{"id":9534,"date":"2015-06-29T08:06:45","date_gmt":"2015-06-29T13:06:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9534"},"modified":"2015-06-29T08:06:45","modified_gmt":"2015-06-29T13:06:45","slug":"orwells-triumph-how-novels-tell-the-truth-of-surveillance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9534","title":{"rendered":"Orwell&#8217;s Triumph: How Novels Tell the Truth of Surveillance"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"https:\/\/firstlook.org\/theintercept\/2015\/06\/28\/orwells-triumph-novels-tell-truth-surveillance\/\" target=\"_blank\">Orwell&#8217;s Triumph: How Novels Tell the Truth of Surveillance<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>When government agencies and private companies access and synthesize our data, they take on the power to novelize our lives. Their profiles of our behavior are semi-fictional stories, pieced together from the digital traces we leave as we go about our days. No matter how many articles we read about this process, grasping its significance is no easy thing. It turns out that to understand the weird experience of being the target of all this surveillance \u2014 how we are characters in semi-true narratives constructed by algorithms and data analysts \u2014 an actual novel can be the best medium.<\/p>\n<p><em>Book of Numbers<\/em>, released earlier this month, is the latest exhibit. Written by Joshua Cohen, the book has received enthusiastic notices from the\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/06\/13\/books\/nothing-to-hide-and-nowhere-to-hide-it-in-joshua-cohens-internet-novel.html\">New York Times<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and other outlets as an ambitious \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/publishersweekly.com\/978-0-8129-9691-3\">Internet novel<\/a>,\u201d embedding the history of Silicon Valley in a dense narrative about a search engine called Tetration.\u00a0<em>Book of Numbers<\/em>\u00a0was written mostly in the wake of the emergence of WikiLeaks and was finished as a trove of NSA documents from Edward Snowden was coming to light. Cohen even adjusted last-minute details to better match XKeyscore, a secret NSA computer system that collects massive amounts of email and web data; in\u00a0<em>Book of Numbers,<\/em>Tetration has a function secreted within it that automatically reports searches to the government. As Tetration\u2019s founder puts it, \u201cAll who read us are read.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Ben Wizner of the ACLU, who is Cohen\u2019s friend and Snowden\u2019s lawyer, has praised the novel\u2019s depiction of the \u201csurveillance economy,\u201d as he puts it. \u201cThere\u2019s a frustration on the law and advocacy side about how abstract some of these issues can seem to the public,\u201d Wizner\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/06\/13\/books\/nothing-to-hide-and-nowhere-to-hide-it-in-joshua-cohens-internet-novel.html\">told the\u00a0<em>Times<\/em><\/a>. \u201cFor some people, the novelist\u2019s eye can show the power and the danger of these systems in ways that we can\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Orwell&#8217;s Triumph: How Novels Tell the Truth of Surveillance When government agencies and private companies access and synthesize our data, they take on the power to novelize our lives. Their profiles of our behavior are semi-fictional stories, pieced together from the digital traces we leave as we go about our days. No matter how many [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[6825,6824,249,311,4543,6822,6821,577,1235,765,6826,6823,880,4465],"class_list":["post-9534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-ben-wizner","tag-book-of-numbers","tag-edward-snowden","tag-fiction","tag-intercept","tag-johsua-cohen","tag-novels","tag-nsa","tag-orwell","tag-surveillance","tag-surveillance-economy","tag-tetration","tag-wikileaks","tag-xkeyscore"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9534"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9535,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9534\/revisions\/9535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}