Tommy Collison's Blog, page 2

Nothing to hide, perhaps, but still everything to lose.

I posted this on Medium in April, and forgot to post it here until now. After Speaking Up, I wrote some longer, more cohesive thoughts on the surveillance state. Next thing I post will probably be a longer report on my second semester, which finishes this week.

One of the most common arguments I hear in the post-Snowden privacy debates is that we need not worry about a pervasive surveillance state if we’re not doing anything wrong.

The argument assumes that if you’re not doing anything illegal, you have no need for (or right to?) privacy. That’s simply not true — there are dozens of everyday examples where we desire privacy for the most mundane topics. Why do bathroom doors have locks? What we do in there isn’t a secret, but we give ourselves privacy with a visual barrier and a lock. Think about the reasons for everyday choices like having curtains on windows and you’ll realize that the majority of our desires for privacy have nothing to do with legality.

So even if you think anti-mass surveillance advocates are a bunch of paranoid hysterics, mindlessly repeating “you’ve nothing to fear if you’ve nothing to hide” reduces a nuanced discussion to an oversimplified soundbite, and you lower the standard of debate. It’s particularly galling and egregious if governments trot out the line.

The cornerstone of the nothing-to-hide argument is that criminals are the only people who stand to lose from mass surveillance. This isn’t true either. Companies have always been able to approximate your location and offer different prices based on that data, but they’re also developing algorithms to guess at your level of education or your income bracket. While researching for “Dragnet Surveillance: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance”, Julia Angwin conducted tests which found that Staples.com offered different prices based on how close they believed you were to a competitor’s store, or whether you lived in an area with a higher average income. It’s a real example of how information about you can translate into financial gain for savvy marketers and retailers. They benefit while you invariably lose. Such economic manipulation is also a reason perfectly law-abiding citizens might elect to install and use the TOR browser, contrary to the popular belief that the anonymizing browser bundle is used to commit crimes.

As technology improves and e-commerce grows, information becomes power in a way none of us could ever have imagined. As Hal Abelson notes in “Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion”, choosing not to participate in a grocery store loyalty program is really like paying a “privacy tax” — you give some of your personal information, and the store offers you discounts. In essence, you’re selling your personal data. What do they do with that data? Well, here’s what they could do:

“Sears Holding Corporation (SHC), the parent of Sears, Roebuck and Kmart, gave consumers an opportunity to join “My Sears Holding Community,” […] Deep in the terms was a detail: You were allowing Sears to install software on your PC that “monitors all of the Internet behavior that occurs on the computer … including … filling a shopping basket, completing an application form, or checking your … personal financial or health information.” So your computer might send your credit history and AIDS test results to SHC, and you said it was fine!” [2]

People who want to obfuscate their location while shopping online to avoid price discrimination or blatant privacy violation are hardly paranoid: they just want to get the best price possible. The argument is one of convenience versus privacy, and to what extent we’re willing to be screwed over because it’s useful that the online store remembers our password. Let’s not forget that you have to agree to the terms before Sears can access the “Internet behavior that occurs on the computer”, so it’s arguably legal. It’s just another example of how technology allows people and corporations unprecedented access to your personal information.

Part of the problem with the surveillance debate is the fact that we’re leaning on dead horses that have been beaten so much they’re not recognizable as arguments or animals. Calling every new encroachment “Orwellian” devalues the term, so much so that it has become a cliché. Thankfully, some writers have started bringing a new angle to the debate by comparing an Orwellian totalitarian future with the future posited by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. Orwell’s view of the future is well-known: individualism is prosecuted, there is omnipresent government surveillance, and thinking socially unacceptable thoughts is tantamount to treason. Huxley approaches the same view of an oppressive future regime from the opposite angle. Where 1984 posits that the government would keep information from us, Brave New World’s world is one where we choose to distance ourselves from uncomfortable thoughts and experiences with mind-altering drugs. In short, people choose happiness over truth.

But truth is stranger than fiction, and the real future (or the present day, as the case may be) is too nuanced to be boiled down to adjectives like “Orwellian” or “Huxleyian”. Both authors were right to an extent — it’s a question of degrees.

