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Privacy vs Open Public Data

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Nick Thompson

Re: [EXTERNAL] Privacy vs Open Public Data

Raymond,

Or we could just use the London Security Camera system, right?

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Parks, Raymond
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 5:28 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Privacy vs Open Public Data

Full motion video is possible, but not for long as it uses a lot of bandwidth and storage. Also, the geometry of satellites is such that, depending upon their orbit, they can only provide good images of a single point on the ground for a limited amount of time. More likely, if a particular human can be identified (unlikely from space), one could use a sort of time-based synthetic aperture to build up knowledge of that person's activities. UAVs are much more likely to be used to track a particular individual in real-time.

Ray Parks

Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager

V: 505-844-4024 M: 505-238-9359 P: 505-951-6084

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On Jan 16, 2013, at 9:19 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:

Re: satellites: they have very high resolution but I'm not sure they have a high frame rate .. ie could "track" an individual.

-- Owen

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Douglas Roberts-2

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Hey, no one ever claimed that life was fair.

--Doug

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 5:47 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

So, you see no problem there? There are good people and bad people. You can tell from the B tattooed on their wrist? So, lets us good people screw the bad people and get on with it. What if one of the bad people is a heluva musician? Or a great mathematician? N

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 4:52 PM
To: [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

On 1/16/13 3:56 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

> Makes me grumpy.

Poor you. It is not surprising that criminals, deviants, and unstable humiliated people populate every community. There is inequity in the world. If people can't find a purpose or acceptable identity in their lives, then drug & sex addiction, magical thinking, and exploitation of others provide some pleasure and sense of control. Meanwhile, it also should not come as any surprise that individuals in a society can learn how to play along and give the appearance of `normal'. The popular use of the Internet simply brings a little more in to the light what was always there: Lots and lots of troubled and mentally-ill people. It's important to make people look at it.

Marcus

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Doug Roberts
[hidden email]
[hidden email]

http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins

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Nick Thompson

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

No. No. it’s the loss, to you that I am worried about, not just the loss to the “deviant”. Take it back 60 years. You are a nice, conventional british academic and you learn from the London Security Camera system that you pal, Alan Turing is a “deviant”. Put yourself in the mindset of that time. What do you do?

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Douglas Roberts
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 5:49 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

Hey, no one ever claimed that life was fair.

--Doug

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 5:47 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

So, you see no problem there? There are good people and bad people. You can tell from the B tattooed on their wrist? So, lets us good people screw the bad people and get on with it. What if one of the bad people is a heluva musician? Or a great mathematician? N

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 4:52 PM
To: [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

On 1/16/13 3:56 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

> Makes me grumpy.

Poor you. It is not surprising that criminals, deviants, and unstable humiliated people populate every community. There is inequity in the world. If people can't find a purpose or acceptable identity in their lives, then drug & sex addiction, magical thinking, and exploitation of others provide some pleasure and sense of control. Meanwhile, it also should not come as any surprise that individuals in a society can learn how to play along and give the appearance of `normal'. The popular use of the Internet simply brings a little more in to the light what was always there: Lots and lots of troubled and mentally-ill people. It's important to make people look at it.

Marcus

--
Doug Roberts
[hidden email]
[hidden email]

http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins

505-455-7333 - Office
505-672-8213 - Mobile

Pamela McCorduck

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

<base href="x-msg://14/">And what if the information is wrong? Which--as our FRIAMer Tom Johnson can tell you--it often is.

On Jan 16, 2013, at 5:56 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

No. No. it’s the loss, to you that I am worried about, not just the loss to the “deviant”. Take it back 60 years. You are a nice, conventional british academic and you learn from the London Security Camera system that you pal, Alan Turing is a “deviant”. Put yourself in the mindset of that time. What do you do?

N

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Douglas Roberts
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 5:49 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

Hey, no one ever claimed that life was fair.

