How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?

                 This post is a summary of three articles. The first with the title above, was published in 2013 http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/10/a-necessary-evil-what-it-takes-for-democracy-to-sur. The second was written by Ramez Naam with the title of, "Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia?"  In 2014 and published at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/02/can-we-avoid-a-surveillance-st.html. The third was written in 2013 and published at http://www.salon.com/2013/10/01/greenwald_surveillance_powe

          Thanks to Edward Snowden`s disclosures, we know that the current level of surveillance in society is incompatible with human rights. To recover our freedom and restore democracy, we must reduce surveillance to the point where it is possible for whistleblowers of all kinds to talk with journalists without being spotted. To do this reliably, we must reduce the surveillance capacity of the systems we use. The repeated harassment and prosecution of dissidents, sources, and journalists only provides confirmation. We need to reduce the level of surveillance, but how far? Where exactly is the maximum tolerate level, beyond which it becomes oppressive? That happens when surveillance interferes with the functioning of democracy. If whistleblowers do not dare reveal crimes and lies, we lose the last shred to effective control over our governments. That is why surveillance that anables the state to find out who has talked with a reporter is too much surveillance, too much for democracy to endure. The EFF (Eletronic Frontier Foundation) propose a set of legal principles designed to prevent the abuses of surveillance. These principles include, crucially, explicit  protection for whistleblowers, as a consequence, they would be adequate for protecting democratic freedoms, if adopted completely and enforced without exception.

          The last year has brought with it the revelations of massive government spying in the U.S. and U.K. On the horizon is more technology that will make it even more easier for governments to monitor and track everything that citizens do. Yet, if we are motivated and sufficiently clever, the future can be one of more freedom rather than less. In fact, an oppressive state that used technologies to control the populace far longer than that. George Orwell published  "1984" in 1948. Aldous Huxley published  "Brave New World" in 1932, and while this is remembered more for predicting controlled biological engineering of the masses, it also features government surveillance, media manipulation, and thought control. So, this is an old idea. Yet, the arc of history has bent towards more freedom. There are two separate tools to win back and extend our freedoms. And both are fronts that need to be pushed on. One is the nature of technology itself, and its tendency to grow cheaper and spread into more hands. The other is democracy. Clive Thompson`s book, "Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better," he talks about one of the influences on Orwell in writing "1984": Joseph Stalin`s manipulation of history. Over the course of his rule of the USSR, Stalin purged millions of people. Among them, were important officials who appeared in pictures with him. Stalin, not content with merely executing his former friends, wanted them out of history. So, he employed a staff of photo editors to simply remove any evidence that these men had ever existed. Then, one by one, as the men fall out of favor and as they are killed, Stalin removed them. This terrified Orwell. If a dictator can do this, if he can re-write history, he could even re-write the present. He could lie to the people with total impunity. What Clive Thompson points out is that something different has happened. It is actually become harder for governments to lie to the people, instead of easier. What is happening is that the tech is not just in the hands of the state, or the super rich. Tech gets cheap, fast. At least digital tech does. And as it gets cheap, it gets into more and more hands. It brings additional skills and capabilities to a wider set of people. So, all power must be held in check. So, is it possible for us to actually act, as citizens in democracies, to curtail the power of intelligence and police agencies? In the 1960s, the abuses of the FBI were many, consider just one example. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, had a personal dislike for Martin Luther King and for the Civil Rights movement, so he bugged every MLK`s hotel rooms. In so doing, Hoover turned up evidence that MLK was having an affair, Seeing his chance, he tried to blackmail MLK. More than half of Americans now believe the NSA has gone too far. That political swing is a direct result of the tech trends that made Snowden`s massive leak possible, and thus enabled the drumbeat of news that kept it on poeple`s minds. Politics and technology interact and feedback on each other. Will that be enough to drive change? The question is how much.

              Since June, the release of NSA documents, leaked by Snowden has shed new and outrage-fueling light on the U.S. government`s near totalized surveillance of communications within and going out of the U.S. "Surveillance=Power. The more you know about someone, the more you can control and manipulate them in all sorts of ways. That is one reason a surveillance state is so menacing to basic political liberties." wrote Greenwald, essentially revealing the undergirding principle behind reporting on the extent of the surveillance state. For Greenwald, and rightly so, the question of surveillance gets to the heart of shadowy operations of governmentality and control. 