One of the most insidious parts of Orwell’s prediction is that our technological devices would become information panopticons. Originally, a panopticon was a type of prison where guards could observe all inmates and the prisoners had to act as if they were always under constant surveillance because they were never sure whether or not they were. Nowadays, the term “information panopticon” refers to the idea of ubiquitous monitoring. As Orwell noted in Nineteen Eighty-Four, this constant surveillance leads to self-censorship:

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment . . .You had to live —did live, from habit that became instinct— in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” [2]

Our cellphones act in very similar ways to panopticons. Whether it’s the news that Verizon is collaborating with the NSA to collect the location, duration, and length of all calls made on their network or AT&T giving the NSA a complete copy of the internet traffic it receives, our cellphones know where we are, what we’re searching, and who we’re talking to.

To me, the dragnet surveillance tactics the NSA uses represent info-gathering to create a context with which they can discredit or even prosecute you. We’ve already seen that the NSA are tracking the porn-viewing habits of Muslim clerics to uncover information that could be used to blacken their reputation, [3] The GCHQ is also exploring ways to manipulate individuals and companies:

“Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG [The GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group] are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.” [4]

The government is overreaching because they can. We use the information on blogs and websites to make decisions about people and products, so the government is trying to take advantage of that. To an extent, a mass surveillance state was inevitable given the technological improvements of the last decades.

But such technological advances benefit both sides of the surveillance debate. The Afghan war logs, which consisted of 91,000 documents, were leaked by Chelsea Manning on one CD. It was unconscionable for one person to secretly transport 91,000 documents across the world 20 years ago. Also, since the information was leaked, it’s been copied so many times that the information will never be secret again. In decades past, it was (in theory at least) possible to track down each copy of a stolen document and destroy it. Now, there are innumerable perfect copies. Pandora’s Box has been opened, so we now have to frame the debate around the question of how we’re going to use the technology we now have. It’s no longer logistically prohibitive for governments today to create these huge invasive databases, and so they do.

We also have to be aware of the fact that digital versions of analog things aren’t always perfect copies. In “Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion”, Hal Abelson warns that just because your Microsoft Word document looks like a miniaturized piece of paper, the similarities end there. The US government found this out to their detriment when they found out that their digital version of redacting a document wasn’t permanent and other people were able to un-redact the digital document and read the sensitive material.

Similarly, you might be forgiven in thinking that the only difference between buying a physical book [5] and a Kindle version of the book from Amazon is that you don’t own a copy you can hold in your hand. That’s not true, as several Kindle owners discovered in 2009 when Amazon reached a digital hand into the hundreds of Kindles and deleted copies of (oh, the irony) Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. According to Amazon, who credited the affected users for the price, there was some mistake with the licensing. The point is that they could only do this because of the eBook explosion — as a reader of David Pogue said, “it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table”. [6]

(Also worth noting — you have to have an account with Amazon to buy books, so they know [at least] your name, e-mail address, and credit card number. With a physical bookseller, I can anonymously pay cash for a book and not part with any of this info.)

The Afghan war logs, redaction screw-up, and digital booksellers show us that digital objects are in no way mirrors of their analog counterparts, only on computer screens. The truth is that each digital jump comes with unintended consequences and side-effects that we couldn’t predict. I believe that the NSA has overstepped its brief and isn’t collecting data responsibility. This is the reason two friends and I launched studentsagainstsurveillance.com, an open letter protesting mass surveillance. The hope is that students from other universities will write similar letters and get the conversation going on their campus. This is, I believe, a debate that will be over one way or another in the next few years. Working with organizations like EFF.org and the Student Net Alliance allows me to be part of the conversation.

Tommy Collison writes tommycollison.com and studies at New York University. He’s @tommycollison on Twitter.

[1] Abelson, Hal; Ledeen, Ken; Lewis, Harry. Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion. Pearson Education, 2008.

[2] Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949. Print.

[3] “Radicalizers appear to be particularly vulnerable in the area of authority when their private and public behaviors are not consistent. Some of the vulnerabilities, if exposed, would likely call into question a radicalizer’s devotion to the jihadist cause, leading to the degradation or loss of his authority. Examples of some of these vulnerabilities include: Viewing sexually explicit material online or using sexually explicit persuasive language when communicating with inexperienced young girls.” https://www.eff.org/files/2013/11/27/20131126-huffpo-radicalizers_pornography.pdf.

[4] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/04/04/cuban-twitter-scam-social-media-tool-disseminating-government-propaganda/

[5] “Dead tree” is my adjective of choice.