--Doug

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 5:47 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
So, you see no problem there? There are good people and bad people. You can tell from the B tattooed on their wrist? So, lets us good people screw the bad people and get on with it. What if one of the bad people is a heluva musician? Or a great mathematician? N

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 4:52 PM
To: [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

On 1/16/13 3:56 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

> Makes me grumpy.

Poor you. It is not surprising that criminals, deviants, and unstable humiliated people populate every community. There is inequity in the world. If people can't find a purpose or acceptable identity in their lives, then drug & sex addiction, magical thinking, and exploitation of others provide some pleasure and sense of control. Meanwhile, it also should not come as any surprise that individuals in a society can learn how to play along and give the appearance of `normal'. The popular use of the Internet simply brings a little more in to the light what was always there: Lots and lots of troubled and mentally-ill people. It's important to make people look at it.

Marcus

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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--
Doug Roberts
[hidden email]
[hidden email]
http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins

505-455-7333 - Office
505-672-8213 - Mobile
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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"Bounded Rationality," by Pamela McCorduck, the second novel in the series, Santa Fe Stories, Sunstone Press, is now available both as ink-on-paper and as an e-book.

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

On 1/16/13 5:47 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

So, you see no problem there? There are good people and bad people. You can tell from the B tattooed on their wrist? So, lets us good people screw the bad people and get on with it. What if one of the bad people is a heluva musician? Or a great mathematician? N

I don't believe that use of public facts is bad, and I find your stalking idea bizarre.

If some subset of a community feels to harass an individual that has engaged in the past in an illegal activity, even after that individual has been treated, then those people should also get treatment. If there are public welfare risks from the past offender that are high and unaddressed, and the treatment of the offender was inadequate, then fix that.

Marcus

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Eric Charles

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Breaking the reply into two parts... first, about the crime:

The notion of public and private has certainly changed over the years. In this context, I think, "public" includes many things that people could find out, but that is not there for people to find out. For example, a public court record exists because someone wanted to takes someone else to court, and a record resulted, which happens to be public.

I think however, this distinction probably originated around the ideas of "public lands." Public lands were there for the purpose of being used by people in general, e.g., to graze their sheep and cattle. If people were not using the public land, we would think something wrong. Similarly, we now have public parks that (at least in theory) are there for anyone to enjoy, and we want people to enjoy them. When we see a public park that has not been used in some time, it strikes us that something is wrong.

In contrast, we now often think it a Good Thing if people do not use our "public information."

This creates an awkward situation for a prosecutor. The public/private distinction was originally about what "we" wanted people in general to use vs. what we wanted to exclude them from using. And now you try to say it is a crime for someone to use public information? What is PUBLIC information for, if not for people in general to use it how they see fit... as it was with PUBLIC land. Unless you can show how I infringe upon another by my use of the public resource, I'm not sure how you will differentiate the criminal from the honest user. And if you can show that I infringe upon another, then prosecute the infringement itself.

This is now complicated by the increasing availability of information about you that is not public in the legal sense of "there is a law making this public", but in the broader sense of "you did that in public and people now know." I think we are back to the point where I tell you that you can't really complain about people seeing you naked, if you walk around town without clothes all day. If someone is following you on twitter, and reading your Facebook posts, and your live journal entries, and tracking your cell phone using GPS (which you told your phone to let people do), etc., etc., etc., then they are just observing things you are doing in public.

I am, again, quite unsure how the law would distinguish between someone doing that as a stalker and someone doing that as your friend. How do you differentiate criminal use from an honest user, unless you have some other crime they are perpetrating with the information?

