[FRIAM] celebrity woes
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Wed Feb 2 19:00:34 EST 2022
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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