Tag Archives: NSA

July 23, 2017 · 12:44 am

Data Visualization Fake-Out?

“Nothing in the world could take us back/ to where we used to be,” as Mariah Carey sings in her 1990 hit, I Don’t Wanna Cry–recorded back in the very year Tim Berners-Lee and CERN collaborators unveiled the World Wide Web, using HTML to share documents across huge networks and URL’s to specify computer targeted and information requested. The coincidence of the design of such a document system that led TBL to build and design the world’s first web browser on an NeXT computer and Mariah Carey’s cooing soft-pop hit on only emptiness inside came together again in the release the WannaCry malware–malicious self-propagating code, able to exploit back-door vulnerabilities of Windows 7–which revealed a landscape from which nothing in the world can take us back to where reused to be.

Indeed, the boom of Malware by which the world’s information highways have been afflicted may have in general declined since 2017, from when the number of malware variants has dropped considerably, malware attacks, from ransomware to cryptojacking attacks, have risen, and the number of malicious email attachments has ballooned, often by inserting malicious code into a website to allow hackers to view financial information and histories of corporate entities and other institutions. The absence of any guides to ransomware of different varieties have left many increasingly vulnerable, as networks gain the vulnerability akin to “skimmer” able to glean financial histories off of the magnetic strips of credit cards at ATM’s across the world, exposing the global vulnerabilities into an infrastructure allowing global financial transactions. And despite relatively wide consensus that one should not pay ransoms from WannaCry as doing so would neither ensure access to the compromised files and possibly only expose one to further vulnerabilities to future attacks, the current wisdom of disconnecting all devises from Ethernet cables and wireless dongles suggest that disconnection without rebooting the system is in fact the best option for compromised systems, with an installation of Microsoft’s security patch–in addition to windows security updates and a reputable antivirus blocker. But the fear of vulnerability in a world where WannaCry remains a threat that has continued to hit 13,000 plus organizations since 2020 has led to increased concern how to prevent WannaCry attacks.

But the data visualizations we’ve used to describe the lateral progression of the encryption of data files from hard drives around the interlinked world lent a new prominence to the World Wide Web as a conduit for targeting destabilization. It not only revealed how the world wide web has reshaped what we still call the world, but posed questions of how to map such a change, as even Microsoft employees in Redmond, Washington scrambled to chart the outbreak of malware after hackers exploited vulnerabilities in the unpatched Eternal Blue, in cyber attacks alternately known as WannaCry in 2017, and Non Petya when it later hit Ukraine, together with all companies, including large American ones, who did business with that nation, in an attempt to undermine its economic viability. From command central in what seems a concrete bunker of the future, before large screens, non-state Microsoft workers in Redmond, Washington tried to maintain a sense of security in their systems around the clock, and conduct repairs, in the weeks after the United States Department of Homeland Security urgently warned that out-of-date software was a global crisis and a national vulnerability. The malware just posed problems that local governments, municipalities, and law enforcement institutions could not bear, and which it seemed only Microsoft could be able to have manpower, incentives, and infrastructure to complete.

Wanna Cry left many literally crying for the sudden encryption of data, and many without services–and was intended to leave an unimaginable number of people desolate, if not quite with the absence of love that Mariah Carey wistfully evoked. But the virulence of its spread should offer a wake-up call to possibilities of global disruption we are still working to be able to track, map or fully comprehend in adequate fashion–but record as a virulent virus blocking systems most densely in nodes of a web-linked world.

the-wannacry-ransomware-attack_535798c2-38bf-11e7-b30b-76e7402dac55

New York Times

The very same visualizations indeed obscure, by oddly rendering it as distributed, the agency that underpins such carefully orchestrated cyber attacks of global consequence, by almost naturalizing its spread. For by moving the sites where data was most encrypted into a geographical frame of reference, the graphic doesn’t help orient us to its spread, so much as overwhelm us with the data-laden content to visualize a paralysis of global systems; it removes it from context or human agency, in order to capture the omnipresence of the self-propagating cyrptoworm as much as tell a story that helps to orient us to its spread. Perhaps that is what was intended.

The mapping of global disruption is perhaps a nightmarish puzzle for members of the interlinked world, and demands a place on the front burners of data visualization: the inadequate nature of considering the spread of systems-wide corruptions can be visualized by cases of the compromising of data, we lack the symbolic tools to grasp the rise of a new map of global dangers. While such data visualizations provide a terrifying premonition of the destabilization that might result from the encryption of data on a broad scale, they obscure the possibilities of specifically targeted attacks on data and visible infrastructure that are now able to be developed, and the nature of targeted threats that we have only begun to imagine. The redefinition in this new geography of document-sharing Tim Berners-Lee and friends developed has prepared the way for a landscape of interaction between removed places broadly adopted as a protocol for information-sharing– but one that, as Mariah Carey sung, and instigators of the malware hoped, left one only wanting to cry from behind one’s screen, devastated at the scope of the unforeseen swift data loss.

The data visualizations adopted to depict the flare-ups in compromised hard drives that the cryptoworm created in a manner of hours show the particular virulence with which malware crossed national divides in unprecedented ways, displacing relations of spatial proximity, geographical distance, and regional divides. In crippling databases including Russian and Chinese private and public institutions in but a day, demanding immediate payment for data to be restored, the ransomware raised the curtain on a new age of uncertainty. But was the threat eclipsed by the scale of the attack by which information was encrypted? If the spread of malware seemed to grow across computer systems without apparent relations, the distributed agency that was invested in how the malware spread worldwide seemed to obscure the possibility of agency of the attacks, concealing the tracks of any perpetrator by placing a problem of urgency on screens worldwide.

Websites of news media of record widely adopted animated data visualizations to orient their readers to the proliferating corruption of data on tens of thousands of computers and computer systems on account of the malware caused. Such elegantly animated maps don’t claim to be comprehensive, and are information-laden to the extent that seek to capture the unprecedented speed and range of the spread of the cyberworm launched Friday, May 12, 2017. We have trouble even comprehending or grasping the scale or speed with which the virus spread on systems, of course, and speed at which malware was propagated itself across networks and spread laterally across systems, rather than by geographic relations, working without a phishing hook of any sort but exploiting an NSA-developed backdoor vulnerability in the Windows 7 operating system to infect networks across national bounds, as it spread laterally across systems worldwide.

The spread of the encryption of hard drives data across space occurred in apparently haphazard ways, spreading globally in the first thirty minutes of across more advanced web-reliant regions of what we still call the globe. While their spread “followed” systems whose operating systems had not been fully updated, it is important to remember that rather than spreading laterally along a system of their own accord, their release was planned and released by agents, rather than being a casualty of the World Wide Web; a map of instances of hard-drive vulnerabilities however can offer few diagnostic signs or clues to interpret their spread, but offer only a catalogue of individual instances difficult to process in their entirety, so overwhelming and geographically dispersed was their occurrence to defy easy interpretation or processing–they provide little that might be suggested as forensic evidence about their spread.

Red Socks Security: Malicious Threat Detection

If the growth of the virus’s spread across nations made it seemed to progress in ways that lacked a target, we may lack the tools to visualize the attack. The systems afflicted were not linked on a geographical register, and in some senses didn’t make sense to read in a map–but if they spread on internet traffic, the broad scale of the attack of ransomeware only foregrounded the fears of where it had arrived from or offer any signs to appreciate any agency within its systems-borne spread. But if the map seemed the best way to the speed of its growth, it was a distraction from the potential targeted threats of the malicious worm–until a lone British researcher, known as “MalwareTech,” saved the compromising of global systems as he serendipitously identified its kill switch to stop its spread: what dominated the headlines conceals the dangers of losing sight of the specificity of the wide-ranging attacks, even while registering them in real time.

The rest of the world could only sit in silence, as Mariah Carey once sung, and watch the range of attacks unfold in space in real time: something went wrong in the mode of sharing data across online systems that had to be couldn’t quite be understood. If Maria Carey’s hit single contemplated the definite break in time, “only emptiness inside us,” the shock of the screens informing users across the world that their data had been definitively compromised made then realize that any notion of data security vanished, and any hope for composure in the face of cryptoworms had disappeared, as Mariah Carey’s softly-sung lyrics described, and as far away as a network-free world, or one where inter-connected users didn’t define the primary routes of its transmission, without considering the dangers of the compromised infrastructure–not only in banking, but in traffic system, airport controlling, water quality monitoring, and even traffic flows.

But we continue to rely on geographic registers, as if we can’t let go of them, and it is what we have to explain the global spread of compromised systems and a collapse of data security. The cryptoworm successfully obtained advanced user privileges that allowed it to hijack computer systems that allowed hackers to encrypt documents worldwide in one day, reaching such a broad range of hard drives to make it seem the attack was random or haphazard. The attacks used code to release a self-propagating worm that didn’t really move spatially, but progressed online, using a vulnerability for which Microsoft had released a patch only two months previous, in March, in devices that share files across local networks. After the patch arrived, we were still mapping its spread, and contemplating the prospects of the return of a similar virus, so clearly had it asked us to redefine internet traffic. But was did the broad spread of the worm and broad scope of systems compromises, which was quick to provoke deep fears of the vulnerabilities that exist from ransomware erase the targeted nature of a similar subsequent malware attack? The spread of thousands of infections in over a hundred–and then over a hundred and fifty countries–across hard drives across the world exploited the failure to update software systems so broadly to obscure the origins or coordination of such malware attacks, whose use of normal language to alert users of encryption made them seem as if it were an isolated standard operating failure, able to be resolved by individual payment–

petya-ransomware-how-remove-decrypt-files-new-unlock-computer-windows-dropbox-file.jpg

–even as the malware crippled networks in different countries without having the appearance of any fixed target. And if masquerading as a form of ransomware, later variants of the cryptoworm suggested a far, far scarier version of the scope of data corruption.

Kapersky Lab/Ars Technica

We were of course struck by the unprecedented speed with which such worms replicated along these dispersive networks–following paths that are not made evident in the map of compromised hard drives provided by data security firms, which show the progression of a disease that, like a cancer, creeps invasively along a hidden network, suggests a nightmare of the distributed agency of the internet, invaded by a particularly vicious parasite that for a considerable amount of time even experts saw no way to resolve.

We can now watch the spread of internet attacks in real time, looking at the threats of hacking in real-time, in ways that reflect the emergence of the internet and World Wide Web as a real-time battlefield, even if this is only a representative tracking of hacking attempts tracked by Norse. It doesn’t include the ten millions of daily attempts to hack into the Pentagon, or the similar number of threats that the National Nuclear Security Administration tries to fend off–and the millions of attacks universities daily confront. But if we are apt to be mesmerized by the range of such attacks, impossible to fully comprehend or track, we’re likely to be overwhelmed by the serious fears of the security vulnerabilities of which they cannot but remind us, although the abstracted sense of a constant barrage of online attacks can remove us from all too real dangers of their infrastructural effects–and the dangers of destabilization of specifically targeted strikes.

Norse

And if we might do well to take stock of the range of attacks by hackers to which the United States is vulnerable, mostly from China and Chinese sources, privileging our country as the target of future strikes–

Norse

–we loose sight of their increasingly global nature, now that much of the software to exploit vulnerabilities is available in the Dark Net. The origins of such attacks aren’t really clearly able to be mapped–hackers are experts at deflecting or rerouting their signals, and bouncing around their traces to make hacks that are located from one site appear to emanate from another from another. And infrastructural vulnerabilities of infrastructure are increasingly on the table for nations other than the United States, often without the means to monitor such cybersecurity issues or strikes.

In an age when the pathways of internet links may have spawned spontaneous revolutions, uprisings, and unexpected results of elections, non-human communication and propagation of such malicious malware viruses seem an apotheosis of the absence of any agency–a worm that is able to replicate itself within hard drives world wide, removed from any intent. To be sure, the range of sped-up animated maps to track the progress of the viruses that compromised data across the world produced a sense of wonder at our vulnerability of a sort that has not been widely mapped since the Cold War: the images generated of internet threats mirrors the map of the danger of missile strikes that emerged in Life magazine back in 1945, at the end of the Second World War–only months after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by American atomic bombs, that increasingly stand as a premonition of the new nature of things to come.

Life Magazine: The Thirty-Six Hour War (November, 1945)

Mutatis mutandi, the image of the visual culture of the early Cold War was adopted by the Russian internet security agency, the Kapersky Labs, as a strategy to image the globally expanding threat of hacking to compromise hard drives and data-based systems.

Kapersky Labs

In an era that was defined as after or following the thaw of the Cold War, the internet emerged in 1990–just a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall heralded its thaw–as a new battleground to wage global conflict. To be sure, the cybermaps of phishing schemes and potential email attacks are traced by the Kapersky labs in real time, to monitor for global security on the interlinked world-wide online systems. But their dynamic images retain the symbolic structure of the arcs of a violation of national airspace to suggest the magnitude of the incursions into cyberspace they monitor and report on round the clock.

We continue to map the global spread of malware as if to wonder at its scale: the distributed compromising of data as an animated sequence of simultaneous flare-ups of intensity from yellow to burning red across the world, as if to pose the question of its communication in terms of spatial continuity and proximity. In some of the best data visualizations of the scare of WannaCry and Petya viruses, the brightly burning flare-ups signalled a fire that burned so brightly to become impossible to contain as if a metastisizing online cancer spread across the world’s wealthiest regions. Despite the power of the animated visualization, we may map it wrongly, as if to imply it can be diagnosed as a spatially transmitted contagion without a target or destination. In using the data-laden information of cybersecurity firms to map the occurrence of data corruption and systems infection, the political antagonisms and animosities that have fed the growth of malware are cunningly left absent from the map at our own peril.

Although these maps suggest the scope and nature of the self-replicating cryptoworm, they may take the metaphorical value of a computer virus in literal terms, as a disease map, or biological virus whose contagious could be explained,–like the famous Snow Map, created by a founder of modern epidemiology, Dr. John Snow, to devise a mode to convince readers of the transmission from a water source of the 1854 London cholera outbreak. Of course, the malware maps do not try to communicate the pathways or mechanics of the virus’ spread. For rather than showcasing an event that was planned and of human agency, and whose propagation was in some sense designed, they run the risk of naturalizing both the incidence of systems’ compromises and the malicious nature of the very phenomenon that they describe. While the meaning that each bring pixel cannot even be understood or processed in a global scale–its impact was local–the intensity of the outbreak seemed almost a skin disease on the surface of the world. The intensity of its transmission surely mirrors the density of online connections or an economy that was web-based, as networks allowed its contagion spread from Indonesia to Europe the United States, raising alarms as it seemed to actualize some of the worst fears of a cyberattack, of the de-empowered nature of a computer system suddenly devouring its own data, but like a faceless god, from 11:00 one Friday morning, so that by 1:20, the spread of the malware had dense sites of infection on five continents.

