MLA 2012: Debates in the Digital Humanities

Hacktivism and the Humanities: Programming Protest in the Era of the Digital University
Elizabeth Losh, University of California, San Diego

In June 2009, Cathy Davidson wrote a blog entry for the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) soliciting applications for a Program Coordinator. In her recruitment, she described HASTAC as a “voluntary network” of scholars who reach beyond academia to expand what the digital humanities could and should be. In doing so, Davidson defined its sphere of influence in broad moral and political terms that included “the role of science and technology and the state of our planet” and “issues of equity and ethics.” However, she concluded her post with a different kind of call to action from her initial “help wanted” message, one that spoke directly to hackers wanting to topple the Iranian regime that had just crushed pro-democracy protests and had shut down the microblogging and text messaging services.

Davidson alerted her audience that Western digital rights advocates had “received an SOS from pro-democracy activists in Tehran asking us all to use basic hacking tools to flood the propaganda sites of the ruling regime with junk traffic in order to bring them down and thereby open Twitter channels again.” Accordingly she reposted the following orders for electronic civil disobedience:

NOTE to HACKERS - attack www.farhang.gov.ir - pls try to hack all iran gov wesites [sic]. very difficult for us,? Tweets one activist. The impact of these distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks isn?t clear. But official online outlets like leader.ir, ahmadinejad.ir, and iribnews.ir are currently inaccessible. (Jardin)

What is the connection between Davidson’s eloquent defense of a broader notion of the digital humanities and her reposting of a rushed message that is peppered with misspellings, abbreviations, and infelicities of style? In both cases DH functions as a site of political activism, recognizable as being in the tradition of campus protests about civil rights or anti-militarism that defined how political commitment and dissent were staged in the built environment of the university in the past while also being part of a new vanguard of networked cultures in which protests in temporary autonomous zones could be rhizomatic, sporadic, and even ironic in their rhetorics.

By urging readers to launch distributed denial of service attacks aimed at the Iranian state, Davidson links HASTAC with another frame of cultural reference, that of “hacktivism” or the writing of code to promote or subvert particular political ideologies. In addition to protesting human rights violations, hacktivists have used their programming skills as a form of civil disobedience to promote free and open software, privacy, free speech, freedom of movement, governmental transparency, information ethics, political self-determination, environmental protection, and a range of other online and offline causes. However, because hacking tends to be a virtuoso performance by seasoned programmers, the ability to wield tools that expose vulnerabilities in security, privacy, or accurate data representation is often seen as the sole purview of an elite group of highly computer-literate cognoscenti very different from the print-cultured readers of her blog.

In thinking about the relationship between “hacktivism” and the humanities, it is worth noting that some academics are already risking tenure and even arrest because of their acts of electronic civil disobedience. To understand these phenomena that test academic freedom either to bring politics into academia or academia into politics, I argue it is helpful to examine theories of “hacktivism” or the nonviolent use of digital tools in pursuit of political ends. In the context of the digital humanities, I argue that hacktivism theory can broaden and deepen our understanding of the use of digital tools and of the politics of that tool use and to question the uncritical instrumentalism of so many DH projects.

Of course, some might argue that Davidson’s appeal for hackers to bring down Iranian government sites shows a naïve understanding of how human rights discourses function in the era of the Internet. In practical terms, denial of service attacks on state-run online media may only intensify suspicions that outside agitators are interfering with the internal politics of a country with a long history of unwelcome intervention. Furthermore, such attacks on the state’s propaganda infrastructure do little to promote the work of activists who bear witness through channels independent of the authoritarian state or provide evidence with persuasive power rather than just disruption of user experience.

In response to the Iranian situation, some digital humanities projects took a fundamentally different approach from the cyber-attacks promoted by Davidson. HyperCities, an initiative that describes itself as “a digital research and educational platform for exploring, learning about, and interacting with the layered histories of city and global spaces,” supported the efforts of UCLA Iranian-American graduate student Xarene Eskandar to create a collection of geotagged social media artifacts that documented Iranian election protests with markers on electronic maps, online videos, links to microblog postings, and explanations of the significance of a range of other digital ephemera from Tehran. More recently, the group created Hypercities Egypt, which included a Google map of Cairo that pinpointed a new anti-government tweet every four seconds. HyperCities director Todd Presner maintained that this retasking of a mapping tool designed to teach about urban history in ancient Rome or Weimar Berlin was completely consistent with the project’s mission, because “HyperCities Egypt gives users a sense of living — and reliving — history.”

