A Video That Every Potential Juror Should See

I’ve written before about the use of police bodycams, mainly looking at what the first person perspective might mean for the way we will see (police) violence in the future.

The ACLU has written an blog post about a video that clearly shows the level of manipulation that is possible for the police around their own footage. The third person viewpoint of a public surveillance camera made that clear in this particular case in point.

Last year I wrote about “acting and directing with police body cameras” — how police officers are likely to increasingly learn to manipulate the photographic record that their cameras create. A stark case study in that kind of manipulation can be found in video of a 2014 arrest in Florida that was released in January and recently came to my attention. It’s the kind of video that everyone should watch in order to become sophisticated and properly skeptical consumers of video evidence.

Source: A Video That Every Potential Juror Should See | American Civil Liberties Union

Update (d.d. 4 April 2016): The New York Times has put up an interactive site that allows you to see the same footage of standard policing situations from different points of view. Do check it out. The main lesson? What we see in police footage tends to be shaped by what we already believe.

Everybody has a share

How the focus on security and the culture of fear has real negative effects and hurts our social integrity.

The term ‘doublethink’ comes from the book ‘1984’ of course. Big Brother’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ -specializing in fabricating lies- uses slogans like ‘War is peace’ and ‘Freedom is slavery’.

There is another classic book in which the state creates paradoxical rules to keep her citizens in check. It is one of my favourites: ‘Catch-22’ by Joseph Heller.

Catch-22

Yossarian is the protagonist, a Captain in the American Airforce during World War Two. When, during a mission, his buddy Snowden (yes, you can’t make it up) dies, something breaks inside of him. He decides he needs to escape. He tells the doctor that the war is making him insane and that he wants to go home. The doctor tells him that there is a rule that says that anybody who wants to go home because of the war can’t be insane. Yossarian has to stay because of rule 22, the infamous ‘Catch-22’.

One of the most interesting characters in the book is the profiteer Milo Minderbinder, responsible for the canteen at the army base.

Milo Minderbinder

Minderbinder runs a ‘syndicate’, M&M Enterprises, of which everybody (according to him) is a member. I can’t explain precisely how Milo buys fresh eggs for 1 cent in Sicily, sells them for 4-and-a-quarter cents in Malta, buys them back from there for 7 cents and sells them to the base for 5 cents, while still making a profit. Milo himself is clear about where the profit goes:

"Of course, I don’t make the profit, the syndicate makes the profit. And everybody has a share."

As soon as anybody questions his intentions, he literally hands them ‘a share’. Minderbinder sells anything and everything that he can find on the base. For example, when their plane has to make an emergency landing on the water, the crew finds out that he has removed the CO2-cannisters from the life jackets to make icecream to sell in the canteen. He has replaced them with a note with the following text:

"What’s good for M & M Enterprises is good for the country."

The Minderbinder character is Heller’s razor-sharp critique of the military-industrial complex. "What was good for the country was good for General Motors, and vice versa" said the former CEO of General Motors in 1953 when he became the American Minister of Defense.

Nowadays companies still use this type of of ‘doublespeak’.

Fox-IT

Commercial interests are then equated to public interests. We now call outsourcing public tasks and risks to the business world (in exchange for a profit of course) ‘public-private partnerships’.

Proponents of this concept are often allowed to appear in the public eye as an ‘independent’ technical expert, to give their opinion on safety and the Internet. For me that feels a bit like you are asking a locksmith whether she thinks that the number of break-ins will increase, or that you create space for the thoughts of the CEO of Durex on the population explosion on the African continent.

Record holder in this rhetoric of (internet)safety as a market is ‘The Hague Security Delta’. A group of private companies, governmental organizations and knowledge institutes with a shared goal. I cite: "more business activity, more jobs and a secure world". Let’s take a look at the way in which The Hague Security Delta recruits students for their campus…

It is important of course to be a frontrunner in the cybersecurity domain. However, this bombastic piece of ‘safety-porn’ has a very damaging side to it. It scares us.

At Bits of Freedom we often talk about the ‘chilling effect’: not daring to do certain things anymore because you think you might be listened in on or looked at. The current focus on more and more security has another negative effect. The effect of the false positive: we see dangers that don’t exist.

