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Agreements:
    
    1) he finds mass targeted distinctions affect of sweeping under the carpet discussions about the legitimacy of targeted surveillance and how targets are select populations.

Accusations:



        it makes it sound like we are suggesting that encryption is not a good response: encryption is a good response, but how you frame the encryption problem matters: crypto is not crypto 
        is the problem only governments or also large corporations, is the problem everyone's data, or that there are policies that deem certain data more precious and worthy of protection than others data. see yemen study mit!
        crypto used for national security is another thing than for privacy: he knows that
        

                we are not saying that white men are only decoration...they may also be under surveillance
Our issues with his framing:
        
        

"It also only recognizes as legitimate political statements only those that wholeheartedly align with a US centered, identity inspired, view of politics. One must denounce surveillance of “racial, gendered, classed, and colonial” nature that protects the privileges of the “liberal subject (White, male, and middle class)” to be political. Protesting at surveillance on the basis of liberal values; on the basis of national interests; on the basis of good governance; on the basis of economics; on the basis of technical feasibility and ultimately rationality or effectiveness; on the basis of the rule of law; and even on the basis of protecting political, even radical or social revolutionary, but not identity based groups; all of those are seen as a-political and purely technocratic, despite dealing fundamentally with the management of the common affairs. This represents an incredible narrowing of politics, to ultimately what the article, considers “the right politics” at the detriment of all other."
        an either or, did we say that?
        we may not have a complete agenda for how to move forward, but we are interested in having that discussion!
        i don't think we said privileged white man can't speak or they don't understand the experience of others, george does (although this is probably also a result of having engaged and experienced things, but let's say this is not a precondition). it is the ability of homogenous groups of privilege to easy reach pragmatic conclusions at the cost of those groups that are not in the room. coming from a country with a history of crazy politics under the name of national security, the statement by the academics is a fucking embarassment.
        
        If we stop at the security engineers, we will not have the experience of those we call "users". If we stop at users, we will not understand how different communities around the globe can participate in, be trapped by, may resist the infrastructures that we are so committed to making more ethical.   
        
        So, no, I think in our article we were too sweet. I think the resistance to discuss race, gender, class, geopolitics coupled with the desire to depoliticize or naturalize national security (spies gotta spy), the war on terror (ISIS as a justification to propel the war on terror rather than to assess its destructive consequences), and what George's blog post does: you either do identity politics or you "real politics", observes what we were trying to criticize: that the boundaries of politics does not include those racialized, sexualized, etc. others, or if so, they need to leave those behind to enter the conversation in which the privileged, educated white man is the rational speaker. And, no, I think we were too modest to argue that those engaged in counter-surveillance should diversify who they speak to. Again and again we hear people talk of diversity within the circles of counter surveillance, by that they mean they were lawyers from different backgrounds, or computer scientists or security engineers with different political convictions that were able to agree on a pragmatic universally acceptable solution. This reminds me of  person who recently asked me enthusiastically what I thought about inviting Laura Poitras as a keynote speaker to a large computer science event: what it would take to provide a balanced view? I asked her what she meant with that: invite somebody who was the subject of surveillance rather than one who was documenting it. On my side, this was a rhetorical move: it was very clear that the audience of this conference could find Poitras' position on surveillance and the war on terror too radical, and in order to avoid alienating his audience, the
 organizer wanted to provide an either or option: was Snowden a hero or a fugitive, should we as computer scientists be taking the revelations about the surveillance programs seriously and if so how. What was interesting was in this either or, the possibility of including somebody subject to the surveillance programs was not even an option. The discussion could only be had among those who are seen as subjects, and who have the power to influence the governance, politics etc. those who are not seen as subjects are not even in the frame of the discussion. 
        
        This needs to change. And, if we failed to convey this message in our paper now, if we did so clumsily, we are happy to learn. We are thankful for the written contribution from George to show where we might have sounded one-dimensional: as people working within computer science and law we are very aware of the multiple dimensions of surveillance and have made many efforst, some more visible than others to open the discussion and never to narrow it. The suggestion that we make poor arguments and depoliticize by talking about race is only proof that we should do more panels, write more articles, and bring more communities together with computer scientists and security engineers who "own" the counter-surveillance discussion.   Maybe it is time to convene to discuss the diversity of crypto politics and strategies forward. 
Answering these questions requires reflecting different political, social, legal and economics stakes and their racialized, gendered, classed, geopolitical underpinnings and implications!