Such software also shares information about rapidly unfolding events organized by smart mobs in the present with future participants. Although the HyperCities team sees disseminating real-time data as continuing the scholarly work of building digital archives, such tools may also become of interest to those outside academia who hope that visualized trends could also be deployed to try to predict the future. This is precisely the situation that Laila Shereen Sakr, a.k.a. VJ Um Amel, a USC graduate student has found herself in once the State Department took interest in her project, R-Shief, a suite of tools designed to visualize the shifting real-time patterns of popular opinion in the Middle East to provide “real-time analysis of opinion about late-breaking issues in the Arab world.” By using aggregate data from Twitter and the Web, R-Shief attempts to dissect phenomena such as how people in Egypt are reacting to the latest changes to the constitutional process, how Libyans perceive the presence of NATO forces, what Bahrainis think about the presence of Saudi military, and how pro-regime supporters in Syria are using social media. Being able, literally, to picture such complex social and political interactions could encourage more meaningful dialogue about democracy and civil society both in and about Arabic-speaking countries Shereen Sakr argues. She also embraces open-ended methods of inquiry that recognize contemporary means of communication as “technically mediated, messy, real-time, and fast” and notes that it is already challenging to write a “history of the present,” because “distance is critical to be critical.” Yet through tech@state now she has also been asked to engage in futurecasting so that public diplomacy efforts could maximize rhetorical impact and minimize security risk. Shereen Sakr might seem to be an unlikely ally to the nation-state, given her interest in hacking and hacktivism as part of the USC Critical Code Studies group and her public promotion of the Occupy Data movement, but with a paucity of regional experts and trained analysts of social media, her digital humanities projects have become of great interest to government agencies far beyond the N.E.H.

New uses for digital testimony and evidence even puts the digital humanities in dialogue with movements for decriminalization and political abolitionism. For example, Sharon Daniel’s “Public Secrets” and “Blood Sugar” websites about imprisonment and addiction were created with programming resources from the online journal Vectors and thus partially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Yet many NEH competitions specifically forbid endorsing any particular political point of view and would seem to promote a form of technocratic neutrality antithetical to the ethos that I am describing here.

At its most extreme, outright electronic civil disobedience could be described as the most militant form of political resistance in DH . Many scholars date theories of electronic civil disobedience in the academy to the early work of Critical Art Ensemble as an artist-activist collective. Electronic Disturbance Theater put many earlier principles of the CAE into digital practice with a series of “virtual sit-ins.” For example, EDT organized digital protests on the virtual real estate of official websites in Mexico, the U.S., and the European Union. No actual damage was done to the infrastructure of the sites or to their security mechanisms; the intent was merely “to disrupt access to the targeted website by flooding the host server with requests.”
Nonetheless, after EDT member Professor Richardo Dominguez held a well-publicized virtual sit-in on March 4, 2010 to protest tuition hikes that used computer servers owned by his employer, University of California, and targeted websites of the UC Office of the President, he found himself under investigation and at risk of losing his recently earned tenure. While faculty and students marched on the state Capitol building, Dominguez had instructed some four hundred EDT supporters to help occupy the ucop.edu domain. Because of the timeline of accusations, some claim that it was actually the development of the controversial “Transborder Immigrant Tool” or TBT that caused Dominguez to face possible disciplinary consequences for expropriating public resources and criminal prosecution for violating existing computer law. After all, Fox News was running stories explaining “hacktivism” to their viewership soon after reporting that Dominguez’s group was helping illegal immigrants by recycling cheap mobile phones and equipping them with new software to guide them in making the risky trip across the border to water caches left by humanitarian groups.

The use of computing resources in more conventional digital humanities projects may seem less obviously open to debate, but Dominguez’s case should function as both a cautionary tale and as an aspirational story to those operating in the mainstream of this emerging area. In other words, projects involving text encoding, archiving, or G.I.S. generally use university computer resources as well, and controversies about ownership, access, and control may have consequences for DH projects also. Although the battles over who uses a given server and under what circumstances may seem less contested for a database of Jane Austen novels than a database of covert water caches in the desert, academics involved in all kinds of projects must grapple with the politics of combative IT funding situations.