Eric

--------
Eric Charles
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State, Altoona

From: "Nicholas Thompson" <[hidden email]>
To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group" <[hidden email]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 12:27:13 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

Dear Eric,

I am deeply suspicious of “rights-talk”. “Rights” talk is “obligations-talk” or it is nothing. So whenever somebody claims a right for themselves, they have to state it in terms of obligations on me and on us. What does your right to do obligate ME to not do. If I am to be obligated to NOT do something I might like to do (wire your phone to hear you talking to your stockbroker, or pimp, say) I have to have some benefit. And if society is to go to the extra trouble to enforce your right against my temptation, society as a whole (WETF that is) has to have an incentive. Like most libertarian responses, yours largely leaves those two sides of the discussion. You are believers in Natural Right, which I think makes you believers in God, or incoherent. Lockeans you are not.

On the other hand, I admired your whole thing about the Frontier and Second Chances. We are, by immigration, probably a nation of former thieves, cutpurses, embezzlers, for whom the choice was the docks or the stocks. But isn’t that shame? The crime was picking the pocket; the SHAME is having been conficted of having picked a pocket. Why not tell Mrs. Jones as you come in to fix her pipes, “Yes I did 10 years for aggravated burglary and I am proud of it?” There is a very nervous making article in the current new Yorker about a guy who has, in fact, never committed a crime, but who has been in jail for 20 years or so because he seems like the sort of guy who might commit a crime. And what, on the other hand, about all the “second chances” those Priests got.

And yes I think we have to consider a new crime. The crime of stalking by using aggregated public data.

Nick

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 9:40 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

Nick,
I have struggled with parts of this quite a bit. As you know, I am a somewhat-crazy Libertarian, and so get stuck in conversations like this on a fairly regular basis. In particular, I reject the idea that privacy is primarily about protecting people from shame or guilt. I believe that privacy (of a certain sort) is a basic right that is essential to a free society. Alas, it is difficult to explain why, as whenever I assert the right to not have certain information public, whomever is on the other side of the argument immediately tries to back me into a corner of being ashamed of whatever it is I want to keep private. There are a few things in my life I am indeed ashamed of, but very few, and I would probably tell most of them to anyone who asked. On the other hand, there are many things that I would like to keep private, and would probably not tell anyone who asked. How to explain the difference?

The best I can say, I think, is that I see the right to (mostly) privacy as inextricably linked to the right to (mostly) self-determination. Whether people should have the latter right is certainly up for debate, but I think it has been a cornerstone of US culture through most of US history. At the least, it has been a cornerstone of our social myth structure (for sure if you were a white male, off and on for other groups). The idea that one could get a "fresh start" in America motivated many an immigrant... and part of getting a fresh start was people not knowing everything about you that those you were leaving knew. The mythic Old West was also largely based on such a principle.

The ability to control (to some extent) what people know about you is often key to achieving goals (or at least it seems that way). Imagine for example, the otherwise charismatic man with "a face made for radio." He might or might not be ashamed of his looks, but either way he has an interest in keeping his face (mostly) private until his career is sufficiently established. To put it in a more Victorian tone: There are certain things, we need not say which, that I am not ashamed of, and yet it would be inconvenient if they came out. Of those things we shan't speak, and it should be my prerogative to protect them as I see fit against the inquiries of others.

----------

To complicate your inquiry, one of the big legal issues in the fight you see brewing is this: Most of the new slush of public information you are concerned with is put out their voluntarily. The GPS in your phone turns on and off (and if not, you could get a different phone). Your posts, emails, blog entries, online photos, etc. are all being made public intentionally. Those software and website user agreements few ever reads often include consents to use your data in various ways, including making parts public.

The old ideas of stalking, I think, mostly involved the accumulation of data against the will of the "victim", and could potentially include the gathering of both private and technically public information (i.e., court records). I don't know how you could make a legal case against someone who only knew things about you that you intentionally threw out into the world for the purpose of people knowing it. If you wander around town everyday without clothes on, it would be hard to accuse someone of being a "peeping Tom" just because they saw you naked.

