See →.
“The SIGINT World Is Flat,” Signal v. Noise column, December 22, 2011.
Michael Sontheimer, “SPIEGEL Interview with Julian Assange: ‘We Are Drowning in Material,’” Spiegel Online, July 20, 2015 →.
Cora Currier and Henrik Moltke, “Spies in the Sky: Israeli Drone Feeds Hacked By British and American Intelligence,” The Intercept, January 28, 2016 →.
Ibid. Many of these images are currently part of Laura Poitras’s excellent show “Astro Noise” at the Whitney Museum in New York.
In the training manual on how to decode these feeds, analysts proudly declared they used open source software developed by the University of Cambridge to hack Sky TV. See →.
See →.
Benjamin H. Bratton, “Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics,” e-flux journal 46 (June 2013) →.
“Israel: Gaza Airstrikes Violated Laws of War,” hrw.org, February 12, 2013 →.
Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics.” Theory & Event, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2001). “In order to refuse the title of political subjects to a category—workers, women, etc.—it has traditionally been sufficient to assert that they belong to a ‘domestic’ space, to a space separated from public life; one from which only groans or cries expressing suffering, hunger, or anger could emerge, but not actual speeches demonstrating a shared aisthesis. And the politics of these categories … has consisted in making what was unseen visible; in getting what was only audible as noise to be heard as speech.”
Verne Kopytoff, “Big data’s dirty problem,” Fortune, June 30, 2014 →.
Larisa Bedgood, “A Halloween Special: Tales from the Dirty Data Crypt,” relevategroup.com, October 30 2015 →. The article continues: “In late June and early July 1991, twelve million people across the country (mostly Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Los Angeles) lost phone service due to a typographical error in the software that controls signals regulating telephone traffic. One employee typed a ‘6’ instead of a ‘D.’ The phone companies essentially lost all control of their networks.”
David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2015), 48.
Steve Lohr, “For Big-Data Scientists, ‘Janitor Work’ Is Key Hurdle to Insights,” New York Times, August 17, 2014 →.
See “E-Verify: The Disparate Impact of Automated Matching Programs,” chap. 2 in the report Civil Rights, Big Data, and Our Algorithmic Future, bigdata.fairness.io, September 2014 →.
See Melissa Eddy and Katarina Johannsen, “Migrants Arriving in Germany Face a Chaotic Reception in Berlin,” New York Times, November 26, 2015 →. A young boy disappeared among the chaos and was later found murdered.
Patrick Tucker, “Refugee or Terrorist? IBM Thinks Its Software Has the Answer,” Defense One, January 27, 2016 →. This example was mentioned by Kate Crawford in her brilliant lecture “Surviving Surveillance,” delivered as part of the panel discussion “Surviving Total Surveillance,” Whitney Museum, February 29, 2016.
Christian Grothoff and J. M. Porup, “The NSA’s SKYNET program may be killing thousands of innocent people,” Ars Technica, February 16, 2016, italics in original →. An additional bug of the system was that the person who seemed to pose the biggest threat of all according to this program was actually the head of the local Al Jazeera office, because he obviously traveled a lot for professional reasons. A similar misassessment also happened to Laura Poitras, who was rated four hundred out of a possible four hundred points on a US Homeland Security threat scale. As Poitras was filming material for her documentary My Country, My Country in Iraq—later nominated for an Academy Award—she ended up filming in the vicinity of an insurgent attack in Baghdad. This coincidence may led to a six-year ordeal that involved her being interrogated, surveilled, searched, etc., every time she reentered the United States from abroad.
Ibid.
See Michael V. Hayden, “To Keep America Safe, Embrace Drone Warfare,” New York Times, February 19, 2016 →. The director of the CIA from 2006–09, Hayden asserts that human intelligence was another factor in determining targets, while admitting that the program did indeed kill people in error: “In one strike, the grandson of the target was sleeping near him on a cot outside, trying to keep cool in the summer heat. The Hellfire missiles were directed so that their energy and fragments splayed away from him and toward his grandfather. They did, but not enough.”
Grothoff and Porup, “The NSA’s SKYNET program.”
Thank you to Ben Bratton for pointing this out.
“Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks,” Google Research Blog, June 17, 2015 →.
Ibid.
Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” available at monoskop.org →.
“Inceptionism.”
See ibid.
Farhad B. Idris, “Realism,”in Encyclopedia of Literature and Politics: Censorship, Revolution, and Writing, Volume II: H–R, ed. M. Keith Booker (Westport, CT: Greenwood), 601.
Is apophenia a new form of paranoia? In 1989, Frederic Jameson declared paranoia to be one of the main cultural patterns of postmodern narrative, pervading the political unconscious. According to Jameson, the totality of social relations could not be culturally represented within the Cold War imagination—and the blanks were filled in by delusions, conjecture, and whacky plots featuring Freemason logos. But after Snowden’s leaks, one thing became clear: all conspiracy theories were actually true. Worse, they were outdone by reality. Paranoia is anxiety caused by an absence of information, by missing links and allegedly covered-up evidence. Today, the contrary applies. Jameson’s totality has taken on a different form. It is not absent. On the contrary: it is rampant. Totality—or maybe a correlated version thereof—has returned with a vengeance in the form of oceanic “truckloads of data.” Social relations are distilled as contact metadata, relational graphs, or infection spread maps. Totality is a tsunami of spam, atrocity porn, and gadget handshakes. This quantified version of social relations is just as readily deployed for police operations as for targeted advertising, for personalized clickbait, eyeball tracking, neurocurating, and the financialization of affect. It works both as social profiling and commodity form. Klout Score–based A-lists and presidential kill lists are equally based on obscure proprietary operations. Today, totality comes as probabilistic notation that includes your fuckability score as well as your disposability ratings. It catalogs affiliation, association, addiction; it converts patterns of life into death by aerial strike.
More recent, extremely fascinating examples include Christian Szegedy et. al, “Intriguing properties of neural networks,” arxiv.org, February 19, 2014 →; and Anh Nguyen, Jason Yosinski, and Jeff Clune, “Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images,” cv-foundation.org, 2015 →. The first paper discusses how the addition of a couple of pixels—a change imperceptible to the human eye—causes a neural network to misidentify a car, an Aztec pyramid, and a pair of loudspeakers for an ostrich. The second paper discusses how entirely abstract shapes are identified as penguins, guitars, and baseballs by neural networks.
“Do We Need a Bigger SIGINT Truck?” Signal v. Noise column, January 23, 2012.
See Jussi Parikka, “The Geology of Media,” The Atlantic, October 11, 2013 →.
Contemporary soothsayers are reading patterns into data as if they were the entrails of sacrificial animals. They are successors of the more traditional augurs that Walter Benjamin described as photographers avant la lettre: “Is not every spot of our cities the scene of a crime? Every passerby a perpetrator? Does not the photographer—descendent of augurers and haruspices—uncover guilt in his pictures?”
“Israel: Gaza Airstrikes Violated Laws of War.”
Acknowledgments: The initial version of this text was written at the request of Laura Poitras, who most generously allowed access to some unclassified documents from the Snowden archive, and a short version was presented during the opening of her show “Astro Noise” at the Whitney Museum. Further thanks to Henrik Moltke for facilitating access to the documents, to Brenda and other members of Laura’s studio, to Linda Stupart for introducing me to the term “apophenia,” and to Ben Bratton for fleshing it out for me.