According to a story in The Chronicle of Higher Education about a new cohort of “digitally incorrect” professors determined to flout convention in defense of hacktivist principles, such misunderstandings may occur more often now that the university must assimilate “the first generation of new-media artists who migrated to academe.” These faculty dissenters use tools of tactical media as imagined most broadly by theorists like Geert Lovink to include not only software, but also other kinds of small-scale media appropriation, such as “pirated radio waves, video art, animations, hoaxes, wi-fi networks, musical jam sessions, Xerox cultures, performances, grassroots robotics, cinema screenings, street graffiti” (Lovink 189).

At the 2011 annual convention of the MLA, noted humanities scholar Alan Liu made a plea for more political engagement within the digital humanities and specifically for taking hacktivism and tactical media activism more seriously: “In the digital humanities, cultural criticism–in both its interpretive and advocacy modes–has been noticeably absent by comparison with the mainstream humanities or, even more strikingly, with “new media studies” (populated as the latter is by net critics, tactical media critics, hacktivists, and so on).” Liu argues that these predictable catalogues of digital humanities products (“tools,” “data,” “metadata,” and “archives”), modes of institutional membership (“associations,” “conferences,” “journals,” and “projects”), and stock issues (“the digital divide,” “privacy,” and “copyright”) add up to little critical thinking about neoliberalism at best and collaboration with for-profit educational outsourcing at worst.

Davidson and Liu are certainly closer to the center of the digital humanities as it is currently defined, and Shereen Sakr and Dominguez are probably located farther away on its peripheries, but they all argue for the formation of new modes of institutional critique, particularly – in Liu’s case – as impersonal and dehumanized distance learning threatens to transform public education for the worse. Yet the history of the digital humanities told by Tara McPherson describes founding fathers who turned to humanities computing not because they were in love with the aquarianism of Ted Nelson, but because were in full retreat from race, gender, and class in the post-free-speech academy. Nonetheless, the history of new media more generally is now filled with stories of gender and race, since even supposedly neutral algorithms and computer chips were shaped by material culture and the labor practices of female programmers and Native American workers, as N. Katherine Hayles and Lisa Nakamura have explained.
In addition to opening up blackboxed systems of nation and sexuality, many hacktivists also tinker with the materiality of technology and the contingent character of current consumer comforts. For example, CAE and EDT hacktivists have created projects on genetically modified food and nanotechnology in cosmetics. Digital humanists may be similarly incorporating criticism from studies of material culture, social practice, or media archeology, but I would argue that hacktivism pushes this consciousness raising further.

Perhaps it is not heretical to say that the digital humanities is more about bit rot and obsolete file formats than it is about “clean” data and perfect visualizations. As Matthew Kirschenbaum has observed in a recent NEH White Paper, DH maintenance and preservation practices are “localized and idiosyncratic,” much – as I would argue – hacker practice is. Furthermore, because digital humanities projects force scholars to care about mundane matters like maintaining servers and replacing routers, this peculiar breed of academic must also come to understand the instability and materiality of the archive not its permanence and abstraction. Even digital files in the “cloud” exist somewhere in time and space, and high-tech satellites or data barges are built and decay in systems of property and territory. As more digital humanities projects, such as the recent Digging into Data challenge, require international collaboration, the geopolitical, legal, logistical, and material risks are even greater.

In the end, both the hacktivist and the more mainstream digital humanist must be sensitive to the vulnerability and imperfection of digital knowledge systems to pursue their avocations on a day-to-day basis. As Galloway and Thacker argue “the exploit” lets us understand procedures and protocols. In considering the need for supporting a truly hacktivist digital humanities, perhaps we can imagine both new forms of activism and new publics for DH, and in thinking about the relationship between forms of symbolic representation that humanists care about and forms of political representation that activists care about, perhaps we all need to break some systems to understand how they should be built.

Feature Creep

I've been thinking about the work of Virtualpolitik friend Chris Soghoian this week, as I traveled to Northern California for an all-day meeting about writing program policy in the UC system and Cal State. As I prepared to board my United flight, I noticed that Soghoian's complaint that online check-in boarding passes were never checked electronically at the same time that they were authenticated with IDs had finally been remedied. A machine that verifies the electronic information about the ticket holder had finally been installed at the head of the security line. Of course, on my return trip, it was clear that the machine wasn't in service.

While I was in meetings, I also thought about his point about "feature creep" and how authentication systems used for one context are often transported into another without reflection. The classic example is how social security numbers intended to keep track of social security benefits were reused by credit bureaus to track irresponsible creditors. Soghoian became famous for interrogating the use of boarding passes generated by commercial companies for airline security purposes under the purview of the federal government. Now educators in California are facing another form of feature creep with the Early Start program , which takes an instrument intended to be a placement test and turns it into a de facto admissions test.