You’ve probably read about Ahmed Mohamed, the 14 year old from Texas who was put in handcuffs and was arrested after he had shown his self-made clock to his teacher at school.

Ahmed Mohamed

Or about the 30 hipsters who had to answer to two police officers after a passer-by had gotten a bit nervous after seeing their black flag.

Beard club

It isn’t only Muslims and men with beards who are the victim of our urge to profile.

'Bomb' shoe

This shoe is owned by Peter Schaap. The laser helps him to walk with his Parkinson’s. Last month, he was sitting in the bus waiting for it to leave. The bus driver refused to get in. Before Peter knew what was happening he was taken off the bus by two police officers. They had been called by one of his fellow passengers who, rather than asking him why he needs those special shoes, had just dialed the emergency number.

Although we can probably also laugh about this, it is very sad story too. Apparently, deviant behavior is immediately seen as suspect. It is symptomatic for what I’ll call a ‘Culture of Fear’. And these are only the examples that make the news. How often does this happen to people without us getting to know about it?

Rob Bertholee

That is why I was so disappointed when the boss of the Dutch secret service, Rob Bertholee, told a room full of readers of ‘De Correspondent’ that he wants to flip around the standard question about the so-called balance between privacy and security. "How much security do you want to give up for privacy?", he asked. This shows that he doesn’t see how fear has a deleterious effect on how we relate to each other. The question that has to be asked instead —by him too— is: How much societal integrity do we want to give up for a one-sided and anxious focus on security?

The earlier examples of false positives show a human failing. But more and more future decisions about us will be taken by computer algorithms using profiling data. On the basis of the collected data about us (where do we live, what is our ‘sentiment’ on social media, what have we bought recently) we are pigeonholed by the system.

Last summer, Google’s image recognition algorithm categorized Jacky Alciné’s black friend as a gorilla…

My friend is not a gorilla

Not only does this say something about the lack of diversity of the Google team, it also shows the current limitations of technology. The exact same machine learning techniques —including its preprogrammed biases— will make a guess whether you should be allowed to order at a web shop, whether you are eligible for a deduction on your insurance premium, if you aren’t being fraudulent with the mileage of your company car, and whether you are intending to travel to Syria of course. If you start looking for that one dangerous exception in massive amounts of data, you will by definition mostly find false positives. These wrongly profiled people are therefore the victim of our craving for more (false) security and for bigger data.

We have to keep resisting the fact that we are constantly being reduced to our profiles. We can really say that in the case of the digital civil rights movement everybody does have a share. So let us keep fighting together for an internet on which human rights are truly meaningful and for a society in which we can truly be free.

This is a slightly shortened version of a speech I gave at the 2016 edition of the Dutch Big Brother Awards. Sources and image credits.

Tips for traveling through Japan

In september 2013 I traveled for a full month through Japan. Just me and my backpack. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. When a friend decided to go there I wrote up some of the things I particularly enjoyed. I guess others might find this advice useful too. So here is my (highly personal) travel guide to Japan…

General advice

First of all make sure you buy one of those all-access railpasses in advance. It might be harder to get that done once you are in Japan. The high-speed trains are insanely efficient and traveling those long distances through (as one of my friends call it) “the most beautiful and the most ugly country in the world” using other means of transportation is a waste of your time.

I did the following route in four weeks and absolutely loved it: Tokyo → Kawaguchiko → Mount Fuji → Kyoto → Hiroshima → Kagoshima → Yokushima → Nagasaki → Osaka → Naoshima → Kobe → Kyoto → Nara → Ise → Matsumoto → Tsumago & Magome → Kanazawa → Tokyo.

Japan is mostly a cash-based society and it can be hard to find ATMs that work for you. If you have a VISA card then you can get money at any of the abundant Seven/Elevens. If you you only have a Mastercard then you have to find the larger post offices to get money out. Update: Apparently Maestro now works at Seven/Eleven too, so no more ATM issues then.

Make sure to visit the different types of onsen. Occasionally you have them outside in nature and they can be wonderful.

