Visualizing transnational threats across the internet

• In Event: Platform Practices and Predictive Seeing 2

Abstract

Digital imaging practices greatly expand the possibilities for what phenomena can be rendered visible, for what purposes and in whose interests. They invite critical reflection on the malleable, contingent, often messy character of images, as well as their uses and abuses, and especially their seductions and perils for prediction and interdiction of threats. Through two linked case studies, this presentation explores these issues in relation to the transnational surveillance platform that the Five Eyes security alliance has embedded within the internet. Both cases involve the generation and interpretation of large datasets of IP addresses, which combined with estimates of physical location and user identities, are enrolled in constructing geographic maps - knowledge production promising to render disparate forms of threat visible, predictable and actionable.

The first case analyses one document released by Edward Snowden, “IP Profiling Analytics & Mission Impacts,” that reveals one attempt of the Canadian national signals intelligence agency, CSE, to address the ‘needle in the haystack problem’ – spotting individuals who threaten national security but whose activities are ‘hiding’ within the enormous data flows captured at obligatory passage points of the global information infrastructure.

The second case focuses on the IXmaps.ca internet mapping project, which adopts similar IP analytic techniques reverses the gaze on this secretive spying by developing map images of internet routing. Here the objective is to render more transparent and accountable the likely locations and actors of internet interception, and the threat being exposed is to civil liberties from the security intelligence apparatus itself.

Author

• Andrew Clement, University of Toronto