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Recorded: 26 August, 2013Participants: Steve Harlow, Emory Holmes II, Jim "Jimmy The Peach" Aaron, Ruth Parson, Allan Ludwig, Anneke van de Kassteele, Ferrie Differentieel.AudioDownload Mp3 Ferrie introduces the subject of government surveillance. By saying he has been very dissapointed in US President Obama. He has allowed the NSA to collect data on citizens. It seems the NSA is more powerful than the President. Ferris would like to discuss the moral aspects of the recently reveiled data collection of civilian internet activities. Are we, as artists ready to make a statement against this development?Steve says he is not concerned.Ferrie says government spying on citizens is happening in the Netherlands also and he is concerned.Steve says Telegraph, telephone, and Internet are all public communication technology with no presumption of privacy.We were mislead into thinking that we had privacy on telephones, except for extraordinary circumstances when law enforcement got court orders to breach it. We are attempting to apply a simular model to internet use. But it's a sham, all data to and from your internet connected computer is public, it may be intercepted and analyzed by anyone who wants to do it.Mary says while it may have always been possible to eavesdrop, there was an agreement that the government would not unless dire circumstances required it.She says she is a private person, but is writing publicly on the web feeling her statements will be lost in all the traffic anyway. She doesn't like the idea of people thinking they have a right to eavesdrop just because it's possible.Anneke says it is not the collection of data that concerns her, but the labels that may be put on her by those who are analysing. She has a friend in Iran she corresponds with through email. Does that make her linked to terrorists in some misanalysis?. Her concern is over what drawer they put me in. "Can I trust my own government?" she asks. "No," others laugh.Emory says he's new to this baffling world of internet and has been dissapointed in President Obama. He wonders if the government is entrenched in certain ways of doing things that it doesn't matter who is head of state, it keeps doing the same things in the same way.He says he's old enough to remember telephone party lines, where you were expected to hang up the phone when your neighbors were talking. A system of trust. He also recalls a friend of his from Zaire, who wore flashy clothes. Deciding to return to his home country after being away for many years, he talked on the phone to a relative there who joked with him about being a king when he got back. He was arrested upon arrival by agents of an eavesdropping government who didn't get the joke and thought he was coming to Zaire to overthrow the government.That's the dread we are all experiencing regarding surveillance, Emory says.He writes posts on Facebook which are read by people he'll probably never meet. What pretense of privacy does he have, he wonders.Allan says he's new to the 21st Century communications we have. He is sure that any government who has access to technology for spying on their citizens or others, will use it. Governments always say they are doing it for "our" protection, but always it is used for their protection, the government's protection. Allan is terrified of the potential, while seeing, at the same time, the potential for communication benifical for the individual.In his own work, he is in communication with people all over the world, including in countries his government does not approve of. Does that mean he's "linked" to those people or countries? "Linked" is a word his government likes to use when describing individuals targeted by drone attacks, "this individual was linked to Al Qaeda." He always wonders what is meant by "linked?" Very ambiguous, very scary. We are entering a very precarious situation because of the surveillance and the action coming from the surveillance. The drones are being made smaller and now are distributed to State governments in the United States of America, which seems to be leading to no privacy at all.Ruth says she has always mistrusted governments and authorities. She has always worried that Dick Tracy types were using high tech devices to eavesdrop on conversations in her house., what she wasaying to her sisters. She has always thought governments have been immoral, she tries not to be involved with them too much. She went for years, decades, without following news because she thought it would all be bad stuff that would give her a stomach ache and make it impossible for her to carry on with her life. She thinks a hopefull change is that people are now saying to governments, "we see what you are doing."Ferris says he hopes that will be enough.Ruth adds that she, like Mary, hopes to be a insignificant person.Steve says that is being called, "security by obscurity."Anneke sums up by saying Ruth is saying that we need to carry on with our lives and not be too frightened by what "they" may do.Ruth hopes to not be too afraid that she will be handcuffed and carried away to someplace she can't escape from.Mary says in Canada, the rules are somewhat different than in the States. She wonders if, in the Netherlands, they feel more protected by their rules against spying by their government?Anneke says she lives in Germany as well as in Holland and she is surprised that in the Dutch newspapers, there is no discussion of these issues. In Germany, perhaps because there are elections coming up in a few weeks or because of the East. - West German history, the issue of spying on citizens is currently much discussed in media. The first article of the Constitution is that the Prime Minister must protect the German people. Angelica Merical has not protected the people enough.Ferrie says the Dutch government is like a dog at the feet of the American government, they absolutely do what they are told.That's really scary, Steve says, the corporations, like Monsanto and Halliburton tell the U.S. government what to do.Mary asks what is that notorious group of corporations?Emory suggests The Trilateral Commission? Mary thinks yes.They had a compound out by Guernville (Russian River, Sonoma County).The Bohemian Club, Steve says. Started in the early Twentieth Century, it is a rich guy's club where they could act like Bohemians for a weekend.Emory says the buzz was that they were there