These were my highlights per location:

Tokyo

The first thing you should check is whether the Sumo tournament happens to be in Tokyo while you are there. If so, get tickets and go there for an afternoon. If you visit the fish market early morning, you shouldn’t go and stand in line at the sushi place that everybody seems to want to go to, go to ‘Ryu Sushi’ instead. They had the best sushi I’ve had in all of Japan. I thought that Akibahara (including the bizarre ‘French maid’-cafes) was a must-see and the tiny bars in Golden Gai were very interesting too. My best memories are of climbing Mount Fuji. I started around 13:00 all the way down at the first station and walked up to the top till 01:00 at night (with a small rest), in time to see the sun come up. It was far and cold, but worth it. I was very lucky to have one of the clearest nights of the season, and I am sure it can be horrible and disappointing too. I haven’t bought much stuff in Japan (I try to buy as little as I can in general), but I did buy a great kitchen knife (for the left-handed) at the kitchen-area in Tokyo and beautiful asymmetric earthenware for a few euros a piece (I should have bought more as they are my favourite things in my house now). I am still disappointed that I couldn’t get a ticket for the Ghibli museum. These seem to sell out weeks in advance.

Kyoto

Everything is beautiful here and nothing disappoints. Two pieces of advice: Rent a bike, it is the ideal place to cycle around because everything is so close to each other; and go to the top floors of the ridiculously massive train station, you have wonderful views from there. Otherwise just go on a hunt for the small Zen temples. I thought that Koto-in was amazing and was hugely impressed by the Zen rock garden at Ryoanji. The manga museum did very little for me, but I am in no way a manga fan anyway. If I ever go back to Kyoto then I would try to go see the ‘Ninja house‘, as I didn’t manage that the first time around.

The atomic bombs: Hiroshima and Nagasaki

If seeing this part of history is something that interests you, then Hiroshima is the place that has the most to offer. I was incredibly touched by the videos of the survivors telling their stories in the museum there. From Hiroshima it is a short trip to Miyajima (see the picture above) which is well worth the effort. Nagasaki is cool too: it has a small piece of Dutch history and has a very interesting fusion kitchen. If you go there, make sure to take the boat to the absurdly weird Gunkanjima.

Yakushima

I thought this island all the way South was super. Apparently it always rains there, but I was lucky and must have caught the two days that it didn’t. The walk to the oldest tree in Japan through nature (following an old train track) was gorgeous. I slept at Lodge Yaedake Sanso which comes highly recommended.

Osaka

Can be skipped. I was there to go and see a yearly festival in one of the neighbouring towns. My best experience there was sleeping in a capsule hotel (Capsule Hotel Asahi Plaza Shinsaibashi, men and women separate). If you like okonomiyaki then Osaka is the place to go.

Naoshima

For me this truly is a must-see. Try and sleep in one of the Mongolian yurts next to the water (Tsutsuji-so) and make sure you have enough time to see all the museums and art pieces. The architecture of the Chi Chu Art Museum literally made me cry (this Tadao Ando is brilliant). Make sure to take the ferry to Teshima, rent a bike with an electric motor and cycle to the Teshima Art Museum (which was missing from my edition of the Lonely Planet), it is utter genius, really. Naoshima was the one place where it was a bit hard to find decent food. Also you can skip the artsy public bath with the elephant.

Nara and Ise

The giant wooden temple at Nara is impressive, but I could have done without it too. So if you are short of time, skip Nara. The story behind Ise is incredible. When I was there was just the time when they were rebuilding everything, but it is a far way out and there is little to see as an outsider.

Magome and Tsumago

I thoroughly enjoyed walking for about half a day from one town to the other using this old Nakasendo postal route. It would have been nice to have been able to spend a bit more time camping along the same road that Musashi traveled. I had a superb meal and slept very well at the Fujioto Ryokan in Tsumago.

Enjoy your trip (the food, the food!), I am very jealous you get to go there…

Is group chat making you sweat? — Signal v. Noise

Jason Fried has writen an incredible post about the benefits and the pitfalls (mostly the latter) of group chat after ten years of experience at 37signals and Basecamp.

I think he is fundamentally right in giving ‘attention’ so much importance as a precious resource. I’ve come to realise that the ability to singletask is the one skill that most people are lacking in their working lives. It is certainly the thing that I would like to get better at.

At my place of work we have been experimenting with Mattermost over the last few weeks and are on the cusp of implementing it for the whole team. I look forward to implementing Fried’s recommendations on how to make that a success.

