User:Pedro Sá Couto/Graduate Research Seminar/Thesis Outline 02

From the XPUB PAD
https://pad.xpub.nl/p/thesis_outline_02_pedrosaclout

Thesis Outline

Introduction

Background

It is relevant to point out that my position on the topic which I will be writing is quite privileged from the start.
First of all, I consider myself privileged to be researching as part of an institution in the Netherlands, with a key interest in the free-flow of information and knowledge. Previously I studied graphic design in one of the key universities in Portugal, also a free country, where I had access to news channels weather being TV channels, decentralized frons or centralized social media platforms. I was able to travel freely within Europe and move Rotterdam without requirements as exhaustively detailed residency permit requirements.

Thesis Statement

The human being always felt the need to extend itself. From wearing clothes to protect us, to developing agriculture tools to become more productive, and the use of medicine to increase our immunity system. We have created the web, originally it was conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world (“The birth of the Web | CERN,” n.d.) and now being a part of it is a demand for being public, to create an audience and to have a bigger reach. What started as being a way to connect us, spread knowledge easily and globally also contributed to mass surveillance. It arose the opportunity to start creating more precise data on the subject and this also impacted how academic publishing and book publishers started to be able to target individuals that didn't comply with the legal requirements.

Topic

Surveillance/ Knowledge Production/ Publishing

Focus

Surveillance in the realm of publishing.

Argument

Surveillance in the realm of publishing is affecting our awareness of spreading knowledge.

Scope

Surveillance in the realm of publishing is affecting our awareness of spreading knowledge. While creating extensions for ourselves, from being a part of online communities to being part of public research institutions, our digital footprint is expanding and becoming more detailed raising awareness and accountability on the self.

Body

Topic A — The chain of power in surveillance

Mass surveillance relating to the subject

1. Normalization of digital surveillance. I am a Millennial and being online played a key part in my development and on cultural references that I used to set as an example. Surveillance might be quickly spotted as it commonly happens with CCTV because we are able to establish a physical connection with it, we can see it, we can choose a different path to walk from it or even try to disguise ourselves, but digitally we are still far from connecting in such a direct way with it. From the start we saw being online and accepted it as being safe, far away from the source of problems, and when digital surveillance started being a mediatic topic with stories like the one from Snowden we were already too comfortable about being online.

1. Participatory surveillance "While surveillance is usually understood as the purposeful monitoring of individuals by those in authority, ‘participatory surveillance’ is a type of surveillance where people willingly keep watch on each other through social media." (Fulton and Kibby, 2017)

Increasing accountability

1. We don't carry an identity card anymore because governments created digital versions of them that may be stored on our smartphones, we give our fingerprints to centralized companies with nothing more than the promise that it will be easier to unlock an everyday device. It is almost mandatory to get digital, from passport checkpoints at the airport to exhaustively detailed residency permit requirements, without acknowledging it we are becoming more responsible and easily accountable for our imprints. "policy affecting our everyday life is moved further from our ability to influence, affect or even understand it. At the same time, the increased use of surveillance and monitoring technologies makes the individual more vulnerable to, and accountable to, these very organizations that are themselves becoming less accountable to the surveilled populace." (Mann, 2003)

1. The privacy centered search engine DuckDuckGo has cleaned up its bangs database. In the process, the company also removed several search shortcuts for 'pirate' sites, to avoid potential liability issues. The removed bangs include those of the popular torrent sites The Pirate Bay and 1337x, as well as other resources such as Sci-Hub and OpenSubtitles.

1. JSTOR and other publishers try to create a relation between a downloaded file and its downloader, being able to track, control and understand if a paper is distributed illegally. Companies that can store, organize and distribute years of research journals are making them inaccessible to the majority of researchers.

