Re: <nettime> monitoring and surveillance

[John Young <cryptome@earthlink.net>]

Odd that the Weimar-Princeton announcement makes no mention of
scholars and researchers gathering, aggregating, mining and messing
with Internet users data under guise of investigating and analyzing
the world's greatest-ever spying machine by spying on the gullible
users "to protect them," the motto of secret agents forever.

Bundles of irresistable funding for that, indeed, alliances and
standards-setting bodies have been established to bless this villainy
and the finely-coutured apologists for the villainous institutions and
"leading" scholars.

Be sure tell the public right away with every media study announcement
about the spy agencies' multi-millions being distributed to eager
institutions to foster open source spying, spy training, covert spying
and camouflage thereof. Admire the spread of euphemistic "security
studies" and "surveillance studies" and "social media studies" and in
particular "open source studies." Even the spy agencies vaunt these
luser lures in their recruiting materials. High-tech seekers, media
mavens especially solicited by CIA University, rush to intern in home
bases of spies and pursue advanced degrees in their cash-rich outliers
in universities. Note who runs these social studies programs ever
adaptable to the king's coin.

Remember the invention by Plato of Socrates, a friendly fellow
favoring open discourse, to undergird the highly privileged
philosopher as king. Machiavelli adored Plato's conceit. Remember the
invention of philosophy to undergird dissimulation, wise faculty club
debate tea cup held with little finger poised just so to signal how
pleasurable it is to outsmart.

Meta surveillance studies presumably sanitizes the vile practice
of social studies long invested in codifying human behavior, first
as allegedly disinterested scholarship, then to repackage and sell
as means of political control to full-spectrum authoritatives ever
indebted to funding sources open and secret, especially the secret
which requires non-disclosure as a condition of scholarly bribery.

Dissimulation provides an escape from complicity, thank heavens for
duplictious obfuscation. "I had no idea my work would be used that
way."

Here's a suggestion: if any use of scholarly research is ever used for
secret purposes the original scholars shall be hung until dead from
Alma Mater, left to rot as a signal of why secrecy is the greatest
threat to democracy.

Monitoring the extended use of scholarly research shall no longer
be forgiven by exculpatory sophistry. No more excusing the study of
complicity by deeper treachery of exploiting hard-up students to do
spies' "dirty work." Oops that is the name of a famous spy story
dissimulation.

Odd that the illegality of data gathering on the Internet is never
admitted by overseers of the intellectual commonweal. Odd that privacy
policies are always taken "very seriously," but never disclosed as
duplicitous.






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