Upon.............................

 

...........................agreeing with Taylor Lorenz.

 

less............................

 

In a world without digital privacy, even if you have done nothing wrong other than think differently, you begin to censor yourself.  Not entirely at first.  Just a little, bit by bit.  To risk less, to hope less, to imagine less, to dare less, to create less, to talk less, to think less.  The chilling effect of digital surveillance is profound and it touches everything.  What a small, unimaginative world we would end up with.  Not entirely at first.  Just bit by bit.

-Tim Cook, from his 2019 speech at Stanford

Alone..................................

 Unlike today, when people tailor even their most intimate moments for consumption on social media, Eisenhower believed that the task of overcoming any challenge must be a personal matter—a burden to be borne alone.

-Susan Eisenhower, How Ike Led:  The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions

Be careful what you wish for.........

Peter Thiel, whom you will also come to know, has famously become associated with one question, which he uses interviews and over long dinners: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"
     I'll give you mine to close this short preface:  Perhaps we have too few conspiracies, not too many.  Too little scheming, rather than too much.  What would happen if more people took up plotting, coordinating how to eliminate what they believe are negative forces and obstacles, and tried to wield power in an attempt to change the world?  We could almost always use more boldness, and less complacency.  We could use less telegraphing of our intentions or ambitions and see what secrecy, patience, and planning might accomplish.  We could use a little more craziness and disruption, even from the people we disagree with.
     This book is my homage to that complicated idea, told in part through the complicated story of one almost unbelievable conspiratorial act.
     Please use it wisely.

-Ryan Holiday,  from his short preface to Conspiracy:  A True Story Of Power, Sex, And A Billionaire's Secret Plot To Destroy A Media Empire

This is one bandwagon........................

.........................I won't be getting on.  Talk about slippery slopes...

A worthy sentiment..............................

"I'm keeping my privacy about how I voted, so don't even ask. I wish the best for my fellow Americans and hope that whatever happens, you'll be able to handle it."


-Ann Althouse, as excerpted from here

The second REALLY big mistake............

......................that George W. Bush made can be found here.

Prescient..........................................

     "There's a guy I know only on the Internet.  He's apparently involved in some kind of hassle with Krause.  Anyway, he says that Krause has got a rat's-nest-inter-agency intelligence operation going, and one of the things that they're testing is called Deep Data Correlation.  The basic concept was supposed to be that they could look at an ocean of data and figure out from that who might be bad guys.  Terrorists."
     "Is that bad?"  The waiter came back with a martini, waited, with me, until Bob nodded.  The waiter went away and I continued.
     "Not if that was what was happening.  but there are some fundamental problems with that kind of data-mining," I said.  I explained the numbers problem.  "So essentially, what they were trying to do is impossible.  But - if you come at it from the other end, starting with a name, then going after associated data, you can develop some pretty powerful tools."
     "What a minute,"  Bob said.  "You're saying that instead of looking at the data, and finding suspects, they find a suspect, and then mine some data to support the suspicion."
     "Yeah.  Except, of course, that you've got to identify a target first.  With terrorists, identifying the target is the whole problem.  That's the hard part.  If they'd been a private company, say, hired to find techniques that would identify terrorists, they'd have concluded that data-mining was a waste of time.  But they're not in a private company.  They're with the government.  So they apparently said to themselves, "Well, data-mining doesn't work, but we've got this great research tool, let's just check it out on a few targets."
-John Sandford,  as excerpted from The Hanged Man's Song, published in 2003

Our best minds are working on it..........

"I'm an optimist, so I wonder if there is any future technology that will help citizens control their governments and neutralize the risks that stem from a total loss of privacy."
-Scott Adams, as excerpted from here

Nothing-to-hide versus Privacy...................

How much should the government know about us citizens seems to be a hot topic here of late.  Some folks, who seem very willing to trade liberty for perceived security, employ the I-Have-Nothing-To-Hide argument in defense of massive data collection on individuals.  As our essayist points out, this is true until you ask them to show you their latest credit card bills or ask them to let you photograph them naked.  For an interesting essay about "privacy," go here and read this.  Excerpt here:

"The deeper problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is that it myopically views privacy as a form of secrecy. In contrast, understanding privacy as a plurality of related issues demonstrates that the disclosure of bad things is just one among many difficulties caused by government security measures. To return to my discussion of literary metaphors, the problems are not just Orwellian but Kafkaesque. Government information-gathering programs are problematic even if no information that people want to hide is uncovered. In The Trial, the problem is not inhibited behavior but rather a suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability created by the court system's use of personal data and its denial to the protagonist of any knowledge of or participation in the process. The harms are bureaucratic ones—indifference, error, abuse, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability."

thanks craig

Regurgitation.............................

Even casual followers of this blog will recognize how much I value the wonder that is YouTube.  So, it was with great interest that I read this quote from Pat Metheny:

"It's an unexpected turn of events for me. When you play that crappy gig in Germany in 1983, it's like, 'OK, we got through that one, and it's behind us.' Then it gets regurgitated 20 years later. The main thing is the way it limits the possibilities now. I used to love going and playing jam sessions, doing things spontaneously. I can't do that anymore. Everything you do is documented, nothing is casual anymore. You can't even have a conversation with someone after the gig, because there's somebody filming it. It turns out the Big Brother thing that was predicted, it's us."

Full interview is here.

thanks mungo