Privacy advocates were right all along: The costs of one of the most controversial spy programs revealed by Edward Snowden far outweighed its benefits. Thats obvious from a 103-page study of recent efforts to log, store, and search phone metadatae.g., the time a call was made, its duration, and the phone numbers involvedabout most calls that Americans made or received.

Researchers at the congressionally created Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board found that from 2015 to 2019, the NSAs call-metadata program cost taxpayers $100 million. Only twice during that four-year period did the program generate unique information that the F.B.I. did not already possess,reportedCharlie Savage ofThe New York Times, who read a copy of the findings and went on to quote a passage characterizing those two pieces of unique information: Based on one report, F.B.I. vetted an individual, but, after vetting, determined that no further action was warranted. The second report provided unique information about a telephone number, previously known to U.S. authorities, which led to the opening of a foreign intelligence investigation.

The NSA shuttered the program in 2019, due in part to the fact that it repeatedlycollected more data than was legally permissible. The law that allows the NSA to search the data trove, moreover, expires next month, on March 15. But the Trump administration wants Congress to reauthorize the metadata program permanently, giving the NSA the discretion to restart it at any time and run it indefinitely.

Thats a bad idea for reasons beyond its dismal return on investment. Fundamentally, the program is impossible to responsibly overseeeven after a 2015 reform that required judges to sign off on spy-agency queries.

Savage explained that in 2018, the N.S.A. obtained 14 court orders, but gathered 434 million call detail records involving 19 million phone numbers. At that scale, the need to get a judges okay doesnt offer much protection to citizens.

Had Donald Trump supporters understood this program in 2016, many would not have trusted the Obama administration to refrain from abusing it. Same goes for Bernie Sanders supporters and the Trump administration today.

And one neednt even mistrust American politicians to object.

A centralized, searchable database of this sort is in itself a security risk. A foreign state that gains access to that data could map the social networks of high-ranking administration officials and their families, members of Congress, nuclear scientists, business leaders in industries with foreign competition, and more. National security would arguably be better protected if the U.S. government was forcing telecom companies to destroy its troves of data.

If ever there were a case for letting authorization of a national-security program expire, this is it: The expense to taxpayers is great, the benefits meager, and the potential for abuses tremendous. But once an authority is given to the executive branch, presidents are loathe to let it lapse.

Congress should ignore the Trump administrations preference and return the country to a place where the private communications of Americans are not stored for the federal government and its spies.

Read more from the original source:
The Costs of Spying - GovExec.com

THE ROMANIAN DIRECTOR Corneliu Porumboiu may be the most epistemologically preoccupied filmmaker this side of Errol Morris, but, having spent his first fourteen years living under the dictator Nicolae Ceauescus Pre Ubuist regime, his sense of the absurd is second nature.

12:08 East of Bucharest (2006), Porumboius first feature, is predicated on a ridiculous controversy as to whether an actual revolution did or did not occur in the directors hometown. (The Romanian title translates as a question that might be the prelude to an Eastern European folktale: Was There or Not?) Police, Adjective (2009), the movie that confirmed Porumboius international reputation, is an investigation of an investigation, hinging on the use of the word police as a noun, verb, or adjective. The wildly self-reflexive When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (2013) concerns the making of a never-made movie that uses footage of an actual endoscopy as fake evidence of the filmmakers supposed authenticity.

Porumboius fondness for metaphysical farce and for the shifting rules of Wittgensteinian language games is equaled by his passion for soccer. The sport has provided him with material for two analytic documentaries: The Second Game (2014), wherein the filmmaker and his father, a retired soccer referee, annotate an ancient VHS tape of a disputed match between teams representing the Romanian army and the state secret police, and the similarly discursive Infinite Football (2018), in which the laws governing the game are called into question.

As demonstrated by these perversely intellectualized sports dramas and by Police, Adjective, Porumboiu enjoys working against genre. The critic Michael Atkinson described The Treasure (2015), a deadpan account of an idiotic get-rich-quick scheme entailing a hunt for the buried booty of pre-Communist Romania, as the quietest heist movie ever made. Consequently, there has been something of a critical reaction against Porumboius relatively showy and superficially conventional thriller La Gomera, named for the second smallest of the Canary Islands and released in the United States as The Whistlers.

