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Jeudi 11 juin, Zeynep Tufekci invitée des Matins de France Culture

https://cfeditions.com/lacrymo/ressources/couv_lacrymo_grand.jpg

Zeynep Tufekci, l’autrice de « Twitter & les gaz lacrymogènes » sera ce jeudi 11 juin l’invitée exceptionnelle des Matins de France Culture. Elle sera interviewée par Guillaume Erner de 7h45 à 8h45.

L’occasion, en direct ou en podcast, de mieux connaître cette « technosociologue » dont nous avons publié la traduction française (par Anne Lemoine, qui a fait un excellent travail).

Twitter & les gaz lacrymogènes
Forces et fragilités de la contestation connectée
Zeynep Tufekci
ISBN 978-2-915825-95-4 - 430 p. - 29 €
►https://cfeditions.com/lacrymo

Zeynep Tufekci est de plus en plus remarquée aux États-Unis et partout dans le monde pour les suites qu’elle a donné à son livre, en particulier dans des éditoriaux dans The Atlantic ou The New York Times. Elle a été, dès le mois de janvier, une des premières à promouvoir la « distanciation sociale » et le port du masque, quand son pays ne croyais pas au virus. Elle revenait de Hong Kong et avait pu comprendre la situation. De même, elle est en pointe sur les questions des médias sociaux et de l’élection de Trump (notamment le débat actuel entre Twitter et Facebook). Elle est enfin partie prenante des mobilisations anti-racistes qui secouent les États-Unis (et qui s’étendent, notamment chez nous). Le bon moment pour une interview.

Je vous mets ci-après pour celles et ceux qui lisent l’anglais une liste de référence de ses articles récents sur ces sujets.

Nous avons également produit un petit livre numérique autour de Zeynep Tufekci, intitulé « Le monde révolté ». Celui-ci comporte la traduction d’un texte autobiographique de Zeynep et un long article de Gus Massiah. Il est gratuit (complètement, on ne demande même pas de mail ou autre, cadeau on vous dit). Vous pouvez l’obtenir à :
►https://cfeditions.com/monde-revolte

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Bonne écoute et bonne lecture,

Hervé Le Crosnier

Voici quelques références récentes sur les publications de Zeynep Tufekci en anglais pour celles et ceux qui lisent la langue de Shakespeare.

Preparing for Coronavirus to Strike the U.S. - Scientific American Blog Network
►https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/preparing-for-coronavirus-to-strike-the-u-s

Opinion | Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired - The New York Times
►https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-masks.html

What Really Doomed America’s Coronavirus Response - The Atlantic
►https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/03/what-really-doomed-americas-coronavirus-response/608596

Closing the Parks Is Ineffective Pandemic Theater - The Atlantic
►https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/closing-parks-ineffective-pandemic-theater/609580

Don’t Wear a Mask for Yourself - The Atlantic
►https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/dont-wear-mask-yourself/610336

Trump’s Executive Order Isn’t About Twitter - The Atlantic
►https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/05/trumps-executive-order-isnt-about-twitter/612349

The Case for Social Media Mobs - The Atlantic
►https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/05/case-social-media-mobs/612202

How a Bad App—Not the Russians—Plunged Iowa Into Chaos - The Atlantic
►https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/bad-app-not-russians-plunged-iowa-into-chaos/606052

Hong Kong Protests : Inside the Chaos - The Atlantic
►https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/11/escalating-violence-hong-kong-protests/601804

#Zeynep_Tufekci #France_Culture

How a Bad App—Not the Russians—Plunged Iowa Into Chaos - The Atlantic
►https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/bad-app-not-russians-plunged-iowa-into-chaos/606052

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You may be wondering if the Iowa caucus chaos is a hit job by election-meddling Russians. The morning after caucus-goers filed into high-school gyms across Iowa, the state’s Democratic Party is still unable to produce results. The app it developed for precisely this purpose seems to have crashed. The party was questioned before by experts about the wisdom of using a secretive app that would be deployed at a crucial juncture, but the concerns were brushed away. Troy Price, the state party’s chairman, claimed that if anything went wrong with the app, staffers would be ready “with a backup and a backup to that backup and a backup to the backup to the backup.” And yet, more than 12 hours after the end of the caucus, they are unable to produce results. Last night, some precinct officials even waited on hold for an hour to report the results—and got hung up on.

If the Russians were responsible for this confusion and disarray, that might be a relatively easy problem to fix. This is worse.

It appears that the Iowa Democrats nixed the plan to have precincts call in their results, and instead hired a for-profit tech firm, aptly named Shadow, to tally the caucus results. (As if the name weren’t enough to fuel conspiracies, the firm is run by an alum of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.) The party paid Shadow $60,000 to develop an app that would tally the results, but gave the company only two months to do it. Worried about Russian hacking, the party addressed security in all the wrong ways: It did not open up the app to outside testing or challenge by independent security experts.

This method is sometimes dubbed “security through obscurity,” and while there are instances for which it might be appropriate, it is a fragile method, especially unsuited to anything public on the internet that might invite an attack. For example, putting a spare key in a secret place in your backyard isn’t a terrible practice, because the odds are low that someone will be highly motivated to break into any given house and manage to look exactly in the right place (well, unless you put it under the mat). But when there are more significant incentives and the system is open to challenge by anyone in the world, as with anything on the internet, someone will likely find a way to get the keys, as the Motion Picture Association of America found out when its supposedly obscure digital keys, meant to prevent copyright infringement, quickly leaked. Shadow’s app was going to be used widely on caucus day, and independent security experts warned that this method wasn’t going to work. The company didn’t listen.

But why bother hacking the system? Anything developed this rapidly that has not been properly stress-tested—and is being used in the wild by thousands of people at the same time—is likely to crash the first time it is deployed.

There never should have been an app. There are officials responsible for precinct results, but there are also representatives of campaigns on the ground in every precinct. Even without a more substantial reform of the complex and demanding caucus process, a simple adversarial confirmation system (a process used by many countries) would have worked well.

America already knows how to do election integrity. The National Academy of Sciences released a lengthy report about it last year, complete with evidence-based recommendations for every step of the electoral process. I wrote a summary of that report, but the full thing is available online. It tells us why optical paper-scan systems offer us the best mix of convenience and security, and advises us how to keep a proper paper trail. Experts and civil-society organizations have been advocating for these changes for years. It would take just a bit of money and political will to fix much of this, and fairly quickly. Instead, we’ve kicked off a 2020 election season that promises to be fraught in any number of ways. Several campaigns have reported that the same app is due to be used in Nevada in just three weeks.

Who needs the Russians?

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Iowa_Caucus #App_inutile #Cybersécurité