The Bottom Line On Surveillance

David Auerbach ponders the motivations of the Reform Government Surveillance (RGS) coalition, formed by Google, Apple, Facebook, and other tech heavyweights to lobby for restrictions on the NSA’s digital surveillance:

It’s notable when nearly all the major Internet competitors, some of them in bloody rivalries with one another, come together take a stance so vastly at odds with that of the government and a large chunk of their customers.

Not even the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would have made Internet companies subject to burdensome requirements to battle piracy and persecute pirates, united tech companies with such vigor. (Microsoft and Apple have generally only offered tepid opposition to anti-piracy bills.) When competitors agree across the board, there is usually only one broad motivator: money. The NSA, it seems, is very bad for business. Aside from damaging the overseas reputations of these international businesses (notably in Europe and China), the surveillance has caused RGS companies to take major financial hits just to protect themselves from the NSA. Google is now encrypting all its internal traffic, and Yahoo is following Google’s lead—expensive, time-consuming, and logistically ugly work. Add that to headaches like the NSA paying off encryption giant RSA (to the tune of $10 million) to add a back door into their default encryption algorithm, and it’s clear that the bottom line is at stake.

Bill Davidow, however, is just as worried about the data these companies collect and how they analyze them:

There will be files of facts about us such as our addresses, phone numbers, the calls we placed on our cellphones and where we were when we placed them, and the Internet sites we visited. But there will also be algorithmic predictions about our tastes, behavior, plans, opinions, thoughts, and health. Almost everything about us will be known or predicted. Those predictions may well become the self-fulfilling prophecies that determine our future.

While much of the world’s concern has been focused on NSA spying, I believe the greatest threat to my freedom will result from my being placed in a virtual algorithmic prison. Those algorithmic predictions could land me on no-fly lists or target me for government audits. They could be used to deny me loans and credit, screen my job applications and scan LinkedIn to determine my suitability for a job. They could be used by potential employers to get a picture of my health. They could predict whether I will commit a crime or am likely to use addictive substances, and determine my eligibility for automobile and life insurance. They could be used by retirement communities to determine if I will be a profitable resident, and employed by colleges as part of the admissions process.

“That Little Serbian”

Jasenovac1

As Bridgegate continues to unfold, a reader takes issue with an earlier comment:

You wrote: “I think anti-semitism has a more disturbing history and connotations than anti-Serbianism, but we’ll see.” You should check out the history of the Ustaša, which in World War II killed hundreds of thousands of Serbians. They also operated what is popularly known as the “worst” concentration camp, Jasenovac. This is a nasty history, which though it may not rank as high as the Jewish experience in terms of lasting-existential terror, is nonetheless so far beyond the pale that it qualifies easily as among the worst ethnic-cleansing experiences of the period. I am neither Serbian nor Croatian, but you wouldn’t need to be either to possibly have your feathers ruffled by the comparison, for the same reason a Chinese or Korean individual might take exceptional umbrage at a mistaken identification as Japanese.

Got it.

(Photo: Serbs and Gypsies who have been rounded up for deportation are marched to the Jasenovac concentration camp under Ustasa guards circa 1942-43. Courtesy of Muzej Revolucije Narodnosti Jugoslavije.)

The Friend Limit

No matter how many Facebook friends you amass, your real-life circle of close mates has a max capacity:

A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that humans have, almost uniformly, a “one-in-one-out” policy—every time you become close to a new person, someone else subconsciously gets the boot. “Although social communication is now easier than ever, it seems that our capacity for maintaining emotionally close relationships is finite,” said Felix Reed-Tsochas, a researcher at Oxford University and an author of the study. “While the number varies from person to person, what holds true in all cases is that at any point individuals are able to keep up close relationships with only a small number of people, so that new friendships come at the expense of ‘relegating’ existing friends.”

Emily Badger adds:

[I]f that’s the case, then advances in communication technology that were supposed to be revolutionizing our social networks probably aren’t doing that after all.

The ease of communication enabled by cell phones doesn’t necessarily allow you to grow closer to more people. And that guy you know who has 1,000 friends on Facebook? “It isn’t exactly that the computer has just done some amazing transformation of what humans are capable of doing socially, and that person now genuinely has 1,000 bosom-buddy friends,” says Reed-Tsochas. Most of those people are from the outer layers of the onion. Facebook (or Twitter or email) has certainly made it easier to stay in touch with these far-flung acquaintances, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed the number or depth of your relationships with the people closest to you. Modern communication tools were also supposedly going to eliminate the importance of “distance” in our lives, and we’ve repeatedly seen evidence that this isn’t true. This same technology is changing our world and how we interact with each other in many ways, but perhaps not quite so fundamentally as to alter our inherent “social signatures.”

A Prescription For Grandeur

5634787772_ee40ed927f_z

Breathtaking architecture is good for your mental health:

The fact is that environments do affect us, regardless of whether by design or by accident. In 2008, researchers in the UK found that a ten-minute walk down a South London main street increased psychotic symptoms significantly. In my own research, I find that the healthier a person is, the more a good environment will affect them positively and the less a bad one will affect them negatively. Mentally ill patients show about 65 times more negative reactivity to bad environments than controls and all these reactions translate directly into symptoms. The same patients have about half the positive responsiveness. That’s fewer smiles, less laughter and a reported drop in feeling the “fun of life.”

