Due Tuesday, October 27: Privacy and the Surveillance State
Two developments make large-scale surveillance possible: the mass collection of data and its storage, retrieval, and analysis through increasingly powerful databases. Information that once required human informants or targeted observation can now come from phones, browsers, cameras, and other everyday technologies.
We will consider what it means that private companies collect so much of this information and how commercial and government surveillance connect. What limits should a democratic society place on surveillance? How should we weigh claims about safety and security against harms to privacy and freedom? Even if someone feels they have “nothing to hide,” how might surveillance change what people feel free to read, say, or do?
1. Surveillance Valley
Read Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (2018), the introduction and pages 151–201. If needed, download and rotate the scan for easier reading. Use the printed page numbers.
Read this as a historical account of the relationship between internet infrastructure, commercial data collection, and government power. Compare Levine’s argument with Tuesday’s PBS discussion: where do the accounts reinforce or complicate one another? Why does Levine challenge a sharp division between private and public surveillance, and how does he assess Snowden’s proposed response?
2. Privacy harms and the “nothing to hide” argument
- Neil M. Richards, “The Dangers of Surveillance”, Harvard Law Review (2013): first page only.
- Danielle Keats Citron and David Gray, “Addressing the Harm of Total Surveillance: A Reply to Professor Neil Richards”, Harvard Law Review Forum (2013).
- Robin Doherty, “Why Privacy Is Important, and Having ‘Nothing to Hide’ Is Irrelevant” (2016).
The 2013 legal readings offer arguments about the harms of surveillance; read them as contributions to that debate rather than as a summary of current law. What does Richards mean by intellectual privacy? Why do Citron and Gray argue that his account does not go far enough? How does Doherty connect privacy with democratic life?
3. Continue the sentiment analysis project
Continue working with your novel in the sentiment analysis notebook on GitHub (click Open in Colab). If you already saved a copy in Drive, continue in that copy. Save your results and notes; we will return to the emotional arcs and passages in class as we develop Mini-Project 2.
Optional example: what metadata reveals
“What Reporter Will Ockenden’s Metadata Reveals About His Life”, ABC News (2015). This example shows how records of activity can reveal patterns about a person even without the contents of their communications.
Tuesday, October 27 in class: SQLZoo
We will practice querying databases with SQLZoo. What changes when individually ordinary records can be searched and combined—and why might that matter even when someone has “nothing to hide”?