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Something Went Wrong 0003 © 2018 McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern assisted by: Mieko Anders, Rachel Z. and the contributors, San Francisco, Arndt, Amy Barnes, Landon Bates, Ellie California. Issue 54, The End of Trust— Bozmarova, Rita Bullwinkel, Jessica otherwise referred to as “Long Island DeCamp, Tasha Kelter, Trang Luu, Iced Tea Shares Went Gangbusters After Jane Marchant, Christina Ortega, Lydia Changing its Name to Long Blockchain” Oxenham, Leon Pan, Alexandre Pomar, and Other Oddities of the Fourth Industrial Enzo Scavone, Courtney Soliday. Revolution—is distributed under the terms web development: Brian Christian. of the Creative Commons Attribution- publishing associate: Eric Cromie. copy NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 editor: Daniel Levin Becker. founding International License and may be freely editor: Dave Eggers. executive and distributed in its original, unmodified editorial director: Kristina Kearns. form for noncommercial purposes, as art direction: Sunra Thompson. long as the author(s) and collection are managing editor: Claire Boyle. properly attributed and the CC BY-NC-ND standards are followed. jacket and interior illustrations: Sunra Thompson. The pieces in this collection are under copyright by their respective authors sidebars compiled by: for them to do with whatever they damn Landon Bates, Trang Luu, Leon Pan. well please, and, unless otherwise noted below, are distributed under the Creative editorial advisors: The Electronic Commons Attribution 4.0 International Frontier Foundation, with special License. “Search Queries of Visitors thanks to Bill Budington, Cindy Cohn, Who Landed at the Online Litmag The Andrew Crocker, Bennett Cyphers, Big Ugly Review, but Who, We Are Pretty Hugh D’Andrade, Cory Doctorow, Elliot Sure, Were Looking for Something Harmon, Aaron Jue, Jason Kelley, Dave Else” by Elizabeth Stix and “The Digital Maass, Corynne McSherry, Soraya Blues” by Jennifer Kabat are distributed Okuda, Seth Schoen. under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 mcsweeney’s inaugural publishing International License. board: Natasha Boas, Kyle Bruck, Carol Davis, Brian Dice (president), Isabel The views expressed in this issue are Duffy-Pinner, Dave Eggers, Caterina those of the individual writers and do Fake, Hilary Kivitz, Nion McEvoy, Gina not necessarily represent those of Pell, Jeremy Radcliffe, Jed Repko, Julia McSweeney’s. Slavin, Vendela Vida. creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Printed in China MCS54 0004 McSWEENEY’S 54 → CONTENTS MCS54 0005 A NOTE from the editors 0007 LETTERS Jenna Wortham, Jenny Odell, Carson Mell, 0010 Chelsea Hogue, and Joanna Howard FOREWORD by Cindy Cohn, Executive Director 0023 of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ESSAY EVERYTHING 0033 HAPPENS SO MUCH Sara Wachter-Boettcher ESSAY PEAK DENIAL 0043 Cory Doctorow Q+A JULIA ANGWIN AND TREVOR 0049 PAGLEN IN CONVERSATION Moderated by Reyhan Harmanci DEBATE SHOULD LAW ENFORCEMENT 0081 USE SURVEILLANCE? Hamid Khan, Ken Montenegro, and Myke Cole McSWEENEY’S SAN FRANCISCO MCS54 0006 ESSAY THE ECONOMICS OF MISTRUST 0095 Ethan Zuckerman ESSAY SEARCH QUERIES OF VISITORS 0109 WHO LANDED AT THE ONLINE LITMAG THE BIG UGLY REVIEW, BUT WHO, WE ARE PRETTY SURE, WERE LOOKING FOR SOMETHING ELSE Elizabeth Stix Q+A EDWARD SNOWDEN EXPLAINS 0115 BLOCKCHAIN TO HIS LAWYER— AND THE REST OF US Ben Wizner ESSAY WATCHING THE BLACK BODY 0133 Malkia Cyril ESSAY THE DIGITAL BLUES 0147 Jennifer Kabat Q+A ALVARO BEDOYA TALKS 0181 WITH CINDY COHN ESSAY RECONSIDERING ANONYMITY 0195 IN THE AGE OF NARCISSISM Gabriella Coleman → CONTENTS MCS54 0007 ESSAY IT TAKES A VILLAGE 0219 Camille Fassett Q+A VIRGINIA EUBANKS TALKS 0233 WITH JACOB SILVERMAN The Postcards We Send: Soraya Okuda 0251 Tips on Staying Vigilant in the Information Age ESSAY A MORE VISIONARY 0275 MOVEMENT Thenmozhi Soundararajan ESSAY THE MEDIA VIRUS, 0287 MY PROBLEM CHILD Douglas Rushkoff ESSAY THE RIGHT TO EXPERIMENT 0307 Bruce Schneier ESSAY FORESEEING FOIAs 0317 FROM THE FUTURE WITH MADELINE ASHBY Dave Maass A Compendium of Edward 0039, 0091, 0130, Law Enforcement F. Loomis 0192, 0246, 0283, Surveillance Tools 0313 A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS 0008 We recently learned about a function deep in the cobwebby bowels of the iPhone. Getting there requires a compass and sensible hiking shoes. From the SETTINGS menu, we opened the PRIVACY tab, went to LOCATION SERVICES, and scrolled all the way down to SYSTEM SERVICES: there lay the entrance to the SIGNIFICANT LOCATIONS log. We entered our passcode and we were in. There it was: each trip into the office, complete with time stamps of our arrival and departure. There it was: the bodega where we stopped during the Families Belong Together march. There they were: the clandestine trips to the Crepe House, our guilty-pleasure breakfast spot, the one we only patronize