The local merged with the global, however, in ways difficult to map: the maps of real-time tracking of the spread of the worm across a grey, global map made it seem totally removed from human actors, in hopes to capture the speed by which the worm managed to rapidly to spread laterally across systems, using an onslaught of randomly generated IP addresses as a way to target an ever-proliferating range of hard drives through multiplying packets sent to remote hosts, whose own hard drives were hijacked, leaving anonymous-sounding messages of no clear provenance to pop-up on users’ screens, in ways that seem to imitate the “normal” logic of an algorithmic process entertaining the possibility of implicating the user in the encryption of their hard drive or the deletion of necessary valuable files.

The communication of the virus–a biomedical metaphor that seemed particularly unable to offer any diagnostic value, suggesting either the banality of the infection or its nasty spread–was not nosologically helpful, but suggested the virulence of its spread. The natural history metaphor of the worm–or, better yet, the coinage of the cryptoworm–better expressed the lack of clarity as to its provenance or the seriousness of its damage. Although subsequent investigations found that the first infections appeared, globally, on computers in India, Hong Kong, and the Philippines, according to SophosLabs, the stage was set for a three-pronged global spread–as if in a negative version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, moving from South-East Asia worldwide–that began from 7:44 UTC with such startling rapidity that it will demand detailed unpacking to understand the target or decipher any of the aims that underlay the attack, or the extent of its destructive scope. The spread of the self-proliferating worm was only stopped by the inadvertent discovery in the code of the ransomware of a kill switch, which allowed a security researcher known only as MalwareTech to register a domain name able to slow the spread of the infection in a compromising manner, effectively halting its viral spread. Despite the rapid proliferation of visualizations of the unprecedented sale of its virulence, in retrospect, it might make sense to ask whether the undifferentiated global nature of the visualization, while stunning, distracted from the malicious operations of its code, and what better metaphors might exist to describe the spread of something dangerously akin to cyberwar.

We only have a few cartographic metaphors to describe the lateral spread of online compromising of computer data and the infiltration of networks, because of the speed with which it spreads challenge human cognition. Even if it can be schematized in a format that suggest the density of data compromises or the amount of encrypted files, the visualizations offer a limited basis to orient oneself to the seriousness or the danger of these infections, which once they start offer little possibility of stopping their spread. The later visualizations of the global impact of the release of Wannacry network worm are usefully foreground the rapidity of its spread, and raise the specter of its unstoppability. But the visualizations of the rapid flare-ups of malware that infect hard drives and encrypt their data may conceal the targeting of instability. If the spread malware and ransomware have been primarily linked to extortion, the spread of self-propogating cryptoworms cannot only be seen in numbers of systems compromised: for they are released and created in order provoke instability, as much as for Bitcoin revenues. Although theft of data is usually seen as most valuable to the owner of the dataset, the potential interest in ransomware as a service–and much ransomware is now available on the darknet in different forms, suggests a needed growth in cybersecurity.

If ransomware collectively netted about $1 billion during 2016–and stands to become a growth industry of sorts–the latest Petya virus netted but $10,000, although the benefits of the attack might have been much greater–in the form of the disruptions that it creates, often not so clearly racked or visible in the data visualizations of its spread, whose animated explosions suggest its out of control migration across networks as wildly crossing boundaries of state sovereignty, encrypting data on computer systems across space as it travelled along the spines of the internet as if without any destination, as tens of thousands od systems were entered and compromised via ‘back door’ disrupting hospitals in the UK, universities in China, rail in Germany, or car plants in Japan, in ways that were far more easy to track as a systems collapse by locking its victims out of critical data that allowed their continued operation. The demand for ransom payments to restore apparently stolen data was a screen for the disruption of invasive attack on companies’ computer networks, whose compromising can only start to suggest the infrastructural disruptions they created as they rapidly globally spread, whose apparently anarchic spread revealed the new globalized nature of system vulnerabilities.

While malware is distinguished by the demand to hold hostage the encrypted files of one’s hard drive, the viral spread of worms targeting systems vulnerabilities can disrupt systems and infrastructure in ways particularly difficult to defend against. Although the attacks depend on failures to update systems and to preserve retrievable back-ups, the vulnerabilities invite disruptions on a scale only so far imagined in futuristic films. These apocalyptic scenarios are perpetuated by security firms–and by the video games of the global imaginary that require only greyed out background maps to treat data visualizations as having sufficient complexity if they register the intensity of attacks, even if this only gives cover for the malicious actors who perpetuate their spread. But the assault on systems by the backdoor vulnerability first discovered by the NSA, in its program for targeting and infiltrating select foreign computer networks, but now for sale on the Dark Web, may only raise the curtain on a far more malicious range of malware, able to backdoor systems that are connected to transportation networks, water treatment plants, traffic systems, credit card systems, banking and airport controlling, far beyond cel phone systems, and able to–as the attack, just before WannaCry plagued web-based systems, compromised IDT Corporation–evade security detection systems. While regular, complete and restorable systems back-ups may be the only response to ransomware, the possibility of already backdoored systems has lead to fears that the Shadow Brokers group who unleashed the Eternal Blue code from the NSA is a group of Russian-backed cybercriminals, and the hackers who released WannaCry who cyber researchers believe have tied to North Korea, may raise the threshold on cyberwarfare of a scale unheard of in previous years.

“Nothing in the world could take us back/to where we used to be.” Golan Ben-Omi–who views the analytic skills honed in studying Torah as good training cybersecurity in the Chabad-Lubavitcher community– Chabad-Lubavitch communities are interested in preserving the integrity of their websites from profane pollution, but are attuned to the dangers of data breaches. The attack that was made on his company, IDT, by means of an NSA tool with the capacity to penetrate computer systems without tripping alarms–named “DoublePulsar”–enters the kernel of computer systems, or its inner core, to trip the connections between hardware and software that would allow hackers to steal systems credentials in order to compromise systems with far greater impact than earlier breaches and infections, appearing as ransomware, but perpetrating far more serious damage on a system. The sequential flaring of compromised computer hard drives suggests a landscape that Ben-Omi has been studying for over fifteen years–and believes that the analytical skills honed in the study of Torah will allow his students to analyze.

While we lack the tools to start to map disruptions on such broad scale, the If the attacks on hard drives that occurred in over one hundred and fifty countries on Friday, May 12, 2017 may have been a case of intentional disruption, but the Petya ransomware attack of July, which successfully targeted the same vulnerabilities, exploited similar vulnerabilities in a potentially more targeted weaponized manner. Although it “is only code,” the lateral spread across the spines of the internet created fears of impending disaster across the most digitally rooted areas of the world, spreading fears of data disruptions, crashes and infrastructure collapse whose potential won’t be able to be so clearly mapped for quite some time.

The terrain of the crypto worm’s spread is better able to be understood, if not quite familiar. During the most recent space of malware attacks left most untouched places those farthest from the most unreflective internet-dependent, the map only can suggest the real-life inconveniences that can hardly be captured by the burning flares of yellow-red bursting at spots across the globe at unprecedented velocity.

Global Internet Penetration 2012/Jeff Ogden

Oxford Internet Institute (2011) Data on Internet users and population from World Bank

For while not only communicated–as at first believed–by malicious email attachments, internet links clicked by users whose unreflective response unleash lost data, frozen systems, or looted bank accounts, the spread of ransomware parallels the amazing intensification of net-dependence and systems-based communicative tools, revealed below in the new information ecosystems that have arisen, illustrated in the quite spread of Facebook use over a short amount of time.

The relation between online activity and real-time consequences are difficult to map.

All maps serve to help tell stories, and the intensity of Facebook connections suggest more than a huge time-suck of human lives: it reveals the increased homogeneity of the systems we use, and the similarity of what we see and read. But if all maps tell stories, the necessarily partial nature of the dense visualizations of the global disruptiveness of malicious attacks on computer systems seem compromised: while over-laden to challenge the abilities of viewers to process their content, they only tell the most superficial part of real-time story–the compromising of data–and not the consequences that the widespread collective compromising of hard drives will effect both immediately and in the long run. And here we get onto thin ice in terms of what can be visualized, and the limits of counting the datasets of the corruptions of computers or systems, and the difficulty of counting beyond the density of compromised hard drives to the real-world implications of systems’ collapse. One can only start to imagine the implications of such collapse in maps contracting the real-time compromises of computer systems, in ways that reveal the global nature of an infectious spread of malware, but also obscure the different places that might be targets of weaponized malware attacks.

What we can track is the most immediate end-product of the malicious attack, but it offers few clues to interpret the basis for the attack or indeed the different scale of its real-time long-term consequences.

The visualizations track an almost near-inevitable progress of red flares in internet-dependent hubs that appear to overwhelm viewers with their over-laden information in ways that run the risk of obscuring any sense of human agency–or intent–as if to track the spread of a virus across a system that lacks internal logic of its own. The intensity of attacks on computer networks tracked from the Wannacry ransomware showed the astoundingly rapid spread of the infectious cryptoworm that caused the attacks. But it presented them as if they were in fact geographically localized, but the disruptions were purged of any explanatory context, geopolitical or other. For the inevitability of the spread of malware that the images provoke–and the fears of the unstoppability of further crypto worms–may obscure the dangers of their weaponization. If the launching of cyberthreats is often depicted as a real-time war by cybersecurity firms as Norse–

–we may be increasingly in need of mapping the intersection of such live attacks on data and their real-life consequences beyond the compromising of datasets.

We were recently warned how the expansion of malware and ransomware would soon propagate over networks in more virulent ways. Earlier worms that infected hard drives as Conficker in 2008 and SQL Slammer back in 2003 or SamSam, spotted in 2016, offer but “a harbinger of a new wave of more malicious, tenacious and costly ransomware to come,” of even greater scale, warned Joe Marshall of Cisco Talos, with “bigger payouts.” Marshall warned of the greater goals of hackers to infect networks, and his warnings might be augmented by suggesting the dangers of hackers working with governments to use malicious code to “cast a wider net” through self-propagating crypto worms able to laterally traverse huge corporate networks as tools by which to target nations–and national infrastructure–in ways that the fear of network intrusion have only begun to come to terms. When Marshall and his co-author Craig Williams noted in 2016 that the rise of ransomeware was an “ever-growing problem” that will involve greater payments to restore databases in Ransomware: Past, Present and Future with greater “intrusive capabilities,” with the repurposing of network vulnerabilities, on a massive scale, presumably including the targeting of entire systems. The maps of data encryptions and corruptions that WannaCry caused worldwide served to capture these fears, and their broadly trans-national consequences; the trans-national nature of such a strike on hard drives may well obscure and conceal the strikes and intentions of other malicious actors. Although some believe payment the easiest option to retrieve data, as the worms are developed that target vulnerabilities in systems, they will potentially be able to compromise targeted banking, transportation, and emergency infrastructures.

Do visualizations of the immediate fears of the spread of one virus conceal concerns of the weaponization of such internet-born infections on specific targets and nations, despite the seemingly unplanned ubiquity of their spread across interlinked systems? Despite their shock, such visualizations of the intensity of compromised systems, often echoing hubs of internet service, raise pressing questions about how to map the operations and actors behind them that are far more complicated to process fully–and lie off of the map.

1. Viewing visualizations of such rapidly spreading worms that compromised computers on a global scale, one wants to be able to peel away layers of the visualization, to reveal, as layers of an onion, the networks along which the cryptoworm laterally spread and the extent of disruptions that its spread caused. For the scale of the disruptions, and the intent of the hackers or those who launched the malicious code, may only be revealed in a more localized map of the sorts of destabilization that cryptoworms might produce. While leaving us to wonder at the unprecedented scale of their recent spread over a few hours or minutes, the visualizations take geographical space as their primary register, blank background maps bleached of underlying history, may make them all the more misleading and difficult to read, as they are removed from human agency and context, and treated as an artifact of the spread of the reliance of increasing multinationals on internet services and web-based networks.

Differences in online activity are far less lopsided across geographic space than in previous years, as shown by the Oxford Internet Institute by a cartogram warping of global space showing the relative density of online activity by 2013 data, in ways that allow the broader targeting of systems to conceal a malicious attack on a country.

–which might also be read as a record of the increased vulnerability of specific areas, and the systems vulnerabilities might offer to compromise local infrastructure, and start to focus on the implications for those places. Doing so would consider the growing intersections between The Real World and the internet in a complex social continuum, where stability can be disrupted at select nodes more dependent on how worlds of finance, banking, shipping, health, and traffic are increasingly interlinked. Given the inevitable nature of such vulnerabilities, the frequent backing up and smooth restoration of backups are necessary to erase the growing threats not only of malware or ransomware, but the disruptions of critical infrastructure future attacks might allow.

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Sites of Internment and Surveillance Hidden in the New American West

The mosaic of ethnicities in the United States today appears so inclusive and diverse that echoes of the state’s sanctioning of the forcible spatial segregation of one ethnic group –Japanese Americans–would seem impossibly remote in time and culture until quite recently. But the tragic and yet state-sponsored episode of Japanese internment by the US military reveals the existence of historical rifts in the historical landscape of the American West, which not only resonate with a history of exclusionary practices, but suggest a striking geography along which practices of exclusion were effected and organized by means of existing maps. And the recent invocation of executive order 9066 by Donald Trump, seventy-four years later, when over 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent were forcibly removed from their own houses and relocated to camps of internment as a precedent for the relocation of resident aliens–which Trump has called a “tough thing,” but refused to condemn in any way–“I would have had to be there at the time to tell you, to give you a proper answer”–not only to cave to his instincts of fueling prejudice if not racial violence among Americans, but to celebrate a precedent for treating illegal immigrants as alien enemies with no understanding of history or the law. As the grossly illegal and shameful episode of internment was cited as a basis for racial profiling during the state of exception of War on Terror by Michelle Malkin, the horrific readiness to accept the episode of internment of those with Japanese ancestry as a part of the American legal tradition is not only an instance of unlearning but an act of amnesia that is utterly irresponsible.

And yet, the continued reference of the non-state spaces of American internment in much of the current American West suggests the survival of the landscape that internment produced. The partitioning of space in maps enabled the exclusionary strategies, moreover, which have a striking overlay with earlier landscapes of exclusion. Despite a stated mission to keep the country “safe” in the face of the shock of war, detainment of Japanese Americans was not at all something of a historical unicum, but rather fit within landscape of ethnic opposition with possible roots in the nineteenth century, whose secret geography informed the use of sites of sequestering those stripped of citizenship at the start of the twenty-first century. The space of Native American reserves, or reservations, had been mapped by F. E. Leupp of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1905 as if it were a hidden nation within a nation–land set off from the four-color map of the United States, if largely concentrated in the lands west of the hundredth meridian–

–an image of spatial separateness that continued by 1941.

The memory of the experience of internment was far more suddenly and deeply inscribed in the national landscape at a single moment, however, if one not without historical precedents. T

he permission Executive Order 9066 gave the Secretary of War to “prescribe military areas . . . from which any or all persons may be excluded” from 1942 that enabled an internal “enemy” population to be stripped of citizenship. The establishment of an archipelago of confinement across Arizona, inland California, and Nevada echoed the confinement of native populations–and resonates with recent attempts to define areas of detainment as “off the map” and consequently removed from legal oversight in ways that we might be all too apt to associate with the Cold War–as much as it was improvised. The geography of the confinement of Japanese Americans provides an instance of something not like race warfare, but the opposition of the state to its enemies perhaps as telling as the geography of ghostly munitions of the Cold War from missile silos, remains of nuclear testing, facilities for storing and developing plutonium, and anti-missile radar that dot the landscapes of Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and South Dakota.

