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DESCRIPTION:'Great Exploitations: Data Mining\, Technological Determinism a
 nd the NSA'\n	Matthew Jones\, Columbia UniversityAbstract: We cannot unders
 tand the programs revealed by Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers with
 out understanding a broader set of historical development in the US and be
 yond before and after 9/11. First\, with the growing spread of computation
  into everyday transactions from the 1960s into the 1990s\, corporations a
 nd governments collected exponentially more information about consumers an
 d citizens. To contend with this deluge of data\, computer scientists\, ma
 thematicians\, and business analysts created new fields of computational a
 nalysis\, colloquially called “data mining\,” designed to produce knowledg
 e or intelligence from vast volume. Second\, conservative legal scholars\,
  government officers\, and judges had long doubted the constitutionality o
 f legal restrictions that the US Congress had placed on intelligence work\
 , foreign and domestic\, in the late 1970s. Facing the growth of the Inter
 net and the increasing availability of high quality cryptography\, nationa
 l security lawyers within the US Department of Justice and the National Se
 curity Agency (NSA) began developing what was called a “modernization” of 
 surveillance and intelligence law to deal with technological developments.
   Third\, in the Bill Clinton era\, concerns about terrorist attacks on th
 e United States came to focus heavily on the need to defend computer syste
 ms and networks. The asymmetrical nature of the terrorist threat had long 
 challenged the traditional division of defense of the homeland versus offe
 nce abroad: attacks honored no territorial boundaries\, and\, neither\, it
  increasingly came to seem\, should defense against them. Protecting the “
 critical infrastructure” of the United States\, the argument ran\, require
 d new domestic surveillance to find insecurities\, and opened the door to 
 much greater Department of Defense capability domestically and new NSA res
 ponsibilities. Tools for assessing domestic vulnerabilities lent themselve
 s easily to discerning—and exploiting—foreign ones. And traditions of acqu
 iring and exploiting any foreign sources of communication prompted the NSA
  to develop ever more invasive ways of hacking into computers and networks
  worldwide. In the immediate wake of 9/11\, the Bush administration braide
 d these developments\, to create a massive global surveillance regime. The
  administration sought to make it appear at once technologically determine
 d and essential for security in the global war of terror. The job of the N
 SA was “to exploit” communications networks—to make them available to poli
 cymakers\; to do this\, its lawyers “exploited” the law as well as technol
 ogy. Bio: Matthew L. Jones is the James R. Barker Professor of Contemporar
 y Civilization at Columbia University. His publications include'Querying t
 he Archive: Data Mining from Apriori to Page Rank\,' in L. Daston\, ed. Ar
 chives of the Sciences (Chicago\, 2016)\; Reckoning with Matter: Calculati
 ng Machines\, Innovation\, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babb
 age (Chicago\, 2016)\;  and The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution (Un
 iversity 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:/channels/event/speaker-series-matt-jones-262960
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