Like Aaron, I had to think about what the geography of networked spaces means. I'll do my best to summarize what I think Cohen is getting at, and then I'll provide a concrete example.
We are very familiar with the geography of physical space. If I want to talk to Aaron about his post, I can’t just say what I’m thinking as I sit in the computer lab –he can’t hear me. If we meet in the Green Lounge to talk, I can tell him what I’m thinking. In the physical world, geography determines who can hear what I have to say. So if I talk in the computer lab, Aaron won’t hear me (and the other people in here would). If I talk to Aaron in the Green Lounge, he will hear me, and it’s likely that a different set of other people will too.
An article in Sunday’s New York Times, A High-Tech War on Leaks, touches on the geographies of networked and physical space. New developments in surveillance technology allow the government to more closely monitor government employees with security clearances. Information from that monitoring is also used in the prosecution of leaks. These changes have “unsettled a decades-long accommodation between national security and press freedom.” Traditionally, government “did what it could to protect its secrets but exercised discretion in resorting to subpoenas and criminal charges when it failed.”
The Obama administration has prosecuted more media leaks by current or former government officials than every previous administration combined. The administration says that the increase in volume is due in part to the increased availability of evidence about leaks. An unnamed Justice Department official noted that “… prosecutions of those who leaked classified information to reporters have been rare, due, in part, to the inherent challenges involved in identifying the person responsible for the illegal disclosure and in compiling the evidence necessary to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.” (For example, John C. Kiriakou is a former C.I.A. agent accused of disclosing classified information to the media about the capture and interrogation of an Al Qaeda operative. The criminal complaint against Kiriakou says it is based largely on “e-mails recovered from search warrants served on two e-mail accounts associated with Kiriakou.”)
Because the geography of networked space is different from the geography of physical space, it has become much easier for the government to monitor information in the networked world. As Cohen says, networked space is “glocal” in it “simultaneously collapses some scales and renders others inconceivably large” (page 191).
In the New York Times article, Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, described a recent conference about government secrecy. At the conference, a national security representative told her that it will become increasingly rare for the government to rely on subpoenas in the prosecution of leaks. Paraphrasing the national security representative, Dalglish said, “We don't need to ask who you're talking to. We know.”
The article concludes that the solution for reporters is to “adopt Mr. Woodward’s methods from the 1970s,” referring to Bob Woodward’s meetings with his source in a parking garage. A former Justice Department spokesman advises government officials “to meet a reporter face to face, hand him an envelope and walk away quickly.”
But these strategies may not work, especially in light of Cohen’s discussion of surveillance strategies on pages 164-170. Networks have made it easier to monitor movement in physical space (like a parking garage), and they have also made it easier to collect and analyze that information. Because of this intersection between physical and networked space, the solution can’t be as simple as returning to the physical geography of the 1970s.
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