Privacy

Algorithms and Society

Michael Filimowicz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032002514
• eBook ISBN: 9781000575811
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Privacy: Algorithms and Society focuses on encryption technologies and privacy debates in journalistic crypto-cultures, countersurveillance technologies, digital advertising, and cellular location data.

Important questions are raised such as: How much information will we be allowed to keep private through the use of encryption on our computational devices? What rights do we have to secure and personalized channels of communication, and how should those be balanced by the state's interests in maintaining order and degrading the capacity of criminals and rival state actors to organize through data channels? What new regimes may be required for states to conduct digital searches, and how does encryption act as countersurveillance? How have key debates relied on racialized social constructions in their discourse? What transformations in journalistic media and practices have occurred with the development of encryption tools? How are the digital footprints of consumers tracked and targeted?

Scholars and students from many backgrounds as well as policy makers, journalists, and the general reading public will find a multidisciplinary approach to questions of privacy and encryption encompassing research from Communication, Sociology, Critical Data Studies, and Advertising and Public Relations.

1 Distributing Journalism Digital Disclosure, Secrecy, and Crypto-Cultures

Luke Heemsbergen and Alexia Maddox

DOI: 10.4324/9781003173335-1

Introduction

This chapter engages with documenting how digital secrets and distributed disclosures are evolving cultures of journalistic and civic practice. The rise and shifts of new forms of distributing journalism trace a movement from private disclosures and exclusive stories to distributed disclosures and public made stories. Often, large datasets and diverse actors factor into the creation of such news stories. These shifts have occurred across techno-cultural contexts of openness and secrecy that have intertwined to redefine the work and identity of journalists.

The practice and promise of journalism in the western world has worn thin. Rosen (1999) suggests that a frame of competent professional bystander who reports on the events of public interest that roll by had fallen out of grace long before algorithmic steering and audience microcasting redefined news.

Foreseeing fractured and fractious publics, Rosen (1999, p. 19) offers journalism’s purpose “not just to inform a public that may or may not emerge, but to improve the chances that it will emerge”. That is to say that the press shapes everyday politics. It does so through the manufacture of stories: from how and who gathers facts, what they decide is news, and then how stories are presented and to whom. At the same time, markets for news and practices of journalism to fill them have suffered from radical external shifts of environment that are well known. Summarizing some of these shifts at the cusp of Social Media ubiquity, Carvajal, García-Avilés, and González (2012) offer that:

As the advertising market disappears into a fragmented world of digital outlets and readers consume news for free, there is little if any money available to subsidise quality journalism. A lack of resources undermines reporting quality and fact-checking practices. Bureau cuts, fewer news correspondents and the abuse of information received from agencies are simply a few consequences of this situation (Brogan, 2010; Starr, 2009). The one thing that can be capitalised is the demand for news products that continue to remain scarce, such as investigative reporting.

(Carvajal et al., 2012, p. 639)

Here, the need for new models for journalism, especially investigative journalism, echoes trends of media ecosystems shifting from centralized to distributed networks. In the broadcast model of centralized news production and consumption, insiders share secrets with other insiders who happen to be journalists. These journalist-gatekeepers then broadcast the stories they decide to make with the information they have. This process describes a classical “leaked” government communiqué being ready for the evening news. It does not, however, explain the democratic merit of centralized, gatekeeping news media. On the opposite end of the spectrum is a distributed model, where secrets first become available to the many – those people formerly known as the audience – who then make multiple stories and in doing so enact a new form of publicness. These renditions of what news is – across extremes of centralized and distributed models – are simplistic. Nevertheless, it serves to show the differences in specific models of journalism practice vis-à-vis the public: consider how Daniel Ellsberg carefully leaked documents to noted reporters, while WikiLeaks offered up literal wiki functionality to masses of data and humans. Stories could be created from and for audiences wide and far.

But WikiLeaks’ wiki did not last. Wikileaks.org’s distinct phases created permutations and combinations of journalism practice that drew light not only to new ways of making news, but the evolutionary complexity of claiming to be a force of transparency and truth in a data-rich world (Heemsbergen, 2021). Part of the complexity had to do with how these cultures attached to cryptography. The cypherpunks – a like-minded, liberty-focused group of computer scientists, coders, and civil libertarians, willed WikiLeaks into existence – rubbed up against structural powers of the state (Follis & Fish, 2020) and the market (Cammaerts, 2013). Paradoxically, part of the new digital machines that “killed secrets” (Greenberg, 2012) was a suite of cryptographic technologies that enabled the many to share data and communicate with each other in private or anonymously. This afforded new ways to organize secrets that in turn created new public information. The ethos that drove these cryptographic practices was not always aligned with traditional journalistic practice or ethics, or the traditional power differentials between western states and their journalists. We turn now from our brief introduction of journalism distributed to focus on cryptographic cultures themselves.

Figure 1.1 Washington Post website.