In mapping the inclusiveness of national diversity, we are increasingly reminded of the ethnic classification of the nation’s population by the carving out of predictions of the behavior of the electorate at the polls–partly because the distribution is so relatively easy to map, partly because how such divisions map onto political parties is a growing riddle, not only since it is less clear that their increasing political voice maps onto a single agenda, but also because of the scare of predictions of white-minority status by 2045. For the apparent cultural remove of the arrogance of an administration that formally instituted the forced geographic relocation of Japanese Americans to camps away from the west coast seems an odd artifact stoked by the proto-fascist flames ignited by the fear of war.

Might it rather be comprehended as a part of California history? If the episode of Japanese American relocation seems removed from the state’s current mosaic of diversity, it has eery ties to the hidden history of the West–and the political landscape of recent years. Although when trains transported individuals to hidden locations inland,their forced displacement for the general safety of “all” was promoted as coalescing home front–based on their predesignation as “enemies of the state” in ways that have recurred in recent years. It pays to return to them to excavate the map of displacement that defined the west coast, and situate its occurrence within a landscape of longue durée.

The interned painter Chiura Obata was a devoted student of the western landscape of the United States, particularly in Yosemite Park, and created an image that inescapably suggests the portents of a shifting political landscape while interned in Topaz, in his quite contemplative painting of the deeply and heavily smeared reddened sky over the stark landscape of the Relocation Camp where he was interned, after having taught art at the University of California, at a War Relocation Camp that opened its doors in September 11, 1942.

Chiura Obata, “Sunset, Water-Tower, Topaz, March 20 1943” painted in the Topaz Relocation Camp

The smears of rust-colored cirrus clouds that Obata drew as reflected on Utah’s barren desert landscape at the Topaz War Relocation Center overwhelms the barbed wire fences barely discernible beneath telephone wires, lending the landscape a monumentality that dwarfs a makeshift guard tower, and creates red lines like scars across the land. Rather than treat the landscape relocation and internment camps as a panicked response to fears of impending military attack, the rapidity of relocation along fault lines in a political landscape that we may have too readily repressed, when the landscape has been forcibly divided along ethnic or cultural lines in terms of belonging–a division that seems to have been rehabilitated in recent years.

1. The recent mapping of the notion of “diversity” based on data culled into one of the appealing visualizations displayed on the website of Trulia–the realtor which seems primarily in the business of making us feel good about the prospective places where we might live, if we really and truly had our druthers–expanded the maps of demographic density designed by Randal Olson in more interactively searchable ways that offer an opportune starting point for this post. The dynamic visualization is based on self-reported Census data promised to capture the current “racial/ethnic” composition of regions across the country where smallest difference existed between a dominant ethnic subset and secondary ethnic group, ranking the relative levels of “diversity” by that metric across the country’s largest metropolitan areas–from Oakland to San Francisco to New York to Houston to San Jose–so that we might better envision the ethnic compositions of the neighborhoods where we live in an era where ethnic diversity seems the closest metric we’ll ever get to what’s cosmopolitan. It is, however, a map of strong ethnic integration that contrasts with the clearcut demarcation of otherness in the map of several generations past that is the header to this post..

The data visualization is impressive despite its clear limitations–especially evident in the broad equivalences that it draws implicitly between the uniformity of “diversity” as a transparent derivative of data of variety. Building on data encoded in Dustin Cable’s “Racial Dot Map,” Trulia provides a metric for “diversity” that ignores exact ethnicities, providing a new way of reading a single argument in the 2012 data of ethnic differences that Cable encoded by five different colors–which can be read as a follow-up map of the image of ethnic segregation in the map with which the musing of this post began.

The Trulia map of America’s Racial Kaleidoscope nonetheless offers an interesting and somewhat jarring image for all of its superficiality, even with apparent bearing on the sociology of the red state/blue state divide. For all the very slipperiness of “ethnic/racial” categories as meaningful demographic tools of parsing populations–when were these two terms ever equivalent seen as surrogates for one another, and how do the categories of the 2010 Census, which use such undifferentiated envelopes as “Asian” or “Black” or “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin” as authoritative diverse to parse populations?–to image diversity, there may be some meaning able to be extracted in the visualizations that show their difference and distance from a historical past, when ethnic differences seemed far more starkly inscribed in a pre-globalized world.

For the folks at Trulia created a visualization to map “diversity” that erases whatever degrees of actual racial or ethnic integration exist within counties. While this may hardly offer a metric of actual “diversity,” the visualization reveals California as the largest continuous body of “diverse” ethnic groups in the country and of its sharpest non-“majority white” areas:

Even without introducing the potentially complexifying newly trending category of the “transracial,” or those individuals who, to use another term diffused in online media thanks to Rachel Dolezal, realized or felt that they were “miscarried”–a term that has touched a clear nerve, given the unclear meaning “race” retains in contemporary America, and the uncomfortable nature of the term. Where Trulia finds diversity to be concentrated in coastal regions and objectively present in a range of areas that seems to correlate with sites where the home-buying market is tight, the visualization seems most useful to force us to ask what diversity means–as well as to mask the sort of rhetoric of ethnic opposition that so often scarred the landscape of the west.

2. “Diversity” is a new world, but may once have led to the one of the clearest instances in US history of the forced marginalization of a population of citizens during the early years of American engagement in World War II. Despite the frustrating failure of imposing categories to classify the composition of our national population at the start of the twenty-first century, the cultural remove at which Japanese ethnicity became a basis for the forced migration of citizens must be balanced with the proximity of the recent circumscription of individual rights. If panic and fear unjustifiably provoked the systematically organized deportation of Americans of Japanese ancestry–in which a strong dose of economic resentment may have played a large role–the act of remapping civil rights in the United States, if seriously compromised, also sanctioned the remapping of rights in ways that both built on and provided some rather scary precedents.

Did the confinement of a considerable section of the population–and indeed the confinement of a somewhat arbitrarily reclassified class of citizens–created something of a crucial precedent to redefine the rights of citizens by unilateral executive fiat? The decision to reclassify a segment of the American population recalls the legal justification for a “state of emergency” which the “crown jurist of the Third Reich” Carl Schmitt notoriously advanced as an adequate rationale to suspend rights in the hopes to re-establish order, responsibility for which, Schmitt argued, ultimately lay with the sovereign alone, but whose actions created shared bonds preceded the very notion of the state–and rested in a political nature of the opposition between friend and enemy. In a cold-hearted logic ways recently revived in George W. Bush’s administration, such an occurrence “extreme emergency” could justify the suspension of the constitution and law, with striking similarity to the political state of emergency by which internment was justified and understood–and was associated with a state of war, both by Schmitt and in the War on Terror of the early twenty-first century. Nowhere is this more evident than in the remapping of California during the Japanese Evacuation Program, where Japanese Americans were segregated from all “exclusion areas” in the name of a political imperative that transcended political practice.

The institutional order that was created between zones of confinement and zones of exclusion in the “Evacuation Map” created “in satisfaction of the impelling military necessity created by total war with Japan” defined some 108 individual “exclusion areas,” in each of which approximately 1,000 persons were evacuated–allegedly totaling the 100,000 persons evacuated during the two weeks between March 24 and June 6. Many were concentrated in the Pacific Northwest. But the repartitioning of the West in terms of Military Area 1 and Military Area 2–a sort of Newspeak of Orwellian resonance–was premised on the presiding rationality of political belonging against the otherness of Japanese Americans that is so foundational in Schmitt’s thought. The exceptionality of “wartime” provided the basis for suspending their right, and insisting on the primacy of the political for redividing national space, and suspending legal or constitutional precedent by a political mandate that, for Schmitt, would indeed historically and existentially precede any legal or constitutional order.

What sort of networks would have allowed the forced migration of a large section of the Japanese American population to internment camps? The imposition of such a nation-wide policy of legislated relocation remains conceptually remote, both as a practice and conceptual possibility, let alone as one accepted by the region’s residents. Its logic lies in the legend to the map, which echoes a truly Schmittian rhetoric of a “state of emergency” in which constitutional rights are suspended; the necessity of “the political” reveals the deep opposition based on “otherness” whose rationality is revealed in its legend. This state of “otherness” was clearly inscribed in the landscape of the two areas of Military Areas, rather than states and superimposed upon states, is linked to “wartime,” but which echoes of the earlier political orders of the American West: its legend offers the underlying logic of the state of emergency during which local division was inscribed.

The partitioning of the same region that seems particularly noted for its diversity–the western region of California–as in the framing of an “Exclusion Zone” that was deemed so sensitive in its concentration of state secrets to be off-limits to members identified with Japanese immigrants that they could be stripped of constitutional rights–and forced to board trains from the cities to anodynely-named “Relocation Centers” that were located in the state’s interior–suggests a civilian partitioning of the country not only in the name of war-time exigency, but in fact a paranoia that was fueled not by actual military dangers or actual risks of espionage, in retrospect, but something that was more fed by a combination of opportunism and on-the-ground animosity and ethnic dislike. If the notion of such dislike might have lain in economic competition, the ethnic opposition was reified in the boundaries of otherness exposed on the map.

The network of relocation camps are often seen as a unicum–and as something like a quite particular circumstantial combination of jealousy for a group of successful immigrants who had often lived in distinct settlements, and whose difference was now cast into political relief, both by the war, and the culture of imperial allegiance that Japanese were seen as increasingly ready to adopt. But the very network of the camps of resettlement recapitulated narratives of the European occupation of Native America by completely effacing an imaginary frontier between Native Lands and European-American pioneers, placed in evidence by the confining of native peoples in discrete sites that were later known as “reservations,” the bounded areas of the absence of any existence of a Native/American divide across the very western states from which Japanese Americans were banned–and indeed denied narratives of racial or ethnic differentiation, where the destruction of the frontier was replaced by the contained presence of the Native populations in reservations, at the same time as many other reservations were reclaimed as military sites for engineers or the army, in the demand for a wartime effort, even as Native American languages were adopted, as they had been in World War One, to encode military communications and Native Americans participated in huge numbers in the US Army.

The rapid constitution of new networks to displace Japanese Americans from their former homes to the periphery of what became defined as Military Area One in the United States was enabled by the infrastructure of railroads that linked cities to removed “War Relocation Centers” in areas where their inhabitants would not be easily noticed or indeed seen. The forcible relocation of Japanese Americans was largely enacted and by non-military authorities, but led to the removal of the large number of immigrants to the country to remote areas, cordoned off from sight, in the four months from March, 1942, by which time some ten centers of “war[-time] relocation” were established that removed Japanese Americans from the coast region that they had increasingly migrated in the past thirty years, to areas where they were less likely to be noticed, and the stripping of their civil rights–and allegedly inalienable liberties–were not even seen.

The deep suspicion of ethnic difference created a proclivity to separate Japanese American citizens as a military threat. Yet as early as 1930, the Office of Naval Intelligence began surveillance on Japanese communities in Hawaii, wary of the military power of Japan. And from 1936, the same Office in fact compiled lists of those Japanese to be “the first to be placed in a concentration camp in the event of trouble” between the countries–long before the idea of confinement camps were broached as a possibility on American soil.

That list would become the Custodial Detention Index, compiled in 1939-41 with help from the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a tabulation one of explicitly “Alien Enemy Control” as enumerating those ostensibly “engaged in subversive activities” or actions deemed “detrimental to the internal security of the United States.” The list was drawn up a decade after further Japanese immigration to the United States had been banned in 1924, and significantly before Executive Order 9066, issued on February 19, 1942, allowed regional military commanders to designate “military areas” from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” The establishment by the civilian-run War Relocation Agency of what were very euphemistically termed “relocation centers,” together with the six internment camps run by the US Department of Justice, were officially built to house all Japanese-Americans who had been removed from the “exclusion zone” that stretched across the entire western coast of the United States, after March, 1942.

Although the scope of detention was not widely known, or discussed in contemporary maps, a relatively recent map of the Assembly Centers and Internment camps emphasized their existence and geographic distribution in areas that were removed from population centers, lending greater prominence to their considerable geographical remove from areas Japanese Americans had settled and the inhospitable places to which these forced relocations in internment camps occurred–in the desert, in relatively abandoned villages of the High Sierra, in areas often excluded from common maps.

Ben Pease

The reparative remapping of such sites as Poston and Gila River to our common memory offers a wonderful way to start to come to terms with the network of civilian-administered internment camps that place into relief a less well-documented or perhaps fully apprehended scale of the effective apparatus of state surveillance and that was in place of over 125,000 Japanese Americans into the desert-liike interior of the country for ostensible reasons of suspicions of a Fifth Column in the country of fully US naturalized citizens, who were stripped of all civil liberties.

The stark existence of such an “Exclusion Zone” or ten euphemistically named ‘relocation centers’ to which Japanese-Americans were without distinction detained from 1942 were inhumanely mapped in purely logistical terms to evacuate the western coast of ethnic Japanese with amazingly well-coordinated efficiency over six months with the sort of reflexive unreflectiveness so often characteristic during the unfolding of events occurring during a war: but the sites were also intentionally created as sites absent from federal law–or international conventions–and in a sense existed as black spots on the national map.

Such practices of forced relocation to sites far removed from cities near the shoreline–and ostensibly near sensitive military sites–depended on a very systematic division and re-assignment of Japanese Americans suddenly dispossessed of their ownership of houses, land, and real estate, which was imagined in a quite cartographical manner–as the movement of Japanese Americans from coastal cities and communities on trains removed them to remote places, as if to expunge their memories, and in locating Japanese Americans in remote areas allowed to be forgotten and go unseen. The subsequent destruction of any buildings, gardens, or evidence of confinement after the war, when the spaces of confinement were promptly shuttered after January 2, 1945–again by executive order–erased any evidence of the space that were bulldozed and razed, effacing memories of the internment, no doubt more problematic after the discovery of Nazi Concentration Camps. Despite the total lack of support for accusations of security threats, suspicion seems to have reigned. If the construction of Internment Camps were officially mandated to be situated in places deemed “climates suitable for people,” from the newly created Military Area #1–western Washington and Oregon; western California; Southern Nevada–to the Mississippi, in ways that created a new geography of the United States during wartime, ostensibly for reasons of state. Yet living in quasi-military improvised unheated barracks ringed by barbed wire that enclosed the thirty to forty blocks of barracks separated by empty spaces, patrolled by soldiers from watchtowers, lacking any privacy or cooking equipment or kitchens, and without any medicine or medical institutions, with only improvised medical care and with nothing but cots in collective rooms, such containment centers were undeniably more than austere–they were dehumanizing by intent. And while not dedicated to a project of ethnic cleansing, they were motivated by a sense of deep suspicion based on ethnicity alone, and reflect a similar fantasia of spatial containment and confinement that was enabled by a new attitude to space that the wartime maps of the Civil Control Administration reveal. The landscape coded in pale pastels masks and obscures the violence of collectively reclassifying Japanese-Americans as if “internal enemies”–and as threats to the national state–within national political discourse in truly Schmittian terms.