Topic B — Surveillance in Knowledge Sharing

Understanding physical imprints

1. Library stamp — In libraries books were stamped to mark ownership of the book. The relation used to be created between the physical medium and the library also creating provenance to the collection. "While library stamps are a useful aid in determining the history of a collection item, it has been noted that many items were stamped much later than their acquisition date and mistakes are known to have occurred. Library stamps should provide just one piece of a greater body of evidence for determining both the circumstance and date of acquisition. Clues may also be found on bindings, bookplates or inscriptions." (Duffy, 2013)

1. Chemical Watermark — "Watermarking originally might have been intended as an aesthetic enhancement, a mark of quality, or a proprietary mark for the papermaker or the wealthy donor or client." (Watkins, 1990)

1. Printer Tracking Microdots — "Several journalists and experts have recently focused on the fact that a scanned document published by The Intercept contained tiny yellow dots produced by a Xerox DocuColor printer. Those dots allow the document's origin and date of printing to be ascertained, which could have played a role in the arrest of Reality Leigh Winner, accused of leaking the document." (Schoen, 2017)

Unraveling digital imprints

1. Digital Stamps — Questioning ownership and acquisition. Relation to the downloader and not to the collection. The relation is intended to be established to its user.
   

The introduction of the internet changed how we relate among ourselves. I can take an example of how forbidden music used to be smuggled on Soviet Russia. They would write directly onto old X-ray films and make them cross the borders more easily. If we wanted to share a film probably it was recorded with a low-quality camera in a cinema and sold to you already burnt in a CD. We are now able to live share different mediums in a matter of seconds. And these stamps are an attempt to if not target you, at least create some self-thinking around the topic.

1. Digital watermark — Adding traces that relate to the subject, and more precisely with geolocation, IP address, mac addresses, email addresses

Topic C — Surveillance in Knowledge Production

Making it inaccessible

1. Why are we publishing in centralized companies

1. It is valuable to trace who is sharing because of its monetary value

Alternatives to centralized publishing in Portugal

1. Taking Portugal universities printshops as an example, while studying there the universities don't have access or subscriptions to all academic journals, scientific books are limited and their cost might be too high for students. Last year in a workshop with Bodo Balázc who is an academic whose interests include copyright and economics, piracy, media regulation, shadow libraries, digital archives, and others we were working around his research on the shadow library Library Genisis. He brought a graph where were listed the top ten books downloaded in all countries. It interesting to see how in Portugal, 10 out of 10 are related to scientific research.

1. Print Shops can provide an answer to students that want to access these books. These printshops outsourced from the university and are independently run. Professors will advise you to visit them. They have all sorts of research material that is needed. They work as a hub to share new books, the person in charge of the shop gathers these books and later one prints them for students. You are paying for the printed labor and paper, there is no fee charged related to the copyrighted material.

1. Students create "sebentas" which are usually handwritten documents, where all the information needed for a certain exam is compiled to facilitate the study. These are later on shared in the local university print shops and are shared around the community of students. It is interesting to see how also the add their name to create provenance on the compiler, may the root of this signatures be inspired in Academic Publishing Businesses?

Conclusion

1. !main points of my paper and Restate my thesis in fresh words goes here!
2. !stong/memorable final statement goes here!

Fulton, J.M., Kibby, M.D., 2017. Millennials and the normalization of surveillance on Facebook. Continuum 31, 189–199. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2016.1265094 Duffy, C., 2013. A Guide to British Library Book Stamps - Collection Care blog [WWW Document]. URL https://blogs.bl.uk/collectioncare/2013/09/a-guide-to-british-library-book-stamps.html (accessed 10.12.19). Watkins, S., 1990. Chemical Watermarking of Paper. Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 29, 117–131. https://doi.org/10.2307/3179578 Amsterdam, U. van, 2019. dr. B. (Balázs) Bodó - University of Amsterdam [WWW Document]. URL https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/b/o/b.bodo/b.bodo.html (accessed 10.12.19). Schoen, S., 2017. Printer Tracking Dots Back in the News [WWW Document]. Electronic Frontier Foundation. URL https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/printer-tracking-dots-back-news (accessed 10.15.19) Bender, W., Gruhl, D., Morimoto, N., Lu, A., 1996. Techniques for data hiding. IBM Systems Journal 35, 313–336. https://doi.org/10.1147/sj.353.0313