[FRIAM] celebrity woes

[Steve Smith]

On 2/2/22 9:32 AM, glen wrote:
>
> Teen monitoring Elon Musk’s jet ‘tracking Gates, Bezos and Drake too’
> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/02/teen-tracking-elon-musk-jet-bill-gates-jeff-bezos-drake-jack-sweeney-tesla-flight-tracker-bot 
>
>
reminds me (vaguely) of Trevor Paglen 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Paglen>'s work:   I met him in 
2006 at USC while he was working on his "Dark Projects".   As Art Work 
it felt blatantly political to a fault but I felt better over time as 
his arc of work unfolded.   At the time, it was a lot about recruiting 
lots of people with long lenses to take pictures at public/private/gov't 
airports (especially) of planes with missing/obscured/modified 
tailnumbers and building networks of where/when they were seen...  they 
used yet other identifying characteristics (like wild animal sitings) to 
establish identity.  Paglen made a visit to Ed Grothus' Black Hole not 
too long after that meeting.

I've a friend who believes strongly that privacy should be inversely 
proportional to power... the more of the latter you have, the less of 
the former... with folks like Putin and Trump (and Biden too) having 
endoscopic monitors on their toilets (for example) and *no* private 
conversations allowed (reference to Trump's recently pieced back 
together official WH docs that he was apparently famous for tearing 
up).   The least of us would  have infinite privacy (blanked out on 
public CCTVs?)    I like the spirit of it, but have no idea of how to 
begin to implement, though SteveG's conceptions around Steve Mann's 
sousveillance do seem like a good place to start?

Paparazzi, despite being their own kind of bottom-feeders do seem to 
provide a useful function, no?

Possibly neither here nor there, but Paglen and Rick Prelinger 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelinger_Archives> (we were all in a 
weeklong Annenberg Foundation workshop together) were exchanging 
partially analyzed copies of a database of timestamps and numbers of 
pagers and cell phone calls from NYC on 9/11/01 during the runup and 
aftermath of the twin towers.   They gave me a thumbdrive with the data 
but I didn't have my own personal computer at the time and they asked me 
to swear to not share/disclose this data to my LANL 
handlers/compatriots...  I never quite figured out what they were afraid 
of, but I was equal parts curious and respectful of their goings 
ons...   By the time I was in a position (2008) to really dig into this 
stuff I had misplaced it.   I forget the magnitude of calls/pages (no 
data, just metadata) they claimed to have  but it seems like it was at 
least 10s of thousands... maybe 100s?

- Steve
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