Japanese internment: Image via Wikipedia

This  was originally written in 2009.  I meant to publish it on O’Reilly Radar but never could finish it.  In light of recent events I have decided to post it here.   I have also updated link references to be as current as possible.

The Internet is a tale of two possibilities.  On the one hand is the story so often told it has grown cliché:

• The Internet empowers everyday people – from organizing rallies and social movements, holding government and corporations accountable or just finding a better shopping deal.  It shifts power toward the individual.

Then there is the other story:

• These technologies, taken together represent an unprecedented and wholesale loss of privacy that could have enormous long-term consequences; specifically, and paradoxically, the undermining of individual power at the hands of those in possession of our identity (read: corporations and government).

I make a good part of my living in the first possibility – helping corporations constructively reorganize to thrive in the “network economy”.   I also firmly believe that the Internet can be a force for good.    It is precisely for this reason that paying attention to its darker side – the second possibility – is so important.

I want to make a case here that privacy and more specifically the right to remain anonymous when engaged in almost any civic or social activity is a precondition for a healthy, functioning democracy.    The ability to remain anonymous when engaged in civic action is what enables any repressed citizenry (and here I mean truly repressed from political violence) to organize.    Anonymity is the counterpart to a free press, the so-called fourth estate.   After all a free press is only of utility if you have a population that can take action without fear of immediate reprisal.   Every revolution against tyranny requires conspiracy.  Every conspiracy requires anonymity in order to survive.

It is no coincidence that the most repressive regimes in history; from East Germany to Stalinist Russia to modern day Iran have been obsessed with data collection on individual behavior.  This historic penchant for amassing “the dossier” has always been limited by the manpower required to gather and maintain such information as well as by the evanescent nature of most human communication.    No longer.  As all of our personal history (commerce, writing, email correspondence, job history, location, travel history, social ties etc.) is migrating to the Internet we are creating a permanent, identifiable and findable record.  The mix of sensor tracking, facial recognition technology, GPS in every mobile phone, the increasing ubiquity of surveillance cameras in urban centers, and the massive consolidation of identity brokers such as Facebook and Google will make anonymity increasingly difficult – online or off.   While this is experienced today as a patchwork of independent technologies these trends are converging upon a day when your activity (what you did, what you said, with whom and where) are all easily collected, analyzed and disclosed.

In late-capitalist democracies surveillance and self-revelation are the price we pay for commerce, convenience and status.  Who can deny the value of finding local pizza or telling your friends that you are sipping a cocktail at a local hot spot?    And yet in the US Sprint Nextel managed to give away your location 8 million times last year alone.  Historically when the government comes calling the big data owners (Telcos, Yahoo, Microsoft etc.) hand your information over.   In a sad bit of irony we find ourselves outraged at corporations who won’t protect us from the government.

Yet when we think of a loss of privacy our imaginations are hampered by our comfortable circumstance and we tend to think of (relatively) modest consequences: my boss sees a picture of me drinking and I lose my job etc.  Yet the long-view of the consequences are far more dire.

We live in modest governments with liberal civil rights but these can vanish quickly and there are other models to serve as a warning: Iran has shut down Gmail and checks your Facebook account on entry to the country.  Mozambique recently outlawed anonymous cell phones after they were used to organize a rally.  What separates us from these regimes is a thin veil of civility that can disappear at a change in circumstance such as a terrorist attack or a fringe political group feeding on a bottomed-out economy.  While 99% of us pursue our lives within socially and politically acceptable boundaries, this is not a permanent condition.   You may not change your behavior but your government might change its expectations.  It is wise for those of us in the U.S. to remember that we are only 70 years removed from Japanese internment camps, 60 years removed from the McCarthy era, 50 years from J. Edgar Hoover’s paranoid dossiers and we are living in the era of Guantanamo Bay where people were rounded up and imprisoned without trial. The rule of law and government policy is an historical contingency.   As a citizen you reside at the back end of that contingency; it’s always best to protect yourself in good times rather than bad.

There are many arguments that the erosion of privacy is simply a by-product of how we live today.   Perhaps.   However when the owners of a social network tell us that privacy is dead we should take it with a grain of salt.  After all your privacy is intimately related to their business model. I find it quite disingenuous that those who have the vision and capacity to remake the future (as a Reid Hoffman or Mark Zuckerberg certainly do) can simultaneously abdicate any responsibility for it by declaring themselves followers of an historic inevitability.   This is not to deny them their work of delivering world-changing innovations.  Perhaps we shouldn’t hold them as responsible for simultaneously realizing their own vision and regulating any negative consequences that might occur.  Perhaps that is our job.

