Finn Brunton is at City Lights Bookstore on Wednesday discussing his new book he wrote with Helen Nissenbaum, Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest (published by MIT Press). Below are Finn’s answers to our 5 questions.
Event: Wednesday, January 13, 7:00PM at City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco, CA 94133.
About Obfuscation: With Obfuscation, Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum mean to start a revolution. They are calling us not to the barricades but to our computers, offering us ways to fight today’s pervasive digital surveillance–the collection of our data by governments, corporations, advertisers, and hackers. To the toolkit of privacy protecting techniques and projects, they propose adding obfuscation: the deliberate use of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection projects. Brunton and Nissenbaum provide tools and a rationale for evasion, noncompliance, refusal, even sabotage—especially for average users, those of us not in a position to opt out or exert control over data about ourselves. Obfuscation will teach users to push back, software developers to keep their user data safe, and policy makers to gather data without misusing it.
Brunton and Nissenbaum present a guide to the forms and formats that obfuscation has taken and explain how to craft its implementation to suit the goal and the adversary. They describe a series of historical and contemporary examples, including radar chaff deployed by World War II pilots, Twitter bots that hobbled the social media strategy of popular protest movements, and software that can camouflage users’ search queries and stymie online advertising. They go on to consider obfuscation in more general terms, discussing why obfuscation is necessary, whether it is justified, how it works, and how it can be integrated with other privacy practices and technologies.
This important book is essential for anyone trying to understand why people resist and challenge tech norms, including policymakers, engineers, and users of technology”
—danah boyd, author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens and founder of Data & Society
About Finn Brunton: Finn Brunton is Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and the author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT Press).
City Lights: If you’ve been to City Lights before, what’s your memory of the visit?
Finn Brunton: I was born and raised in the Bay Area, and I’ve been to City Lights many times. All my visits to the bookstore are a continuous, jagged line, with each zig and zag an encounter with something I found there that knocked me into a new trajectory: RE/SEARCH books, Clarice Lispector, Guy Davenport, Chris Kraus, Mishima! Because of the layout of the place, every time I visit City Lights it seems bigger inside than I remember–like the books on its shelves have covert pagination, opening out surface on surface, each filled with more words.
CL: If your book had a soundtrack, what would it be?
FB: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, “In Motion,” from the soundtrack for The Social Network. (This is such a great question! I’ve always wanted to write a book that felt like Alice Coltrane, or Stars of the Lid, or a Dum Dum Girls song. Maybe next time . . .)
CL: What’s the first book you actually finished reading?
FB: The first one I vividly remember finishing was The Wind in the Willows. Especially “Wayfarers All,” which has stayed with me. The patient and curious attention to the natural world, and the sense for the open country waiting on the other side of the forest and the way the river goes from here to the sea.
CL: If you weren’t a writer, what might you do?
FB: I’ve been learning quite a lot about smuggling recently.
CL: Name a few things you’d require if stranded on a desert island for an undefined period of time (and, yes, no wifi).
FB: Polaris, Antares, Arcturus, Deneb, Aldebaran, Dubhe, Sirius, Fomalhaut . . . (And a nice sharp high-carbon steel camp axe always comes in handy.)
Join Finn Brunton at City Lights Bookstore this Wednesday, January 13 at 7:00PM. He’ll be presenting his new book, Obfuscation: A User’s Guide to Privacy and Protest, co-authored by Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum.
For more about Finn, go to his site. Find Obfuscation at City Lights, direct from MIT Press, or ask for it at your local independent bookstore.
