New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

One Small Step for Trans Rights. And a Moment for Dan Bishop Awareness.

North Carolina took a small step today towards undoing its disgraceful HB2 legislation passed by the state’s Republican legislature back in 2016 as an effort to stop Charlotte’s attempt to allow trans people to use the bathroom matching their gender identity.  Per a consent decree today, the state has agreed that no provision in HB2’s successor, HB142, can be read to prohibit trans people from using the bathroom matching their gender identity.

Two cheers for small victories!  It would of course mean a lot more if HB142 weren’t such a crappy law.  Although it was advertised by the legislature as a repeal to HB2, thank you, all done  discriminating, it did nothing of the sort.  The replacement – and these things are still part of state law - locks into place an explicit refusal to offer employment and other civil rights protections to LGBTQ individuals in state law, and it forbids other governmental entities in the state (cities, schools, universities) from going further on other employment laws. So this is very much a partial victory.

In the meantime, one of the original architects of HB2, the egregious state senator Dan Bishop, is running for the state’s currently vacant House of Representatives seat.  Why is this seat vacant?  Well, the state elections board refused to certify the results of last election because of serious issues with ballot tampering emanating from Republican Mark Harris’ campaign (see here, and here to get started).  So we get a do-over.  Harris decided not to run for health reasons and now we have Bishop, who won the Republican primary between himself and a guy who honestly liked to dress up as Boss Hogg.  And who is Dan Bishop?

Philip Agre on Privacy and Big Data (part 1)

By Gordon Hull

A current paper by Mireille Hildebrandt sent me to a paper from 1994 that I’m embarrassed to say I hadn’t read before: Philip Agre’s “Surveillance and Capture.”  Agre’s paper has been cited over 300 times, but it’s missing in a lot of the privacy literature I know.  After reading it, I’ve decided that’s a mistake, and it’s time to make amends.  I’ll begin by saying why I think Hildebrandt is exactly right to bring the paper up in a context of big data.

Agre starts with quotidian examples of tracking, things like employee ID cards that let systems know where they are, to UPS package tracking.  The core argument of Agre’s paper is that there’s two conceptual models of privacy that need to be distinguished in making sense of phenomena like these: one, the one that we all talk about all the time, is surveillance.  The surveillance model grew out of experience with state bureaucracies, particularly in the Soviet bloc, and features visual metaphors (typically Orwell and Bentham); assumes that the watching is nondisruptive and secret; involves territorial metaphors like invasion of space, which tend to then lead to a dichotomy between coercion and consent; involves centralized orchestration; and is identified with the state.  This model, though ubiquitous, isn’t the only or even the best one.  Agre spends most of his time developing the alternative model, though he notes that “when applied as the sole framework of computing and privacy, the surveillance model can lead to oversimplified analysis” and suggests that it lends itself to caricature and easy dismissals such that “genuinely worrisome developments can be seen as ‘not so bad’ simply for lacking the overt horrors of Orwell’s dystopia” (116).   It’s not hard to say that Agre got this one right: whether it’s the well-trodden problems with notice-and-consent or the stubborn persistence of the “I’ve got nothing to hide” deflection, the surveillance model isn’t adequate to privacy worries now.

The second model, which Agre ties to computer science and information systems management, is built around the idea of “capture.”  The capture model also has five characteristics, which Agre develops as a contrast with surveillance.  Capture: uses linguistic metaphors for human activities; assumes that linguistic parsing of activities is active intervention; defaults to structural metaphors; is decentralized; and is driven by to reconstruct human activity “through [its] assimilation to a transcendent (‘virtual’) order of mathematical formalism” (107).  The core concept here is grammar: the basic mechanism of capture is to pick a set of atomic elements (people, UPS packages) and to then develop a grammar that describes their possible movements or changes.  This model is then imposed – sometimes coercively – on the activities it purports to describe, mechanisms are used to then track and measure the activity according to the grammar; the system can then be further calibrated.

Our Corrupt Carneades, or the Citizenship Question

The Trump administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census is a farce attempting to be a tragedy.  The initial claim – that the question was needed to enforce the Voting rights Act – was so obviously pretextual that Justice Roberts had to join the Court’s liberals to strike it down (even though, as Adam Serwer points out, four justices don’t seem to care that they were being lied to).  Printing of the forms commenced, and everybody thought the case was dead, until Trump tweeted new policy and forced the Justice Department attorneys to humiliate themselves in court.  The DOJ then attempted to replace all the attorneys on the case without specifying why – though most informed commentators assumed that this was because the original attorneys felt ethically uncomfortable with whatever they were about to be asked to do, such as reverse themselves on positions that they had insisted upon before.  A federal judge rejected that request today.  There is supposedly a new rationale coming for the question, maybe by way of an unconstitutional executive order, because William Barr says so.  Any minute now.  The difference is that this new rationale will be delivered for self-evidently pretextual reasons, rather than just evidently pretextual ones (Joseph Fishkin outlines what he thinks is wrong with the best argument the DOJ can likely produce here).

Another development that has gotten less attention is perhaps particularly intriguing.  The government has insisted over and over and over that the census had to be at the printer’s by June 30.  The ACLU has now asked the court system to enforce those words, effectively closing the case.  As Marty Lederman usefully summarizes: