[governance] Tangential - Obama's faith in geek elites, who have your secrets

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

Just how much do you know them, riaz, to forward this generalization?

Blindly recycling articles that are couched in over broad generalities 
doesn't quite facilitate any discussion or any change from whatever current 
state that you find unacceptable

--srs (htc one x)



On 5 June 2013 12:00:29 AM riaz.tayob at gmail.com wrote:
>
> > June 2, 2013 7:01 pm
> > Obama’s faith in the geek elite who have your secrets
> > <mime-attachment.gif> By Edward Luce
> > Self-interest guides the Big Data companies, and the same is often true 
> of the White House
> > <mime-attachment.jpg>©Matt Kenyon
> > On Monday, Barack Obama’s administration begins its court martial of 
> Bradley Manning, the former US army private who uploaded hundreds of 
> thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. Reasonable people disagree 
> on whether Mr Manning “aided the enemy” (as President Obama’s prosecutors 
> allege) or is a hero for helping to educate us about Washington’s shadowy 
> drone programme. Most are surprised the White House is demanding a life 
> sentence four years after putting Mr Manning behind bars. In their view, Mr 
> Obama is a self-confessed geek with Silicon Valley’s transparent “Do no 
> evil” values. Yet he regularly betrays these with his “Nixonian” mania for 
> secrecy.
> > Such concerns are charmingly naive: Mr Obama is no traitor to geek 
> culture. His administration shares many of the faults and virtues of the 
> Silicon Valley leaders to whom it is so closely allied. Mr Manning’s 
> prosecution begins three days after the White House co-hosted its second 
> “We the Geeks” conference with Google. This Thursday, Mr Obama will attend 
> a fundraiser at the home of Vinod Khosla, one of Silicon Valley’s most 
> celebrated venture capital geeks. And in the coming months the White House 
> will be pushing for Congress to pass immigration reform – alongside a 
> newly-created lobby group founded by Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive 
> of Facebook. This controversial outfit is called Forward (Fwd.us), which 
> was also the slogan of Mr Obama’s 2012 campaign.
> > One of the geekocracy’s main characteristics is a serene faith in its own 
> good motives. It is not hard to imagine how much greater the US left’s 
> outrage would be over the drone programme were it carried out by George W. 
> Bush or Mitt Romney. When Mr Obama asks Americans to trust that he 
> evaluates every target on his “kill list”, most acquiesce. That pass is 
> also extended to Mr Obama’s “signature strikes”, which select targets by 
> probability based on often sketchy information. But there is a world of 
> difference between zapping a known target and taking an educated guess. It 
> is hard to avoid the suspicion that Mr Obama’s reputation for being a nerd 
> shields him from tougher criticism. Call it geek exceptionalism. To his 
> credit, Mr Obama conveyed last month that he shares much of this disquiet 
> in a lapidary address on counterterrorism.
> > If signature strikes – attacking suspected terrorists before they can act 
> – are the stuff of the film Minority Report’s “pre-crimes”, the Obama 
> campaign’s brilliant use of demographic data is about “pre-votes”. His data 
> team has aggregated more detail about individual preferences than most 
> voters know about themselves. Mr Obama is likely to use his database as a 
> bargaining tool to help secure his legacy after 2016 (whoever is the 
> Democratic nominee will need it to win). It is no coincidence this 
> resembles the growing ingenuity with which Facebook, and other social 
> media, cull their users’ personal information. Mr Obama’s operation was 
> partly designed by Silicon Valley techies. The Obama administration is also 
> a strong ally of Google, Facebook and others in pushing against Europe’s 
> moves towards far stronger data privacy rights. France’s so-called “right 
> to be forgotten” sparks as much derision in Washington as it does in San 
> Francisco. “Trust us,” say the geeks. “We have noble motives.”
> > The reality is more mundane. Self-interest, rather than virtue, guides 
> the growing clout of these “Big Data” companies in Washington. The same is 
> often true of Mr Obama. Big data’s agenda is not confined to immigration 
> reform. Among other areas, it has a deep interest in shaping what 
> Washington does on privacy, online education, the school system, the 
> internet, corporate tax reform, cyber security and even cyber warfare. Big 
> data is also likely to be influential in the US-European trade partnership 
> talks, which start this month. Whether the sector becomes a thorn in the 
> side of the process remains to be seen. Either way, Americans should be 
> relieved someone is making the case for privacy. “I don’t say this often 
> but I think the Europeans are on the right side of the data protection 
> issue,” says Tyler Cowen, a leading libertarian economist.
> > For while big data brings innovation, it also has dangerous side effects. 
> Culture is already pushing Americans towards “data nudism”. Such currents 
> will only get more acute. Before long, it will be possible to map an 
> individual’s genetic sequencing at an affordable price. No one will be 
> forced to attach their genetic record to online dating profiles. But 
> potential mates may assume that anyone who chooses not to is concealing a 
> genetic disorder.
> > America’s middle classes are already in thrall to their often capricious 
> credit scores – a determination that is notoriously hard to correct. In a 
> world where the average home will have hundreds of sensors, and where 
> ubiquitous tracking systems can intimately map an individual’s habits, the 
> right to privacy could become an economic tool of survival. Already, US 
> employers often demand a credit score, a drugs test and fingerprinting from 
> many kinds of applicant. In the new digital world, the right to expunge 
> past blemishes may turn into a rumbling civil struggle.
> > Should such futurology bother Mr Obama? Yes. A century ago, Theodore 
> Roosevelt pushed back against the power of the rail barons and oil titans – 
> the great technological disrupters of his day. Mr Obama should pay closer 
> heed to history. And he should become wary of geeks bearing gifts.
> > edward.luce at ft.com
> >
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