Dataveillance and Countervailance - "Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron - page 126

sociocultural, and juridical contexts of a nation-state. Consider, by contrast, the German
government's successful campaign against Google's Street View feature. For an early report on
the issue, see Kevin O'Brien, “Google Data Admission Angers European Officials,” New York Times
(May 15, 2010), http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/technology/16google.html (accessed
May 15, 2010).
22. Mark Poster, “ Databases as Discourse; or, Electronic Interpellations, ” Computers, Surveillance,
and Privacy , ed. David Lyon and Elia Zureik (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996),
187. The Sonmi chapters of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas are set in the dystopian corpocratic state called
Nea So Copros.
23. Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, “Cybernetic Capitalism: Information, Technology, Every-
day Life, ” The Political Economy of Information , ed. Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 44-75.
24. For a thorough account of pattern-based searches by government and corporations and the
techniques one can use to mask online activity; a detailed overview of the public outcry over
TIA, its subsequent de-funding, and the continuation of the same data-mining exercises under
the classified intelligence budget; and, finally, a detailed legal review that makes the case for
transparency and new identity technologies with privacy protections, see Rubinstein, Lee, and
Schwartz, “Data Mining and Internet Profiling.” It is important to note, however, that these
debates are premised on a notion of privacy with a particular history and cultural specificity.
25. Greg Elmer, Profiling Machines: Mapping the Personal Information Economy (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2004), 17.
26. Lyon, The Electronic Eye , 52.
27. There are substantive juridico-political questions that need to be addressed as the legal
infrastructure develops: What is the legal status of our financial records, unique ID codes, and
biometric data? How or to what extent will individual data be monetized? Can individual brows-
ing be considered labor? If so, would not the unique ID code that records sites visited be
considered a product of that labor and thus private property? Does the person from whom
data originated have claims over it once it enters into circulation on the “data exchange”?
Will data follow the model of genetic materials, with data becoming the intellectual property
of a data broker who had altered it in some fashion? Proposed policy solutions thus far include
improved securitization, transparency and informed consent, expiration dates and storage limits,
and the regulation of data centers.
28. On the era of personalization, see Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding
from You (New York: Penguin Books, 2011).
29. Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 4.