[6] http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/some-e-books-are-more-equal-than-others/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Diverging Paths

One of the central ideas behind If/Then, the new Broadway musical starring Idina Menzel, is that little changes change the course of your life -- whether or not you take that phone call, whether or not you go on that date. I find it fascinating to compare this new show to Rent not only because the shows share two leads but also because If/Then's cast is that bit older -- the twenty-something bohos from the East Village are 20 years older and evaluating their choices. 

I'm probably still too young to identify with the did-I-choose-the-right-path questions of the show (the low-key community activist of ambiguous sexuality, on the other hand...), but I did think of Menzel's character the other day as I was talking about classes and my major with someone. 

If I go ahead with the classes I've chosen for Fall 2014, I won't have time to complete a Journalism and Political Science double major in the regular 32-credits-over-4-years track. (I could probably still do so taking summer classes, but I'm against doing so on principle.) I feel okay with this decision now, swapping to media analysis and criticism, but as we go through life choosing between innumerable forks in the road, accompanied by an inexorable feeling that our choices are being limited and that our options are being closed off. 

I think my mild unease is mostly caused by the fact that, throughout high school, I was so sure Journalism and Political Science was what I wanted to do. I was that kid, the one who thought he knew exactly what he wanted to do. While I'll be the first to say that it's okay not to know what you want, I can't help but wonder if there are more seemingly absolute truths about to shaken. 

Maybe, but we'll take them as they come.

NYU Responds

On April 29, we officially launched studentsagainstsurveillance.com, hosting our own NYU letter protesting academic surveillance. Soon after, we started encouraging other students to write letters on behalf of other universities. We're in talks with several institutions nationwide on this count, but tonight, as we wait for more progress, I was incredibly proud to be able to send this e-mail to the original signatories of the NYU letter:

Hi there -- 

Recently, you signed a petition protesting mass surveillance in an academic setting. You thought universities should be strongholds of open communication, where the free flow of information is encouraged.

Today, we're very proud to be able to say that NYU president John Sexton agrees with us. We've just added a statement from him to studentsagainstsurveillance.com/nyu. The statement, provided to us by Marc Wais (Vice President for Global Student Affairs), affirms his commitment to open dialogue:

"Increasingly, our great universities are modern sanctuaries, the sacred spaces sustaining and enhancing scholarship, creativity and learning [...] What makes these sanctuaries special is the core commitment to free, unbridled and ideologically unconstrained discourse in which claims of knowledge are examined, confirmed, deepened or replaced. . In this regard, I emphasize the importance of acting aggressively and with every means at our disposal to secure and protect every element essential to the general enterprise of free inquiry, the centrality of standards and the reciprocal commitments attendant to citizenship within the sanctuary." 

We're working with students from other universities to draft their own letters of protest, and we could use your help. If you know a student at another university who'd be interested in writing a letter of protest, put them in touch with us -- we can host their letter on studentsagainstsurveillance.com and get the conversation started on their campus. Together, we can put pressure on the U.S. government to bring the NSA back within the bounds of the constitution. 

Best --

Tommy, Hannah, and Luc. 

Students Against Surveillance

Where should the letter live?

You can host it on your own site and embed a form to collect signatures. Alternatively, you can use a petition site, like change.org or www.thepetitionsite.com to host your letter. If you’re interested in making a free page on www.studentsagainstsurveillance.com, email April for more information. Also, consider limiting the signatories to email addresses from your college or university (.edu).

On May 7, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published an electronic call to arms: "Join Students and Scholars In Speaking Out About the Effects of Mass Surveillance on Campus". It mentions an initiative I've been involved with over the last few weeks: after a meeting between the EFF and the Student Net Alliance, I was one of three NYU students (the others being Luc Lewitanski and Hannah Weverka) who wrote an open letter protesting dragnet surveillance, talking about how it negatively impacts students as a subset of the population.
Backed by the EFF and the SNA, we published the letter on studentsagainstsurveillance.com/ and allowed students and faculty to add their name to the letter. So far, almost a hundred student and faculty members have signed on, and the local NYU paper covered it. 