Eric

--------
Eric Charles
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State, Altoona

From: "Nicholas Thompson" <[hidden email]>
To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group" <[hidden email]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 2:45:52 PM
Subject: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

Dear all,

We had a discussion last Friday at Friam that I would like to see continued here. Many of us had seen a recent talk in which somebody was using satellite imagery to track an individual through his day. The resolution of such imagery is now down to 20 cm, and that is before processing. We stipulated (not sure it's true in NM) that if I were to follow one of you around for week, never intruding into your private space, but tagging along after you everywhere you went and patiently recording your every public act, that I could eventually be thrown in jail for stalking. We tried to decide what the law should say about assembling public data to create a record of the moment by moment activities of an individual. We suspected that nothing in law would forbid that kind of surveillance, but it made some of us uneasy. So much of what we take to be our private lives, is, after all, just a way of organizing public data.

We then wondered what justified any kind of privacy law. If everybody were honest, the cameras would reveal nothing that everybody would not be happy to have known? Were not privacy concerns proof of guilt? No, we concluded: they might be proof of SHAME, but shame and guilt are not the same, and the law, per se, is not in the business of punishing SHAME.

I thought our discussion was interesting for its combination of technological sophistication and legal naiveté. (In short, we needed a lawyer) In the end I concluded that, as more and more public data is put on line and more and more sophisticated data mining techniques are deployed, there will come a time when a category of cyber-stalking might have to be identified which involves using public data to track and aggregate in detail the movements of a particular individual. Do we have an opinion on this?

We will now be at St. Johns for the foreseeable future.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

http://www.cusf.org

Eric Charles

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

The second part of your inquiry is about "rights":

I am certainly not a believer in God-given rights, as you point out. I'm pretty sure I couched my claims in all the needed ways, that there was an assumption, in our country, that certain types of things benefited society as a whole, etc.

There most common argument for a right of this type, I believe, should be that the benefits are symmetrical between you and I. The benefit you get from respecting my privacy is that I in turn respect yours. To the extent that I can be "the person I want", you get to be "the person you want." This seems to me, as a John Dewey fan now, the inherent experiment of America. What happens when you let people live in a democratic country - not one in which "majority rules", but one in which people are broadly allowed to do their own thing and get the result it produces? The "right to privacy" is a foundational support (I think) for the "right to self-determination". If we have stopped valuing the latter, then we should have an honest conversation about that, instead of trying to kick out the foundation while no one is looking.

Since we seem to need a better example... at this point I have no trouble discussing how awkward it was when my mother sent me a "sweet 16" birthday card during my freshman year of college. I wasn't ashamed of being in college at that age, and I certainly wasn't guilty of anything as a result of my age. If anything I was oblivious of it most of the time, and proud of it when I cared to think about it. On the other hand, it made things very awkward when the other students became aware that I was 2-3 years younger than most of them. There was a similar extreme awkwardness to try to avoid when I arrived in graduate school... and at my post-doc... and at my current job. At this point, I am old enough that a few years doesn't make much difference, so I usually will answer when someone asks my age, but I spent many years trying to avoid telling people how old I was.

For me, at least, the ability to keep my age private was important for regulating how others treated me. And I think I should have the right to that. (Of course, you will probably point out, my birth record is public... but now we are back to the two different meanings of public vs. private. I'm not sure that it should be public, and at any rate I wasn't worried that a fellow student would fly to San Diego and pull my birth record.)

Similarly, my sociologist colleague and I have done some research on atheism in rural Pennsylvania, and I think it speaks to the same point. Most of the participants in our study claim not to be ashamed of their atheism, but they would still rather we don't tell everyone about it. The ways in which they think it would change their social dynamic leads them to keep their lack of faith hidden. For example, they want to avoid the awkward discussions they imagine would happen around the Thanksgiving table every year. The ability, for example, to have an anonymous account they could use in an online atheist chat room, and to know their identity was private, was very important to them. To some extent, I am sure, they would be embarrassed if their non-religious identities were revealed to their families, but that is not their primary motivation for keeping their beliefs private.