The Impact of Higher Education on Development

       This post is a summary of three articles. The first with the  title  above  more  the word  economic, before development.  Published at http://www.insideindianabusiness.com/contributors.asp?ID=282. The second was published at http://www.hearrr.org/pdf/HEARRRWhitePaper.pdf. With the title of, "The role of higher education in economic development." The third was published in 2012, at http://www.theguardian.com/. With the title of, "BRIC countries need more tertiary education."

          Over the years, universities have evolved their roles into a broader mission that better support economic development efforts. While the education of students is and should be the primary objective, other roles have become and are more importants to better support business and economic development initiatives. During the last twenty years, research and development activities at universities have become much more important. Universities have also recognized the need to help nurture entrepreneurs through technical and financial assistance. If these entities can help entrepreneurs survive and succeed, they are making a significant contribution to the region they are serving, can use their success to market the universities to new students and business partners, in some case, secure a financial return to the university. Purdue university has made a concerted effort to focus its energies on developing and commercializing technology, incubating and investing in companies, and the efforts of the university to leverage its engineering and scientific disciplines to help businesses succeed have already generated tremendous results for Indiana state. There are several ways in which an university can make significant contributions to economic development initiatives. To maximize results, the university must be engaged with government, the private sector, other academic institutions and the NGO community. If everyone is working together to support development, everyone will benefit.

          The role of higher education as a major driver of economic development is well established, and this role will increase as further changes in technology and globalization impact a country. To remain competitive in light of these changes, regions will need to improve productivity and adopt an innovative spirit. Research and technology are needed to create sustainable economic growth. Research conducted by higher education enhances the economic development of a region in various ways, including forming research partnerships with business which result in new tech, industries and jobs. Higher education has the capacity, knowledge, and research necessary to help achieve these goals. Higher education will be a dominant, if not decisive, factor in preparing workers with the robust skills needed to adapt to changing job requirements. The transition from manufacturing to the technology-based economy raised the skill level needed to get a job. Teaching excellence is the key to a strong and growing economy. Some higher educational institutions work with some schools to help prepare students with the increasingly higher level skills needed to obtain and retain employment. Preparing students will be challenging because there is a perceived mismatch between the jobs and careers of the new economy and the current high school curricula. The challenge is not only how to replace the manufacturing jobs that were lost, but how to create a workforce with the skills needed for the new economy. To create the education need to support a thriving economy, all sectors, private and public, need to adopt a commitment to increase the value placed on education and to improve the educational programs so there is a continuous pipeline of students who graduate from high school with the requisite skills to succeed in higher education. 

            The growth of emerging economies, led by BRIC countries (|Brazil, Russia, India and China), is widely perceived as vital to global recovery. The world now needs them succeed, but must neither ignore nor underestimate the challenges they face in producing a rapidly growing supply of entrepreneurial and professional skills. To meet these challenges, a keystone will undoubtedly be the development of human capital through tertiary education.  Emerging markets must be willing to reinvent tertiary institutions, create new ones and transform structures, systems and curricula, with the creative and constructive coexistence of private and public institutions. And to encompass these changes in strategies that include all forms of post-compulsory education. Emerging countries are economically, culturally and socially diverse, but all of them must increase acess to tertiary education to promote social mobility, reduce economic inequality, and tackle the unforgivable waste in human capital , if their promise is to be fulfilled

        

          

Benefits of Literature

          Yesterday something strange happened when I published this post, unexplained the text was translated to Portuguese and I could not undo it, so I had to do the all text again today. I think was another interference, like so many others that has been happened in my life in the last 15 years. I hope everybody like to know more about literature. This post is a summary of four articles. The first with the title above, published in 2010 at http://www.education.com/reference/article/benefits-literature/. The second was published at http://www.ukessays.com/essays/philosophy/literature-has-qualities-which-improve-society-philosophy-essay.php. The third was published at http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/diniejko. The last and fourth was published in 2013 at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/world/asia/using-books-to-build-a-ladder-out-of-poverty.html?

           Literature is an important component of a language program at all levels because of the many benefits it offers. Here are some reasons for integrating literature into your curriculum. Literature provides pleasure to readers. It is a relaxing escape from daily problems, and it fills leisure moments. Developing a love of literature as a recreational activity is possibly the most important outcome of a literature program. Literature builds experience. Readers expand their horizons through experiences. They visit new places, gain new experiences, and meet new people. They learn about the past as well as the present. They discover the common goals and similar emotions found in people of all times and places. Literature provides a language model for those who read it. Good literature exposes readers to correct sentences patterns, standard story structures, and new vocabulary. Literature develops thinking skills. Discussions of literature bring out reasoning related to sequence, cause and effect, character motivation, visualization of actions and critical analysis of the story. Literature supports all areas of the curriculum. When students read, they are practicing their comprehension in meaningful situations. Literature helps readers deal with their problems. By finding out about the problems of others, readers receive insights into dealing with their own problems. 
              Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Ethics at the University of Chicago said, "literature has qualities which improve society by helping people be better citizens. To some extent this is true of all arts. All have a role in shaping our understanding of the people around us." She argues that a strenght to be drawn from stories and that which will improve our society is learning to be empathetic. Whether mythical or real stories we decide the value of the ideas it contains. Adversity is a theme in all good stories, it means we are alive. Empathy is the combatant of selfishness. It is consider someone else and to wonder about him or her.  All of this seems pertinent to decisions we must make as citizens. In "Braveheart", the citizenry of Scotland is suffering the injustices of colonization. Empathy is an important part of every character in the story. William Wallace`s wife is murdered and he decides to fight for justice, freedom, love and friendship. He and his allies are driven by empathy because even though no one else knows his pain, they fight to protect each other and for the same causes. The fact is that it could have happened to them as well. Imagining what he feels and knowing that it could happen again to another person unless they change that by fighting. Honesty is an asset to a society, the ability to share one´s voices has to be a upheld. Real issues require realism, things which are relevant to the treatment and the behavior of our citizens is an ethical matter, so if censorship happens how can we explore those issues properly?
        Charles Dickens was not only the first great urban novelist in England, but also one of the most important social commentator who used fiction effectively to criticize economic, social and moral abuses in the Victorian era. Dickens showed compassion and empathy towards the vulnerable and in disadvantaged. Dickens`s deep social commitment and awareness of social ills are derived from his traumatic experiences. Dickens developed a strong social conscience, an ability to empathise with the victims of social  and economic injustices. Dickens wrote about the importance of social commitment. Although Dickens`s early works implied faith in the new commercial middle class as opposed to the old aristocracy, the writer saw the discrepancy between the ideas and practice of this new class and the principles of morality and ethic. During the 1850s Dickens`s interests shifted gradually from the examination of individual social ills to the examination of the state of society, particularly its laws, education, and the terrible conditions of the poor.In "Hard Times," human relationships are contaminated by economics. The formation of a selfish and an atomistic society. Dickens as a social commentator exerted a profound influence on later novelists committed to social analysis. Some of his concerns with the conditions-of-England question were further dealt with Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, George orwell, and Martin Amis.
              John Wood is the founder of Room to Read, a U.S. NGO dedicated to improving literacy in developing countries. He left his job at Microsoft and found it, which has opened 15,000 libraries and 1,600 schools. Room to Read is now the size of a corporation itself, with 10,000 volunteers in 53 cities. He said in an interview, "The seed for Room to Read was planted in 1998 when I took a vacation to trek in Nepal. One year later, I returned with 3,000 books. Education is one issue that has a ripple effect. Educated people work their way out of poverty, and educated people have much more stable societies. So if you get education right, you get every other issue right. If yoou can give these kids a school with great teachers, a library with great books and librarians who encourage them to read. The community involvement in our projects is important. Everything is based on a self-help model. Things get done because the local people are investing in their own solution. Now we have our sights set on Indonesia, and we want to expand our programs into the region as we see great opportunities to raise communities up through education. We plan to go to South America  at some point. The big goal for us once we reach 10 million kids is to not stop there but to be part of a global movement. And the solution is not expensive. $250 dollars puts a child in school for a year, $5,000 opens a library serving 400 children. These are immediately deployable solutions to transform children`s lives through education.
                                   

Why Privacy Matters Even If You Have 'Nothing to Hide'

          This is a summary of an article published at https://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/. Written by professor of law at George Washington University, Daniel Solove, in May 15th 2011.

           When the government gathers or analyzes personal information, many people say they are not worried. "I`ve got nothing to hide," they declare. This argument pervades discussions about privacy. The security expert Bruce Schneier calls it, "the most common retort against privacy advocates." On the surface, it seems easy to dismiss the "nothing to hide" argument. Everybody probably has something to hide from somebody. As a commenter noted, " If you have nothing to hide, then that means you let me photograph you naked? And I get full rights to that photograph."  Some might argue, the privacy interest is minimal, and the security interest in preventing terrorism is much more important. However, it stems from certain faulty assumptions about privacy and its value. Privacy is a plurality of different things that do not share any element but nevertheless bear a resemblance to one another. For example, privacy can be invaded by the disclosure of your secrets. It might also be invaded if you are being watched, even if no secrets are ever revealed. In both cases, there are harms. And there are many other forms of invasion of privacy, such as blackmail and the improper use of your personal data. Your privacy can also be invaded if the government compiles an extensive dossier about you. Regardless of whether we call something a privacy problem, it still remains a problem. We should pay attention to all of the different problems that spark our desire to protect privacy. To describe the problems created by lack of privacy, many use a metaphor based on George Orwell`s 1984. Orwell depicted a harrowing totalitarian society ruled by a government that watches its citizens obsessively. This metaphor, which focuses on the harms of surveillance, such as inhibition and social control, might be apt to describe government monitoring of citizens. Another metaphor captures other problems of lack of privacy. Franz Kafka`s The Trial. This novel centers around a man who is arrested but not informed why. He desperately tries to find out what triggered his arrested. The Trial depicts a bureaucracy with inscrutable purpose that uses information of people to make important decisions about them, yet denies the people the ability to participate in how their information is used. The problems portrayed by the Kafkaesque metaphor are of a different sort than the problems caused by surveillance. They are problems of information processing or analysis of data. They affect the power`s relationships between people and the institutions of the state. They not only frustate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationship people have with the institutions that make important decisions about them.

             The problem with the 'nothing to hide' argument is the underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things. By accepting this assumption, we concede far too much ground and invite an unproductive discussion about information that people would like to hide. As Bruce Scheneier aptly notes, the 'nothing to hide' argument stems from a faulty "premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong." Surveillance, for example can inhibit such lawful activities as free speech, free association, and other rights essential for democracy. Government information gathering programs are problematic even if no information that people want to hide is uncovered. Franz Kafka`s The Trial, the problem is not inhibited behavior but rather a suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability created by use of personal data and its denial of any knowledge of the process. The harm are error, abuse, and lack of transparency and accountability. It is a structural problem, involving the way people are treated by government institutions. To what extent should government officials have such a significant power over citizens? This issue is not about information people want to hide but about the power of government. A related problem involves secondary use. Secondary use is the exploitation of data obtained for any other unrelated purpose without the consent. How long will data be stored? How will the information be used? Without limits on or accountability for how that information is used, it is hard for people to assess the dangers of the data being in government control. The nothing to hide argument focuses on just one or two particular kinds of privacy problems, the disclosure of personal data or surveillance, while ignoring the others. Those advancing the 'nothing to hide' argument have in mind a particular kind of appalling privacy harm, one in which privacy is violated only when something deeply embarrassing is revealed. Privacy is rarely lost in one fell swoop. It is usually eroded over time, little bits dissolving almost imperceptibly until we finally begin to notice how much is gone. When government starts monitoring phone numbers, many may shrug their shoulders. Then goverment might start monitoring phone calls. The government may then start expand to internet service, and satellite surveillance might be added to help track people movement. Each step may seem incremental, but after a while, the government has large dossiers of everyone`s activities. What if the government leaks the information to the public? And if an identity thief obtains it and uses it to defraud you? When engaged directly, the 'nothing to hide' argument can ensnare, for it forces the debate to focus on its narrow understanding of privacy. But when confronted with the plurality of privacy problems implicated by government data collection and use beyond surveillance and disclosure, this argument, in the end, has nothing to say.