Heralded by a blast of Iggy Pops insouciant anthem The Passenger, and nearly three times as expensive as any previous Porumboiu film, The Whistlers suggests an updated, if still scaled down, version of glitzy mid-1960s international caper films like Topkapi (1964) or Charade (1963), complete with Pop-art color coordination. Bucharest scenes aside, the locations are exotica paradisal Spanish isle off the coast of Africa, with a surprise detour for a rhapsodic light show in Singapores Garden by the Bay. The characters are standard-issue noir types, with a rogue cop-cum-patsy called Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) falling hard for a glamorous femme fatale with the archetypal name Gilda (Catrinel Marlon). The register, however, is comic. While some gags, such as those involving a stray filmmaker scouting locations on La Gomera, get laughs, The Whistlers is primarily stocked with low-key jokes that dont provoke guffaws so much as sustained bemusement.

In its offhand way, the new movie brings back two characters (and their actors) from Police, Adjective. The pedantic provincial inspector Cristi has been relocated to Bucharest and apparently demotedhis tough-minded boss is another femme fatalewhile one of the delinquents he arrested in the earlier film (Sabin Tambrea) has grown into the shady businessman with whom he becomes entangled and who lures him to the Canaries. The Whistlers also elaborates on, and perhaps parodies, the earlier films linguistic concerns. The most Porumboiuvian element is La Gomeras indigenous whistling language, which transposes Spanish phonemes into shrill chirrups and warbles that can be heard for miles. Used by the islanders to exchange messages from hilltop to hilltop, it functions for the stoic Cristi and the crooks he serves as a coded alternative to cell phones or email.

The Whistlers second-most characteristic element is the ubiquity of surveillance. Eavesdroppers monitor other eavesdroppers. Characters deploy spy cams and also playact for them. One elaborate bust takes place on an abandoned movie set that is in fact a trap with hidden police secretly documenting the scene before moving in to decimate the crooks. Given the sense of a global panopticon, The Whistlers feels like it might have been dreamed by someone falling asleep during a screening of Laura Poitrass 2014 Edward Snowden doc, Citizenfourwhich, like Porumboius, is a gadabout movie dealing with mass surveillance and featuring frequent discussion of whistleblowers.

As the viewer ponders the various double (or triple) games that Cristi and Gilda play, the story unfolds in discontinuous sections, somewhat like an origami cube. When two characters rendezvous at a movie theater showing The Searchers, its obvious that Porumboiu references the 1956 classic because he cant resist referencing another genre flick that features a whistling language (in this case, that of the Comanche). The screen within the screen speaks. But why is Jacques Offenbachs soothing, dreamy Barcarolle, often employed to evoke Venice, heard throughout? Could Porumboiu really be alluding to the melodys use in the 1931 Disney Silly Symphony Birds of a Feather (the subject of a lengthy footnote in Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eislers Composing for the Films)? Lapping in our ears throughout Porumboius droll vision of totaland thus naturalizedspycraft, these pensive strains seem an appropriate theme for that vast invisible network in which virtually everyone is a willing participant, packing their own personal tracking device.

J. Hobermanwas a Village Voicefilm critic for thirty years and has been contributing toArtforumfor even longer. His new book isMake My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan(The New Press, 2019).

Originally posted here:
J. Hoberman on Corneliu Porumboiu's The Whistlers - Artforum

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

Review by Emily Nicolle

In the past four years, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerbergs world has been turned upside down. From a simple social media platform he created while studying at Harvard university first blossomed a networking supersite, that later became a regulatory and ethical data minefield which holds a terrifying amount of power over the way we communicate and form decisions.

At the centre of this, Zuckerberg maintains a significant amount of influence that has most certainly dictated Facebooks trajectory owning around 60 per cent of the companys voting shares, despite having raised billions of dollars in private and public investment.

Steven Levys Facebook: The Inside Story aims to chart one mans rise from a coder with a voracious appetite for challenging computer projects to the head of a global empire. Levy, having previously written one of the most definitive books on Google, was given unprecedented levels of access to Zuckerberg and senior company executives over three years to achieve this goal.

We follow Zuckerberg and the team as he almost gets expelled from Harvard for stripping its servers for college student data to create Facebooks earlier brother, Facemash. Later, we see a more human side to Zuckerberg as he gets upset at having to turn down a favoured investor.

