GPS Tracking or What is Privacy?

The Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday regarding the privacy of citizens, specifically regarding the ability to track vehicle movements via GPS without a warrant.  First read about this in Wired in this article  Busted! Two New Fed GPS Trackers Found on SUV  which has a good sum-up of the case, with full details and pictures of the GPS trackers including manufacturer details and specs.  The biggest issue in this that should really disturb us as citizens is the basis from which the government is arguing for warrant-less placement of GPS devices on vehicles, namely "...  that citizens have no expectation of privacy when it comes to their movements in public so officers don’t need to get a warrant to use such devices." (Wired) 
     If you're not familiar with the case the NYT has a quick summation Court Casts a Wary Eye on Tracking by GPS . "The case concerned Antoine Jones, who was the owner of a Washington nightclub when the police came to suspect him of being part of a cocaine-selling operation. They placed a tracking device on his Jeep Grand Cherokee without a valid warrant, tracked his travels for a month and used the evidence they gathered to convict him of conspiring to sell cocaine. He was sentenced to life in prison." (NYT)
 NPR has a slew of articles on this, though none on the front page. High Court Troubled By Warrantless GPS Tracking   This is  one of the better articles as it has some excerpts from the hearing transcripts. What The governemnt's attorny, Dreeben, is pretty well prepared, articulate and seems to recognize that this is not simply about the case which brought this to the Supreme Court. The defense attorny, Leckar, seems to lacking a full understanding of the greater implications of this hearing. Driving home and listening to this last night caused me to wonder if a lawyer more cognizant of the wider impact of this decision could have been chosen. Especially one who doesn't admit to the Supreme Court that he thinks London's CCTV surveillance is "scary". In context Justice Kagan is discussing Lodon's surveillance and Leckar replies: "It's pretty scary. I wouldn't want to live in London under those circumstances." Justice SCALIA: "Well, it must be unconstitutional if it's scary."
Reading through the transcript, Leckar gets beat up pretty good while Dreeben is much more persuasive. While the Supreme Court is a substantially intimidating group of people, Leckar really needed to be on his game and this transcript makes me nervous that he does not do an adequate job in defending privacy. To Leckar's credit privacy has become a difficult term to define but this decision is going to set precedent for the future and to fail to address this meaningfully, I think, is going to dramatically change the way we live.


 The full transcript of the  is available here. Towards the beginning of the transcript Judge Scalia asks the question, which I think is key to this debate, "...are you obtaining information that a person had a reasonable expectation to be kept private?" This is at the heart of  the current privacy debate. Dreeben goes on to argue that GPS offer a less time-consuming method of collecting this data to which Judge Alita responds "...in the pre-computer, pre-Internet age much of the privacy -- I would say most of the privacy -- that people enjoyed was not the result of legal protections or constitutional protections; it was the result simply of the difficulty of traveling around and gathering up information." This difficulty of gathering people's information
The two other questions raised here, I think, are 1) what is privacy and 2) is that privacy a right of the citizens of this country.

 Supreme Court Hears Arguments In GPS Case
Do Police Need Warrants For GPS Tracking Devices?
GPS Tracking: Supreme Court Debates Privacy Limits On Police (Huffington Post)

All the world's a screen

 This is a recent video from Microsoft doing some potential crystal ball gazing into the future of the integration of the physical world and the tools of technology/computer. Where everything is a potential screen and information is neither digital nor physical but can be shared, moved and manipulated from surface to device. In watching this video, this future world is both completely urban and very sterile. All surfaces are immaculately clean and much of the. It seems that this new digital world has no room for piles of stuff or leftover bits of projects because it's all pixels. There's some corollary to this project in Chris Harrison's work on Skinput or Pranav Mistry's Sixth Sense Project demoed in this TED video.