Within the intentionally dispersive extended archipelago of camps, removed from centers of habitation, inmates were largely supervised or overseen by the Wartime Civil Control Administration–a civilian unit–because of falsified reports of a proclivity to espionage. Such reports were diffused largely through the military and future Department of Defense (then Department of War) and were also fostered by intense lobbying efforts of white or Anglo farmers (who saw the Japanese American farmers as a threat) encouraged the perpetuation of a race-based paranoia. Even though J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI doubted that any real threat was posed by Japanese Americans, the decision to confine seems to have been preemptively made to quiet a home front: President Roosevelt’s issuance of Executive Order 9066 led to over 112,000 Japanese Americans to be moved to effective prison camps located in nine states–California, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Texas, Arkansas, and the porto-state of Alaska. Although two-thirds had already gained citizenship, they were asked to submit to loyalty oaths and swear not to interfere with the ongoing war effort that had consumed the country. And were excluded from much of the country. The internment sites were removed in the interior–and located in “Military Area 2”–whose definition somewhat bizzarely, and, quite Orwellianly, departed from the boundary lines of individual states.

They created a new logic of displacement and of the suspension of individual rights. 3. We associate the transport of prisoners as human chattel destined for ethnic cleansing on trains with Hitler’s Final Solution, perhaps the paradigmatic instance of the forced migration of populations becoming a national project and mission. But the national network of trains similarly provided the basis for the relatively fast geographic removal of US citizens of Japanese descent across the state from Exclusion Areas, effecting the legal reclassification of citizenship in was that oddly reflected the claims of spatial purification that the abstract order of maps almost inspires. The spectrum of pastel colors of the map issued by the Western Defense Command of the Exclusion Areas where men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry were forbidden to set foot conceals its violent measures.

The process of internal evacuation conducted “in satisfaction of the impelling military necessity created by total war with Japan” created an “evacuee population” in the United States whose movement was to be controlled and supervised by military forces, ostensibly to remove them from areas where there was any military presence that might be observed. When immigrants from Japan had been banned from becoming naturalized citizens of the United States–from either owning any property of their own or the ability to vote–Japanese Americans formed independent communities of their own in the western United States, often with separate schools. The forced transport of Japanese Americans to sites where they were stripped of citizenship and pursuant rights created something of a new standard for the imposition of classification on naturalized citizens for unstated reasons of possible danger to “state secrets”–although the actual likelihood of any attempted infiltration or espionage on existing military installations was not particularly credible. Forced transportation from communities in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle created an archipelago of the confined not only in California–and prevented from entering “exclusion zones” that came to include almost one-third of the country, eliminating the presence of Japanese Americans in anywhere save the less densely populated lands of the interior. While ostensibly directed against possible espionage of those sensitive military areas “from which any or all persons may be [rightfully[ excluded,” the expansion of exclusion zones to constitute a large share of the country became something of a pretense to redirect populations to areas where they were not seen. Not only was a third of the Territory of Hawai’i Japanese–between 140,00 and 150,000–in ways that make it ethnically complex, almost 127,000 Japanese Americans were listed in the 1940 Census as living in the country, mostly in California, Oregon and Washington, of which 40,869 resident aliens, born in Japan.

The rapidly expanding rate at which camps opened across the country over five months testify to the paranoia and unjustified fears that fed the relatively quick establishment of similar internment camps where local rights were suspended or stripped, and the role of the rail in moving a sizable sector of the population nationwide:

This quite carefully planned and strikingly extensive network to move populations from Assembly Centers to Relocation Centers–all since anodynely named–allowed the significant expansion of the areas of exclusion from which Japanese were not allowed to set foot. They were codified quite rapidly in the months after the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor led to all of “Japanese ancestry” to be reclassified as potential security threats, despite little evidence of their disloyalty, as attempts to argue against imprisonment that fell on deaf ears: six weeks after Pearl Harbor was attacked, after some ethnic Japanese living in Hawaii helped a downed airman, leading to a questioning of their ability to not be imperial subjects and “unassailable” as such, set the basis for a new geography of confinement and exclusion of Japanese from public areas that Earl Warren spearheaded, creating the basis to prevent ethnic Japanese from entering exclusion zones” of almost a third of the country–and encouraging by May 1942 all Japanese to be moved to network of assembly centers and readied for transport to permanent relocation centers across the country.

The declarative bluntness of the administrative languages in the authoritative public notices placed in the street corners of cities such as San Francisco that trumpeted the specter of foreign racial “ancestry” of Japanese Americans–

or the expanse of almost a third of the country from which Japanese Americans had been displaced–

cannot speak to the surprised faces of the deported who arrived by train in Arcadia, California, fresh from San Pedro, and the machinery that brought them there, and the helmeted soldiers who are staring down those recently stripped of citizenship, who don’t seem to have fully fathomed the reasons for their fate, or what perhaps the suspension of all legal rights would mean.

The role of the trains in moving populations in California would have paralleled the travels that the young Steve Reich made with his governess across the country from Los Angeles to New York in 1939 and 1940, and the “music documentary” he composed that retrospectively juxtapose those trips with the contemporaneous forced transport of European Jewry for ethnic cleansing. Reich’s travels occurred almost immediately before Japanese-Americans were moved en masse from Los Angeles to Relocation Centers as Poston or Gila River. Rendered in the propulsive straining tempo of violins that alternately suggest accelerating pistons and air raid sirens, and accompanied by parallel intonations of porters calling railway stops and voices of survivors, Reich’s braiding of memories intentionally evoked parallel lived geographic relocations as fantasia of forced displacement that mechanized electric rail travel allowed.

4. Was there a precedent for such forced movement under military oversight, in the confinement of native Americans in much of the American West to “reservations”, in a manner that Adolf Hitler himself has been noted to have particularly admired for the effective reorganization of the population of the West? (Hitler was a large fan of Karl May as well as Fenimore Cooper; Navajo reservations provided not only an architectural model for early concentration camps, according to John Toland, which he took as a promise of the extermination of those unable to be “civilized,” in a bizarre bit of cross-cultural reading.) The precedent of the forced 1864 “Long March” of over 300 miles–some fifty of which in fact occurred between designed to create forced migrations of American Indians from more potentially valuable mineralogical resources to reservations of contracting size.

For between 1864-6 of up to eighteen days attempted an ethnic cleansing of Navajo, from the ancestral homelands of hunters and gatherers located in current northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico to the Bosque Redondo internment camp on the Pecos River nearby Fort Sumner–an internment camp that was itself an attempt at ethnic cleansing, where some 3,500 Navajo men, women, and children died and that stood as an inspiration of the possibilities of ethnic cleansing to the Nazi party, as did the camp for Boer prisoners in South Africa, and perhaps a model for the first plans to deport Jews to the area of Lubin to die of disease. (The image of the confined Native American was potent: Karl May remained among Hitler’s preferred authors, and Hitler continued to read May’s stories of the grizzled white cowboy Old Shatterhand as Führer and personally recommended to his officers, David Meier notes, during the Russian campaign–perhaps providing a model for the forced marches of prisoners of war to death camps.)

The forced migration of a hunting and gathering migratory tribe to an arid 40-square-mile reservation with contaminated water, to face failing crops, disease and raids from neighbouring tribes is a not-so-hidden part of the landscape of the “wild” west that must have been present in the minds of those who administered the transportation of Japanese Americans to sequestered sites of minimal economic or strategic value.

While such equivalences in atrocity can hardly be drawn, and should not be encouraged, it remains striking on a conceptual and genealogical level that so many of the camps of internment for Japanese Americans were geographically located not only on state land, but at times on the very reservations on which Native Americans were actually confined–and restricted–in ways that provided a powerful precedent for such practices of territorial confinement and surveillance.

The Poston Relocation Center, for example, built on the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation in Arizona, working to provide the Reservation with electricity; the Leupp Isolation Center on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, northwest of Winslow; the Gila River Camp, approved in March 18, 1942, for 10,00, over pointed objections of the Gila River Indian Tribe; Tule Lake in an area that was the ancestral home of the Modoc, surviving members of whom were exiled to Oklahoma in 1873; Manzanar, located in the Owens Valley, in an area whose farmlands were worked by Shoshone and Paiutes for some time. In these circumscribed and well-defined areas, the Constitution was deemed not to apply. Despite no clear reaction between the Relocation Authorities and future Bureau of Indian Affairs, the director of the War Relocation Authority, Dillon S. Meyer, from 1950 to 1953 worked as the Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

5. Few of these sites of isolation were known to the public, moreover, or showcased in the media, with the exception the “show-camp” of Gila River, Arizona. But the existence of a “hidden geography” necessitated the show-camp among the numerous centers of sequestration Japanese-Americans might have faced. Lying quite literally “off the map,”and not appearing on maps of the west save in those redacted by the government, the internment camps provide more than a solely symbolic predecessors of what Trevor Paglen has so accurately characterized as the “blank spots on the map Trevor Paglen described, run by the National Security Administration, in the wake of the newfound popularity of the juridical writings of Carl Schmitt.

For the that became centers for the rendition of foreign nationals deemed security threats, like dry lakebed of Groom Lake, the area of the testing of the U2 missiles and other military aircraft in Area 51, run by the Air Force, or the National Data Center, sites run by the government but which lie outside the legal administration of the state, perversely, and in which the suspension of constitutional rights that Schmitt had claimed was argued to similarly apply.

The suspension of constitutional rights for the American-Japanese who were sequestered has an analogously long set of precedents of its own: the forced displacement of Native Americans had been an established government policy and project for over sixty years in the nineteenth century, based on denying precedence to claims of residence in lands they had traditionally occupied.

The result created some unique patterns and combinations of interior settlement. The Japanese Americans in one region came to outnumber the Mohave and Chemahuevi in the area of the desert where they had confined: the Office of Indian Affairs, indeed, ran many camps together with the War Relocation Authority, based on the hope was to use Japanese labor to construct larger spaces of confinement for Native tribes–either using the confined to confine tribes already stripped of land, or using the dispossessed to create spaces of confinement for the nation-state that had stripped them of their own property–by the canalization of the desert or the construction of newly electrified living quarters. Native Americans as the Cherokee had earlier been confined to “internment camps” before these were termed “reservations–internment camps whose plans may have served as models for the confinement of Jews in what became Death Camps–in World War II, the US also displaced Aleut people from the Pribilof Islands to internment camps located in Southeast Alaska.

Do such sites of isolation provide an alternate genealogy for the foundation of rendition sites–“blank spots on the map“–that the NSA much more recently operated at a similar remove from the coasts, public memory, or legal oversight? Do they provide one genealogy of the “black areas” of the law that allow the invocation of state secrets by the government and especially by the Air Force and CIA, but also the Department of Justice of Alberto Gonzalez, where the torturous logic of Schmitt’s emphasis on the state’s right to name its enemies regained respect, partly through the validity that the conservative icon Leo Strauss had given his “political theology” as one way for a strong state to unite men against “evil”: it is tempting to see what role Schmitt had in providing a precedent to invoke state secrets privilege to shore up the “black worlds” of the NSA, where extraordinary rendition of foreigners like Khaled El-Masri or the Canadian Maher Arar occur, and Groom Lake stays black–and effectively off the map–removing the construction of Air Force bases in Area 51 from criminal persecution, and effectively sanction violations of both federal law and the international Convention Against Torture in some locations. Indeed, the establishment of Relocation Camps mirror and echo the temporal creation of military sites in Southern Nevada that sprung up in the 1950s, nearby Area 51, which has been imagined both as a site of alien abductions and an alleged site for the US military to dedicated efforts to converting alien aircraft, have long remained hidden, and most probably not only to conceal contact with extra-terrestrial life for reasons of state. The recently expanding government centers tied to extradition offer an an odd gloss on the myths of alien crafts’ conversion to the US military. In a perverse fantasy of military omnipotence and natural providence, where for some the US Government is believed by many to have inherited the manifest destiny of the nation into the otherworldly relations to alien life. Just past Death Valley National Park, the Nevada Test Site and Yucca Mountain almost constitute the areas that the nation has removed from most maps–

–even if the secretive area around Region 51 and Groom Lake, just above the Nellis Air Force Range near Las Vegas, became best-known as sites of an secretive space of rendition and imagined extraterritoriality.

Is the ideal mapping of these areas as removed from oversight, and not subject to prosecution, not only a relic of the Cold War, but a region rich with precedence as offering a theater of opposing the enemy, to maintain enmity, in Schmitt’s curious words, and to maintain such enmities to cultivate the primacy of action, and sustain a not-so-hidden sort of political theology? If nothing else, it is an odd through-the-looking-glass sort of authenticity that seems located in these areas hidden from oversight. The imagined extraterritoriality which the government entertains is after all a sort of fictive escape from recognizing rights agreed to be accorded individuals, by the escapist alternative of removing them from the actual map: it is as if, by leaving the map blank where they lie, the conventional rights accorded to all who inhabit the actual world are somehow exempted by their placement off of the recognized map, and outside the nominally universal rights that are accorded citizens by US law and by international legal conventions. The map, in this sense, seems to have more power for removing people from international treaties and standards that the law could otherwise allow.

Is this a landscape of paranoia, whose contours were poisonously sculpted by a nuclear arms race of the Cold War–or a map of a secret history of sequestration, whereby an expanding nation state subtracted places from judicial review and removed them from public scrutiny?

Metadata-Driven Maps: Mismapping Social Networks and Unseen Populations

Tracking cellphones is not strictly speaking a practice of mapping, so much as one of surveillance or data collection. Yet the increased dependence of our National Security Agency on cyber-surveillance amassing big data has so convinced parts of our government of the ability to render something like an actual map of activities that threaten the state that the compilation of something like a comprehensive metadata map has created the illusion of assembling a map that will ensure our security. “Our business processes need to promote data-driven decision-making,” the agency coolly notes, and circumscribes its goals as “to answer questions about threatening activities that others mean to keep hidden.” The recent expansion of the mission statement of the NSA to intercept, weed through and filter out threatening personal communications transmitted on cables in email or by phone communications that are grabbed from the air with an air of self-justified righteousness that conceals their potential invasiveness and criminality, however, opened the floodgates to data collection of all metadata.

The right to sift through all communications that pass across the internet or are mediated by satellite without apparently intruding on their content offers the chance to assemble a clearer picture of an individual as more data is gathered in bulk: the more information amassed, rather than selective use of criteria, paradoxically provides the more accurate picture of the person mapped–and an image that is, in fact, more likely far more intrusive than the content of phone calls. As whistle-blower William Binney put it so succinctly, “When you take all those records of who’s communicating with who, you can build social networks and communities for everyone in the world. And when you marry it up with the content, you have leverage against everybody in the country.”