As we gathered more signatures, April Glaser, our contact at the EFF, mentioned a planned initiative to get other universities to write protest letters. I pitched the idea that our domain, studentsagainstsurveillance.com would host these protest letters on subdomains. If the idea took off, we'd become studentsagainstsurveillance.com/nyu, Columbia, for example, would be .com/columbia, or the University of California, Santa Barbara would be .com/ucsb. The EFF liked the idea and we're now waiting for more universities to write letters. 
In terms of continuing the work the letter starts, I'm working on two projects: a short template other universities could use [1] and some sort of site which logs local aberrations. I think our letter benefitted from the mention that the NYPD was monitoring Muslim student organizations at NYU and Columbia: students sort of knew the NSA was spying on everyone, but it was news to 99% of the NYU students I spoke to that the NYPD had been monitoring their campus. [2] For a lot of people, this seemed to bring NSA spying into their own backyard, out of the realm of disconnected DC politics and into their everyday lives. I'm weighing up how much work would be involved in doing a state-by-state list of concrete ways the NSA dragnet is being used against college campuses. To borrow the words of David Foster Wallace, who was speaking about political disillusionment among young American voters, the trick is to get people to "try and stay awake". 
Another very nascent idea I'm considering is hosting a PGP/OTR how-to event, specifically targeting journalism students. Most of the journalism students I've spoken to are reasonably tech-savvy, but haven't given much thought to how the EFF dragnet will affect their ability to work with sources. Snowden has said that "Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on." [3] Even though PGP in particular is still pretty hard for non-technical students to work with [4], I think it's important to teach students how to use PGP despite that complexity.
As I work more and more with other advocates of digital rights, the worries I mentioned in "Speaking Up: preliminary thoughts on advocacy and the internet" (that I'm being a stereotypical college pseudo-activist) dissipate. The letter's something concrete that's started some discussion on campus, and it's part of a wider campaign organizations like the Student Net Alliance are mounting. The work waits.
Interested in getting involved? You can e-mail me (tommy@collison.ie) April at the EFF (april@eff.org). 
====
[1] Although the EFF deeplinks post does a good job of starting you off.[2] http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/documents/nypd-msa-report.pdf
[3] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-nsa-files-whistleblower?CMP=twt_gu
[4] Hat-tip to Keybase.io for trying to solve this problem. 

Short Murmurs about a Major

Minor college update: 

I think I'm sold on changing my school (from NYU College of Arts and Science to NYU Steinhardt) so that I can major in Media, Culture, and Communications (MCC). Furthering my belief that college is a series of bureaucratic experiences interspersed with actual learning, I probably won't be able to complete the transfer until Fall 2015. 

I'm still slightly  wary of majoring in something that has "communications" in the title but given the sort of classes I get to take as part of this major, I'm pretty excited. Right now, here are the briefs of the two MCC classes I'm registered for next semester: 

Privacy and Media
This course will explore the philosophical roots of privacy as a deeply held social value and consider how it may conflict with other values, such as freedom of speech, anonymity, efficiency, accountability, and national security.  Our discussions will be situated in leading ethical and legal controversies concerning new media tools (e.g., social networks, mobile apps, digital e-readers, wearable health sensors), practices (e.g., online tracking, behavioral advertising, automated face recognition, video surveillance), platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Google Maps), and other topics shaping today's privacy discourse.

War as Media
This course examines the proposition that contemporary war should be understood as media. Was has become mediatized and media has been militarized. This course treats war and political violence as communicative acts and technologies and focuses on how they shape our understanding and experience of landscape, vision, body, time and memory.

Both sound super fascinating and they fit the media criticism track I'm trying to take in college. Apart from those, I'll be taking a class on the history of math and an introductory journalism class. In all, it should be a fun semester and I'll enjoy having Mondays off.

Things

Life is cyclical -- there are times when nothing seems to be happening, and there are times when everything starts happening simultaneously and you struggle to juggle all your responsibilities and sometimes it feels too much and you wonder how you got into this position in the first place. Right now, I'm very much in the latter camp.

We're coming to the end of the semester: I have a week and a half of classes left, and then three exams across two days. After that, I'm headed to SF to stay with my brothers and generally engage in shenanigans. I'm lucky to have a place to crash because it allows me a change of scene, and NYC during the summer can get miserably hot and sticky. I'm not too worried about final exams, but I do have my work cut out for me in terms of revision that I should stay on top of. My classes this semester have mostly been reading and theory-based, so the papers haven't been crazy and I'm keeping my head above water. I'll have more to talk about next semester after I meet my academic advisor today and (hopefully) lock in my class choices for Fall 2014.