 

The description of the Sixth Sense project follows as taken from Mistry's website: "'SixthSense' is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information. By using a camera and a tiny projector mounted in a pendant like wearable device, 'SixthSense' sees what you see and visually augments any surfaces or objects we are interacting with. It projects information onto surfaces, walls, and physical objects around us, and lets us interact with the projected information through natural hand gestures, arm movements, or our interaction with the object itself. 'SixthSense' attempts to free information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer."   The last sentence nicely captures the point of Microsoft's video. If the entire world is our computer then this seems to imply that our informaiton is necessary to be the world's as well so that the world as computer has something to process. A recent NYR article Over the High-Tech Rainbow asks this question: "... should we just assume that all this personal information being generated and collected won’t be used against us by insurers, or employers, or lawyers, or marketers, or the government?" Not that our personal information isn't already collected and used against us but the increasing drive to remove any perceived barriers between the desire and the ability to share information should warrant increased scrutiny of how that information is actually used by and against its progenitors.

The People's Library in my library

Occupy Wall Street (specifically NYC) has many facets that bear discussion but one of the things that has stood out to me is the fact that they have a library. You can check out the library's web page here the official title of which is The People's Library. What's interesting about this setup is that there are no, as far as I can tell, ebooks, databases or otherwise digital media in, or part of, this library. There is available internet connectivity but there is not, as far as I've read, any subscriptions to library vendors or databases.
What really intrigues me is this people's library exists as a library of necessity and purposeful in scope. The books chosen seem to be based around the ideas of free speech, response to government, etc. (Check out the related links below for additional info on how people are picking books.)
   While there has not been a particularly well-stated set of specific goals of those doing the occupying, there seems to be a perception that the library's provided sources of information is needed/interesting/pointedly relevant in order to help those protesting to do so better or more intelligently, or help inform about how the nation got to the point it's at, biography of national leaders, etc.
Why does a protest movement need a library? It's hard to tell not actually being there but my own, from-a-distance-personal conjecture follows. Here goes: many of these books have all been available for a while (Zinn's a People's History of the United States is a good example) but it's not until these reader's need have changed that these resources are now recognized as important or helpful. The importance of the object is elevated relative to the current need of the user. Libraries are supposed to exist to meet need(s) but  one of the challenges is trying to figure out or identify exactly what drives patrons/users to act on their information needs or to realize that there is a resource that meets a need that was previously unvoiced or less urgent. 
This library has comes to the protestors directly. It has arisen out of the gathering of people to meet a specific need and is therefore valued because it is need-based.
 The tradition of acadmeic libraries is that they are developed to meet a specific need but because there are other immediately available sources.
The People's Library exemplifies the five quote unquote laws of library use codified by S. Ranganathan.

Books are for use.
Every reader his [or her] book.
Every book its reader.
Save the time of the reader.
The library is a growing organism.

I wonder if patrons of The People's Library may actually have an easier time of selecting resources because there is a specifically limited focus and reaourxes which they are concerned.

Location also matters. 

im tempted to decamp parts of the collection into a rolling cart and haul it around campus.Recently I brought three books over to a colleague in Student Development who had requested some "interesting stuff". Another staff member happened to overhear our conversation, expressed interest in one of the books and ended up walking away with it. This is an individual who is very unlikely to engage with the library resources on a regular basis. But presenting them with a manageable chunk of a resource in a subject area they were interested in, piqued their interest.
How do I, then, turn my library into a people's or in this case, a student's library? Or better inform users what is in the stacks? I want my student users to have the same sense of purpose, relevance and excitement that the OWD have about their books. What are additional ways to increase the transparency of what's in the stacks?The other, more difficult bit, is to highlight the importance of the works both for for its own sake as well as for its potential applicability to a particular research or information-gathering project.