Hmm... I might be starting to ramble... but I hope my position is at least a little more clear,

Eric

P.S. By the way, WASP, I can assure you that most of my relatives did not immigrate to this country because they were criminals. (Maybe you are thinking of the early waves of Australian immigrants?) My relatives might ultimately have been choosing to leave or be killed... but politics hadn't gotten quite that bad yet in eastern Europe and western Russia when they shipped themselves over.

--------
Eric Charles
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State, Altoona

Dear Eric,

And yes I think we have to consider a new crime. The crime of stalking by using aggregated public data.

Nick

--------
Eric Charles
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State, Altoona

Dear all,

We will now be at St. Johns for the foreseeable future.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

http://www.cusf.org

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Eric Charles

On 1/16/13 7:18 PM, Eric Charles wrote:

I am, again, quite unsure how the law would distinguish between someone doing that as a stalker and someone doing that as your friend.

From Wikipedia:

According to a 2002 report by the National Center for Victims of Crime, "Virtually
any unwanted contact between two people [that intends] to directly or indirectly
communicates a threat or places the victim in fear can be considered stalking"[1]
although in practice the legal standard is usually somewhat more strict.

So long as your friend, or some other curious person, is not doing it in such a way to make you afraid, it's not stalking. The observation would need to be recognized as an event by the observed, or there would need to be a third party witness or some way to relate to the observed that an observation occurred in order for a threat to even be considered. For example, that the observer dumped all of the individual-focused, but public-sourced surveillance into a web page. But it is not the surveillance itself that is the stalking threat, it's making it known that the surveillance is underway that is the stalking threat. The type of source used is incidental.

Marcus

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Eric Charles

On 1/16/13 8:00 PM, Eric Charles wrote:

For me, at least, the ability to keep my age private was important for regulating how others treated me. And I think I should have the right to that. (Of course, you will probably point out, my birth record is public... but now we are back to the two different meanings of public vs. private. I'm not sure that it should be public, and at any rate I wasn't worried that a fellow student would fly to San Diego and pull my birth record.)

It should be public. But it is rude to press a person for personal facts they don't volunteer. If someone uses a source, whether it is convenient or inconvenient, public or something else, they they then have no business making you feel uncomfortable about information they acquired out-of-band. It's polite behavior. Nothing must change because of the Information Age, etc.

Marcus

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Nick Thompson

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

Wow! Your confidence in behavioral technology is way greater than mine; but perhaps that’s because I am a psychologist.

Do you find stalking laws, as presently constituted, bizarre?

Nick

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 7:03 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

On 1/16/13 5:47 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

So, you see no problem there? There are good people and bad people. You can tell from the B tattooed on their wrist? So, lets us good people screw the bad people and get on with it. What if one of the bad people is a heluva musician? Or a great mathematician? N

Nick Thompson

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Eric Charles

Interesting. As I said originally, we stipulated in our original discussion here in Santa Fe that stalking was illegal. Actually, I don’t know that for a fact. I tried to ensnare a lawyer in our discussions, but he didn’t take the bait. Damn! But continuing to speculate, I assume, if there are such laws they criminalize behavior that is otherwise scrupulously legal. That is, if I follow you around in all you public comings and goings, lurk in the shadows across the street from your house at night, read your garbage, join clubs that you join so I can sit next to you on the next rowing machine, drink at the next table at the bar that you frequent, etc., etc., that eventually I will get a tap on the shoulder from a good constable.

I take it that neither you nor Marcus would think that that tap on the shoulder was justified?

If so, then we have no interesting agreement about cyberstalking, because we already disagree about stalking. It’s a metaphor. If we disagree about the source phenomenon, we are obviously going to disagree about the metaphoric one.

Nick

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 7:18 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

--------
Eric Charles
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State, Altoona

Dear Eric,

And yes I think we have to consider a new crime. The crime of stalking by using aggregated public data.