Live from Radio City

For those following the Critical Code Studies discussion taking place this month, it is definitely worth checking out the video Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools from Stephen Ramsay, which is an interesting example of the video essay as an emerging genre.

In Hot Water

Jeremy Douglass of the Critical Code Studies working group is offering an interesting series of readings of the computer code related to climate models that demonstrate global warming at work in the so-called "Climategate" scandal involving leaked e-mail messages exchanged among scientists, which I have written about here before.



This tutorial from Michael Suede supposedly on reading comments in code encourages climate skeptics to hit pause on their online video players in order to carefully peruse the evidence that the speaker presents. Because programming is often a collaborative activity, it is suprising to see that the author of these comments used so much profanity and personal attitude in his expressions in the genre. In the classes on programming that I've taken, NPOV is emphasized in composing comments or a winking friendliness to the next programmer who might tackle a tricky section that might seem somewhat opaque.

However, as Douglass points out, not all would agree with Suede's reading or another reading of the code as dubious by the BBC. The following videos present a much more generous reading of the code practices involved in developing the software used by climate scientists, which -- according to Douglass -- "argues for a different interpretation of the 'climategate' source code based on a critique of interpretive rhetoric (e.g. ad hominem interpretation), an appeal to understanding of the culture of personality among software engineers, and the contextually specific meaning of the word 'integrity' and what it signifies in the context of 'data integrity' about the software and data."





This shows the productivity of this start-up group, which leader Mark Marino notes already has 97 members, 15 code critiques, over 80 bibliographic entries: 80+ entries, and 67 comments generated in response to the first week's presentation.

Taking Virtual Candy from a Baby

There are many things that I might disagree about with economist Edward Castronova, but his argument that virtual economies at work in games merit study is certainly legitimate. As Castronova and others have pointed out, understanding virtual economies is particularly important as our own economic systems become independent of any substrate of material production and as virtual goods and ethereal substances like attention and membership and trust get assigned dollar values.

Pollution would seem to be something that could function with a commodity market model, since particulates can be measured and tracked as a definite negative good, but the market of carbon credits that might attempt to regulate them functions like other markets with a number of imaginary quantities in play.

Now Wired describes how hackers have broken into online carbon credit databases to steal carbon credits worth real money. The German news station Deutsche Welle describes how "Hackers steal emissions trading certificates" as well. Apparently, it operated as a relatively straightforward phishing venture:

According to the Financial Times Deutschland, the fraudsters sent e-mails to companies in several European countries, as well as in Japan and New Zealand.

They used the official DEHSt logo, and urged the companies in the mails to register again as a hacker attack was allegedly imminent.

The hackers were thus able to gain access to company accounts and transferred their emission certificates to accounts registered in Denmark and Great Britain.

From there they sold the CO2 emission permits on the free market for a thus far undisclosed sum of money.

One medium-sized company in Germany, for instance, reportedly lost permits worth 1.5 million euros ($2.1million).

Code Read

Check out the call for proposals for the Critical Code Studies working group, which already includes important media scholars like Wendy Chun and N. Katherine Hayles on its roster and indicates that this subfield is preparing for some serious scholarly writing to follow up on its earlier manifesto.

The call makes an appeal for response from collaborators and offers mentorship to graduate students:

The time for debating the possibility of critical readings of code is now over. It is time to begin the business of reading code.

The Working Group will offer an opportunity to produce methodologies and readings for Critical Code Studies. It will be organized around a series of hosted discussions and presentations about reading code launched weekly.
Publication: electronic book review

Electronic book review will be publishing curated threads from the Working Group discussions.

We are also planning a mini-conference after the Working Group. Details to follow.

Interested graduate students will find application information on the Critical Code Studies blog.

A Czar is Born

When watching the struggles of the Obama White House to implement policy, most eyes have turned to the health care debate or to the efforts to fight emissions linked to global warming, but there has been another negotiated milestone that has been months in the making: appointment of a cybersecurity "czar." Perhaps it is this week's scandal about how insurgents have managed to hack into video feeds of unmanned aircraft over Iraq that has brought the issue to the forefront, but this morning I received the following e-mail from John O. Brennan, announcing the appointment of Howard A. Schmidt for the position:

Dear Friend,

Cybersecurity matters to all of us. Protecting the internet is critical to our national security, public safety and our personal privacy and civil liberties. It’s also vital to President Obama’s efforts to strengthen our country, from the modernization of our health care system to the high-tech job creation central to our economic recovery.