There are sound reasons to believe that we will gain our rights through some form of data portability and legal reform but I believe the odds are long:

• The social nature of people means we will continue to opt into sharing personal information (myself included).
• Businesses will continue to encourage this sharing and lobby hard to own that data.
• Government will continue to seek total information awareness – whether as part of the “war on terror” “the war on drugs” or any other totem that justifies their need-to-know.

The only people who stand to benefit from clearly defined limits on how your personal data is handled (or pay the price) are you and I; a shambling horde – disorganized and charmed at the moment by the first of the two possible narratives.

Related articles

• Egypt and The Politics of Technology (O’Reilly Radar) (opposableplanets.com)
• Clinton Defends Facebook and Twitter as Egypt Erupts in Protest (businessweek.com)
• What exactly does the Internet know about you? (techvibes.com)

This is cross posted from O’Reilly Radar

I was struck by this photo that appeared Sunday in the New York Times.  It shows a crowd of Egyptian protesters listening to a military announcement.   Try to count the number of people in the crowd who DO NOT have a mobile device recording the action.

Expanding people’s ability to communicate (from printing press to telegraph to telephone to text messaging) is always a revolutionary act.   Communications technologies do not create the conditions for civic action (the unrest in Egypt is due to longstanding political repression) – but they can accelerate the entire process by (1) dramatically expanding the number of people directly involved in gathering, distributing and consuming information  and (2) allowing a positive feedback loop to develop where people  see the effect of their actions in real-time, which simultaneously reinforces commitment and recruits more members into the cause.

We tend to think of these technologies as inherently democratic.  But the rub in all of this is that while these technologies democratize communications they tend to monopolize surveillance and control.    So while more of us are capable of holding an open, peer-to-peer discussion we are doing so with the consent and under the watchful (or subpoena-able) eye of just a handful of corporations or governments.  And when citizen calls-to-action conflict with government calls for quiet, the government holds more of the cards.  Vodafone has shut down cell phone communications in Egypt,  the Egyptian government has effectively shut down Internet communications and there are now calls for Ham radio operators to lend assistance as Egypt is being pushed back down the communications ladder.

In the “rich world” our experience of  technology is often Utopian and our forecasts of negative consequences are framed only through our experience of current circumstance; we simply can’t imagine what it is like to live in a repressive government or believe that we will ever live under one.  But the seemingly benign governments in which we reside are an historical contingency.   If the past provides any lesson it is that governments will wax and wane in their concern for civil liberties and human rights.  Yet our digital profile (purchase history, political and personal associations etc.) will remain.  Through our participation in these technologies we are donating our data to a vast, indelible reservoir whose future utility is unknown to us…

I am actually optimistic about the future of the Internet as a medium to promote civil liberty, free expression, better government and corporate citizenship (if one can credibly use such a phrase).      However I don’t think it happens on its own.   The Internet needs an architecture (legal and physical) to achieve such ends.  Paradoxically I believe it requires some form of regulation to maintain its dynamic, emergent and decentralized properties so that when any government or corporation wants to hit the kill switch – they can’t.

Is access to communications a fundamental human right?  If so, should a corporation have the ability to abrogate that right at the request of a host government?  As we watch the battle between the Egyptian government’s attempts to throttle information flow (including how corporations defy or collaborate with these attempts) and the people’s struggle to maintain access to communications – we are seeing the  contours of a struggle that will exemplify the next decades of political and policy changes as we try to define the increasingly critical relationship between technology and civil liberties.

Related articles

• Vodafone confirms Egypt lock-down (go.theregister.com)
• Still No Internet or Mobile In Egypt (prblognews.com)
• Regime throws information blackout over Egypt – ABC Online (news.google.com)
• Regime throws information blackout over Egypt – ABC Online (news.google.com)

In 2008 I delivered a keynote at a conference on law and journalism.  The mood among the journalists present was one of palpable contempt for blogging and “citizen journalism.”  You  would think we were witnessing the undermining of Western civilization at the hands of a rabble of pajama-wearing, due diligence-ignoring amateur (God forbid!) know-nothing ideologues.   During the post-talk Q&A  I felt compelled to tell the audience  that I was quite happy with my news choices and I sought online alternatives in large part because I had lost faith in traditional media’s role as the fourth estate.  This new study  from several Harvard students at the Kennedy School puts a fine point on that loss of faith.  You can read it here (pdf) but the  abstract is devastating:

“The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture. In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.”