The recent revelations of Edward Snowden and others have provided fairly chilling examples of the extent to which government agencies like the NSA have taken the internet as a particular sort of extraterritorial domain. While the expanse of the internet seems vast, the proprietary relation to the passage of information along internet cables created a logic for culling metadata that evacuated claims of individual privacy, whether it travelled within the sovereign bounds of the United States our outside of them. The view that information that travelled on the internet was ipso facto subject to the authority of the United States government enabled a redrawing of boundaries of the invasive or intrusive, viewing the data that travelled outside and around the personal communications subject to culling in secret fashion: culling information on its cables has both shifted the definition of individual privacy in considerable ways, and, as it has provided the potential to map people by metadata argued to be surrendered to US companies that serve as providers, and, by extension, to the US government. (Soon after Snowden revealed documents, printed in the Washington Post, that detailed how the US government used Google cookies to track individual suspects, CEO Eric Schmidt claims to have considered the possibility of moving its servers outside of the United States.) The government built on its supervision of distribution of internet domain names and addresses, with limited legal ground, to assert ownership of private information; if the claims of ownership routinely made by the government agency, which has embedded systems of passive surveillance onto the material geography of the internet, may have been made out of the need to secure the country from threats, it has been based on the misguided belief that “tracking” all communications create readable “maps.”

Whether such maps would indeed track immanent threats or security risks is less clear than the preposterous assertion of the right to create a detailed map of all individual’s actions. If the aim for such comprehensive mapping seems an illusion of the right to know ass, the elevation of the degree of surveillance that this would accept over US citizens is not only unwarranted but shockingly arrogant as a claim. The transparency by which the agency represents their passive monitoring of communications exchange to collect data along the high speed optical cables is all too clear in their maps–which mark the sites of funneling information from undersea transmission cables. It is indeed striking how, by mapping a space of information’s transit over which they defensively assert the ability to intercept, in a sequence of maps purposefully erasing sovereign entities from a traditional world map. And while these sorts of maps illustrating the points of the interception of messages at crucially located nodes of the internet made known in the declassified images released by Edward Snowden, the peculiarly self-confident reposting of similar and analogous maps on the NSA website reveals the unquestioning confidence and assertion of the justifiable right to listen in on and surveil the data streams and communications traveling across undersea cables or by satellite transmissions to intercept signs of potential dangers to the nation–although what the nation save an entity in need of protection by worldwide monitoring remains unclear.

For while without traditional legal per se precedent, the map of NSA access to and interception of internet communications and traffic is an extension of the notion of the protection of borders that has gained attention to become so problematic after the events of 9/11, when the relation of the US to other almost intentionally amorphous and unlocatable rogue “terrorist” networks has magnified a sense of those borders’ vulnerability, and intentionally evoked the Orwellian concept of the “Homeland”–rather than the nation–to extend protection to conduits that pass across international waters, in the hope of surveilling and collating all possible potential threats.

In a skeletal apparatus of the interception of information that is defined by the alliances among intelligence systems, the world is redivided by the NSA in terms of the signals able to be monitored and received by the largest stations or nodes of interception, rather than its actual space:

The basis for such surveillance has rested in an ability to triangulate the vast bulk of signals transmitted along the cables of the internet, and satellite transmissions of cellular phones, along the so-called “Five Eyes” partners in surveilling–England; Canada; Australia; For the network of passive and active surveillance by metadata accumulation–and indeed monitoring of all email and phone communications–is based on a division of the world between those who are surveilled and those who are partners in the surveillance, in ways that create the central distorting lens through which the NSA divides the world into those who are monitored, those doing the surveilling, and those who are assisting with its operations, even if most of the signal interception occurs among the “five eyes” of the US, Canada, England, New Zealand and Australia, to provide global coverage of activity worldwide:

Indeed, the massive project of amassing of telephony metadata, including guides to position, email metadata, and a “Treasure Map” based on foreign data and other Signals Intelligence–Sigint–all suggest a ballooning business of data collection in the hope to process or track suspicious movements or activities deemed to be dangerous to the United States.

The “Treasure Map” distinguishes layers of the interface with cyberspace and individuals and geographical space. But the weird aesthetics of the blackening out–or greying out–of the inhabited world and centers of inhabitation oddly persist in most often using the empty and evacuated outlines of tradition maps to map the sites for collecting information. All routing guided through global networks is amassed from all internet exchanges in the hope of creating a comprehensive map of relevant threats from all possible surveillance stations, including from a range of candy-color-coded cables that seem wrapped around the world, with a noticeable set of blindspots around Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan:

Yet how is this volume of data ever processed–or ever read selectively enough to create a trustworthy or reliable map? Despite “ensuring that we are focussed above all on threats to the American people,” as an NSA spokesperson recently affirmed, has led to continued bulk collection of metadata out of a belief that ‘knowledge is power’ has itself abandoned the hope of mapping a valuable synthesis–and turned into a data collection engine of its own, expanding to process data acquisition from some 30 to 50 million users, by gathering some 5 billion records to track and try to pinpoint the locations of individuals world wide, using cell phone towers as tools of triangulation to track their users within a vast database able to store the locations of hundreds of millions of devices through the offshore cables that connect networks globally in ways that sift aggregated intelligence to map individual locations and connections of existing intelligence targets. The comprehensiveness of purview and data suggest a redefinition of the function and nature of how data collection informs a map–and redrawing the boundaries of individual privacy.

Although the massive network is designed for collecting geolocation data, the absence of clear lines of selectivity suggests a deep mis-use of the term “map” for the rationale for a rapidly expanding are of intelligence-gathering. The graphing of metadata offers an in illusion of information control, but one which substitutes for that diverts attention from the benefits of a selective map. The justifications about the need for “mapping” such ties in a visualization moreover conceals and diverts attention from containing such acts of surveillance. It is sady apparent that the ostensible gathering of data about terrorists and terrorism provided a pretext for the NSA and US government to bolster their own authority to collect data, as Glenn Greenwald argued in one of his final posts for The Guardian, as if this were a goal in itself–and that the agency’s data-collection abilities are a rationale for their continuation, out of a misguided belief in the greater coherence of the sort of map that they might provide.

The hunger for such intercepted data to be sequestered and analyzed is overwhelming, even without recent disclosures that such excessive amounts of data from contacts, address books, buddy lists, and in-boxes. The N.S.A. emerges as an overflowing vacuum cleaner of data, whose dominance in data collection serves to assert its importance in the world. Such expansive data banks allow the N.S.A. not only to store but map out social connections of any person whose information is captured, creating its own kind of social graph, the proliferation of data about such inter-connections might feed the most paranoid vision of a map of any society, network, or association, and to transform them into potential targets whose surveillance might be justified–to the extent to which they have encouraged new servers to offer a level of encryption designed to evade the NSA’s spying eyes. The trust in our abilities to map terrorist networks has driven the expansion of clandestine mapping skills, fueled by the lack of walls to protect individual privacy and the growing demand to map the rather spectral links of alleged terrorist networks that allegedly continue to threaten national interests.

Unlike earlier government intelligence collection, such data-collection is often recorded and preserved as a map if not a social graph: for as NSA mines social media to create graphs of social networks boating comprehensive coverage, they present a map–and not only in a metaphorical sense–of potential threats, targeting potential networks of terrorism as if to track threats to the nation by rendering pushpins in Pakistani territory–as this NSA map, labelled “top secret,” suggests.

Data siphoned or intercepted the internet is far less embodied and material than the physical media of maps. But in its conversion to the sources that are rendered on a base layer, they seductively promise to resolve the problems of mapping the unmappable–the spectral networks of al Quaeda or the Haqqani network or Al Shabaab–all by targeting cell phones with the illusory precision of a Google Maps pushpin.

The mapping of intercepted data-flows–and consequent tracing graphs of social networks–run against the selective visualization in most maps, however, by mapping potential sources of data or discussion with a precision that is far more illusory than their actual content. In part, there is no clear way to map such compendious data, and in part they raise the very questions familiar to other modes of data visualizations that present themselves with the authority of an objective map–but are based on the qualitative nature of the data that they employ. Indeed, by rendering data in the authoritative terms of a map, they elide the determination of GPS position with the precision of terrestrial coordinates. The creation of this map is extremely important to the increased authority that the NSA claims, this post argues, both on symbolic levels as a strategic image that commands assurance in the maintenance of its programs at great cost, as well as a strategic tool that conveys accuracy in the implementation of unjust “targeted” air strikes.

These ‘maps’ created by intercepted metadata are less concerned with the lay of the land, to be sure, than the ability to synthesize the large numbers of data “grabbed” or siphoned off data networks, using “big data” to create a comprehensive image of hidden dangers.

The accumulation of digital metadata is deeply troubling in the lack of respect for privacy. But the tracking and compiling of metadata records in data visualizations seem to claim an illusion of comprehensive coverage that is also misleading: they abandon a clear protocol of mapping selective sites of interest or of linking information to locations, but use the map both as a template and interface to track and target actual locations and a way to legitimize and justify comprehensive coverage. And, lastly, they exploit the power of a rhetoric of mapping to normalize the grabbing IP addresses and disclosing information to readers. While most of these centers seem located in the United States, several serve as platforms for foreign intelligence collection. Although this map of data collected by the NSA–with hotspots signaled in red–seems to respect national boundary lines, it maps a broad range of regions acrosswhose networks we known we listen in upon.

From at least 2007, the NSA’s goal of “electronic mass surveillance” through data-mining provided a sinkhole of government funding. But it has recently expanded as a projection of assembling something of a map not only metaphorical in nature: NSA patents extend far beyond obtaining cell phone conversations and data from satellite monitoring stations to U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Officers, and intercepting conversations of citizens of the U.S.–to include geographically locating a specific computer site, presumably by tracking location from cell phone towers. The resulting maps and social graphs create precedents for disclosing information in ways that suggest an erosion of individual rights, even as they claim to map networks that pose a national threat: the map provides a powerful tool to express the mission of the Department of Homeland Security to “secure the nation from the many threats we face” and for processing big data secured from online sources in a persuasive readable format, but privileges the power of engines of data-sorting over the readability of an actual map, or the relevance of its content. Compiling data via digital geolocation goes beyond an intrusion of privacy, to use public funds to create a virtual map of webs perceived social threats at considerable expense.

What sorts of searchable databank are we creating in the new NSA centers, and what to they portend? It is troubling that such surveillance sets a new level of intrusiveness, and raises questions about the merits of generating such a map both for its invasiveness and the breadth of its purview. Despite the illusion of total information that the metaphor of mapping provides, monitoring a virtual fire hose of social media posts, telephony metadata, email records, or other data threatens to become a project in and of itself. If the NSA’s hope for “owning the internet” were described by former NSA senior executive and whistleblower Thomas Drake, the abilities of tracking the latency of multiple network communications to allow communications networks to be given a geographically location or topology, according to a 2005 patent granted to the National Security Administration, or NSA, so as to remotely extract locations from cellphones–perhaps identifiable as the NSA tool “Airhandler” that approximates and geographically places the location of sent data, that go beyond content surveillance to locate users’ positions.

Such projects of intelligence-gathering have given momentum to bankrolling new forms of surveillance that parallel the NSA’s growth by a third since the attacks of Sept. 11–and reflect devotion of a roughly two-fold expansion of its budget to procure intelligence for tracking and targeting presumed terrorists. The data collected has won a prominent place in the President’s Daily Briefing, which regularly includes information obtained through the from NSA’s Geolocation Cell, a project dedicated to tracking people geographically in real time: we have moved away from “Minaret” or “Mainway,” the NSA’s call database, to new programs of more expansive data-mining projects such as X-Keyscore, Boundless Informant, and Prism–engines which boasts to parse big data into clear data streams.

The embrace of metadata by the NSA through such surveillance of telecommunications networks at a cost of $20 million a year, stored from millions of users for one year, exploited the “home-field advantage” of databases of internet companies in “one of the most valuable, unique, and productive” for the NSA, grabbing data from such servers as Skype, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo for military ends, without oversight: such databanks presumably provides targets for the sites of drone planes, as well as legitimize the ongoing expansion of drone attacks from 2002 to 2013 that have claimed over 4,000 victims in an undeclared aerial war in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia–exemplified in the large number of civilian deaths in places in northwest Waziristan region of Pakistan in towns such as Miram Shah where, rather than being contained, have increased to an extent that can be called a Human Rights abuse both in a new Amnesty International investigation and a separate Human Rights Watch report on American drone strikes in Yemen. The shifting maps that are created from cell-phone use and internet surveillance may, indeed, create faulty targets that were targeted by the NSA to “flag” terrorists. According to maps such as the below, the NSA presumably targets suspected terrorists in the region. Indeed, the official release of the now-ubiquitous Google Maps in 2005 provided something of a template, as we have seen, for imagining the expansion of drone attacks far beyond whatever the Pakistani government had approved–strikes now estimated to have killed between 2,525 and 3,613 people in Pakistan since 2004, and maimed countless more.

It is true that Section 701 of a FISA Amendment permits data collection on foreigners, and has effectively permitted a huge increase in the abilities to mine data collected from warrantless interceptions of multiple service providers: the map is bizarre in mapping the flows of data monitored and collected, in a mapping of links of collection, as much as collection, that rather than describing actual populations presents an image of the links in the world which we can readily access. Such maps might indeed deflect attention from the situation on the ground, as they come to substitute for actual geospatial intelligence.

For the systematic collection of data creates a map shaping foreign policy, as well as a credible illusion of power. Indeed, if dramatic increases in drone strikes from 2008 in Pakistan bay be explained by operators’ practice or drone technology, the dramatic expansion in intensity reflects how such data served to rationalize remotely pinpointed attacks–green pinpricks note attacks ordered during the Obama administration from 2009, less than 2% of which hit high-profile militant targets; those red and yellow correspond to those under the Bush administration. It is amazing that only after their continuation for more than ten years have they been publicly resisted by the Pakistani government. To erase the deaths that occur from errant drone strikes or from bystanders, red and green pushpins provide a suitably emotionally distancing device.

When mapping drone strikes on a more concrete local map of a recognizably urban area of Waziristan, Miram Shah, we might prefer to employ equally disembodied icons of explosions.

The expanded reliance on metadata to track terrorists is both “very, very intrusive,” and a crude metric to deploy drone strikes. The expanded unquestioned use of such surveillance has created a self-consuming practice, funneling a floodgate of data for review with limited selectivity or often refinement: the huge expansion of drone strikes undoubtedly hindered the battle against extremism, killing far many more civilians than the militants against whom they were targeted.

Indeed, recent suggestions of the extensive involvement of the NSA in these drone killing programs suggests the extent to which cyber-surveillance, and the siphoning of radio messages, metadata and seized laptops provided a basis to track a presumed al-Qaeda operative who had been followed since 2004, Hassan Ghul–or to kill a man presumed to be him–by a drone strike in Mir Ali, based on email from Ghul’s wife about her “current living conditions” that was the fruit of the SIGINT campaign waged by the NSA. “We provided the map,” said a former intelligence official presumed associated with the NSA, “and they just filled in the pieces,” describing the NSA as having 20 times the budget as the CIA in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in northwest Pakistan believed to be a center of Al Qaeda operations: the same agent is quoted as saying “NSA threw the kitchen sink at the FATA,” including the creation of long-term data repositories of logs, digital information, all to “help NSA map out the movement of terrorists and aspiring extremists between Yemen, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Libya, and Iran,” reads a quoted document cited by the Washington Post, including “thousands” of chat logs. If the obtaining of this information is of questionable legality, the use of such a map to target individuals becomes instrumental in achieving a violation of international law.