Outside of class, I've continued being a rabble-rouser. With the support of EFF.org and the Student Net Alliance, studentsagainstsurveillance.com launched last weekend. It's a letter written by Luc Lewitanski, Hannah Weverka, and I which protests mass surveillance on campus. It comes on the heels of my newfound interest in activism and the surveillance state. The Medium.com piece I wrote on the subject was well-received and I finally got to grapple with thoughts about Nineteen Eighty-Four and the economic implications of mass surveillance -- thoughts which had been churning about in my head for a few weeks. The letter currently has 80something signatures and was picked up by NYU's local daily, the Washington Square News. I'm also currently in talks to teach PGP encryption at an upcoming NYU hackathon. As I wrote in the Medium post, I love the activism work I'm doing, mainly because I feel part of the ongoing debate between privacy and convenience, and whether or not law-abiding citizens have anything to fear from dragnet surveillance. (Hint: they do.) I think college campuses are pretty unique places in that regard -- people seem receptive to ideas they've never considered, I come into contact with literally hundreds of 18-22s every day, and there's a sense of ownership about the debate: this stuff is going to affect us for years to come, and people seem receptive to talking about it. 

Writing the letter also gave me an excuse to improve my nascent HTML/Python skills. I first learned the basics of programming a few years ago, and having this project was a good excuse to brush up on things. I'm hoping to use the summer to cement that knowledge and expand it beyond the basics. (My friend, watching the development of studentsagainstsurveillance.com, commended me after a few hours work, telling me that I'd graduated to "HTML 102".) On the whole, the summer should afford me the time to brush up on some skills and read a lot, even if I'm working. Whatever classes I pick for next semester, I'll be able to concentrate on my major requirements (whatever that major ends up being...), which is exciting.

I'm working my way through Hal Abelson's Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion which is good but ultimately a bit simplistic. I'm about halfway through and I'm loving it, but it feels unmistakably written for a layperson. That's not necessarily bad, but I think I'll find something a little deeper and more complex for next time. My fiction intake has dropped to basically zero, probably because I'm writing no fiction at the moment. There's one long-form fiction project I want to return to in the summer, but as of now such projects are on ice. I have one goal right now, and that's to finish the semester well. 

Speaking Up

Preliminary thoughts on advocacy and the internet. April 2014.

I haven’t been an “activist” for long. I am probably not even a very good activist.

In fact, I often worry that I’m only interested in advocacy because I’m a freshman at college and these are the years when you’re most likely to be “edgy” and “counter-cultural”. Am I becoming interested in advocacy against a backdrop of older generations “not getting it” and with “that’s all very well, but…” being the constant refrain?

This semester at NYU, I started working with EFF.org and realized that I cared very much about an open internet, free from both corporate interference and censorship. To an extent, getting involved in internet advocacy was an inevitability: I’ve always been interested in politics and communications, and I grew up the son of an electrical engineer and the younger brother of two computer programers. My involvement in advocacy and communications comes (quite usefully, it must be said) colored by a tech background.

In the US version of House of Cards, Michael Kern, the Secretary of State, is ousted from his post after it comes to light that he wrote an editorial in college where he called Israel’s occupation of Palestine illegal. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m only here on a temporary student visa, but I wonder sometimes if the advocacy work I’m doing will come back to haunt me in some way. Maybe self-doubt is part and parcel of college in the same way challenging convention is.

On my site, I keep a list of books I’m currently reading, and I’ve noticed a shift from fiction to non-fiction as I look around and devour everything in sight about activism. The more I read, the more I realize that the Internet has changed activism forever. In Digitally Enabled Social Activism: Activism in the Internet Age, the authors note at an early stage that the internet’s effect is two-fold: it both enables new activism and changes traditional activism.

One question I’m particularly interested in is how much different branches of advocacy are related. I don’t buy the argument that LGBTQ activists are the same as those who advocated for the rights of black Americans during the 1960s — there are more differences than “we’re advocating for different things”. Whatever about the rise of the internet, the social climate of the USA has changed in the last 50 years: we’ve gone from a president not mentioning AIDS in his entire first term to a president affirming in no uncertain terms that he believes same-sex couples should be able to get married. Advocacy is no longer subject to local or even national constraints.

Even though no two advocacy campaigns are the same, we can afford to be partially reductionist. Those of us who advocate for digital rights share something not insignificant with civil rights and LGBTQ activists. We have to be loud — nothing happens if we do or say nothing. We have to cut through the everyday noise and convince people that, whatever else is going on in their life, this is important. (This is arguably much harder on the internet, where over a million terabytes of data is produced a day.)