plotting world domination.Steve says he knows a Chef who worked there, what he saw was the industrialists getting super drunk and pissing on trees.Allan asks if that is what Bohemians do?Steve says that's what rich industrialist think Bohemians do.Mary says that, as Ferrie says about The Netherlands, Canada usually caves to the wishes of America, because they are so close and so economically dominated. But not always. We'be had some Prime Ministers who have stood up to the U.S. by not joining them in the Iraq War and Trudeau back in the '60s, so freely accepting U.S. Draft Resisters. She doesn't see a lot of public disscussion of what Edward Snowden revealed. She doesn't like the Obama Administration's response. What happened to protecting "whistleblowers"?Allan says recently whistleblowers have been low-level people, the government, the U.S. of A. government, has tried to lock them up for long sentences. Meanwhile, the high level officials responsible for the revealed policies remain free. It's always the little guys who go to jail. It's an illusion that you can hide as a small person, it's the big guys who don't get caught.Steve says the purpose of data mining all the internet traffic is for the purpose of establishing a baseline of normal activity, so unusual activity can be seen in contrast.Anneke says the problem is defining normal.Agreeing, Steve explains that to discover criminal activity on the Internet, we have to establish what noncriminal looks like. Of course this process is fraught with moral dangers. He says his opinion is that it is necessary and he'll trust the government to establish the baseline of normal internet behaviors. Even though Obama has not been the President Steve expected him to be, he still trusts him to be making good decisions in the situation. Ones may be seeing a more desperate situation than Steve sees. Steve says he still gives Obama the benefit of doubt, even though there are some horrrorfying ironies in his Presidency, the main one being that his candidacy is largely a product of the successful Civil Rights Movement bring full Constitional protections of citizenship to Africian Americans and as the first African American elected President, he and Congress have taken those protections away from all citizens.Steve reminds that Internet activity is public, there should be no presumption of privacy. Data collection of public activity is not surveillance, although the analysis of that data and actions taken as a result of that analysis could violate human rights, the data collection itself doesn't violate, Steve says. He says further that he wants the government, which is public, to do it's business in public, with legislation written in public wikis and all meetings live streamed to the open Internet.Mary says her, "jaw dropped" at Steve's uncharacteristic extreme naivety.She'd like to know what artistic responses do people think can be done?Emory recalls the film, "The Lives of Others," where a government agent was assigned to eavesdrop on a group of artists, thought to be subversive. The agent had no artistic sensibility, but over the course of his assignment became sensitized and influenced by the aesthetic concerns of the artists. It had a transformative affect on him. Emory thinks that Steve is implying that making more interactions transparent may transform the people who may want to do the most evil. We ate just now in this new world and perhaps the things we most fear may have hidden virtue. It may provide a salvation. In that film the agent's listening in had a momentous effect on his life.Steve recalls the novel, Crime and Punishment, the police official had looked up Raskolnikov after reading an editorial Raskolnikov wrote expressing an anti-social arrogance. The policeman was correct, Raskolnikov was a danger to the public, he was a murderer. The policeman was doing the right thing, protecting society from a dangerous person.Emory says the problem for us today is who is doing the analysis and what do we know about their powers of divination?Steve says that is the scary thing, especially considering the history of the U.S. and it's continuing violence of government policies. From the beginning, the U.S. has been a ruthless, violent country and is that today.Emory says we should remember President Lincoln suspending Habeas Corpus during the Civil War. Taking away rights to save the country.Take away your rights, kill (six hundred twenty five thousand) people to "save" the country, Steve says. Lincoln is not a hero, he continues, the States should be free to leave the Union.Anneke says we should not forget what happened in East Germany when it was split. People decided they didn't want to live like that and started a silent revolution that lead to freedom. She thinks that is human nature. We will find a way to fight containment.Emory says it takes an individual with tremendous courage to stand up against injustice. He is reminded of the recent case of a woman who confronted an armed and loaded would be school shooter with only her empathy, discussing the shooter's plan, connecting him with the common humanity, disarming him.It takes a singular act of courage, Emory says, and most of us, like Thoreau said, "live lives of quiet desperation," we don't want to be in the fray.Ferry says if we all use our voice against it, at one time, we can stop it.Anneke says she always will believe that. We do have the power.Steve says he doesn't hear sensible discussion about this issue. What do we want to say? He will not be on the street to protect his privacy in public places.Ferry says the point is to talk about it, address the concerns, get some power in the situation.Emory recalls the work of Franz Kafka, who made an indelible image of the dangers of this new society. That is what an artist does, delineate the dangers facing us.Anneke says she thinks intellectuals and artists need to take the people to a higher level. She says she sees in Germany since the war the artists and writers have taken away the shame, the blame, the guilt, by talking about it, creating narratives about it, not denying it, but, dealing with it.Mary says in art it isn't black and white. It wasn't a clear victory for justice in Raskolnikov's case, the social inequities he acted against remained. Artists can address the degrees of the issue. Subscribe to this blog's feed  |  Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes  |  Follow  |  Like  |  Plus