  10 Dec 2013 @ 14:53, by Heiner Benking
Just comming from the Writers Against Mass Surveillance - Civil Liberties in the Digital Age press conference.
560 authors from 83 countries intervened publicly by signinig a petion which will go online today! Please have a look, dig deeper: [link]
On International Human Rights Day, 562 authors, including 5 Nobel Prize laureates, from over 80 countries have joined together to launch an appeal in defense of civil liberties against surveillance by corporations and governments. 5 Nobel Prize Winners have signed: Orhan Pamuk, J.M. Coetzee, Elfriede Jelinek, Günter Grass and Tomas Tranströmer. Also among the signatories are Umberto Eco, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Daniel Kehlmann, Nawal El Saadawi, Arundhati Roy, Henning Mankell, Richard Ford, Javier Marias, Björk, David Grossman, Arnon Grünberg, Angeles Mastretta, Juan Goytisolo, Nuruddin Farah, João Ribeiro, Victor Erofeyev, Liao Yiwu and David Malouf.
The issue is important and very deer to me. We struggeled with a HUMANE INFORMATION SOCIETY in the early 90ies, The World Summit on Information Sciences (UN_WSIS), and many efforts, but nobody had in mind such a stroke on Sept 11. Jerome Glenn form the Millennium Project presented after the SIS Kouvola 2001 in the Finish Foreign Office on Sept 14th that there is no way to fight terrorism, (add slides and details a.s.a.p.)***** I would add now "especially not by "inteligence agencies" investing in dumb data collections". See article just printed on Collecting and Connecting...
Why I am rushing this? I promised some of the initiators and well known writers and Publisists, the PEN CLUB, and many others are involved, an interanet page on "Watching" called: The Spectrum of Meaning as publihed in HUMANKYBERNETIK - grkg in 1985 explaining the meaning of the citation “Big Brother is watching you” depending on the context and agency. Who is watching, with which detail and on what scale, for which purpose, with which proportions and consequences.
I immeditely think about: SAYING NO ! CULTURE OF REFUSAL - KULTUR DER VERWEIGERUNG - DAS KONSTRUKTIVE NEIN. 14 years ago published by Boelau Verlag, Vienna-Weimar. Check the "deadly sins" TODSUENDEN and more: [link]
We see a lot of ignorance and negligence in the public, media, and politics. What we are experiencing is a serious attack on human rights, democracies and constitutions, the way we write and share, hide and ignore. I opt here in teh sense of Herbert Stachowiak to sonsider a spectrum ofg meaning, but also a spectrum of impact along and across scales. I hope it helps if we make such surveillance and data-grabing more concrete by adding the situtation, context, scale, ... in oder to make visible and real what is happening on which scales and which dangers are involved.
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