Then again, internet advocates differ from those who advocated through traditional channels because we’re still experimenting with our tools: is social media useful or just a waste of time?

When it comes to Facebook, I’ve noticed that the debate seems to be framed in a very one-dimensional way. Liking a page “in solidarity” with a certain group is a very weak form of activism, it’s true, but does that mean Facebook’s useless? Young people today get a huge amount of their news from the likes of Twitter and Facebook — everyone realizes that these apps are tools for communicating with this generation. The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach; the way to a teenager’s brain is through their phone.

Dan Savage realized this. In the preface to It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living, he talks about social networks (particularly YouTube) giving him access to teens’ attention spans in a way middle school officials never allowed him. A teenager who commits suicide, he says, can’t imagine a future that’s worth the current pain they’re experiencing. Savage released a video telling (and, with his husband by his side, showing) that it got better. Celebrities followed suit, and, a month later, Obama released his own “it gets better” video. This, as Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport noted in Digitally Enabled Social Change, is the internet is changing the face of traditional activism.

I find it interesting that the mediums we use to advocate nowadays are themselves coming under scrutiny. Undoubtably, my interest in traditional advocacy (women’s rights, LGBTQ equality) is informing and fueling my interest in internet advocacy. I don’t know if I’m a “good” activist, or if I’m doing the “right things”, but I can be comforted in the knowledge that I’m doing something.

Tommy Collison writes tommycollison.com and studies at New York University. He’s @tommycollison on Twitter.

Speaking Up was originally posted on Medium.com in Activism in the Digital Age.

Books, Books, Books

Anecdotally, one of the hardest parts of adjusting to college has been figuring out how best to manage my time. I've written at length about how being away from parents means that you have to discover new habits. To a large extent, you can decide what sort of person you are -- you have a lot more free time, and it's up to you to decide how that gets used.

When I'm at home, I often stay up much later than my parents, sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop. My life has made the transatlantic shift -- most of my friends and all of my work are based in GMT-5 now. E-mail and Facebook are the connections to my life now. Being at home is relaxing and enjoyable, but it definitely feels like I'm stepping away from my everyday life. Sitting in the kitchen with my laptop is my way of staying connected to the rest of my life, now that my parents aren't a physical presence everyday. I enjoy the catch-up time, when nobody else is awake and there are no distractions -- nothing to bend to but my own will.

In the same way, college is a time when you can exercise your will a lot more. Not only to you have more time, but your entire schedule changes. I'm a morning person, so I organized my classes as such and have evenings off. (I don't know if I have a matutinal personality or if it's more correct to say that my joints fare better in the mornings -- in the evenings, I want to walk less and lie down more. My joints have been worse recently, possibly due to the change in the seasons. Cold weather really hinders my ability to get around, so I'm hoping to get around more now that the temperatures are in the sixties.)

One of the most important things for me coming to college was that I was going to read more. I tried and failed to read a book a fortnight in high school, but mostly fell down. Given that my concentration has improved since coming to college, I decided at the start of this year to read 60 books, or roughly a book every six days. Here's what I've read recently: 

Night, by Elie Wiesel.
Read this mostly because it's short and its reputation precedes it. Good, and very important given that it's first-person, but not something that'll change your life. 

Dragnet Nation, by Julie Angwin.
The latest in a long line of non-fiction I've been reading recently about surveillance and national security. Quite good at summing up the infosec landscape of the last decade. Only veers into the hippie today's-world-is-too-connected-world-not-having-a-cellphone-is-a-blessing in one chapter. 

House Of Cards, by Michael Dobbs
Very British, very Machiavellian, very good light read.

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
I read this one for college, and it was hard to read it without the lecture baggage of Shelley writing a modern take on the Promethean myth and posing questions about human versus divine creation. Read this in two sittings and enjoyed very much. 

V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore
Read for its connections to the cypherpunk movement. Offers an interesting take, but isn't something anti-surveillance wonks should take as their call-to-arms. Melodramatic and overblown, which makes it a bad manual but a fine story. Neither the US nor the UK have gotten to the stage of V For Vendetta's Britain, so the real-life debate needs to be a lot more moderate. 

If I was to recommend one of these to you, I'd recommend House of Cards for fiction and Dragnet Nation for a non-fiction read. HOC is quick and enjoyable, and DN is a good introduction if you've heard a lot about surveillance in the news and want to know more about it. 

