Event

AHCS Speaker Series | Matthew Jones: "Great Exploitations: Data Mining, Technological Determinism and the NSA"

Tuesday, October 4, 2016 17:30to19:00
Arts Building 260, 853 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3A 0G5, CA

"Great Exploitations: Data Mining, Technological Determinism and the NSA"
Matthew Jones, Columbia University

Abstract: We cannot understand the programs revealed by Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers without understanding a broader set of historical development in the US and beyond before and after 9/11. First, with the growing spread of computation into everyday transactions from the 1960s into the 1990s, corporations and governments collected exponentially more information about consumers and citizens. To contend with this deluge of data, computer scientists, mathematicians, and business analysts created new fields of computational analysis, colloquially called “data mining,” designed to produce knowledge or intelligence from vast volume. Second, conservative legal scholars, government officers, and judges had long doubted the constitutionality of legal restrictions that the US Congress had placed on intelligence work, foreign and domestic, in the late 1970s. Facing the growth of the Internet and the increasing availability of high quality cryptography, national security lawyers within the US Department of Justice and the National Security Agency (NSA) began developing what was called a “modernization” of surveillance and intelligence law to deal with technological developments.  Third, in the Bill Clinton era, concerns about terrorist attacks on the United States came to focus heavily on the need to defend computer systems and networks. The asymmetrical nature of the terrorist threat had long challenged the traditional division of defense of the homeland versus offence abroad: attacks honored no territorial boundaries, and, neither, it increasingly came to seem, should defense against them. Protecting the “critical infrastructure” of the United States, the argument ran, required new domestic surveillance to find insecurities, and opened the door to much greater Department of Defense capability domestically and new NSA responsibilities. Tools for assessing domestic vulnerabilities lent themselves easily to discerning—and exploiting—foreign ones. And traditions of acquiring and exploiting any foreign sources of communication prompted the NSA to develop ever more invasive ways of hacking into computers and networks worldwide. In the immediate wake of 9/11, the Bush administration braided these developments, to create a massive global surveillance regime. The administration sought to make it appear at once technologically determined and essential for security in the global war of terror. The job of the NSA was “to exploit” communications networks—to make them available to policymakers; to do this, its lawyers “exploited” the law as well as technology. 

Bio: Matthew L. Jones is the James R. Barker Professor of Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University. His publications include"Querying the Archive: Data Mining from Apriori to Page Rank," in L. Daston, ed. Archives of the Sciences (Chicago, 2016); Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (Chicago, 2016);  and The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2006).

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