The very email you are reading underscores our dependence on information technologies in this digital age, which is why it seemed like a fitting way to announce that the President has chosen Howard Schmidt to be the White House Cybersecurity Coordinator. Howard will have the important responsibility of orchestrating the many important cybersecurity activities across the government.

Howard is one of the world’s leading authorities on computer security, with some 40 years of experience in government, business and law enforcement. Learn more about Howard's background and approach to cybersecurity:

Howard will have regular access to the President and serve as a key member of his National Security Staff. He will also work closely with his economic team to ensure that our cybersecurity efforts keep the Nation secure and prosperous.

Moving forward we will use WhiteHouse.gov, this email program and our other communications tools to keep you posted about our progress in this important area.

Sincerely,

John O. Brennan
Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism

P.S. You can play an important role in cybersecurity as well. Learn more about the issue and steps you can take to ensure your own security.

There is a link that introduces the white-haired corporate veteran with a background in the military and law enforcement, but I still have many question about Schmidt's appointment, his lack of a computer science background, and the possibility that he might offer only lukewarm support for cybersecurity research at universities, which often requires finding the vulnerabilities in proprietary software in ways that corporate shareholders don't like. I visited the website of the Information Security Forum that Schmidt has headed and saw a lot of material about licenses that support the current intellectual property regime and little about open source alternatives. (The phrase "open source" generated no results from their search engine, while "Microsoft" brought up eight links.)

As this story in the Washington Post indicates, the road to the appointment has been a bumpy one, with many first draft nominees who have turned the post down and key cybersecurity personnel who felt disadvantaged by their association with the Bush administration resigning in frustration as the search dragged on. That's certainly not an auspicious beginning.

Droning On

Stories from CNET and the Christian Science Monitor about the recent hacking of U.S. Predator drones over Iraq to acquire images from their video feeds explain how jihadists were able to use low-cost SkyGrabber software to gain access to unencrypted data.

Of course, the fact that the main audience for this software is composed of those who want free and uncensored television broadcasts without paying or having permission may just feed into the conflation of piracy with terrorism that I have already argued in the Virtualpolitik book is part of a general rhetoric of criminality around the Internet. More information about the technical specifics is in this YouTube video below.

Campaign Finance Loophole

As Forbes explains in a piece called "A Presidential Hacking Hoax," the linking structures in certain kinds of websites facilitate so-called SQL injection, and now a hacker is claiming to have used the still-active campaign website at BarackObama.com to access Roosevelt University, which had databases with unencrypted passwords that could have made the incursion far worse for the campus's public reputation.

An anonymous blogger is claiming to have gained full access to the databases behind the president's campaign site, BarackObama.com, through a simple SQL injection attack. The White House says it doesn't have a comment on the matter and the Democratic National Committee denies the blogger's claim.

Forbes analyzed the hack and it appears that the blogger used BarackObama.com to gain access to the databases behind Roosevelt.edu, a liberal arts college outside Chicago.

As the magazine points out, there is an irony that the hacker chose not to explore: "What's interesting to note is that it appears that any outside Web site can be browsed using the secure donate.BarackObama.com proxy, including the Republican National Committee."

View Open Source

This image of the HTML code on the White House website represents what one sees if one chooses the "view source" command in your browser window. It lets you see how the site uses XML, Javascript, and CSS to improve its appearance, availability for RSS feeds, and interactivity, while still making content available in the public formats preferred by archivists and advocates for access by the disabled.

What you can't see is today's announcement of a momentous change at "WhiteHouse.gov Goes Drupal," which explains that the current administration has finally abandoned the proprietary software system of the previous administration in favor of a well-regarded open source content management platform alternative: Drupal.

WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software, as the AP alluded to in its reporting several minutes ago.

The great Drupal switch came about after the Obama new media team, with a few months of executive branch service (and tweaking of WhiteHouse.gov) under their belts, decided they needed a more malleable development environment for the White House web presence. They wanted to be able to more quickly, easily, and gracefully build out their vision of interactive government. General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), the Virginia-based government contractor who had executed the Bush-era White House CMS contract, was tasked by the Obama Administration with finding a more flexible alternative. The ideal new platform would be one where dynamic features like question-and-answer forums, live video streaming, and collaborative tools could work more fluidly together with the site's infrastructure. The solution, says the White House, turned out to be Drupal. That's something of a victory for the Drupal (not to mention open-source) community.