Photo:AFP/File

Predators and Reapers have long bombed training camps, Al Qaeda operation networks, and leaders in the region with hundreds of civilian casualties–and have recently expanded to target sites in Yemen and other countries, in explicit violation of international law.

If the intrusiveness on individual privacy may be criminal in its intrusiveness, the use of such radically disembodied data to “map” networks by social graphs is not only a refinement of data into a spectrum, as suggested in the icon below, but in fact a far more messy image–less a “circumscribed, narrow system” President Obama imagines than a floodgate of unfiltered data in a system of visualization with scary precedent for surveying our citizenry and “allies”–and quite a blunt instrument and limited metric, instead of the precision its advocates claim.

Without knowing what PRISM is, it seems a means to synthesize multiple sources of collected metadata relating to foreign intelligence.

1. Privacy and Grabbing Social Networks

Wire-tapping surveillance began as a front of the “war on terror.” But the increasing data-banks of interaction networks create a mappability of space not rooted in location–even if locations are duly noted–so much as in filtering the multitude of network exchanges that take place at something like a dozen junctions of the internet–junctions which a spatial map can hardly serve to record or transcribe, to graph networks of individual interest.

Such graphs lack the prospects or gradients, sites of inhabitation, rivers, forests, or grassy slopes: the bleached skein of the information highway is a negative of the qualitative embodiment of place, and rather graphs an etherial network, floating in the ether, but with contours the NSA tenaciously tries to decode. What sort of readable social graph does their siphoning off of radically disembodied streams of data, based on the thread-bare skeins of metadata.

The promise “Boundless Informant” offers to “graphically display the [collected] information in a map view . . . with no human intervention” based on metadata records suggests a more radically disembodied concept of “mapping” that stands to become a sort of local model for compiling masses of big data, without scrutiny of what utility such “maps” afford–or violations of individual privacy. The legality of creating such an expansive database by intercepting and decoding streams of data in large part turns on the degree to which their individual invasiveness is construed as “unreasonable seizures” of personal papers and effects–but before our government invests more monies in such projects, more attention should be paid to the very real qualitative limits hopes for “total information” conceal. The surreptitious mass-tracking of cellphone data suggests a hidden form of surveillance, indeed, more extensive than drone flights or CCTV: as a round-the-clock mapping of both position and contact with others, it provides a constant target of geolocation as well as situating individuals, unbeknownst to them, within social networks, purchasing habits, website visits, as well as call logs, that can provide a predictive index of habits, tastes, socio-demographic profile, circles, and even daily activities. PRISM collects data from a range of servers or NSA “providers”, as this NSA Power Point slide, released by Edward Snowden, makes all too clear:

The dominance of this type of “profiling,” however, also suggests an impoverishment of the cartographical landscape; it is predominantly attuned to data-mining as effective and immediate mode of intelligence-gathering, and, for all its informational datasets, whose contours are often less informative or qualitatively accurate than it would suggest, given the unfiltered information that it includes, which temptingly promise an illusion of total information–an illusion deriving in no small part from invasive powers that skirt legal protections of privacy that the same agencies have long desired to overstep or outright deny. The concept of individual privacy is, most accept, protected by the Constitution, despite the claims of some “originalists” questioning a “right” to individual privacy, in the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights; the amendment expressly protects citizens from unreasonable seizure of personal records by state agencies when not judicially sanctioned or supported by probable cause; recent critics have expressed concern that infringements on privacy also stand in violation of the personal rights expressed in the Ninth Amendment. Any restriction to rights of privacy would effectively entail redrawing the map where rights granted by the Constitution apply, or circumscribing regions where they are suspended.

To be sure, the warrantless wiretapping of digital communications is only the beginning of the large range of maps daily compiled and collated from the data derived from citizens’ purchases, internet connections, telephony metadata, and social networking, if recent testimony is to be believed, that provide a basic “map” of subjects of suspicion: the precedent of sharing of users’ phone logs with companies, it has been ruled, leaves them not protected by a right to privacy, although the expansiveness of associated metadata provide a basis for the predictive mapping of individual persons that approaches the infringement of privacy: from tabulating the tracking of spatial position, personal ties to individuals or groups, websites visited, and store receipts, a profile emerges verging on invasive surveillance, potentially compromising in its totality. Although there is no attempt to resolve the disembodied content of such secretly siphoned data, there is an odd exchange between the rhetoric of objective mapping of location or place and sorting data as a way of constituting the individual and his/her associates: mapping as an exercise to locate the subjects of observation which are not, by definition, present on a normal map. Indeed, the redrawing of a map of rights was presented as an almost serious issue by Amnesty International.

The demands of the U.S. Office of Homeland Security to amass bulk data by social network surveillance is something of an extension of the rights already claimed to allow surveillance and policing by border patrols and drones within 100 miles of any international crossing–and the search and seizure of electronic devices at any border crossing–and the expansion of drone surveillance in the nation’s borders. The circumscription of individual rights creates a “constitution-free zone” within the United States:

For Orin Kerr, as Nick Szabo, seizing of laptops near borders effectively creates a similar cordon of the suspension of constitutional rights. Such a suspension has occurred in the regions overseen by judges in the fourth, fifth, and ninth circuits, all of which have all upheld the right for border exceptions to search through laptops or storage devices. But most often, fears of the constraints of surveillance have been quantitatively measured by border guards or their use of drones–including unmanned “drone” flights planned for expanded domestic surveillance, some mounted with “non-lethal weapons” to be employed against “targets of interest” to the Dept. of Homeland Security. (The echo of the expansion of drones that target houses and Pakistani populations are, however, eery.) To be sure, this attention of borders the areas around actual borders could create comic conundrums of surveillance to the north, but the map of surveillance is in itself scary as a new way of imagining the national landscape or national liberties:

These maps point up the problems for how we map the landscape of civil society or the shifting contours of public space. It is impossible to use a terrestrial projection to “map” the shifting contours of the suspension of individual’s rights to privacy, if recent leaks are trusted–of which a land-map offers a misleading analogy. The medium of a paper or static map cannot encompass the qualitative level or extent of information processed at such collection centers–measured in yottabytes, as much as by indices of spatial position–and which we are only beginning to use maps as an interface. The web of data flows that enter this surveillance octopus are not only developing a nation-wide ecology of their own, but seem to threaten to take our eyes and attention away from the geopolitical map that they seek to monitor and tabulate.

The individuation of a ‘hidden’ or secret map of social networks that can be grabbed off internet communications provides a source of intelligence whose data analytics have so dramatically grown in the twelve years since 9/11 that there is no clear model for selective mapping, but for compiling a totalistic map of people-centric proportions. Much as the kind folks at MIT’s Media Lab have offered a PRISM-like program to map your own social networks from your Gmail, yahoo, or MS accounts, in template of “DIY Spying”–

–the social graphic and network mapping that lead to clear problems in the over-collection of data from scouring some millions of email address books daily by the NSA’s own Special Source Operations Branch, described in the Washington Post by Bart Gellman and Ashkan Soltani. All in the interests of the nation’s security, a dragnet of data flows grabs hundreds of millions of contact lists from e-mail and instant messaging accounts without external oversight, including the addresses of many Americans.

The result of information tracked provides “metadata” to assemble a range of individual portraits based on surveillance and composite mapping of individuals’ ties. Indeed, if the collection of email address books that makes up so large a share of the data that NSA obtains, together with “buddylists” and in boxes, so much that the hacking of an account under surveillance by spammers to send bulk emails threatened to create an overflow in the collection system–leading to a shift in philosophies of data-collection, driven by the proliferation of data email servers generate, and the lack of selectivity they allow from the some 250 million address books that NSA analysts collect every year–creating the new problem of “Content Acquisition Optimization.”

2. The Social Network as Map

A single regional or global map cannot comprehend the level of current surveillance or data interception in a readily readable form. There’s no clear or apparent ancestor for such surveillance over so broad a purview or scope, although attempts to pinpoint and track potentially dangerous groups of citizens suggests something of an ancestor to maps of potentially dangerous networks by intelligence networks–as those made of all Moslem student groups to try to control an unstable situation in response to the twin towers’ destruction in New York City after 9/11–when the feeling that dangers existed that almost couldn’t be mapped produced a near-mania for mapping to which an expansion of “legal” domestic online surveillance represent the final logical extension. Although such maps simply plotted known organizations, social network graphs seek to map the coherence of threats perceived from around the world. They also reveal the expansion of local observation, infiltration, and surveillance within the New York City Police Department’s “Demographics Unit,” with direct assistance from the CIA, that are only now being investigated by the ACLU as having violated restrictions against domestic spying.

Since then, domestic spying has expanded in ways we can only begin to chart, in a massive race for bits of possible intelligence that shows little respect for privacy, and little chance of abating. Surveillance flights from airports in every state in the nation seems to guarantee the safety of a national space, here suggested by the broad coverage of surveillance drone flights from multiple airports across the United States planned for the coming year. This map of the unmanned flights that are managed and maintained by the Department of Defence, a map of prospective departures of unmanned surveillance flights, boast near-national coverage with particular attention to the Eastern Seaboard and border with Mexico to the nation’s south.

Yet if drones monitor but the surfaces of daily events, they track only the crests of waves in comparison to the deep tracking of currents of information flow by the NSA. The mass surveillance of transactional records communicated along the backbone of the internet from Quantico, Virginia, described by Seymour Hersh as among “the largest database ever assembled in the world.” Mass surveillance on this level, based on phone data, banking records, email, spending habits, flights and web searches, were described in 2008 as one end of the NSA expanding its “Total Information Awareness Program”–without sacrificing its acronym–to the “Terrorism Information Awareness Program.” In ways that long earlier provoked consternation from the ever-vigilant Senator Ron Wyden, such data-sifting blurred domestic and foreign surveillance, given the sensitivity and revelatory nature of information transacted online, intercepting roughly 75% of internet traffic in the United States through such high-powered programs like Blarney, Fairview, Lithium or Stormbrew, despite its limited legal authority to do so, by filtering data streams of domestic communications to be snared within the parameters increasingly finely-woven wefts of nets in the sea of telecommunications.

Since the 2003 United States’ invasion of Iraq, these programs have grown: an increasing attention has gone to data collection and intelligence surveillance to provide a better image of the undefined missions in which we are engaged as a nation. Indeed, a reliance on surveillance corresponds to the relative disintegration of civil government. The increasing the role of the NSA as a secret system of intelligence collection serves, it seems, to locate cell phones, even when off, and collect emails and store oceans of data to define potentially dangerous networks in the name of counterterrorism–or, as the NSA saw it,“to make the agency’s global enterprise even more seamless as we confronted increasingly networked adversaries.”

And yet. The totality of communications assembled do not necessarily create the continuous coverage of spatial location as a map. Although the scrutiny of telegraphic data, cables or letters sent during wartime in other periods was standard, the sheer amount of data synthesized has little precedent, and if citizens were placed on “watch lists” by the NSA, data-maps of social networks suggest breaking a new frontier in individual privacy. If Frank Church announced back in 1975 that “the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air” as a capability that could be easily turned on the American people, urging that its actions must always operate within the law, the NSA increasingly claimed rights to surveillance of global coverage. In 2002, DARPA established an “Information Awareness Office” with a mandate of “Total Information Awareness,” appropriating the masonic ‘Eye of Providence’ in ways PRISM’s logo referenced–but casting a glance over AfPak nations and the Middle East, the prime regions NSA seeks to monitor, using a globe to remind us of the locus of danger it seeks to control:

The DARFA disembodied eye suggests its omnipotence in an age of information control that is an odd appropriation of the all-seeing eye of the new age marking America’s foundation in a far more bucolic landscape.

“Scientia est potentia,” reads the legend of the DARFA seal. But what “scientia” is at work? The demand to locate and track, and identify and search, real-time “actionable intelligence” grew after 9/11 rapidly, with the demand to provide global coverage–offering a map disproportionately concentrated by 2007 on Pakistan and Iran. Yet what sort of coherence does is mapped, and with what “accuracy”? In data-driven visualizations, is the data conditioned by the sorts of social networking sources that are used?

The mapping of internet usage–represented below by three pictographic “global heats maps” of ties to Russia, Pakistan, and Iran, showing relative volumes of internet ties in red–with surveillance of data from India immediately following.

The dedication to surveillance by the internet and confidence in internet levels as a source of surveillance may obscure deep disparities in global access to the internet. But twenty-nine countries have reported NSA internet surveillance.

And the internet provides a key example of belief in the ability to tap into a global information system–much as the key interception of data from Brazil provides a means to track information not passing through the United States. But it may underplay the limited access and use of internet sites worldwide, despite the global share of Google + Facebook:

In the below map, Boundless Informant tracks intelligence collections from foreign computer networks, with a lopsided focus on disembodied data-mining is apparent: sites marked yellow, orange or, in most intensive surveillance, red, reveal a concentration on Iran (subject of some 14 billion intelligence reports that year), and Pakistan (13.5 billion)–with our Jordanian “allies” third (a close 12.7 billion), and Egypt fourth (7.6 billion), as Boundless Informant processes upwards of 97 billion bits of information worldwide as of 2013, according to this secret map generated by the NSA, and allowing its user to consult the relative volumes of sources of data-collection.

Given the astounding volume of data surveyed, it is striking how poorly connected we seemed to be to Egyptian intelligence or Iranian intelligence, among the clear “hot-spots” of countries most subject to mass-surveillance within the Middle East (Jordan and Egypt) outside Pakistan and Afghanistan and India.

Areas of pronounced data-surveillance contrast to the 2011 global “heat-map” of areas judged by the Institute for Economics and Peace to be most affected by terrorism in its annual Global Terrorism Index:

Are such threats seen as less linked to our sense of sovereignty?

It seems as if we are less clear about the maps such metadata might be measured against, so radically disembodied is the data that they grab. The data-banks of metadata compiled with FISA approval has however supposedly led to amassing a huge reserve of potential clues to identify other terrorist networks–mostly by “gathering data on the incidence of calls made to and from his phone by people associated with him and others,” data for which, since “there’s no personal identifier involved, other than the metadata from a call,” warranted no warrant at all. The expanded the filtering of metadata–now done for two-thirds of all emails–creates a set of data banks too complicated to navigate meaningfully, and which stand at a curious remove from a larger geopolitical landscape.