alone, hunched over, hoping no one sees us there. But someone did—Apple saw us there. Apple saw us there on August 3 at 11:13 a.m. Apple saw us there on June 11 at 10:44 a.m. Apple saw us there on January 5 at 1:43 p.m. These aren’t just embarrassing secrets laid bare—these are the details of our whole life, mapped out and catalogued. The people we spend our time with, the meetings we attend, our penchant for crepes during work hours. Innocence lost, we tapped through the thorny brambles of our PRIVACY options to the beat of our quickened pulse. We realized that we’d become so used to breezing past user agreements that we’d forgotten privacy was something we should still expect, or rather demand. If we’re being honest, we’d hand over all of our Facebook contacts just to watch the final episode ofMasterChef A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS MCS54 0009 Junior for free. But every day that we ignore the consequences of these little trade-offs, we’re tacitly consenting. Through this collection, our first-ever entirely nonfiction issue, we wanted to make sure that, at this moment of unparalleled technological advance- ment, we were taking the time to ask not just whether we can, but whether we should. It’s high time we took stock of what we really have to lose to encroaching surveillance from our government and from corporations. As mother always said, you’ve got to keep your friends close and your internet service providers closer. So, with these goals in mind, we struck out, seeking answers. We called in some of today’s most incisive thinkers on privacy—lawyers, activists, journal- ists, whistleblowers, muckrakers—and got the folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation on board as advisors. We learned about the work that they and others are doing to keep us safe during this time when trust is hard-earned and rarely deserved. We covered our laptop cameras with sticky notes. We cast aside Google search for its privacy-minded cousin, DuckDuckGo. (Though, sometimes we pull up Google through the DuckDuckGo search bar when we miss its cozy familiarity. Old habits are hard to kick.) We wondered more than once what government lists we’d landed ourselves on after eight months of taking calls with NSA whistleblowers and searching variations of “what percent 0010 of the dark web is drugs?” We thought about reverting to flip phones, but hell, we’re no saints. It wasn’t until Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth came out, though, that we realized we’d tapped into a collective awakening. Also, we’d been calling our collection The End of Trust since its conception years ago, and were too lazy to change it. One unifying truth runs through the resulting collection: when our privacy is stolen, so is our right to control our own narrative. We no longer get to choose what we share of ourselves and with whom. Next to go will be our rights to speak truth to power and to express our uncensored selves, anonymously or otherwise. Most importantly, this collection reminds us that even if we feel we ourselves have “nothing to hide,” even if we don’t mind the DEA listening while we tell our herbalists we’ve recently been having more heartburn than usual, the journalists and activists we depend upon have much at stake—and so, therefore, do we. We’re all part of something beyond ourselves when it comes to resisting surveillance, and the folks who are already most vulnera- ble disproportionally bear the consequences of our collective slide into the privacy vacuum. We need to rally together—not just because it’s creepy that Taco Bell ads know what we’re thinking before we do—but because privacy is a team sport, and every game counts. Every single one. We lose this or we win this together. ⦁ LETTERS THE END OF TRUST MCS54 0011 DEAR McSWEENEY’S, These images subvert the rules that Are you seeing what I’m seeing on govern what it means to inhabit the Instagram these days? Selfies, taken black female body, especially online. in the feeds of store security cameras. Generally speaking, avatars have long Sometimes they’re staged in a bodega, functioned as commentary on identity. sometimes in a museum. They mimic In Embodied Avatars, Uri McMillan that old-school picture-in-picture wrote that we are “canvases of repre- effect, which helped sell televisions in sentation” and that, in mutating our the 1980s and ’90s. A person capturing likenesses, we are wrenching open a themselves as captured by a closed- new consciousness with these “brave circuit television, an image frozen in performances of alterity.” Avatars have repetition, like in a funhouse mirror. the power to chart the course into a At first glance, it might appear new modality of blackness. to be a purely aesthetic choice, an Security cameras have a long and analog trick, as people grow bored complicated relationship to blackness, of the prepackaged filters on photo- rendering it in high-contrast hypervis- sharing apps like Snapchat and Snow.