I believe attention is one of your most precious resources. If something else controls my attention, that something else controls what I’m capable of. I also believe your full attention is required to do great work. So when something like a pile of group chats, and the expectations that come along with them, systematically steals that resource from me, I consider it a potential enemy. “Right now” is a resource worth conserving, not wasting.

Group chatSource: Is group chat making you sweat? — Signal v. Noise — Medium

Guest editor for a day

Maurits Martijn from the Dutch online news medium De Correspondent asked me to be a guest editor for his newsletter. He asked me which sources I wouldn’t want to miss and would recommend to others. Below my Dutch reply to his questions (without the mailing list tracking codes…):

1. Cory Doctorow op Boing Boing

Zoals ik nu voor jullie dit lijstje samenstel, zijn er mensen die dat al jaren voor mij doen. Een van mijn helden is de sciencefictionauteur en activist Cory Doctorow. Bijna elke dag plaatst link naar interessante artikelen op Boing Boing. Het is een meesterlijke mix van digitale rechten, internetcultuur en politiek commentaar. Hij weet daarbij zaken vaak fantastisch te framen. Als Bill Gates de FBI steunt in plaats van Apple dan zet hij daar ‘Bill Gates: Microsoft would backdoor its products in a heartbeat’ boven. Doctorow schrijft ongelooflijk veel. Lees hier hoe hij dat voor mekaar krijgt: Writing in the Age of Distraction.

2. Evgeny Morozov

Evgeny Morozov is een vlijmscherpe criticaster van het libertarische, publieke ruimte vretende, innovatie-über-alles gedachtegoed zoals dat vaak uit Silicon Valley komt. Vorige week fileerde hij bijvoorbeeld hun perspectief op het basisinkomen. Zijn stukken zijn niet altijd even vindbaar, maar hier vind je de stukken die hij voor The Guardian schrijft. Zin in meer? Lees dan vooral zijn boek To Save Everything, Click Here waarin hij de heilige huisjes van maakbaarheid 2.0 (denk aan open data, de Quantified Self, netwerkdemocratie, en natuurlijk Big Data) één voor één omver schopt.

3. Bruce Schneier

Als je snel een overzicht wilt hebben van wat er nu op het gebied van digitale rechten speelt, dan kun je het beste beginnen met het lezen van het boek Data and Goliath van Bruce Schneier. Ik ken niemand die zo helder kan schrijven over hoe technologie onze rechten kan beperken en wat wij daaraan kunnen doen als hij. In dit boek legt hij bijvoorbeeld uit waarom het feit dat terroristische aanvallen zo extreem weinig voorkomen ervoor zorgt dat je in het bestrijden van terreur vooral false positives tegenkomt én waarom bedrijven nooit hun eigen verzamelwoede zullen reguleren en dat dus is wat je als overheid moet doen. Schneier heeft ook een zeer lezenswaardig blog.

4. Ta-Nehisi Coates

In de afgelopen jaren heb ik geen boek gelezen dat mij harder heeft geraakt dan Between the World and Me van Ta-Nehisi Coates. Met de digitale wereld heeft het weinig te maken, maar met mensenrechten des te meer. Coates schrijft namelijk over wat het betekent om zwart te zijn in Amerika. Ik was na het lezen letterlijk ziek van mijn white privilege.

5. Mijn favoriete technologiepodcast

Ik ben een fervent podcastluisteraar. Al bijna tien jaar staat This Week in Tech bovenaan mijn playlist. Gastheer Leo Laporte bespreekt met zijn gasten in anderhalf uur (door mij afgeluisterd op anderhalve snelheid) het technologienieuws van de week. Ik kan de grote Amerikaanse technologieblogs met een gerust hart overslaan en blijf op de hoogte van wat er gebeurt met Google’s Alphabet, Apple versus de FBI, Virtual Reality of de Blockchain.

6. Meer lezen?

Tot slot, vier nieuwsbrieven die ook een abonnement waard zijn:

Wait but Why, omdat Tim Urban als geen ander in staat is om complexe vraagstukken met humor en inzicht terug te brengen naar hun essentie. Audrey Watters, voor een hyperkritische kijk op onderwijstechnologie en Stephen Downes voor een filosofische kijk op hetzelfde onderwerp.

En niet te vergeten de nieuwsbrief van Bits of Freedom!