Nick

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 9:40 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

--------
Eric Charles
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State, Altoona

Dear all,

We will now be at St. Johns for the foreseeable future.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

http://www.cusf.org

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

On 1/16/13 9:30 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Wow! Your confidence in behavioral technology is way greater than mine; but perhaps that’s because I am a psychologist.

I have no confidence in behavioral technology. I'm using the word `treatment' in the experimental design sense. One `treatment' could be long term containment, another could be castration, or, heck, even termination of the offender. I would only steer away from the latter options for pedophiles because the free will punishment folks will pile-on and confuse matters, and would make a costly situation even more expensive. And not that I would say physical abuse of children has any special status over physical abuse of any other defenseless adult person.

Marcus

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Nick Thompson

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

Thanks, Marcus for this clarification. I should have looked it up myself.

So I guess I CAN shadow you, just so long as I do it with effusive reassurances of my good will. I imagine myself telling the police officer, “I so admire Marcus. I want to know EVERYTHING about him. I want to BE him. (Sorry Doug, I have changed my allegiance. Fickle, I know) I want to join every club. Accompany him to every restaurant. Order what he orders. “ Glad to be clear on that.

Now. Where is it you said you live?

Nick

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 8:06 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

On 1/16/13 7:18 PM, Eric Charles wrote:

I am, again, quite unsure how the law would distinguish between someone doing that as a stalker and someone doing that as your friend.

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

On 1/16/13 9:45 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

join clubs that you join so I can sit next to you on the next rowing machine, drink at the next table at the bar that you frequent, etc., etc.,

Those specific behaviors are potentially stalking and they have nothing to do with my argument.

Marcus

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Steve Smith

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2

Nick -

I acknowledge your grumpiness at feeling your serious quest on this topic was derailed by what you took to be fun-poking.   I read the Blue Velvet reference as a slight tangent (me, a prince of tangents), but still relevant, and only a little appropriate mirth on Marcus' part.

As one who has participated in making you grumpy in this way in the past, I acknowledge that your earnestness has been mishandled from time to time.   I don't think this is what Marcus was up to but can see how you might have thought it was.

As for me... I've been close to a situation such as you/Doug describe. I had to choose between helping someone close to me extract herself from the larger messy situation, helping make sure the sex offender was monitored by someone who knew his nature in detail vs making sure the letter of the law was upheld and the neighbors who looked could find him on the list. The sex offender was geriatric and very cowed by a decade in prison (by this time) and the estrangement of his entire family and community, not a big risk, but still worth keeping away from children.

His son, the monitor, a victim himself and the brother and uncle to other victims needed to force his registration, or to do it himself. If anyone else had forced it, I think they would have simply moved the potential problem to someone else' back yard.   Eventually they took themselves back to the community they came from where registration would have been redundant if technically required. I am not sure if any healing resulted, and I fear the greatest risk of propogation of the damage was through the victims themselves, not the original perpetrator. The cycle of abuse seems very real, if deeply puzzlingly paradoxical.

I don't know Doug's situation and yours is hypothetical (right?) but sometimes I think taking personal responsibility (monitoring the situation yourself) may be more effective and important than making sure the bureaucratic requirements are met.   It may not always be appropriate, possible, or effective to do this, but it is always worth considering.

I also know people whose public record makes them look scarier than they are (or ever were) who have had to live with variations on the Scarlet A forever.   Some would say false positives are a hazard necessary to reduce false negatives.   They may be right, but I still don't like it when it happens to me or mine.   Anyone want to take a polygraph and have the results published?

- Steve

Ah, a breath of fresh air. I'm afraid we're going to ask you to leave, Marcus.

<irritating smirky face>

--Doug

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 4:51 PM, Marcus G. Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

On 1/16/13 3:56 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

> Makes me grumpy.