Read more: Facebook and Google ad revenue to surpass TV for first time

But the narrative that runs through the entire work is one of a tech founders lust for control, having fallen in love with strategic computer games such as Civilisation as a teenager and developed an awe of the (questionable) empire tactics of Roman leader Augustus.

The young entrepreneur regularly shouted out Domination! at the end of company meetings at Facebook, as the company absorbed smaller rivals such as Instagram and ignored the warning signs of misusing the personal data of billions.

Facebook: The Inside Story provides unparalleled insight into one of the worlds most prominent tech companies, and is required reading for anyone seeking to understand Facebook or its infamous founder.

But the access given to Levy in the writing of this book has ultimately forged a saccharine view of Facebooks transformation into a company for which scandals have become the norm. Attempts to remind the reader of the consequences of Facebooks power are briefly passed over, in favour of depicting Zuckerberg as a teenager with good intentions who was awarded too much power at an early age.

Be careful not to come away from Levys writing with a sense of pity for the man for whom it all seemingly accidentally happened to, rather than techs next calculating megamind.

Review by Poppy Wood

As a disillusioned twenty-something, Anna Wiener abandoned her publishing job in New York and swapped her silk blouses for hoodies and high-tops as she headed for the rapidly mobilising oasis of Silicon Valley.

With little experience of tech culture beyond hours of endless scrolling on the social media network that everyone hated, Wiener managed to land jobs at a string of startups and gently wing her way into a world of coding and customer support. The result is a wry and intelligent reality check for startup culture written from the perspective of a rank outsider.

As much a critique of millenial consumerism as the tech world, Uncanny Valley paints the San Francisco startup scene as the male version of green smoothies and yoga. Both swear by self-help books; both dabble in veganism and semi-spiritualism but both are not treated equally.

With a fine balance of comedy and caution, Wiener prises open a world where sexism is rife, like wallpaper, like air. Though this is mainly handled with the same casualness with which it is dished out, at some points her anecdotes of workplace sexism hit some rather alarming decibels this is a world where women are discouraged from asking for a raise and encouraged to trust karma; where CEOs create lists of the most bangable women in the office; and where one woman is raped by an engineer and then pushed out of the company when reporting it to HR.

Read more: Reality is finally catching up with overblown Silicon Valley rhetoric

The book is consistently sharp and incisive, and scattered with thinly-veiled allusions to the brightest stars on the tech walk of fame. At one point, Wiener splurges her whopping new salary by attending hypnotherapy to stop her from biting her nails, during which I accidentally fell asleep and had an unerotic dream about the founder of the social media network everyone hated.

But Uncanny Valley is also a fable for the digital age. Wiener nonchalantly dismantles the jargon of Siliconese, as if trialling a new Dualingo feature but in doing so undergoes the slow dawning that her many perky office jobs filled with pool tables and trailer mix might have been up to slightly more sinister things. My throat felt like acid, she says, as the shadow of Edward Snowden seeps into the cracks of each chapter and she slowly realises what a data collection startup might entail.

As a result, Wiener is forced to tackle the big bad wolf of surveillance one of the moral quandaries of our time and wryly illustrates how the perceived monolith actually boils down to a bunch of software firms run by 25-year-old tech bros who genuinely believe they are splitting the atom.

Though well-written and brilliantly sardonic, Wieners experience ultimately serves as an interrogation of a world teetering on the edge of illegality a world whose uncanny consequences we are only just starting to feel.

Review by Jess Clark

Most of Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists plays out online.

Assuming a variety of identities, Julia Ebner reports from the frontline of far right messageboards, jihadi forums and anti-feminist communities, in a thorough and shocking exploration of how the internet has facilitated the spread of extremism.

Read more: We must not let fear of terror attacks compromise our human rights

However, the book is the most unsettling when Ebner shows the physical manifestation of online extremism. Ebner, who by day is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, visits a neo Nazi music festival and goes undercover at a far right meeting in a London pub.

If those events are unsettling, then more harrowing is when Ebners research demonstrates how online extremism can transform into real world violence that readers will recognise from recent news headlines. Ebner depicts the vast and rapid spread of online extremism, and the challenge we face in fighting it.

Read the rest here:
City Pages: Behind the scenes at Facebook, the secret lives of extremists and a Silicon Valley memoir - City A.M.