Drupal proponents have long tried to make the case that open-source software could be just as safe, just as stable, and and just as reliable as pre-boxed software, even if hundreds, thousands, or even millions of volunteer developers had their fingers in the mix at some point along the way. The White House's seal of approval doesn't hurt.

Thanks to Alex Halavais for the link.

Bad Actors

Interesting to see that even the country's paper of record can unwittingly become a malware distributor, as the New York Times explains in its account of being "a victim of a malicious ad swap."

The Fugitive

In "Hacker’s Extradition to U.S. More Likely," the New York Times explains that British citizen Gary McKinnon is losing his three-year fight to avoid trial in the United States for hacking into military computers. McKinnon has responded that he did little damage, that much of the most sensitive data wasn't even password protected, and that he was only looking for evidence of UFO landings and research on free clean energy sources. Rockers Chrissie Hynde and Bob Geldorf have been taking McKinnon's side and are promoting a musical anthem to prevent what they see as a miscarriage of justice. The tune, "Chicago - Change the World," will soon be released. Meanwhile you can check out McKinnon's own song on YouTube.

Cyberspace War

In a New York Times article about how the "U.S. and Russia Differ on a Treaty for Cyberspace," the reporter notes that two superpowers are adopting fundamentally different paradigms through which to understand how new cybersecurity goals could be achieved through the traditional mechanism of the international treaty. More than virtual territory comes into play, as the two sides advance very different game plans.

“We really believe it’s defense, defense, defense,” said the State Department official, who asked not to be identified because authorization had not been given to speak on the record. “They want to constrain offense. We needed to be able to criminalize these horrible 50,000 attacks we were getting a day.”

Rather than focus on criminal attacks by non-state actors, the Russians worry about military-style incursions led by government agencies and want a chemical weapons-style treaty to set limits and define the rules that constitute just warfare in new domains.

More Chain Letter

Kudos to Virtualpolitik pal Chris Soghoian for raising awareness about security flaws in Google's Gmail service by sending "An open letter to Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt." As the New York Times explains, Soghoian's rhetorical strategy was aimed at Google because they already had developed https encryption, although this level of security was not the default option for Gmail users. By publicizing an easy fix rather than one of the more intractable problems in cloud computing services, the group of "38 researchers and academics" present themselves as corporate-friendly cyber-moderates.

Czar Power

Since the election, there has been speculation about the kind of person that President Obama would choose to fill the role of "CyberCzar" to advise the Chief Executive about appropriate policies on network security and head up initiatives to police the Web. In stories like "Seeking Obama's Cyber Czar" and "Security experts sound off on Obama's cyber czar," it seemed that everyone had an opinion. Some believed that the president has already made a decision about who would fill the post as early as December, and many expected the pick to be announced at the end of May.

In "Remarks by the President on Securing our Nation's Cyber Infrastructure," however, many were surprised to have no announcement of an appointment to address the fact that there is no "single official" who "oversees cybersecurity policy across the federal government, and no single agency has the responsibility or authority to match the scope and scale of the challenge. "

Obama also describes his own feeling of "violation" when faced with stealthy attacks by hackers on websites associated with his candidacy in the 2008 election.

I know how it feels to have privacy violated because it has happened to me and the people around me. It's no secret that my presidential campaign harnessed the Internet and technology to transform our politics. What isn't widely known is that during the general election hackers managed to penetrate our computer systems. To all of you who donated to our campaign, I want you to all rest assured, our fundraising website was untouched. (Laughter.) So your confidential personal and financial information was protected.

But between August and October, hackers gained access to emails and a range of campaign files, from policy position papers to travel plans. And we worked closely with the CIA -- with the FBI and the Secret Service and hired security consultants to restore the security of our systems. It was a powerful reminder: In this Information Age, one of your greatest strengths -- in our case, our ability to communicate to a wide range of supporters through the Internet -- could also be one of your greatest vulnerabilities.

