Paper Bits

Prism is part, I would suggest, of the realm of design thinking. This is a problem-solving methodology born out of similarly strange bedfellows as The Californian Ideology. In this case it’s art school creativity hijacked by management theory. Design thinking suggests the synthetic way in which designers are (supposed to be) thinking can be applied to almost any subject. […] By seeing the world through the lens of this conceptual design ecosystem, design thinking abstracts the world into a series of interactions with outputs and it remains poised to provide a solution for anything. Never mind the fact that there are many who would argue with the idea of design as a solution-focused activity, that this conception of design is pure ideological cant.

Of course, like digital culture and like late capitalism, design thinking prefers to appear a non-ideological matter of common sense. Apparently de-politicised and post-ideological, design thinking appears free of its own innate desires and tendencies in order to open-mindedly and radically reinvent the world.

This is what happens when a society tacitly agrees that, while (theoretically, at least) its citizens have rights the government may not abridge, the government is free to subcontract that job to every other important institution that affects the lives of its people. Employers, for example, may drug-test employees without cause, and they may monitor the political and social media activities of those employees even when those employees are off the job. Your children lose their Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights — and most of their First Amendment rights — as soon as they walk through the schoolhouse doors. There have been, of course, no effective counterweights to any of this. Union protection in the workplace is gone. Schoolchildren have no effective lobby for their rights. Of course, Verizon cooperated with the government. Even if they hadn’t been ordered to do so, do you think there would have been 15 minutes of serious debate in the boardroom over the privacy rights of their millions of customers? How’s that no-call list thing working for you?

This is the surveillance state writ large, with large corporations and the government in close cooperation, and hallowed by a warrant from a secret court that was supposed to be the last line of defense against this sort of thing. (Even though the FISA court has been a rubber stamp for years, which was an argument back during the previous administration for why that administration should have gotten a warrant. Ah, thim was the days.) And because we are supposed to be a self-governing political commonwealth, we are complicit, too. All of the powers under which the NSA operated were approved, over and over again, by the Congress, the members of which we freely elect, and none of whom will ever win an election on issues like this because, all tricornered hats and the outrage of the Paul family aside, there is no electoral constituency for the Bill of Rights any more. All of the powers under which Verizon operated were approved, over and over again, by its customers, who now know what the company was doing, and who, I predict, will keep handing over the data. Given the dark, midnight nature of government secrecy, a lot of the infrastructure behind this current outrage was put in place in the daylight. The fault, dear Brutus…

Details on the 60 incidents recorded to date are scant as Sentinel is still evaluating the causes, but at least one jamming device has been seized. Curry says most jammers seem to be being used by truckers to stop ‘spy-in-the-cab’ tachographs working, preventing their journeys being tracked by their bosses, or by thieves stealing commercial vehicles. “The one police have confiscated is of the type that fits in a vehicle and is powered via a lighter socket,” he says.

Oddly, more than one person appears to be responsible for the jamming at some locations: Chronos is trying to differentiate between different jammers to give “a better idea of how many individuals at a particular location are jamming GPS”. Vigilantes could be one source: a major problem with GPS is the way some small villages and towns suffer visits from dangerously outsized trucks - which often get stuck in tiny streets - attempting to follow satnav-advised shortcuts. So it is possible locals are placing jammers to prevent drivers’ antisocial behaviour.