Note that as this chapter unpacks the ethos in distributed journalism, we highlight a set of techno-cultural practices that were not apparent or were potentially unprofessional in the earlier iterations of what was dubbed network journalism. We break from a networked journalism that acknowledges multi-platform, multi-voice, always on digital content machines (Beckett & Mansell, 2008) that is understood through a frame of convergence culture. Closer is how Van Der Haak, Parks, and Castells (2012, p. 2927) describe a “diffused capacity to record information, share it, and distribute it” that includes as novel digital tools crowdsourcing, data analytics, and automated writing tools, among other digital capacities offered to the journalist subject.

Yet even further, we suggest that cryptography brings a new suite of affordances to journalism that is worth identifying and exploring in technical and cultural affect. Here we align to Costa (2018) and Heemsbergen (2019) and suggest that rather than focus on cryptography’s specific technical architectures, it is useful to focus on cryptographic practices of use within situated environments, namely how cultures of cryptography pervade and interface with journalism practice. How do cryptographic affordances in practice facilitate a model of distributed journalism? In summary, the early promise of networked journalism gave way to a cacophony of feedback loops and even disinformation that were afforded by the corporate interests of Web 2.0 products focusing attention on the most divisive content (Ribeiro et al., 2019) to drive engagement. Some of what is left of the original networked journalism promise remains at the margins, present in a set of techno-cultural cypherpunk practices that open new ways of seeking, protecting, and then widely sharing what makes news, news. We are interested in showing how far the liminal and periphery of journalistic practice around cryptography has come. Note that we signal distributing journalism as a practice and action rather than a noun or standard of “distributed journalism”. Its essence is tactical pushes into new distributions of making secret information public and then crafting public information. Cryptography helps with the former, and cryptographic cultures with the latter.

Strictly speaking, cryptography is the use and study of techniques to secure communications from being read by third parties or the public. In the digital age, these techniques form a ubiquitous layer of invisible digital infrastructures that enable and secure everything from banking online to watching DVDs and streaming Netflix. Yet as Bruun, Andersen, and Mannov (2020, p. 13) point out, employing cryptographic security systems “into the telecommunication data of millions of people reveal that data infrastructures and cryptographic systems are not just technical but also social and political forms”. It is not just certain products and their corporate interests that are protected by cryptography, but our capacity to communicate as we intend in a digital world. Cryptography is utilized to retain the levels of privacy and security present in the analogue world (Narayanan, 2013) by offering a technical solution to the expectation of a whispered conversation, sealed envelope, or locked box. However, cryptography constitutes a method of rearranging power in ways that were previously unavailable. These new power relations have confused states, offered moral panics for law enforcement, and in their ideal deployment enabled a utopian zero-trust society tied to libertarian ideologies. As Bauman et al. (2014) have it, there is a tension between the concerns raised in public debates about data security and the promises of emerging cryptographic protocols. Similarly, Bruun et al. (2020, p. 13) observe that in political speeches and public debates, citizens’ trust that governments and tech companies will protect their data is framed as important and essential. In the environments of emerging cryptographic technologies, such as blockchains, bitcoin, and multiparty computation (MPC), a promise to provide “trustless trust” and abandon the need for trusted intermediaries, authorities, and institutions is articulated (Bruun et al., 2020). In the next section, we more fully explore these ideologies and cultures to frame how they might relate to the cryptographic distribution of journalism.

Crypto-cultures and the public interest

How such techniques and cultures of cryptography distribute journalism’s practice and worth is a question of public interest. Follis and Fish (2020) argue that contradictory relationships emerge through the entanglements of hacking, journalism, the state, and political action that we discuss in this chapter. We contend that these relationships are not always contradictory and at times represent a convergence of politics within and across institutions, services, and people that bridge between the technopolitics of cypherpunks and journalism. This section will introduce the cultural milieu surrounding cryptography, present a typology of crypto-cultures, and then signpost the merger of these practices and politics with journalism. Moving through the realism of the scientific journalism spruiked by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, this section will lead us into the more diverse realm of crypto-journalism.

Turning for a moment to the history of technical cryptography is useful to describe the conditions created by cryptographic cultures and the cypherpunk moment. Before the 1970s, governments, particularly that of the US, stifled public pursuits in crypto (Levy, 2001). However, under pressure from industry and various organizations, in 1973 the US Government instigated work toward the Data Encryption Standard. In 1975, a proposal put forward by IBM was accepted and a modified version was adopted as the Federal Information Processing Standard 46 (FIPS-46) in 1977 and renamed the US Federal Data Encryption Standard (DES)¹ (Dooley, 2018, p. 169). The DES became the most widely used computer encryption algorithm of the twentieth century, to be replaced more recently with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in 2001 (Dooley, 2018, p. 167). Durin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Series Preface: Algorithms and Society
• Volume introduction
• Acknowledgment
• 1 Distributing Journalism: Digital Disclosure, Secrecy, and Crypto-Cultures
• 2 Centering Race in Analyses and Practices of Countersurveillance Advocacy: Mythologies of the Racialized Other in the Crypto Wars
• 3 Data Privacy in Digital Advertising: Towards a Post-Third-Party Cookie Era
• 4 Smartphones, APIs & GNSS (Not GPS) Location Data
• Index