Poor you. It is not surprising that criminals, deviants, and unstable humiliated people populate every community. There is inequity in the world. If people can't find a purpose or acceptable identity in their lives, then drug & sex addiction, magical thinking, and exploitation of others provide some pleasure and sense of control. Meanwhile, it also should not come as any surprise that individuals in a society can learn how to play along and give the appearance of `normal'. The popular use of the Internet simply brings a little more in to the light what was always there: Lots and lots of troubled and mentally-ill people. It's important to make people look at it.

Marcus

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Steve Smith

Re: [EXTERNAL] Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Parks, Raymond

Full motion video is possible, but not for long as it uses a lot of bandwidth and storage. Also, the geometry of satellites is such that, depending upon their orbit, they can only provide good images of a single point on the ground for a limited amount of time. More likely, if a particular human can be identified (unlikely from space), one could use a sort of time-based synthetic aperture to build up knowledge of that person's activities. UAVs are much more likely to be used to track a particular individual in real-time.

LANL and the Air Force developed something called Angel Fire that was used in Iraq and Afghanistan based on high flying conventional aircraft (too high to see/hear/shoot from the ground)

Steve Suddarth, now AF retired from that project, has started a commercial venture out of the Edgewood airport called Transparent Sky, they flew at least one mission during the last devastating fires in the Jemez to demonstrate real-time acquisition and registration.

Anecdotally, I understand that Angel Fire was used effectively with other tools layered on top to trace the source of IEDs after they were detonated (run back and see who had stopped at that location earlier in the day, where they drove in from, etc.) It has been called "Tivo for Marines". All well and good perhaps for the battlefield but do we want that level of surveillance in civilian situations?

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

On 1/16/13 9:59 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Where is it you said you live?

A form of public information known as the phone book..
Also in the household is my pit bull. Shadow _her_ and you'll be in for a vicious demand for a belly rub.

Marcus

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Nick Thompson

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

Wait a minute, Marcus. Why would those behaviors be stalking, absent any intent to communicate a threat!?

By the way, have you ever read the book Enduring Love? Ian McEwen.

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 10:09 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

On 1/16/13 9:45 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

join clubs that you join so I can sit next to you on the next rowing machine, drink at the next table at the bar that you frequent, etc., etc.,

Those specific behaviors are potentially stalking and they have nothing to do with my argument.

Marcus

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

On 1/16/13 11:05 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Wait a minute, Marcus. Why would those behaviors be stalking, absent any intent to communicate a threat!?

At the gym and I see a particular person from work over and over. I go for a walk and I see them at St. Johns. He is following me! Or am I following him?

In your example, depending on what was said at the bar or rowing machine, a witness might agree that it was consistent with stalking. Was it asymmetric precise information about the `victim' pulled out of thin air? Did it happen several times?

But we see each other and barely find the energy to grunt acknowledgement. So it's plainly just a similarity.

By the way, have you ever read the book Enduring Love? Ian McEwen.

...web search..
No, but sounds relevant.

Marcus

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Nick Thompson

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

Marcus,

I once had a British friend who had a dog. We were invited over one evening to try out my friend’s sumptuous new lounge chair, and as soon as I sat in it and lounged backward, the dog, a sort of blondish, short haired thing with a square jaw, started to take a very active interest in me. I asked, what was her interest. Oh, my friend said. She wants to climb up and lounge with you. Invite her up.

So I did. At my prompting the dog eagerly jumped up in my lab and spread herself out on my chest with her head under my chin, and after a few moments began licking lovingly at my jugular vein.

“Oh”, I said. “What a sweet dog. What kind of dog is it? “

“We call them American Staffordshire Terriers.”

“Oh”, I said. “ I didn’t know there was a Staffordshire in America.”

“There probably isn’t,” my friend said. “I believe you call them Pit Bulls.”

I lay very still on the lounger.

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 10:46 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

On 1/16/13 9:59 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Where is it you said you live?

A form of public information known as the phone book..
Also in the household is my pit bull. Shadow _her_ and you'll be in for a vicious demand for a belly rub.

Marcus

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