http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.hacking/
I found this section of the article particularly pertinent:
"Google's system isn't unique. Democratic governments around the world -- in Sweden, Canada and the UK, for example -- are rushing to pass laws giving their police new powers of Internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell.
Many are also passing data retention laws, forcing companies to retain information on their customers. In the U.S., the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act required phone companies to facilitate FBI eavesdropping, and since 2001, the National Security Agency has built substantial eavesdropping systems with the help of those phone companies.
Systems like these invite misuse: criminal appropriation, government abuse and stretching by everyone possible to apply to situations that are applicable only by the most tortuous logic. The FBI illegally wiretapped the phones of Americans, often falsely invoking terrorism emergencies, 3,500 times between 2002 and 2006 without a warrant. Internet surveillance and control will be no different."
Thoughts?
Greetings all,
ReplyDeleteToday's meeting was highly insightful, revealing, and rejuvenating. I have so much I want to write about body politics, but it'll have to wait until tomorrow. In the meantime, here are the books that I mentioned:
Sacred possessions: Vodou, SanterÃa, Obeah, and the Caribbean. (Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, eds.)
The Reaper's Garden: Death and power in the world of Atlantic slavery (Vincent Brown) *An excellent book about body and mortuary politics, which I enjoyed reading.*
Plus, here are two books that I forgot to mention (or couldn't remember the titles of):
Flash of the spirit: African and Afro-American art and philosophy (Robert Farris Thompson) *Thompson discusses the Kongo Cosmogram and capoeira...more circles for you Skylar. I will try to locate the article by John Thornton which addresses how Catholic missionaries often misread the Kongo Kosmogram and though it was just an artistic cross.*
Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Jennifer Morgan)
I found Chapter 1 ("'Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder': Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology") to be the most fascinating. If you want to talk about "writing" on bodies, then you have to read Morgan's discussion of how Spanish (and Dutch?) travelers wrote about women on the continent of Africa in terms of their breasts. Some of the illustrations she includes are priceless and insightful.
(Here's a link to the chapter on googlebooks: http://books.google.com/books?id=_7gIP9D2NmoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Laboring+Women&ei=DghqS8rrCIvazQTEqcHnDQ&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false)
I'll be back soon with a follow-up...
Tamara