不良研究所

"Great Exploitations: Data Mining, Technological Determinism and the NSA"
Matthew Jones, Columbia University

Abstract:聽We cannot understand the programs revealed by Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers without understanding a broader set聽of historical development in the US and beyond before and after 9/11. First, with the growing spread of computation into everyday聽transactions from the 1960s into the 1990s, corporations and governments collected exponentially more information about consumers and聽citizens. To contend with this deluge of data, computer scientists, mathematicians, and business analysts created new fields of computational聽analysis, colloquially called 鈥渄ata mining,鈥� designed to produce knowledge or intelligence from vast volume. Second, conservative legal聽scholars, government officers, and judges had long doubted the constitutionality of legal restrictions that the US Congress had placed on聽intelligence work, foreign and domestic, in the late 1970s. Facing the growth of the Internet and the increasing availability of high quality聽cryptography, national security lawyers within the US Department of Justice and the National Security Agency (NSA) began developing what聽was called a 鈥渕odernization鈥� of surveillance and intelligence law to deal with technological developments. 聽Third, in the Bill Clinton era,聽concerns about terrorist attacks on the United States came to focus heavily on the need to defend computer systems and networks. The聽asymmetrical nature of the terrorist threat had long challenged the traditional division of defense of the homeland versus offence abroad:聽attacks honored no territorial boundaries, and, neither, it increasingly came to seem, should defense against them. Protecting the 鈥渃ritical聽infrastructure鈥� of the United States, the argument ran, required new domestic surveillance to find insecurities, and opened the door to much聽greater Department of Defense capability domestically and new NSA responsibilities. Tools for assessing domestic vulnerabilities lent聽themselves easily to discerning鈥攁nd exploiting鈥攆oreign ones. And traditions of acquiring and exploiting any foreign sources of聽communication prompted the NSA to develop ever more invasive ways of hacking into computers and networks worldwide. In the immediate聽wake of 9/11, the Bush administration braided these developments, to create a massive global surveillance regime. The administration sought聽to make it appear at once technologically determined and essential for security in the global war of terror. The job of the NSA was 鈥渢o exploit鈥澛燾ommunications networks鈥攖o make them available to policymakers; to do this, its lawyers 鈥渆xploited鈥� the law as well as technology.聽

Bio:聽Matthew L. Jones is the James R. Barker Professor of Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University. His publications聽include"Querying the Archive: Data Mining from Apriori to Page Rank," in L. Daston, ed.聽Archives of the聽Sciences聽(Chicago, 2016);聽Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking聽about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage聽(Chicago, 2016); 聽and聽The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution聽(University of Chicago Press, 2006).