neil mathis's List: DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP ASSIGNMENT

• • After the tragic bombing at the Boston
    marathon, Boston's cellular networks
    instantly filled with calls.
• • There has since been movement in
    this direction, culminating in 2012 when the U.S. Congress
    funded the creation of a new nationwide network called
    FirstNet.
• • In contrast,
    with FirstNet, responders from all agencies will be able to
    communicate using whatever infrastructure has survived.
    In addition to voice communications, medics will send video
    of critical patients back to hospitals, police will distribute
    pictures of missing children over the airwaves, and firefighters will download the blueprints of damaged buildings to
    see how to enter safely.
• • One company spokeswoman had to publicly
    plead with its customers "to use text or
    email to free up voice capacity for public safety officials at the scene." 
• • The unnecessarily large number of
    towers combined with pre-cellular technologies also make
    public safety an extremely inefficient user of spectrum, and
    preventing a shortage of available spectrum from hampering economic growth has become a high priority for the
    U.S. government.
• • Under the right federal policy, it would be possible to adopt a single technical approach
    nationwide, and to choose an approach that uses the latest
    and most cost-effective cellular and Internet technologies
    to bring a wide range of broadband services to public safety.
• • . U.S. public safety agencies do have the alternative of
    using their own communications systems, although most
    of today s public safety systems are based on pre-Internet,
    pre-cellular technology that does not meet the needs or expectations of today's emergency responders.
• • The solution to all these problems is to build out
    a public safety network infrastructure that serves the thousands of municipal public safety organizations and is based
    on a single technical architecture that uses spectrum efficiently. At this time, such an architecture would be based
    on the fourth-generation cellular standard (LTE) and Internet standards (IP).
• • the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) estimated the cost of building an
    LTE network in the most-populous areas that would provide indoor coverage to 99% of the population and outdoor
    coverage to 99.5%.
• • As I argued in a 2007 article in Issues, part of the problem
    with traditional public safety communications systems is
    that many thousands of individual police and fire departments run their own systems, perhaps with a different technology than their neighbors, when what is really needed is
    a nationwide solution
• • Moreover, as we saw after Hurricane Katrina, even local responders may not be able to communicate if the hurricane destroys the towers they depend on, even if there are
    commercial systems still working

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• We were living in an age of surveillance before the Boston Marathon bombing, but the event and its investigation produced calls for much greater monitoring of our cities and our lives. 
• The media narrative of the investigation, manhunt, and lockdown that followed the bombing was like something out of an action movie, with car chases, shootouts, and a dramatic televised ending.
• But it was like a science-fiction movie, too, featuring surveillance cameras, smartphones, GPS trackers, facial-recognition technology, thermal imagers, and even a robot. Hovering in the background, ready for the inevitable sequel, are the specters of police surveillance drones.
• They have certainly intensified the debate over how much surveillance we should have as a society.
• Our cities were filling with surveillance cameras before the bombing, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York and the legal theorist Richard Posner, among others, have called for even more monitoring.
• If we have nothing to hide, goes the argument, we have nothing to fear. After all, don’t we want to be safe?
• Whenever we talk about surveillance, we need to keep two facts in mind. First, there are different kinds of monitoring, and we need to think about them differently. Much of the debate since the Boston Marathon has dealt with stationary cameras on public streets. 
• these simple cameras with ones linked to facial recognition databases, or GPS trackers, or wiretap orders, or surveillance of a person’s computer use through their monitor and even their Webcam.
• For example, Boston’s existing network of surveillance cameras was enough to catch the Tsarnaev brothers, but we might decide some other city might need more cameras. But from there, it’s not a logical leap to advocate an increase in drones or computer monitoring.
• Secondly, if we want to talk about surveillance, we need to talk about both government and private monitoring.
• Private entities of all kinds—Internet advertisers, department stores, people on the street with smartphones—engage in surveillance of one kind or another. 
• Companies use data bought from data brokers to assess when and where to advertise to and at what price. Governments buy or gain access to private databases.
• The iconic images of the Tsarnaev brothers were apparently captured by the private camera at the Lord & Taylor department store, then handed over to police. Police also obtained countless photos and videos taken by witnesses to the marathon explosions.
• Any assessment of surveillance has to consider the ease with which its data and technologies cross the blurry boundaries, in all directions, between public, private, and law-enforcement entities.
• Each technology raises its own questions, but in general surveillance raises three kinds of perils—financial cost, threats to civil liberties, and the creation of power imbalances.
• Even if we decide that an increase in government surveillance is justified, we need to pay for it somehow, either by reducing other police expenditures, reducing other government expenditures (like roads or schools), or raising taxes.
• Surveillance also poses a danger to our civil liberties. That can take many forms.  Monitoring of our reading, Web surfing, and private communications threatens our intellectual privacy—our ability to engage with ideas and facts on our own terms without scrutiny or interference by others.
• We increasingly use digital technologies to communicate, to read, and even to think, but those technologies create records of our messages, our browsing, and even (through notes, memos, calendars, etc.) our thoughts.
• Surveillance is justified as protecting a free society, but a society in which the government can monitor our intellectual activities without significant legal process is free in name only.
• It’s one thing for a camera in the city center to record us anonymously, but it’s quite another for it to systematically identify us as we travel through town, whether by face recognition or other means.
• Another basic principle of political freedom is that the people know what the government is up to, a value that is defeated by shadowy webs of secret monitoring.
• A final cost of surveillance is that it changes the power relationship between the watcher and the watched. Information is undoubtedly power, and the point of surveillance is to provide information.
• Watchers can use their information power to influence behavior. That power can be used to deter crime, but it can also be used to blackmail, as the FBI tried to do with Martin Luther King Jr. after surveillance of his personal life produced evidence of marital infidelity.
• nd surveillance can be used to sort people into categories, with all the accompanying risks of discrimination.
• We already use data surveillance to sort airline passengers roughly into preferred flyers, ordinary passengers, and suspicious members on watch or no-fly lists.
• Greater surveillance gives public and private watchers alike greater ability to sort and, overtly or secretly, discriminate and exploit.
• The costs of surveillance offer a response to the “nothing to hide” argument. Even if you have “nothing to hide,” you may well still care if the government is wasting money in monitoring you unnecessarily.
• Moreover, all of us except the most boring have secrets that aren’t criminal but that we still don’t want to share with the world. We have sex, we have naked bodies, we use the toilet, and most of us let our hair down from time to time. We should all care about being blackmailed, subconsciously persuaded, sorted, or discriminated against. Put simply, privacy matters
• It’s too simplistic to say that we need more (or even less) surveillance. We need better surveillance, where “better” takes into account the benefits and costs of particular tools, and whole existing backdrop of surveillance.
• We need principles to help guide the evolution of our surveillance society, to chart a course between total surveillance and insufficient safety
• First, we must recognize that surveillance is complex, and consider both the types of surveillance at issue, and the degrees to which government and private monitoring are in question. Second, we must remember that secret surveillance is illegitimate. A free society should know the tools that the government can use to watch its citizens. Third, total surveillance is illegitimate. Government monitoring, especially of intellectual activities, must remain accountable to legal checks and balances.  Finally, we need to recognize that while surveillance has limited benefits when used properly, it has substantial costs in money, civil liberties, and power.
• We must take those harms into account as we decide what kinds of surveillance and how much are consistent with our basic commitment to a free society.