But that’s not all. The potential for architecture is richer still. The ease with which architecture can embrace sublime aesthetics makes it great for generating awe. Psychiatrists have found that awe reduces the prevalence and severity of mood disorders. Could sublime architecture even potentially save lives?

(Photo of Truro Cathedral by George Thomas)

“Medical Necessity”

David Goldhill considers how the definition has expanded:

Increasingly, health experts rely on the political system to answer the difficult questions of what should be reimbursable by insurers, Medicare, and Medicaid, but the results haven’t been promising in terms of consistency or principle, not to mention control over the expanding definition of care. The fifty states have imposed on health insurers more than 2,000 mandates—requirements to reimburse certain procedures—and the regulations required by the Affordable Care Act will include additional mandates on a national level.

Many of these mandates cover treatments that used to be thought of as cosmetic, optional, or at the very least not medically necessary. In 2008, ten states required coverage for hair prostheses; thirteen for in vitro fertilization. Thirty-one mandated contraceptive reimbursement. Forty-six required reimbursement for the services of chiropractors; fourteen for marriage counselors; and four for massage therapists. Arizona mandated the cost of athletic training. The issue isn’t whether any or all of these treatments are good or useful: the question is whether we should all be required to pay for some who want them.

When Messy Is More Effective

“Biomimetic” design draws on other species’ architectural habits and adapts them for human constructions. As Lee Billings explains, “those examinations yield surprises not only about the animal being observed, but also the observer”:

A telling example is the comparative architecture of orb-weaver versus tangle-web spiders. Imagine a spider web, and chances are you summon an orb-weaver’s work in your mind: A branch-hung 1548563407_ca04fb34d5_zmesh of silk spiraling around a central hub so orderly and symmetrical you would consider it beautiful, and certainly superior to the irregular skein of strands of a tangle web in a wood pile. An orb web’s beauty comes from the simple algorithm the spider follows to construct it within a single plane. By comparison, a tangle web is the result of a significantly more dynamic behavioral process of trial-and-error construction, methodically stringing and testing silk between any available surfaces until an ideal prey-trapping tension is reached. It looks messy, and primitive.

But the tangle web is actually derived from the more primitive orb web. A tangle web can be built almost anywhere, and it doesn’t require airflow to catch prey. Its marvelous, asymmetric design allowed the spiders that developed it to begin a great radiation into thousands of new species. “Humans like symmetry and order, I think because symmetry and order help us recognize patterns, and we like to think we understand things,” says [entomologist John] Wenzel. … “In my studies I’ve seen things many times that I think are anomalies, pathologies, almost like mutations,” Wenzel says. But what seem like pathologies … can become useful, even essential. And difficult to understand.

(Photo of a tangle-web spider by Joe Lapp)

Hope As A Human Right?

Dirk van Zyl Smit, a law professor, argues against life sentences without the possibility of parole, writing that “even the worst offenders have the right to hope”:

A commitment that we will never consider the release of some offenders serving life sentences, except perhaps when they are at death’s door, means that we write them off permanently. It means that we deny that with the passage of time they may change for the better; or that we may change our assessment of their crimes. Worse still, we are denying some fellow humans all hope. In that sense we are putting them in the same position as those awaiting execution on death row.

In July 2013, in the case of Vinter and Others, the grand chamber of the European Court of Human Rights explained why it was fundamentally unacceptable for the United Kingdom to deny these prisoners any prospect of release. Its thinking is best captured in the opinion of Judge Power-Forde of the Republic of Ireland:

Hope is an important and constitutive aspect of the human person. Those who commit the most abhorrent and egregious of acts and who inflict untold suffering upon others, nevertheless retain their fundamental humanity and carry within themselves the capacity to change. Long and deserved though their prison sentences may be, they retain the right tohope that, someday, they may have atoned for the wrongs which they have committed … To deny them the experience of hope would be to deny a fundamental aspect of their humanity and, to do that, would be degrading.

Charting A New Course Online

Gabriel Kahn discusses the meteoric rise of an obscure university:

Five years ago, Southern New Hampshire University was a 2,000-student private school struggling against declining enrollment, poor name recognition, and teetering finances. Today, it’s the Amazon.com of higher education. The school’s burgeoning online division has 180 different programs with an enrollment of 34,000. Students are referred to as “customers.” It undercuts competitors on tuition. And it deploys data analytics for everything from anticipating future demand to figuring out which students are most likely to stumble. “We are super-focused on customer service, which is a phrase that most universities can’t even use,” says Paul LeBlanc, SNHU’s president. …

SNHU boasts six-year online graduation rates of about 50 percent for bachelor’s students. While LeBlanc concedes that’s still abysmal—“Would you accept a 50 percent success rate for surgery? For construction?”—it’s partly explained by the fact that most SNHU students are part time and take even longer to finish.