***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org *****

Hi

Perhaps this meeting on Political Uses and Abuses of Data might be of
interest to those in NYC:

http://www.meetup.com/The-NYC-Data-Skeptics-Meetup/events/117592242/

Best,

--Moses

On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 12:22 PM, Matteo Gagliolo <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> ***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org *****
>
> Dear Phillip and SOCNET community,
>
> unfortunately we don't need to go back to the 60's
> to find governments monitoring social movements. Here's a
> more recent story:
>
> http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Government_Surveillance_of_Occupy_Movement
>
> Ciao,
>
> Matteo
>
>
> On 06/21/2013 06:32 PM, Phillip Bonacich wrote:
>>
>> Hi Moses,
>>
>> Over the past 50 years social scientists have developed
>> sophisticated techniques for analyzing social networks. Now these
>> techniques are being used to fight a global war on terrorists. We don’t
>> own the techniques we developed but I think we can profitably reflect on
>> the ways in which these techniques are used and the ways in which they
>> might be used but aren’t. For example, the resources devoted to the war
>> on terror could be used to root out insider trading, a possibility which
>> sends chills of pleasure down my spine. On the other hand, in the 60’s
>> they would certainly have been used against the civil rights and
>> anti-war movements.
>>
>> *From:*Moses Boudourides [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>> *Sent:* Friday, June 21, 2013 8:58 AM
>> *To:* Phillip Bonacich; Social Networks Discussion Forum
>> *Subject:* Re: puzzling omissions
>>
>>
>> Hi Phil,
>>
>> Is there any known example of a case where NSA or anybody else has
>> directly misappropriated data or analyses used in a journal publication
>> of a social networks scholar and without the latter's consent or
>> authorization? Or are we just speculating about possibilities and
>> potential risks? Living outside the US I'm not familiar with what is
>> really at stake in this debate and thus I'm asking.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> --Moses
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 6:22 PM, Phillip Bonacich <[log in to unmask]
>> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi. Let me suggest another explanation for the silence. There have
>> been newspaper articles recently on the increasing collaboration between
>> major Silicon Valley firms (Google, Facebook, etc.) and the NSA.
>> Silicon Valley has the tools, talent, and data that the intelligence
>> community wants. To a much lesser extent, this relationship also holds
>> for the social network community. I, and probably others, am critical
>> of massive intelligence gathering but I also know the intellectual and
>> career pressures that would lead one to collaborate: that’s where the
>> action is. But, the moral dilemma is uniquely ours, and we could
>> politely and publically debate the issues. A debate might help all of
>> us achieve some clarity on this murky subject. Or, you might think of
>> it as an experiment in network dynamics. The outcome could be greater
>> consensus or greater polarization.
>>
>> Phillip Bonacich
>>
>> Professor Emeritus
>>
>> Department of Sociology
>>
>> U.C.L.A.
>>
>> *From:*Social Networks Discussion Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]
>> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>] *On Behalf Of *James Moody
>> *Sent:* Friday, June 21, 2013 5:40 AM
>> *To:* [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>> *Subject:* Re: puzzling omissions
>>
>>
>> ***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org *****
>>
>> He –
>>
>> Perhaps part of the silence is because the most interesting questions
>> raised are not particularly network-specific (who owns data, what is the
>> balance of govt protection vs. individual privacy, etc.), while the
>> network-analytic issues are not particularly interesting (all the
>> descriptions suggest that they are just building a big edgelist & doing
>> a k-step breath-first-search from target nodes).
>>
>> On the former, the issues are deep moral & political questions –
>> important and interesting, but not particularly network-centric.
>> Perhaps the one unique advantage folks on this list have to contribute
>> to that is probably that most of the public severely over-estimates the
>> computational ease of any real-time monitoring (rather than just data
>> aggregation/collection). We could, perhaps, do a public service by
>> making that more clear.
>>
>> On the latter, I think the technically interesting questions here turn
>> on how to store, organize & efficiently maintain a giant evolving
>> edge-list, particularly when you care about people as nodes rather than
>> the phone numbers as nodes. That is, since numbers get changed &
>> re-used and any nefarious near-do-well would certainly use multiple
>> phones, a simple phone-number-is-node-number data storage system (which
>> is inefficient in general, but fine for a BFS where all the isolates are
>> ignored anyway) is not going to be particularly useful. So you need a
>> way to take each new batch of raw two-mode data (phone number – person)
>> and sort, merge, match, etc. to your growing archive. (the other
>> obvious problem once you get into people-to-number merging on real data
>> is the problem of false positives in name matching. Again, great
>> problem but not unique to networks).
>>
>> Peaceful Thoughts,
>>
>> Jim
>>
>> Professor Duke Sociology,
>>
>> Director, Duke Network Analysis Center
>>
>> *From:*Social Networks Discussion Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>> *On Behalf Of *Moses Boudourides
>> *Sent:* Thursday, June 20, 2013 4:31 PM
>> *To:* [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>> *Subject:* Re: puzzling omissions
>>
>>
>> ***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org *****
>>
>> Wait a minute, folks, where's the PRISM-free social network analysis
>> software? Tell me, Vlado, is Pajek safely PRISM-free?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> --Moses
>>
>> On Jun 20, 2013 8:25 PM, "Michał Bojanowski" <[log in to unmask]
>> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
>>
>> ***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org *****
>>
>> Bruce,
>>
>> Thanks! Thats an awesome compilation.
>>
>> ~michal
>>
>> On Jun 20, 2013 10:17 PM, "Bruce Cronin" <[log in to unmask]
>> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
>>
>> ***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org *****
>>
>> http://prism-break.org/
>>
>>
>>
>> On 14 Jun 2013, at 14:10, "Barry Wellman" <[log in to unmask]
>> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
>>
>> > ***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org *****
>> >
>> > I am flabbergasted that there has been no discussion on this list -- or
>> > even announcement -- of the NSA's use of social network analysis to do
>> > massive surveillance of American and unAmerican populations.
>> >
>> > Nor any talk of the Turkish situation -- seems to fit Chuck Tilly's
>> > network-basis analyses of collective political behaviour.
>> >
>> > Barry Wellman
>> >
>> _______________________________________________________________________
>> >
>> > S.D. Clark Professor FRSC NetLab Director
>> > Faculty of Information (iSchool) 611 Bissell Building
>> > 140 St. George St. University of Toronto Toronto Canada M5S 3G6
>> > http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman twitter: @barrywellman
>> >
>> > NETWORKED:The New Social Operating System. Lee Rainie & Barry Wellman
>> > MIT Press http://amzn.to/zXZg39 Print $22 Kindle $16
>> > Old/NewCyberTimes http://bit.ly/c8N9V8
>> >
>> ________________________________________________________________________
>> >
>> > _____________________________________________________________________
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>
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