Thursday 3 December 2015

#OEB15 keynote Cory Doctorow we are living in a surveillance state

If you can see a sci-fi novelist, blogger, and technology activist at work using a wonderfully harsh Canadian accent …. you need to stretch your fingers, massage your brain and prepare for some quick thinking.
Cory wears a nice reversed white and black jacket over his skull-pirate t-shirt and it suits his stage presents. So, Cory Doctorow.

Schools are increasingly surveyanced places, but this means that learners are negatively impacted by the idea of what is good and bad learning. Eg. Website pages that have been blocked for learners, but this flies in the face of digital learning. As kids are exploring information and content.
This means we are filtering pages, censoring pages for repressive regimes. We are offshoring our kids clicks to war criminals.
But kids (time rich and cash poor) will find solutions, but this means that they are not really learning digital skills, but marginal digital solution finding.
So what if we will give them real life challenges: which pages would you catalogue, and what do you think about the pages that they are not allowed to be seen.
Freedom of information act: explore that
Research companies by using the internet, and give that to the journals, magazines… which will make them fully digital citizens.
Children are the beta testers of the internet age.
It matters what we teach our kids.
Macbooks: laptop was equipped with software that would harvest the clicks of all the kids (in the most affluent high school of USA).
Now school administrations provide laptops, with those types of software.
The surveillance state are increasingly spreading to all digital users. They want to take the inkjet model into every home. Making it difficult to build tools without giving them some money (standardisation).
Digital locks are now used in cars to make sure that every garage owner buys the readers. And this pressures those garagists to buy parts with particular stores… which should be seen as a felony
But it is not restricted to cars, it is part of the complete ecosystem we live in and in which (John Deers tractors, with software from Monsanto).
Also inside of the body. The logbook of continuous blood glucose meters… so human beings are turned into inktjet printers.
The rules that prohibit people from downloading their own data generatied by these softwares, makes them objects without rights.
We only have one methodology to see whether security works: making it transparent.
We need to ask for a knowledge age that is enlightened, to free people in our society.

Cory gives example of STazi, then NSA spionage, … so there is a productivity gain in surveillance due to data recording devices.
(inge: add this to the telepathic slides)
And, strangely enough each one of us is actually paying the companies that get these data for this data (mobile plans).
In our own living memory, people that are seen as right, which first were people that could go to jail, social inclused… the way we as a society changed to a more open social attitude, we made things transparent. But how do we do this?

ICT literacy is thinking critically on how they stand on the digital data, the social implications of this data… all foundational, future fights will be fought on the internet. So it is pivotal to make our world more transparent, especially the security software… and to make people critical and smart and above all subversive on how they use the technology around them.
Computers have brought new powers to us, but producers prohibit access to your own data.
Although computers can have really safe encrypting software, our kids must just learn to use it.
 People care about security, so that is a good thing.
Electronic frontier toolkit (Inge look it up).
We need better tools, and social
Living in an age of surveillance: total control of the means of information: why is the computer not doing what you want it to do.
Improving digital citizenships: should be lead by institutions, so as teachers the only thing we can do is to teach them how to ask critical questions, to demand evidence-based proof. Digital citizenship is crucial, but there is a lock on personal data. Digital locks have been put on so much, how can we see where to unlock them: it is a matter of policy and skills.
At present non of us know how much of our data is shared or owned by whom.

Security services should be on the side of the users, not on their own existence only.