3. The Metadata-Driven Landscape

The data mined and tracked is so radically disembodied to provide an incomplete or partial picture of the very sites on which “we” have focused most intensely–for which we are not particularly successful in mapping political environments. Indeed, the odd picture of what the areas that NSA obtained crucial information from suggested an Orwellian redrawing of the North American–here labeled simply “Homeland” (in something of a geographic deformation of whoever drew the chart)–even though the map locates most “terror disruptions” far outside the areas to which NSA monitors:

“13 EVENTS IN HOMELAND?” What is the “Homeland” that is mapped above, but a imaginary realization of an amalgamate lands of shared intelligence, or a distortion of data mining? This map, allegedly “declassified” this past July, was produced to substantiate the claim that the interception of messages by the NSA without warrants over fifty times had thwarted over fifty terrorist activities across the globe–even though no evidence has been produced to substantiate this claim and there seems little substantiation that the NSA was involved in some of these ‘plots,’ that their disruption required warrantless surveillance, or that any prosecutions were ever attempted–despite the circulation, like a meme, of the number of “at least fifty” or “fifty-four separate” plots.

The map served to substantiate the need for a system of surveillance that utterly disregarded sovereign lines. Its construction appears the creation of the very computers programmed to do data collection–or the fantasy of the mindset of national intelligence collection with little actual regard for geopolitical sovereign boundaries. (The odd map elicited considerable interest as a de facto unannounced annexation of Canada and Mexico. “Is this a way of blending in Canadian and Mexican terror activity disruptions (which, we’ll remind you, is different from actual plots interrupted) to give a larger sense of the NSA’s success at halting terrorism within our borders?” asked Atlantic Wire.)

Indeed, data collection has provided a basis to crystallize the attituded of the US government to a world as if no sovereign boundaries existed, and in which just as data can be siphoned off the internet, international sovereignty can be violated at will. NSA has recognized the new mode of data collection PRISM or Boundless Informant allow as programs collecting voluminous amount of information.

The report by Glenn Greenwald that a previously unreported X-Keyscore gives the NSA “nearly everything a user does on the internet” and allows employees to search a vast database with “no prior authorization” made one wonder what all those computing drives stored–and to what end they assembled data into data visualizations that became the guiding maps of NSA activities.

While invasive in their filtering of email subjects, addresses, and content, the suggestion of amassing and filtering data is perhaps more apparently impressive than their actual results. Of course, the sheer power of sifting through such data is a form of power, perhaps evident in the mastery FOX news tries to communicate to viewers by outfitting its newsroom with gigantic monitors capable of detailed data visualizations, and the odd belief that large screens show or hold more data.

The big charts in the newsroom monster-tablets reflect the scale and scope of data mining now widely discussed as perfected by the NSA. The daily monitoring and storage of internet data, telephone calls, email, text messaging and GPS tracking regularly shared among interconnected government agencies at “Fusion Centers” across the nation, parsing the content of web-based content of frequently vapid interest. As of 2009, some 72 such centers already existed–one in each state save Idaho–run by the Dept. of Homeland Security as “the centerpiece of state, local, federal intelligence-sharing for the future.”

The hope is that tapping into the backbone of the internet can create a record of messages communicated by our enemies, and a large enough database to map their potential terrorist activities by whatever means–in this slide that recalls an earlier map of data collection, and which boasts the promise of disregarding boundaries of national sovereignty by “upstream” collection of communications in the name national safety:

Relative to PRISM, the hope for global coverage was very much the aim of X-Keyscore, the result of numerous syntheses of corporations’ donations of their metadata, although this seems only to create an illusion of data-control of a truly global scale, focussed on Europe and the Middle East, but with tight coverage of Pakistan and Central America, as well as Indonesia.

Where are these oceans of radically disembodied data stored? Recently, the construction of the Utah Data Center in Bluffdale of one trillion terabytes–or one yottabite–at a cost of $2 billion. This large data farm will, from the fall of 2013, constitute the centerpiece of a range of interconnected NSA data centers located across the country: as the jewel of the security necklace, five times the geographic size of the US Capitol, it will be the center of data-collection, dwarfing the White House, CIA, and Pentagon in information charts, which are all but satellites through which data is funneled to be interpreted, synthesized, and visualized–though the contours of the assembled map remain startlingly unclear.

erhaps mapping the web of surveillance from Bluffdale would be a job for a modern cartographer as much as mapping Bluffdale, where Apostolic United Brethren came to practice polygamy with piety, away from the rest of the world. But the map’s dots might not really need be connected, as the information feeds lack any physically embodied location–especially when one considers the geospatial nature in which the conflicts are framed. For new maps of information flow are no longer rooted in place. The structure o all maps are designed to best encode data, but the tremendous mind-boggling expansion of data generated from the buzz of online exchanges that will be monitored in Utah, where the early Mormons focussed on their own skills to decode a revealed truth made manifest in God’s new land are designed to intercept, synthesize, and analyze data streams in ways that to render paper maps obsolete. The data daily generated so greatly qualitatively supersedes the ability to render them on paper and antiquate the concept of a paper map: no single map could register the shifting nature of relationships and synthesis of variable data within the expansion recently obtained by the NSA for trawling a profile-map of individuals, beyond foreign nationals or web-traffic from foreign sites, suggests something more akin to data aggregation than actual analysis or selective mapping: the project for “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata” provides a way to map the profiles from any internet traffic, pinning visits to websites, phone calls, credit card use and GPS-position, FaceBook friending, photos or likes–all serving to pinpoint us by the data streams we generate daily by smart phones, credit cards, or cell phones–as distinctly individual as a finger print.

The hope of such a compilation of potentially compromising data–or potential networks of dangerous terrorists–emerged as a huge project of intelligence during the increased chaos of the Iraq War. The result was to gain a window in US counter-intelligence surveillance from the FISA court, however, that NSA had long desired on a huge range of phone calls and data streaming within the USA from comprehensive communications routing data of all calls made on the Verizon network, within the US and abroad, from the duration of the calls, connected numbers, and time of call, and even location, if thought to be communicating with, to, or about Al Qaeda:

Recently, considerable attention has been directed to phones as “trackers” that disclose location and and social ties by “frictionless surveillance”–invasive devices which, Paul Ohm argues, effectively “track, store and share the words, movements and even the thoughts of their customers”–and even track locations to predict future locations than one would ever wish to corporations: the cell phone stares back!

If telephony metadata is ostensibly collected in relation to “foreign intelligence” targets, the resulting graphs of networks of social relations in relation to a foreign “agent” or organization identify individual locations and contacts that even expanded beyond a need to check for a tie to “foreign” ties from January 2011, the expansion of programs capable of still greater collection of data and social network synthesis has emerged as an even more prized security tools as comprehensive portrait of individual behavior. (One of the Powerpoint images Edward Snowden downloaded suggested the degree to which, according to an intelligence budget document, the N.S.A. spends more than $250 million a year on its Sigint Enabling Project, which “actively engages the U.S. and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs” to make them “exploitable”–including pre-encryption access–a goal since the mid-1990s, leading to a public warning from Lavabit’s funder that “Without Congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States”–in a war against terror, the American people’s privacy seems to be loosing.)

Yet perhaps ambitions to comprehensive coverage of signals in SYANPSE seems so Faustian it ceases to map of terrorist cells–or snaps the synapses of anyone seeking to synthesize such a gathering of such heterogeneous conduits of data removed from a context of ideological or religious conflict. There is a striking absence of clear selective criteria within this “map” challenges its level of meaning–even as it threatens to violate individual privacy by an expansion that threatens or skirts legal restraints on surveillance. This makes the devotion of such single-minded dedication to an expansion of an internet dragnet–and indeed to break new forms of encryption that encode online communication–particularly questionable. In part, the circulation of data has effectively downplayed the spatial distributions as primary registers of information. In maps driven by the need to encompass the statistical image of a totality, the demand to register such a quantity or breadth of data shift from the sort of detailed qualitative picture of a topography of human settlement or record of human habitation, or even of their actual locations–all absent from the “information” sourced from privileged sites upstream the internet’s architecture from multiple data streams before being sifted on the massive mainframe computers back in Bluffdale, UT.

Whereas the amount of information filtered out in a drawn map serves to process the situation of place in expanse, the selective criteria for mapping are omitted from networks culled from such massive data streams that any search for a name of a “foreign factor” might generate: the acceptance that any email even discussing or relating to “foreign” events seem particularly ironic here, since it grants a stunning exception to the legal protection of the rights of American citizenry on any pretence that bearing on foreign intelligence, rather than only the communications of foreign nationals. The irony lies in the broad purview that this grants the NSA to assemble a map of domestic intelligence. The scramble to identify potential targets in the United States plays out in the internet’s ether, removed from the usual and familiar divides of actual sovereign borders, and hangs from the hope of finding a compromising exchange of messages waiting to be overheard from our rich data banks. Queries are generated by snoops, as much as folks with terrorism expertise:

Despite the breadth of potential queries of user-activity, web-histories, or email contacts, the expansive database rarely generates lists that map onto more than a suspicious landscape, and even when the phrase-driven dragnet through personal correspondences offers a poor matrix to parse information or snare communications beyond input values or potential actual contacts–and almost seems a self-generated search of expanding data flows that the filters collect.

The mapping of traffic that the Digital Network Intelligence received from its FAIRVIEW program–an “umbrella program” tapping into intercontinental fiber-optic cables–of North Korea’s ties to the world in one day suggests the monitoring a constantly changing map of internet traffic, by transposing such data to an interface with a familiar map:

Or the similar ties of traffic to Pakistan, which reveal substantial traffic to and from Brazil:

What sorts of “environments” do these maps of data mining reveal, and how much can they be trusted as predictive sources? Note how a map of the Middle East and Persian Gulf, situated behind the statistic that NSA boasts, blends into a sequence of digitized information, as if the landscape were the data that is mined by the X-Keyscore Program:

4. Metadata-Driven Maps

The networks drawn from amassing newly generated data recalls the logical operations by which digitized maps are regularly updated with amazing speed, but without a similar filtering device. Data-driven maps often dispense with filters in the need to provide a total map as if this would provide a decisive advantage in detecting potential networks of terrorists and thwarting plots whose actual dimensions are only shadowily known: indeed, a premium rests on the totality of data encompassed, rather than the criteria of selectivity they adopt. In this, they reflect a new variety of mapping forms, as much as they express the desideratum of total surveillance.

How has this come to replace an actual map of local rights? Partly by the odd parsing of strictures against warrantless surveillance of Americans as permitting the surveillance of non-Americans.

NSA apparently presumes not only that such signals of communication can be tracked–doubtful even before Edward Snowden released several NSA Powerpoint images–but that the amount of information provides a meaningfully selective social information: after former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey cleared the screening of metadata “without regard to the nationality or [actual] location of the communicants,” in the “Defense Supplemental Procedures Governing Communications Metadata Analysis” in 2008, opening the door to maps of social network analysis, justifying its expanded surveillance by drug smuggling or the clandestine weapons’ trading or foreign businesses. Even as General Alexander refuses to openly respond to questions about NSA gathering of large quantities of data of American citizens, this change opened a veritable floodgate on data storage and analysis skirting safeguards for invasiveness that may expand plans to process upwards of 20 billion “record events” daily.

The result is a map of global listening posts and interception of data that creates a distorted image of the world, as well as our picture of the respect for individual rights: X-Keyscore validates the all-seeing and omniscient qualities of the NSA.

Whereas accuracy was a premium in the selectively drawn map, the value of accuracy shifts when it is assumed to lie within the system whose data is mapped rather than the map itself, and whose authority lies in the multiple servers or listening posts from which data intelligence is collected–and not the points from which an actual map is synthesized–and no integrity of individual ownership of metadata is respected.

The resulting map is an image of the monitoring of internet communications that eerily recalls Big Brother. The failure to filter selective data in a simplified image might be pointed to as creating the ballooning of data potentialities in these ostensible counter-terrorism data banks of “record events” that the NSA seeks to protect as its own. The range of data collection filtered from the metadata gathered by the NSA culls mediated data, as much as it provides a selective “map,” from which we can then select suspicious profiles. Yet the map is a poor model for explaining its power, even as it justifies the purloined data-collection processes that the government is currently expanding.

The question of the legality of arrogating communications is, in a sense, masked over by the promise of total information control that is expressed within this map–an information control that encompasses both local positions and strategic communications within groups. As a recent article by Laura Poitras and James Risen suggests, the question of what this means for individual privacy demand to be answered: under the title of “better person centric analysis,” without even a business-like hyphen, seems an expansion of snooping activities: the map is a justification for wire-tapping and surveillance, collecting information without the coherence or concreteness of a record related to geographic position.

The hegemony of the data visualization risks creating a radically disembodied map: if data-collection is not about creating a map per se, but the constellation of data used in geolocation is a map, if one with few filters: the term “map” may suggest disinterested objectivity in data collection, or naturalize our acceptance of such”analysis” as a “map.” There is a clear tendency to invest the search with a logic of creating a comprehensive map–as in covering the globe’s terrestrial expanse–in the names for such programs, but such a map will not only never be drafted, and can never reflect the actual arrangements of any networks of terrorist cells, given their constantly shifting profile. Yet intelligence networks as X-Keyscore continue to map the ongoing “real-time” internet activity in comprehensive fashion, in hopes to assemble a predictive map of individuals and identify targets of future surveillance world-wide, and illustrate the scope that will comprehend the broad purview of the United States’ global war on terror, in order to emulate the all-seeing eye of Total Information Awareness.

The resulting data visualization may be, as well as disrespecting of individual privacy or local sovereignty, a fantasy of totalistic synthesis that is more distracting than clearly conceived. For “X-Keyscore” synthesizes data from everywhere, in short, covering a map of web-traffic from which there is no evasion. But although the data culled and synthesized from such sources as GPS, telephone logs, email communications, or social networks in “social network graphs” extrapolated from “signals intelligence” based on something on the order of 20 billion “record events” daily–this is quite a substantial rise from the 1.1 daily cell phone calls or 700 million daily phone records that the “Mainway” program processed in 2011–how much does this create a federal dragnet to individuate potentially dangerous individual activities? We have come to store metadata and content alike about US citizens for five years online and for an additional 10 years offline to permit “historical searches” of past activities in the name of national security. But the lack of any filter suggests a failure to map-a failure of imagination to map, by accumulating so large a range of records that it presents each an every one. Rather than map locations in a fixed manner or orienting a viewer to inter-relations within a whole, the coherence of the map is less a question than the contours and limits of individuals by crucial signposts of their daily lives and interaction.

The resulting map of “social network profiles” described in leaks synthesized 164 different forms of social relations in but 60 minutes to “chart community of interest profiles” in a convincingly comprehensive fashion. But the limits of the resulting data visualizations are alarming. The culling of an individual profile within this data gives new sense to the ‘filtering’ of information within a map: for programs that allow NSA to reconstruct profiles of an individual from multiple streams of data powerful as an identifying and, effectively, a surveillance too: by tailoring the mapping to a specific person or individual, the 20 billion “record events” taken in daily constituted a basis to map individuals within a potentially incriminating network, and in so doing to orient the intelligence networks to areas worthy of further attention. (Although it has been the case since 2008 that the FISA court only stipulated data can only be collected if at least one end of the exchange be foreign, there is no constitutional protection of the privacy of “metadata”–often far more incriminating–which can be used “without regard to nationality or location,” legitimizing mapping of individual profiles by social network graphing, when able to be justified by its relevance to procuring foreign intelligence.)