Now You Hear Me; Now You Don't

This local news piece from WHTR about "Tapping Your Cell Phone" on how "anonymous stalkers literally took control" of a suburban family's cell phones presents an interesting form of risk communication from the popular media about the dangers of hacking. The story emphasizes the dark side of ubiquitous computing technologies that facilitate omnipresent surveillance and the fact that "your privacy isn't your privacy" with these devices. The narrative combines a horror-movie style harasser in the shadows serving as voyeur with James Bond style gadgetry in which the reporter traces his quarry's whereabouts on a digital map that he eventually coinhabits.

Of course, I am always interested to see how the rhetoric of such shows presents the individual stalker as threat but does not bother with institutional data collection as a concern for privacy advocates. I also am struck by the irony of how this story about how the efficacy of "latest spy technology for cell phones" available on the Internet will likely lead to more downloads of this illegal software from the web.

Talk to the Hands

The New York Times has been following the story of President Obama's new Blackberry in "New Symbol of Elite Access - E-mail to the Chief," which notes that several of his top advisors do not have the e-mail address that reaches Obama's device. Vice President Biden apparently has it, along with his own secure Blackberry, but many of his cabinet members do not. Keeping a limited list of e-mail correspondents is one way to limit potential problems with hacking and spamming. (The article reports that the private Clinton fax number was often vulnerable to the latter kind of attack from political interest groups.)

Because the president's computer security experts have to "add" you to the list of those who can send and receive, one obvious effect of this exclusivity is that it limits what has been called the "equalization effect" of e-mail, where those who are disenfranchised socially are able to reach authority figures and policy makers. It makes e-mail somewhat more like a social network site in which parties are "friended," but one in which selectivity is prized rather than more generally defined popularity. I'm not sure that the limited e-mail circle will necessarily hamper deliberative activities. As a way of effecting change through whistle-blowing, I point out in the Virtualpolitik book that e-mail is often more important after the fact of a disaster or scandal as a sign that warnings were ignored than it is as a way to get the powerful to change course. The reason for this, I argue, is its status as evidence rather than testimony, which was clearly in the minds of the Bush administration, where correspondents were concerned about the Presidential Records Act.

While reading the article, I wanted to hear more about the other functions that Obama is using on his Blackberry and how he is incorporating ubiquitous computing into his interactions with his daily routine. Kazys Varnelis and Anne Friedberg argue in "Place: The Networking of Public Space" that such practices lead to inhabiting multiple spaces simultaneously.

What applications is Obama using other than Google searching? Are the geographical sensors in the phone turned off for security reasons, so that he actually has a less powerful device than the average consumer could buy rather than a James Bond-style super gadget?

Blackberry Like Me

In "The BlackBerry accord of 2009," the Los Angeles Times explains how President Obama has been allowed to keep his Blackberry to stay in contact with distant friends, keep current on online culture, and do Internet research independent of his advisors. Many who study digital culture see this as a very good sign for the new administration, given how the Bush White House far too frequently used national security as an excuse for excessive secrecy and justified bizarre e-mail practices and a hermetically sealed deliberative sphere on those grounds.

Former President George W. Bush gave up personal e-mail upon entering office, fearing he would create a public record with every touch of the "send" button. Bill Clinton has been reported to avoid e-mail even today.

However, security officials did voice some legitimate concerns about the vulnerabilities of this third-party commercial device to malicious external activities by hackers, including "malicious software" that "can transform the device into a miniature radio transmitter, allowing eavesdroppers to hear conversations near it" and a program that "can detect the phone's location by way of signals it sends to nearby cellular towers, turning it into a homing device." As the LA Times explains, "According to a database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, at least 16 potential chinks in the BlackBerry's security armor have come to light since 2004."

Nonetheless, like many of his age and education, Obama apparently told reporters that he would be unwilling to part with a device to which he was so intimately connected on a minute-by-minute basis: "I'm still clinging to my BlackBerry. They're going to pry it out of my hands."

Fox in the Henhouse

Today's story in the Los Angeles Times about how a "Cyber-attack on Defense Department computers raises concerns" explains a recent ban on portable flash drives being used by U.S. military personnel as an attempt to quarantine a massive attack on Defense Department computer networks by agent.btz variant originating in Russia.

Those Darn Kids

Although many calls and flyers have attempted to persuade gullible voters that the election has been rescheduled for tomorrow, campus computer security experts are joining election officials in trying to track down the authors of a specific e-mail message that appeared to be from the Provost of George Mason University. As the Washington Post reports in "GMU E-Mail Hoax: Election Day Moved to Nov. 5," hackers broke into campus computer systems to deliver their deceptive message to the student body.