(As always, I keep a recently read list too.)

Information Bytes 1.0

(Leaving this as 1.0 in case I want to do more catch-up posts in the future.)

It's one of those movie-style spring mornings in Manhattan today. When Elbow's One Day Like This came on shuffle, I definitely felt like I was in a movie. We're a little over midway through the semester, especially now that NYC's unseasonably cold winter is well and truly gone. We've had some spring showers and 5th Avenue sometimes feels like a wind tunnel, but it's a great time to be alive. Midterm exams are over, professors appear to have stopped colluding to make papers all fall due on the same day, and everyone's beginning to think about summer.

This shot was taken in Washington Square Park on Tuesday. The park's the closest thing NYU has to a campus, and there's something incredible about sitting out in the sun, listening to the lunchtime jazz, and working on a Spanish oral presentation due in two hours.

Speaking of classes -- next semester's still up in the air, but I think I have some of my picks narrowed down. As I mentioned in a previous post, I want to take a law class, and I'll officially start some major classes. As it turns out, the NYU journalism institute has a media-criticism track alongside its regular classes on reporting. Personally, I think "hating on media", as it's been called, would be much more interesting to study. I'm not spending too much time thinking about it given I'm a freshman, but I'm debating between a double major journalism and politics, most likely), doing an inter-school transfer for a double-major in Media, Culture, an Communications (MCC) and politics, or simply creating  my own major in the area of cryptography/politics/activism/media criticism. Next semester, at least, I'm looking at an intro law class, an intro MCC class, quantitive stats in politics, and the intro journalism class every student takes before choosing a track. All said, I think the only clear thing, major-wise, is that I'll be spending an awful lot of time in my advisor's office next semester. 

I have a couple of plans in the works right now, but I don't want to speak too much about them until they're more concrete. Tentatively, I'll say that I'll probably be spending most of my time in the US this summer, and that, whatever else, I want to devote a chunk of time to writing projects (both fiction and non-fiction) I've been neglecting. One random thought I had was that I wanted to write an essay as a post-postscript to Consider This, the series of essays I wrote about physical disability. It's been almost two years since it was published, and I'd love to revisit it after moving to the US and having a year of college under my belt. Stay tuned.

Tech@NYU, MCC, and HOC

In my Twitter bio, I mention that I enjoy working at the intersection of tech and communication -- thinking about the policies surrounding online interaction and the digital tools we use. I have a couple of long-form essays in the works about communication and whether we should value privacy even if we've nothing to hide, but in the meantime, I'm happy to interact and work with likeminded folks. 

In that vein, I've started to work with the communications director of Tech@NYU. Personally, I'm surprised it took me until my second semester to find and befriend the community of hackers and designers. Today was DemoDay, where students gave two-minute presentations on little hacks and projects they've been working on. As a writer, I'm totally biased, but I really liked Joey Organisak's Wrdz.co.

Here, Ryan Shea gives us a Bitcoin primer: 

Not that I want to boil every experience down to the question of how-do-I-college, but I really think I underutilized the clubs and societies at NYU during my first semester -- I'm really glad to have the opportunity to befriend and work with some incredibly talented people.

I'm halfway through the spring semester and work is going well. I'm busier this semester than in the fall because of how my schedule of classes worked out. I met my advisor yesterday and, as I discussed in Soundboard, we chatted about the possibility of doing an introductory law class. Turns out that doing one wouldn't be hard at all, and we looked at some media criticism and communication courses. Steinhardt, another school within NYU (I'm in the College of Arts and Science right now) has a media, cultures, and communications (MCC) major that I might want to pair with political science. Majoring in MCC would require a school transfer within NYU, and MCC is, apparently, a fairly competitive major, but I'd be reasonably confident of being able to do it. 

Apart from that, I'm currently reading House of Cards, the book that inspired the TV series. It's set in the UK and is delightfully British -- Underwood (called Urquhart in the book) is much more Shakespearean here. My main criticism of the US TV series has -and remains to be- that Spacey plays the antagonist with far too much blind ambition. It's clear that Urquhart recognizes the ridiculousness of the situation and is far more deprecating. I've been meaning to post more book reviews, and I'll start that by reviewing HOC in the next day or two.

Just one final note -- NYers should check out If/Then, the new (and original!) musical that opens on Broadway tomorrow night. A good friend stars and the show deserves a long, happy life.