We must beware of at whose cost we find consensus around a flavor of national security, and we ask all our colleagues to not push this discussion away by saying it steals from the political but consider ways to have a richer conversation that questions in every step who is in the room, and how the discussion in the rooms that we sit in reproduces whose experience counts and whose is made invisible.

George says that he is a proponent of end-to-end encryption on all communications, free of government and other backdoors, as a major ingredient in countering mass and other (some targeted) forms of electronic communications. This sounds like a universal principle that is really worthy and I suspect that all three authors would also subcribe to. However, who counts as an "end" is not settled and is effectively the central point of contention of encryption. We rarely hear governments going to court to stop HTTPS which certainly may be effective in raising the cost of eavesdropping in bulk, but if the "end" is an organization that serves the informatization of everyday life, and therefore contribute to the surveillant assemblage, the contention is unlikely. In comparison, if the end is an individual user, things get contentious, and if the agencies want to bring their case forward, it is likely (although not always) to play on racialized, gendered, ethnicized and geopoliticized notion of the other who cannot be seen as a legitimate subject. In accepting the inquiry into whether terrorists in San Bernardino, Brussels and Paris used encryption as a relevant question, pro-encryption advocates join a loosing game. There is a sigh of relief on twitter and blogs if it is revealed that some set of attackers used burner phones instead of encryption. Rather than defending that encryption, like water, roads, transportation are a substantial part of our infrastructure the abuse of which should not be sufficient to contend their public availability, we accept a discusourse that says it is plausible to question the deployment of end-to-end encryption between individuals on the basis of who uses it. These advocates hence fall for the framing of encryption as a weapon which muddles the possibility of defending it as a basic right and pulls it right back into national security. Something like this!

        
AK thoughts:
            
            
ALSO - let's not forget if possible to refer to other articles or the introduction to the special issue we are a part of - as Paula suggested.

Outline:
    
    
1. Intro paragraph

The Snowden revelations were a turning point for different communities working on counter -surveillance. How did these different communities respond to the Snowden revelations , which voices are heard and what h as become the dominant response? Th ese were the question s that the three of us were thinking about when contributing to the W orkshop on I nfrastructures of E mpire [0] , which took place on April 25/26 at New York University's Gallatin school and was organized by Paula Chakravartty (NYU), Miriyam Aouragh (U of Westministed) and Jack Qiu (Chinese University of Hong Kong) . 

For sure, the 21st century counter-surveillance is a d ebate for technical experts, lawyers and those interested in policy reforms. But, how about the voices of the communities that are experiencing the surveillance in question most strongly ?   Coming from our different perspectives, we d ived into a project together to s tudy the movement s against state surveillance in order to see whose voices have come to dominate this debate and whose voices were ommitted.

Earlier this year, the product of this work, ti t tled "C rypto and empire : the contradictinos of the counter-surveillance advocacy , " was published in " Media Infrastructures and Empire " a Special Issue of the Media, Culture, and Society Journal. The special issue focused on the embedding of media and information infrastructures in the geopolitics of empire. Most importantly, the editors intend to connect popular discussions that essentialized the transformative role of digital media in the Arab Spring to debates about the United States and other Western colonial powers’ legacy of occupation, ongoing violence and strategic interests in the region. In the process, the authors also aspired to move away from Eurocentric conceptions of imperial interests by widening the focus to understanding the myth and reality of the "rise of the BRICS" (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). This proved to be a learning process in which we developed the argument of our paper.
                                
In t he article , we argue that there is a cost to the predominantly technical and legal framing in which the counter-surveillance movement was preominantly shaped . We argue, bsed on the distinction between mass surveillance (bad) and targeted surveillance (good), that a dominant frame was deployed that does not attend to the racial, gendered, classed, and colonial aspects of the surveillance programs. We go one step further and argue that this framing even contributes to undermining this possibility. Our aim was to inform people partaking in this debate of this issue and hopefully start a conversation o n how to ensure a wider societal debate about surveillance that is informed by the experiences of those subjected to targeted surveillance and associated state violence.

