The Problem with Obfuscation

“By various means of seduction, coercion, and co-optation, everyday life has been irresistibly colonized by forces collectively known as Big Data: the corporations and state agencies that use communications networks and digital surveillance to amass huge quantities of information on the activities of individuals and groups in hopes of predicting and containing their next moves.”

“Short of a total renunciation of the now routine conveniences of contemporary life and voluntary exile from the spaces where almost all social belonging and recognition takes place, you cannot escape.”

““The proximate reasons for the culture of total surveillance are clear,” the software developer Maciej Cegłowski explained in a recent talk. “Storage is cheap enough that we can keep everything. Computers are fast enough to examine this information, both in real time and retrospectively. Our daily activities are mediated with software that can easily be configured to record and report everything it sees upstream.””

“But behind those proximate causes, as Cegłowski points out, are resilient, long-standing motives that have guided the direction of technological development for centuries: “State surveillance is driven by fear. And corporate surveillance is driven by money.””

“A data profile that seems innocent enough now could combine with future information and as-yet-untested analytical approaches to become a vector of persecution.”

“Big Data propagandists who insist mass data collection is always and ever for our own good, and that only selfish people would try to meddle with the reliability of omnipresent surveillance by being intentionally dishonest.”

“the tactics of obfuscation do nothing to decrease the asymmetries of power and information they are designed to disrupt. At best, they only “pollute” the databases of the powerful, and spur them to do a better job justifying their data collection and analysis and clarifying exactly what good they are doing”

“They draw explicit inspiration from political scientist James C. Scott’s concept of “weapons of the weak.” In Scott’s 1985 book of that title, he analyzed how oppressed Malaysian peasants without political agency found other, less overtly political means to resist: squatting, poaching, petty theft, work slowdowns, furtive complaints, and so on. Obfuscation, in Brunton and Nissenbaum’s account, works similarly, granting a limited form of agency to those who can’t rely on “wealth, the law, social sanction, and force” to protect their interests.”

“The evasions of obfuscation are contingent on acceptance of the impossibility of genuine escape. They provide means of getting along under conditions of enemy occupation, not strategies of revolution or resistance. They consolidate rather than dismantle the asymmetries of power; they are fugitive, rearguard actions in the midst of an ongoing collective surrender.”

“Weapons of the weak are for those who have become resigned to remaining weak.”

“Brunton and Nissenbaum argue that it “offers some measure of resistance, obscurity, and dignity, if not a permanent reconfiguration of control or an inversion of the entrenched hierarchy.” In other words, it permits gestures of independence that feel satisfying, without changing the actual conditions of domination.”

“the tactics of obfuscation don’t scale: the more people use them, the more incentive corporations and governments have to devote their superior resources to developing countertactics, thus quickly closing off whatever vulnerabilities were revealed”

“Nor is obfuscation an effective foundation for a collective democratic politics. As Brunton and Nissenbaum recognize, obfuscation relies on secrecy and deception, not transparency, making it much more useful for individual protection than for public advocacy.”

“privacy-based obfuscation negates the tendency to protest: it caters to a self-protectiveness that runs counter to the self-sacrifice that civic engagement often requires”

“Obfuscation tends to configure protest as an assertion of personal privacy rather than collective public risk-taking.”

“Many of us have learned to consume surveillance — even the surveillance of our own bodies — as entertainment.”

“They encourage us to think of ourselves as enthralling yet solvable mysteries, stories we can enjoy vicariously.”

“In this way, surveillance becomes both a means to self-knowledge and a precondition for it.”

“When surveillance makes us seek lines of flight, it sharpens our awareness of ourselves as selves, as people having selves worth protecting or concealing from view. We rely on surveillance to supply a sense of stakes for the self.”

“While obfuscation intends to spread disinformation at the expense of data collectors, it also undermines the information channels we rely on for social cohesion.”

“Obfuscation assumes that the autonomy of the individual self is something precious that needs to be protected from violation. But in making the unmonitored self the ultimate prize, obfuscations colludes with existing systems of power which rely on our isolation, and our eagerness to assume responsibility for circumstances we can’t entirely control. Surveillance is more effective the more we are guided by the threat it seems to represent to our personal integrity.”

“But a merely illusory integrity, rooted in paranoia, may not be worth holding on to at all. So what if, instead of obfuscating, we stayed alert to the potential solidarities that are articulated by the very schemes designed to control us? What if, instead of trying to fly under the enemy’s radar, we let that radar help us find allies with whom we can fly in formation? If we can find a way to repurpose the resources of surveillance toward ends it can’t perceive, we could begin to consume the system rather than be consumed by it.”