else 11/25: The Collective Hallucination of Currency

This week, bitcoin seems to have gotten the thumbs up for innovation despite some shady origins, lots of background details came out about the circumstances that approved NSA dragnet, and privacy is declared an anomaly. As always, if you want to keep up with what we’re reading/thinking about on a weekly basis, the best way is to subscribe to the “else” feed, either as an email newsletter or through RSS. And tweet us links!

Senate Committee Listens to Bitcoin Experts, Expresses Open-Mindedness – On Bitcoin
This does a good job summing up the week’s news around how the US is approaching new developments in Bitcoin. Namely, comparing it to the early internet, and echoing the importance of not stifling innovation with overly restrictive policy.

Bitcoins Bitcoins Everywhere – Brad Feld
On the heels of the bitcoin hype of this week, Feld offers a helpful deconstruction: “It’s possible to separate the functions of value store, unit of account, and transaction mechanism. They fit together neatly and are systemically related, but they’re three different things…As a software person, I think of this as a platform. A new electronic payment platform that may have significant advantages over most of the existing ones.”

The Myth of Virtual Currency – Cyborgology
“Calling Bitcoins ‘virtual currency’ is nonsensical because all currencies are virtual in that they are ‘collective hallucinations’ about measurement of worth, and they are all equally physical because they are held, exchanged and produced in very tangible ways with equally tangible consequences.”

Congress and Courts Weigh Restraints on N.S.A. Spying – NYTimes
How to handle critical response to the NSA is becoming messy, a challenge from the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed directly to the Supreme Court is turned away. It argued that the NSA “exceeded its statutory jurisdiction when it ordered production of millions of domestic telephone records that cannot plausibly be relevant to an authorized investigation.”

Fisa court order that allowed NSA surveillance is revealed for first time – The Guardian
Revealing that the “novel use” of surveillance technology made bulk collection hard to compare to previous precedents. “These definitions do not restrict the use of pen registers or trap-and-trace devices to communication facilities associated with individual users, it is finding that these definitions encompass an exceptionally broad form of collection.”

N.S.A. Report Outlined Goals for More Power – NYTimes.com
On the “golden age of Sigint”: “To be ‘optimally effective,’ the paper said, ‘legal, policy and process authorities must be as adaptive and dynamic as the technological and operational advances we seek to exploit.'”

Google’s chief internet evangelist says ‘privacy may actually be an anomaly’ – The Verge
Vint Cerf takes a historical view of privacy being relatively novel, the result of the anonymizing affordances of urban living. His important point: that we are still figuring out “social conventions that are more respectful of people’s privacy.”

Things You’re Not Supposed to Do With Google Glass – Google Glass Dating – Esquire
A.J. Jacobs did everything you are not supposed to do—including reading, getting outside help at poker, and playing Cyrano—to amusing ends.

If this doesn’t terrify you… Google’s computers OUTWIT their humans – The Register
Despite the link-baity headline, pretty interesting to think about when we can no longer understand how our algorithms work…”This means that for some things, Google researchers can no longer explain exactly how the system has learned to spot certain objects, because the programming appears to think independently from its creators, and its complex cognitive processes are inscrutable. This ‘thinking’ is within an extremely narrow remit, but it is demonstrably effective and independently verifiable.”

A Palimpsest of Code – Snarkmarket
The Google books ruling is all about turning the physical into digital: “Similarly, Google Books is also transformative in the sense that it has transformed book text into data for purposes of substantive research, including data mining and text mining in new areas, thereby opening up new fields of research. Words in books are being used in a way they have not been used before.”