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DESCRIPTION:'Great Exploitations: Data Mining\, Technological Determinism a
 nd the NSA'\n	Matthew Jones\, Columbia University\n	\n	Abstract: We cannot un
 derstand the programs revealed by Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers 
 without understanding a broader set of historical development in the US an
 d beyond before and after 9/11. First\, with the growing spread of computa
 tion into everyday transactions from the 1960s into the 1990s\, corporatio
 ns and governments collected exponentially more information about consumer
 s and citizens. To contend with this deluge of data\, computer scientists\
 , mathematicians\, and business analysts created new fields of computation
 al analysis\, colloquially called “data mining\,” designed to produce know
 ledge or intelligence from vast volume. Second\, conservative legal schola
 rs\, government officers\, and judges had long doubted the constitutionali
 ty of legal restrictions that the US Congress had placed on intelligence w
 ork\, foreign and domestic\, in the late 1970s. Facing the growth of the I
 nternet and the increasing availability of high quality cryptography\, nat
 ional security lawyers within the US Department of Justice and the Nationa
 l Security Agency (NSA) began developing what was called a “modernization”
  of surveillance and intelligence law to deal with technological developme
 nts.  Third\, in the Bill Clinton era\, concerns about terrorist attacks o
 n the United States came to focus heavily on the need to defend computer s
 ystems and networks. The asymmetrical nature of the terrorist threat had l
 ong challenged the traditional division of defense of the homeland versus 
 offence abroad: attacks honored no territorial boundaries\, and\, neither\
 , it increasingly came to seem\, should defense against them. Protecting t
 he “critical infrastructure” of the United States\, the argument ran\, req
 uired new domestic surveillance to find insecurities\, and opened the door
  to much greater Department of Defense capability domestically and new NSA
  responsibilities. Tools for assessing domestic vulnerabilities lent thems
 elves easily to discerning—and exploiting—foreign ones. And traditions of 
 acquiring and exploiting any foreign sources of communication prompted the
  NSA to develop ever more invasive ways of hacking into computers and netw
 orks worldwide. In the immediate wake of 9/11\, the Bush administration br
 aided these developments\, to create a massive global surveillance regime.
  The administration sought to make it appear at once technologically deter
 mined and essential for security in the global war of terror. The job of t
 he NSA was “to exploit” communications networks—to make them available to 
 policymakers\; to do this\, its lawyers “exploited” the law as well as tec
 hnology. \n	\n	Bio: Matthew L. Jones is the James R. Barker Professor of Con
 temporary Civilization at Columbia University. His publications include'Qu
 erying the Archive: Data Mining from Apriori to Page Rank\,' in L. Daston\
 , ed. Archives of the Sciences (Chicago\, 2016)\; Reckoning with Matter: C
 alculating Machines\, Innovation\, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal
  to Babbage (Chicago\, 2016)\;  and The Good Life in the Scientific Revolu
 tion (University of Chicago Press\, 2006).\n
DTSTART:20161004T213000Z
DTEND:20161004T230000Z
LOCATION:260\, Arts Building\, CA\, QC\, Montreal\, H3A 0G5\, 853 rue Sherb
 rooke Ouest
SUMMARY:AHCS Speaker Series | Matthew Jones: 'Great Exploitations: Data Min
 ing\, Technological Determinism and the NSA'
URL:/ahcs/channels/event/ahcs-speaker-series-matthew-j
 ones-great-exploitations-data-mining-technological-determinism-and-nsa-262
 960
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