Date/Time
Friday
5 Feb 2016
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Location
190 Doe Library

Event Type

Matthew L. Jones
James R. Barker Professor of Contemporary Civilization, Columbia University

We cannot understand the programs revealed by Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers without understanding a broader set of historical development before and after 9/11. With the growing spread of computation into everyday transactions from the 1960s into the 1990s, corporations and governments collected exponentially more information about consumers and citizens. To contend with this deluge of data, computer scientists, mathematicians, and business analysts created new fields of computational analysis, colloquially called “data mining,” designed to produce knowledge or intelligence from vast volume.  Great Exploitations tells a history of how we came to exploit communications, law, bureaucracy, and the fear of terrorism, and how we might choose to do so differently.