Responses:
Given our aspiration to collectively rethink the counter-surveillance debate , we have been happy with the exposure and responses the article has received until now. One critical, engaged response of George Danezis, just 48 hours after publication shows us that further conversation is both possible and necessary. George Danezis is an important voice in the counter-surveillance debate, as well as a colleague, co-author and friend . In the article, we used his work as inspiration and at times to demonstrate our point that the counter-surveillance debate is informed by academic research . I n the following, we will discuss that in addition to pointing out some possible limitations of the article, the blogpost by Danezis illustrates the point we are making 

3. LIMITATIONS (JORIS)
Some limitations of the article directly relate to its length. We had analyzed a much wider array of counter-surveillance responses than the ones that made their way into the final version. As a result, those voices we used to paint the picture of counter-surveillance frame we characterize as selective and problematic may find our engagement with their work superficial and limited. We also decided to 

Gloabl dependencies not included (but inspired/informed by cyber-colonialism article).

4. Central concerns of George
a. Reduction of his work
b. Narrowing of politics /identity politics / US centric view
d. Denying the reality of crypto politics. We are naive. They are grown-ups making progress.

5. Our reaction:
    
    factual claims:
We were hoping for reactions from 'people like' George Danezis. 

His more fundamental critique of our article is not persuasive

Danezis makes a false distinction between surveillance programs selecting on a “‘racial, gendered, classed, and colonial’ basis per se” or “simply on the basis of the national and economic interests of the nations that implemented them, current geopolitical priorities, and the needs of political elites that commissioned them.” However, political elites do not calculate their interests outside of the racial, gendered, colonial, and class-based frameworks through which they interpret their position in the world. 

In Danezis discussion of surveillance in Greece and how to address it, the discussion is centered upon surveillance of elites. Unsurprisingly, from this vantage point, policy reform and encryption technology look like the most viable solutions. But this illustrates our argument. The picture changes when we ask about the surveillance of non-elite constituencies in Greece, for example migrants and refugees whose movements are policed in Greece in various ways as part of a broader EU infrastructure of surveillance. To think about how this constituency might overcome the problem of surveillance, and what is the role of technologists within that struggle, is taken by the article to be “abstract,” “identity politics,” and not “grown up.”  

The justification for avoiding these political questions is that it would undermine a consensus among technologists about the direction of their political activism. But, again, that is precisely the point we are making in the article. Danezis’s “consensus” only looks like a consensus because certain experiences of surveillance – those of racialized populations, for example – are not expressed in the conversation. Then, when people try to bring those experiences into the conversation, they are told, in circular fashion, that they are threatening the consensus. This tells us that the consensus only exists because of a pattern of exclusion hiding behind Danezis’s undefined use of the “us” word. This is in fact the real “narrowing of politics.”  This consensus might appear to be a strength that pragmatically enables an effective advocacy strategy in policy-making. But it only looks that way if the effects on certain constituencies are ignored. This exclusion also introduces vulnerabilities that the state can exploit, and so is counter-productive, even for activists within the consensus. This is illustrated, for example, in the FBI vs. Apple case, where the racialized threat of terrorism was mobilized to justify the breaking of encryption. The racial politics of state arguments for surveillance cannot be effectively countered if discussions of “race” are seen as no more than distractions by technology activists.

we are not being us centric

 Conclusion
 Restate aims of the article.
 Forward conversation
 Questions and challenges to be included moving forward
 Some people need to (be able to) speak up in meetings and there should be effors to connect to targeted communities.
 
 grown up politics of experts coming together
 and if you are outside of that world you are abstract, ally, identity politics
 sensible reforms and dreamy radicalism on the other hand
what should the technical experts do?
human rights communities need to be accountable to the communities that they work for
elevation of a disciplinary project to a general political project is the problem here
 

[0] Workshop on Infrastructures of Empire https://sites.google.com/site/empiresworkshop2014/home