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• The illusion of privacy gives us room to be fully human, sharing intimacies and risking mistakes. But all the while, the line between private and public space is as porous as tissue paper.
• Privacy is mostly an illusion. A useful illusion, no question about it, one that allows us to live without being paralyzed by self-consciousness.
• Privacy is mostly an illusion. A useful illusion, no question about it, one that allows us to live without being paralyzed by self-consciousness.
• This was true long before the National Security Agency began collecting our telephone and Internet records from technology and communications companies, and long before the House of Representatives on July 24 gave a fresh thumbs-up to further NSA collections by a narrow 12-vote margin, 217-205.
• But the revelation of the NSA's vast data-collection programs by a crusading contract worker, Edward Snowden, has made it clear that the rise of technology is shattering even the illusion of privacy. Almost overnight, and with too little reflection, the U.S. and other developed nations have stacked the deck in favor of the watchers.
• Video cameras peer constantly from lamp poles and storefronts. Satellites and drones float hawkeyed through the skies. Smartphones relay a dizzying barrage of information about their owners to sentinel towers dotting cities and punctuating pastureland.
• License-plate cameras and fast-pass lanes track the movements of cars, which are themselves keeping a detailed record of their speed and location.
• Meanwhile, on the information superhighway, every stop by every traveler is noted and stored by Internet service providers like Google, Verizon and Comcast.
• ntil recently, there were hard physical limits on the number of pictures that could be developed, videotapes that could be stored, phone-company records that could be typed or photocopied or packed into boxes--let alone analyzed. Now the very idea of limits is melting away.
• If storage is free but analysts' time is costly, then the cost-minimizing strategy is to record everything and sort it out later," Felten noted.
• Nearly everything that happens from now on has the potential not just to be seen by some restless King David or overheard by an eavesdropping Polonius but also stored indefinitely. Government agencies, and the private corporations working with them, collect and store billions of records every day, and they're hungry for more: not just phone records and Web addresses but e-mails, texts, downloads, medical records, retail receipts, bank balances, credit-card numbers and travel itineraries.
• The bombers had vanished. Yet within a few hours, their faces were plainly visible on TV screens around the world.
• It turned out that every nefarious move they made as they delivered their deadly packages to Boylston Street had been scanned and stored by surveillance cameras. Their quick capture was a triumph for law enforcement but left an unsettling realization in its wake: everyone else on those teeming Boston sidewalks was also being watched and remembered.
• Then, just weeks after Boston, the slight and pallid Snowden emerged from his NSA cubicle to warn us that surveillance goes far beyond the tireless eyes of the cameras.
• Every phone call placed, every Web page visited--billions and trillions of data points, like raindrops in a monsoon--is captured daily and stored for possible analysis by the U.S. government.
• Remember the time you pocket-dialed your sister? The time you Googled your college flame? The day you did that thing you so deeply regret--that thing you thought was private--involving a Web search or a phone call or a text or an e-mail? It's all there.
• In fact, the government, with the NSA as the lead agency, is this moment busy building the world's largest data-storage facility in Utah. More than a million square feet, room enough to preserve everything, for the time being.
• The government calls the material it collects metadata, instead of plain old data
• In any event, the government assures us that as long as we don't consort with menaces to national security, our phone calls and Web searches are of no more interest to Uncle Sam than an outdated tome on Bolivian agronomy.
• only about 1 in 5 people surveyed believe the government actually keeps its nose out of private phone calls and e-mails.

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