In their pursuit of both national and homeland security as well as the creation of new markets, the state and corporations are engaging the free-flowing horizontal communication which takes place in cyberspace, with the aim of reworking its architecture into a Semantic Web. The Semantic Web has been primarily conceptualized and developed by Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web. The Semantic Web can be understood as a sustained indexing of cyberspace, whereby information is semantically coded in order to be processed and interpreted, across various platforms and programs, through “automated” analysis. To semantically code and then circulate this data, Web ontologies are developed and adopted which rationalize and categorically conform information in order to establish relationships. Most prominent of these ontologies is the Web Ontology Language (OWL). As cyberspace is semantically codified, both the state and corporations have moved to develop methodologies to utilize the Semantic Web for more efficient surveillance – often framed as “data mining” or “market research.” Particularly notable has been the Department of Homeland Security’s “Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement” (ADVISE) program, defined as, “a data mining tool under development intended to help the Department of Homeland Security analyze large amounts of information. It is designed to allow an analyst to search for patterns in data—such as relationships among people, organizations, and events—and to produce visual representations of these patterns” (United States Government Accountability Office 2007). In reformatting cyberspace, the Semantic Web makes information more locative, circulatory and integrable. In doing so, this reformatting enhances cyberspatial navigation but also erodes the qualities of cyberspace that have functioned to protect the privacy and anonymity of cyber-surfers.

NOTE This “outtake” and its relation to the larger paper, from which it was eventually cut, were inspired by two earlier posts: “what they want is an automatic feed” and (young) person of interest.

]]> http://cyberenviro.org/2008/outtake-governing-the-semantic-web/feed/ 0 http://cyberenviro.org/2008/outtake-public-wi-fi-nola/ http://cyberenviro.org/2008/outtake-public-wi-fi-nola/#comments Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:12:29 +0000 gtdonovan http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/?p=133 Continue reading →]]> The following is an outtake from an article Cindi Katz and I have been writing on the relationship between U.S. children and young people and their technological environments in the post-9/11 security state. Once/if the final article is published, I’ll post a link to it here. In the meantime, consider this a “teaser.”

These shifts, and the struggles over them, remind us of Seymour Papert’s (1993, p5) caution that, “there is a world of difference between what computers can do and what society will choose to do with them.” In the post-9/11 security state, we can look to that other contemporary site of homeland (in)security, New Orleans, for an example of how state and corporate security concerns shape the difference between what a particular technology can do and the purposes to which it is put. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the city’s communicative infrastructure was badly damaged except for a wireless mesh-network, similar to one the FOSS XO can generate.  The network covered the downtown business district and the French Quarter. This network, originally implemented to support surveillance cameras in the area, was “hacked” by emergency personnel in the wake of the hurricane and later converted by the city into a free public Wi-Fi service. Although Louisiana state laws ban the free distribution of broadband services with municipal monies, New Orleans was able to circumvent this ban because of its declared state of emergency. Now that the state of emergency has been lifted, BellSouth has challenged the legality of the public Wi-Fi. While the use of publicly funded Wi-Fi is sanctioned for state surveillance, free public access Wi-Fi is seen as a threat to corporate profit and thus curbed.  Clearly choices are being made—choices that go against the democratic possibilities that Papert and his colleagues envisioned when the Internet and personal computing were in their infancy.

NOTE This “outtake” and its relation to the larger paper, from which it was eventually cut, were inspired by two earlier posts: Connectile Dysfunction (CD) and mesh-networking.

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