The result is less a mapping of networks per se than mapping a new language of privacy. The mapping of the ‘metadata’ of a call’s time, location, length, and billing filters content draw relations between devices to discern webs of connectivity or “signals intelligence”–defined by the NSA as “collecting foreign intelligence from communications and information systems and providing it to customers across the US Government, such as senior civilian and military officials“–ostensibly filter out content for the shadowy foreign networks, although they can also store content via wiretaps or email exchanges. The map they offer of internet use is distinct from the map of global inhabitation, or even of a statistical visualization of place. Place is, as it were, flattened to reflect the globalization of its primary concerns: mapping data flow becomes a practice in itself whose paranoiac practices of data collection necessitate colossal computer banks and decoding centers as large as cities to oversee the daily expansion of channels of information-flow catalogued as potentially worthy of interest, informative or not. While all data is potentially with interest, the pre-mapping and imagining that valuable information will of necessity flow along familiar channels–Facebook; Gmail; Yahoo; maybe even somehow LinkedIn–oddly supposes that our own habits of information-generation are the same as those we’re guarding against–and that controlling those channels is the best basis for preparing oneself.

Land-maps act as useful filters by limiting information so as to embody distributions and spatial variations in new forms. The networks graphed filter out all but the signal pathways of information–or signals intelligence. The results gain their value by encompassing the almost exponentially growing range of data and information that they process, rather than creating a spatial distribution of them. The linkages they create provide a sort of skein in which to sift through or catch suspicious characters and “draw” a schema of relations among them. This occurs at a significant price tag: Poitras and Risen describe a multiyear budget of $394 million dedicated to “rapidly discover and correlate complex relationships and patterns across diverse data sources on a massive scale,” as of 2008, to synthesize the culling of phone numbers, e-mail addresses and IP addresses by such a dream of “Better Person-Centric Analysis.” The program that was designed to “rapidly discover and correlate complex relationships and patterns across diverse data sources on a massive scale” maps individuals in social networks from the totality of information and metadata that they have grabbed.

As early as 2006, USA Today reported that the NSA had “been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth” and intentionally “using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity.” A document Poitras and Risen cited dating to 2008 cited an “Enterprise Knowledge System” designed to allow the government to chart and locate potential targets of surveillance–or speedily discern targets of state intelligence, to better map them in clandestine form–and to graph them from 2010. NSA director Keith Alexander continues to ensure us that this is the only means to “connect the dots” between foreign phone lines and phones in the United States’ shorelines, echoing fears of the terrorist plots of 9/11/2001, although the fears of surveillance of US citizens as abusing its surveillance powers in ways that echoed the abusive targeting of NSA surveillance during the Vietnam war in the top-secret Minaret program. By 2007, the NSA itself estimated 850 billion “call events” stored in their databases and accessible to searches. And so the NSA Powerpoint rather cheekily asks recruits to consider the rhetorical question by a collage of trademarks and logos from which they actively siphon data:

The totality of connections amassed by the NSA programs eerily mirror how Mark Zuckerberg discussed his hope to “take these separate maps of the graph and pull them all together, [so that] then we can create a Web that’s smarter, more social, more personalized, and more semantically aware” in “Open Graph,” a composite image of overlays among, say, the smaller businesses mapped in Yelp, musical choices in Pandora, and searches in Yahoo. Analogous ambitions for mapping the totality of information however raises questions about abilities to track individuals that violate their rights to privacy and effectively spy on their activities in ways that they can never know. How we can chart data overflows in information watersheds such as Facebook, Gmail, Google, Yahoo, and Twitter raises questions of how we map today, when the huge databases that are readily available online offer the possibility of generating maps to assemble a total image–often less linked to geographical certitude, and decouple the very category of place from distribution–but a cartographical landscape shaped by disembodied data. The limits of the sorts of “maps” this creates of individuals should be apparent, given the considerable price tags on these operations and the huge investment of manpower in turning up social ties.

The interests such a map serves are less evident than the logic by which data-driven maps capture, and the sorts of landscape that they ostensibly reveal from a totality of information. They seem to be informed not by descriptive tools of mapping, but the ways that “data driven maps” inventively employ cartographical visualizations to explain complex concepts, illustrate relationships or tell a story using GIS tools, using tools to build layered maps to describe geographic data–by focussing less on human populations’ actual distribution than on the map as an expressive, layered medium to reveal spatial networks in visually effective ways, by grabbing data and then plotting it in effective ways. The data-driven map has a logic derived from disembodied data, in other words, which it seeks to embody–rather than impose order on a transcription of spatial distributions.

The NSA’s aim for total and apparently seamless coverage of global networks says a lot about how we map data. by funneling data into visualizations that often stop short of the clarification of social practices they illuminate, the agency seems consumed as they are with the promise a map of terrorist networks–in which ‘space’ ceases to be the primary capacious container of meaning, reflecting how tracking is removed from spatial coherence, and probably unable to “sort” the information it collects in a coherent vision.

The data-driven map is constructed to interface with other maps, rather than creating a map in itself. It creates a map whose very disposability derives from the immediacy and rapid changes among data it so readily incorporates and generates in a recognizable visual form. This widespread use of maps as interfaces, familiar from many data visualizations, presents something of a shift in how space is conceived within a map. It has interesting parallels with the articulation of a determined spatial map in early modern Europe, because it creates an image of coherence where spatial measurement is less the subject of the map. Yet such “maps” risk devaluing space, by diminishing the meaning or category of place; encoding place as a value (rather than a category) and visualizing data against a cartographical interface is removed from creating a map, although it creates a similar confidence of totality and omniscence.

This post might stop here, given its length, but it is helpful to cite two cases of how place is a diminished category in recent “maps” based on the large-scale generation of data. Let me close with two examples. The meaning of “place” shifts as we organize “big data” in maps in ways that parallel the data mining and visualization to which the NSA has come to dedicate such attention–and which seem a model for the processing of large-scale data-collection from the internet.

6. Still More Data-Driven Maps

Two examples of how maps provide compelling ways as graphic interfaces for “big data” offer a powerfully seductive model for the expanding the collection and analysis of surveillance data in our cities. The statistical demographer Dustin Cable designed a striking racial dot map based on the 2010 Census to provide a ‘snapshot’ of the nation’s population. Cable took data from each of the 8-million odd census blocks in the nation to create a broad-brushed visualization of the entire nation’s population–noting each person the census registered in a synthesis able to be magnified, navigated, and explored as an alternate landscape, readily viewable in all its totality. But the presuppositions and amalgamated categories by which he did so, if they create a fascinating picture of population variations, are not only created with a considerably broad brush-strokes, but suggest some odd presuppositions of the integrity of the five categories of racial “identity” that he used. The map sought to create a “composite image” of the nation, although it did not preserve the defining features or individuality of its subjects, so much as create an imagined notional subject of observation in itself. Rather than filtering information, the digitized compendia aims to visualize networks from generated data not ordered in a framework of reference, but that orients one primarily to itself–or the data that it collects or has collected. In ways that make one wonder what it’s use is anyway, this computer-generated map assigns a dot to each person in the United States that it filters and displays in a scattering across census blocks, even though the “dot” corresponding to each person is itself smaller than could be rendered in the pixels of the computer screen. As if an attempt to resolve in digital terms Borges’ famous story about the construction of a map as large as the territory that it seeks to map, the problems that ensue from an absence of selective criteria in mapping readily generated data recalls other similar Faustian shema to comprehend masses of data in an age of information overload–data generated from information networks. Indeed, the census data that Cable uses is spread locally into the units of census blocks–odd descriptive categories that often run across neighborhoods, states, or county lines, and provide more of a pastiche on the local level, if a nice pastel on the national.

Indeed, the muting of many colors in the one-dot Census Block map seems to downplay both yellow dots marking “Hispanic” individuals, or indeed many of the catch-all “Asian” dots of red, save in their heaviest concentration, as does the scattering of dots within each census blocks, to downplay their visibility in a sea of light blue. Even in an age of the recognized diversity, the map casts the country as by and large powder blue–or caucasian.

Were does it map diversity, save on the coasts? The one-dot map boasts a total visualization of a dataset boasts a richly chromatic distribution of populations in the Bay Area and San Francisco East:

Despite Cable’s hope to provide a statistical “snapshot” of the American population in a single image, the categories parsed and colors employed serve to register non-whites more than to give a portrait of diversity rooted in self-identification. California’s coastline, taken as a whole, reveals a fascinating mosaic, although one in which the value of a “dot” is so blurred that the picture is less of a meaningfully measured distribution than an aestheticized view, whose categories are less meaningful–“Asian”? “Hispanic”? “Other”?–than its author might hope to communicate. What is going on in projecting these categories into a map more redolent of inherited and outdated “racial” divisions than he would care to admit. They are used as generalities to parse the amounts of big data that the census provides, rather than as categories that retain meaning on a local level–or serve to negotiate the local and general in the manner of an actually fine-grained map.

The map provides a minimal fine-grained distinctions of integration or lack as a result: the impossibility of granting enough space to visualize each dot’s relation to one another provides limited visibility to parse relative integration even in a map that fills the confines of a large-screen television; the census block provides a gross yardstick for diversity, but an incomplete metric to distribute California’s population.

There is minimal ability to impose meaningful distinctions or extract meaningful distinctions from the map, despite the admirable nature of its one-dot-per-person esthetic, on account of the well-intentioned aim to render the population visible: limited screening of data among the 308,745,538 dots leave each smaller than a pixel on your computer screen; the resulting “color-coded” snapshot that is more effective in revealing the smudges of colors, rendered by the variety of purples and teals, that might map ethnic or racial integration in urban areas, most likely by the overlapping of “red” “White” and “blue” “Asian”–a fairly meaningless category not created by the Census itself, but by Cable using more refined census data–but often masking actual divisions more apparent at smaller scales, but difficult to render or parse at the gross map of the United States; moreover, the dots are not distributed with spatial accuracy, but distributed in a random scattering within each census block, to magnify integration.

The simple questions of how we inhabit space are difficult to map, given the overwhelming demand not to filter anything from a map. The data, in other words, is greater than a visualization is able to render. In similar ways, the “Sigint” data culled by the NSA suggest a mapping of the inhabitation of information networks, and the complete relinquishing of space. If minimal geographic information is present in Cable’s statistical map, the filtering of space from what I will call the Sigint map is even more pronounced, and a premium placed on its rapid generation. Whereas Cable generated the map, once having entered data of the entire nation, in some five hours against a Google API, rapid fire surveying of the communications web occurs with similar speed, removed from any illusion of an actual “space.” The filtering of data in each case provides few tools or handles to process the data on which they’re based.

The absence of space–its filtering from data visualizations–raises questions of the problems of drawing meaningful distinctions from a map, and specifically of the relations between individuals and a map. Space is not a homogeneous and recognizable extent that a territorial map can bound, delimit, and define. Rather, how space now exists for most Americans is far less tied to place than they were in the immediate past, given frequent geographic mobility and shifts in landscape: the mutability and erosion of space is something of a crisis in epistemological practices or familiarity, that compels us to create new spaces that are more familiar. I close with a very striking data-driven map tracking population by data compilation. The data visualization that is projected on a map is based less on rootedness or location than by taking web-traffic as a proxy for spatial situation, to suggest the notional construction of place in our cartographical landscapes. Some of the most impressive maps expressive of the mobility of Americans in recent years are those compiled by the realtors Trulia and graphic design group Stamen to track visits to realty websites in different cities across our increasingly mobile nation: rather than a track individual mobility and relocations, the maps compiled by Stamen and Trulia map interest in relocation and possibilities of geographic mobility–by mapping searches for homes suggest desires to relocate to different places, rather than geographic mobility. A lack rootedness of populations in a place or community can reveal disengagement and lack of responsibility for a given place. This example of people moving from New York reveals a rather restricted level of imagining what other areas of the nation they could live in, here based on the rather limited data sampling of October-December 2011: Outside the city–if one counts Long Island and Poughkeepsie as in the metro area–Atlanta, Palm Beach, Miami and Los Angeles are the dominant sites for prospective movers. One could make arguments about blue-staters only moving to blue states. But this restricted range of interest in geographic mobility contrasts in ways with, say, Los Angeles, although they reflect each others’ general interest in limiting cross-country migration to one another’s region. Some Angelenos look at San Francisco, or Sacramento, but are focussed primarily on Riverside, Orange County, and Oxnard, yet as well as Las Vegas, San Diego, and Phoenix, suggesting a far more extensive regional mobility. To be sure, the question of restriction of a compelling interest in geographic mobility is evident in cities as Cincinnati to relatively nearby cities n the final months of 2011:

Or, to take an even more prominent case, from, say, Fresno:

In each case, a temptation for wide mobility–if only of the voyeuristic observation of realty sites–is evident in America. And a considerable spread of regional interest–as well as a less pronounced national interest–is evident if one maps those looking at houses in, for example, Oakland:

And an even broader range of interest across the nation–at least from Chicago, New York, Washington, Houston and Phoenix–if one surveys those examining potential moves to San Francisco:

Of course, this data is skewed by those who have access to look at realty websites, and by the far greater web-traffic that results from a densely populated set of cities on the east and west coasts. But it is striking how less mobile the nation in general seems to think of itself. When we map in each of these different cases, the map seems more evocative of the authority of the territorial maps which they so faintly echo but which they effectively erase; as if to question the meaningfulness of place as a construct, the perhaps unintended divorce of location from data undermines communicative effectiveness by the decoupling of place from distribution, however–the mapping of flows, in place of spatial relations or networks of geographic travel, suggests not only a new age of map making, but a wanting lack of filters within the map. If the ways we read maps were based on our acceptance of filters, and an absence of the registration of totality in favor of the selective choices of the cartographer, data visualizations serve to synthesize a range of data as much as defining the criteria of selectivity that privilege the readability of a spatial distribution alone. What this means for the claims of and reading of maps is unclear, but the notion of place is the category that informs the reading of maps, but less of readily accepted construction or presupposition for how a uniform expanse is able to be read. We are, however, using the forms (and promise) of maps to decode information flows to grant some orientation on the networks we can’t perceive. This is true both in our visualization of census data or data visualizations of searching websites as well as of graphing personal information: but the promise of mapping creates a logic of comprehensive coverage that they don’t possess. The attribution of such goals of total information may divert our attentiveness or abilities of interpretation from real-time events–much as the project for eavesdropping on internet communications and telephone calls may have taken a greater share of the intelligence market than understanding our relation to the Iraqi people, or our geopolitical maps of Iran and Iraq. The US seems to assume too often a sort of empyrean map-maker’s view of the situation on the ground, in the confidence that we need total information coverage–and it is what can best protect us. We may all end up employed in Utah, trying to decode encrypted wisdom that reminds us of our status as a privileged people, privileged by our access to technology rather than our liberties.

We also may end up remembering this age of increased filtering of internet users as being as antiquated as this map of internet empires, whose servers are only seem omnipotent but serve but a portion of the inhabited world, and have only a loose hold on geographic expanse:

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October 13, 2013 · 9:00 am

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