Related articles

• The People's Library is the collective, public, open library of the Occupy Wall Street leaderless resistance movement. (librarian.net)
• The Occupy Wall Street Library Matthew Wolfe
• The Eclectic Reading List at Occupy Wall Street (themillions.com)

Matthew Battles on Reading, Libraries and Occupations

This video by Matthew Battles discusses the idea of libraries and occupations. He asks the perfect question of "Why do we need libraries for an occupation/movement?"  Battles draws parallels between the occupy movement and the Chartist movement of 19th century Britain. (If you're not familiar with the Chartist movement, don't worry neither was I. Battles gives a nice explanation.) More importantly Battles describes an interaction with an occupy library, perhaps better described as a reading room, as possessing "...a wonderful energy of charged contemplation". This idea of "charged contemplation" is  very much what I was thinking, and couldn't quite get to, with my previous post. That there is a very particular and meaningful reason for using these resources it seems that it's not just the people who are charged with contemplative meaning but the materials themselves. I like Battles' highlight of the 19th century reading room concept as it seems to be more applicable to this particular constellation of collected items. Regardless the occupy movement has one and, I think, it has interesting implications for doing library work and especially outreach.

Flooding

After my thinking and writing about how the camera effects how we see, here's a bunch of pictures from the flooding in our area.
There is currently a state of emergency and we're really not supposed to be traveling but we were out and seeing how bad it was. Last night I worked for three hours with friends to move hundreds of pounds of tools and fiberglass materials from their plastics plant to safety. Our friends Walter and Kristen with their two girls called us up at 1 am due to the mandatory evacuation and have been hanging out with us today.  They live two streets away from the park in the images below.
 We are up on a hill so that with the lack of rain it's quite tranquil. All of the flash flooding that closed streets last night up here has diminished. Helicopter are periodically  flying over and sirens regularly approach and recede.There are many better images and news reports but these are the shots from my iPhone around Endicott.

                                          This is at Miserau Park at around 7:30 am. The flood wall is the green bank in the background.

 This is the same park about three hours later and bit farther down. The slight rise behind the pool of water is the flood wall. The Susquhanna is just behind the wall.

 

If you look in the background in the left hand corner, you can see the water pouring over the flood wall.

                                                                Another shot of the park.

 This is is my favorite picture. You can see the water has come up the pole significantly and the sign is just ironic.

 

People coming out to see the river, take pictures and call their friends to let them know how bad it is.

 The perspective isn't great but the parking lot is lower than the grass you can see in the foreground and the water has completely filled that area.

         This medical building is to the right of the picture of Kmart. They are building sandbags.

                                 National Guard on the scene. Kmart is to the picture's left.

                                                It's never good when the Red Cross  floods.

The NYT tossed up an article today "When the camera takes over for the eye"with an almost inspired quote regarding on how we do the recording-as-better-remembering act: "...the camera is a way of connecting, participating and collecting fleeting experiences." The piece is short but adds to this ongoing discussion of what the image-taking process means for us as viewers and consumers. This is not just for art but for family outings, special events or moving sunsets. 
Jaron Lanier has a recent interview/article in the Edge, I'm still working through this but Lanier has some interesting ideas that relate to this camera idea.
"Can people learn to forego the temptations, the heroin-like rewards of being able to reform the world to your own advantage in order to instead make something sustainable?"
Seemingly, those with cameras can now re-make the world so that a piece of art that is physically stuck in pcae can now be carried, printed or displayed wherever the individual's device allows. So we cease looking at items in their settings and look to see the most advantageous vantage point or interesting view point to capture the piece rather than simply being with it. The camera diminishes the art by reducing it to pixels and thus allowing the viewer to bypass the aesthetic experience or challenge. By capturing an image of the piece/scultpure the need to further interact with the work is pushed into the future since there is an artifact that can, if needed, be considered at leisure without the need to return to the thing itself. The world remade in the eye of the beholder holding a tiny lens and screen.

 To stare at Maria Abramovi's image is not to sit down with her. What would it have been like to have sat down with Maria Abramovic in the MOMA for "The Artist is Present" and brought out a camera phone and interposed it into the visual space? You can see many of the people who sat with Maria here. But without cameras no one outside of that room would have seen/experienced this event. There would simply be a blank square.

Is it simply because the technological devices are now available to us that we persist in recording these events? We are interested in recording and then digging those recordings up after they have been covered in dust but who is going to shift through the terabytes of digital files to find the important stuff?








Perhaps it is that we are too afraid of loss  to stop recording.