While there is plenty of need to discuss the business models under which proper journalism can thrive (that was the purpose of my keynote two years ago)  it would be good for those in the journalism business to be thinking about how to maintain public credibility by focusing on the purpose of journalism rather than just the business of it…

Cross-posted in its entirety from a series I just finished on Radar:

In the circles that I travel the Internet is often breathlessly embraced as the herald of all things good; the bringer of increased choice, personal empowerment, social harmony…and the list goes on.  And yet, as with any powerful technology,  the truth of its consequences eludes such a singular and happy narrative.

Here are three paradoxes of the Internet Age.  I would love to see  readers point out others.

One:  More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us.

Elizabeth Kolbert has a piece in this week’s New Yorker reviewing Cass Sunstein’s new book,  “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done.”  In the review she lays out the concept of “group polarization”

People’s tendency to become more extreme after speaking with like-minded others has become known as “group polarization,” and it has been documented in dozens of other experiments. In one, feminists who spoke with other feminists became more adamant in their feminism. In a second, opponents of same-sex marriage became even more opposed to the idea, while proponents shifted further in favor. In a third, doves who were grouped with other doves became more dovish still.

The Internet is becoming a vast petri dish for the group polarization phenomena.   As Sunstein puts it “The most striking power provided by emerging technologies,” is the “growing power of consumers to ‘filter’ what they see.”

(Thanks to Jim Stogdill for surfacing this link via email)

Two: Individual perception of increased choice can occur while the overall choice pool is getting smaller

This gem from Whimsley makes the point – with extensive statistical modeling supporting the argument – that our algorithm-obsessed, long tail merchants are actually depleting the overall choice pool despite the fact that as individuals we may be experiencing a sense of more choice through recommendations engines…

Online merchants such as Amazon, iTunes and Netflix may stock more items than your local book, CD, or video store, but they are no friend to “niche culture”. Internet sharing mechanisms such as YouTube and Google PageRank, which distil the clicks of millions of people into recommendations, may also be promoting an online monoculture. Even word of mouth recommendations such as blogging links may exert a homogenizing pressure and lead to an online culture that is less democratic and less equitable, than offline culture.

In short, the long tail has gangrene at its extremity – the niche.  More disarming is the conclusion that it isn’t just the output of our recommendation algorithms that is leading to what the author calls “monopoly populism”and the end of niche culture:

“The recommender “system” could be anything that tends to build on its own popularity, including word of mouth…Our online experiences are heavily correlated, and we end up with monopoly populism…A “niche”, remember, is a protected and hidden recess or cranny, not just another row in a big database. Ecological niches need protection from the surrounding harsh environment if they are to thrive. Simply putting lots of music into a single online iTunes store is no recipe for a broad, niche-friendly culture.

Three: The myth of personal empowerment takes root amidst a massive loss of personal control.

Social technologies are cloaked in a rhetoric of liberation (customers are in control, the internet fosters democracy, social technologies propagate truth etc.) that tend to obscure the fact that never before have we handed so much personal information over in exchange for so little in return.  As we move from the “web of information” to the “web of people” (aka the Social Web) the output of all of this social participation is massive dossiers on individual behavior (your social network profiles, photos, location, status updates, searches etc.) and social activity.  This loss of control over personal information is on a collision course with the law of unintended consequences:  MIT’s Project Gaydar can spot your sexual preference by your social ties, Facebook checks are occurring customs and every quiz you take on Facebook delivers a shocking amount of personally identifiable information to third parties.   Amidst this barrage of good news for how much power we wield in the transaction of commerce one has to wonder if we are giving away something quite precious in the bargain.

What are other paradoxes of the Internet Age?  What did I get wrong above?

flickr: kjell

Cross-post from Radar:
This week gave us two reasons to reconsider the state of broadband connectivity in the US.

First, Finland has announced that it will guarantee broadband access as a right for all its citizens:

Second, Yochai Benkler and the Berkman Center released a study of broadband Internet transitions and policy.  A global review of how connected various countries are – and the policies that have performed well to stimulate connectivity, both in-home and mobile.  While the U.S. has over 7 billion in stimulus dollars going toward improvements in rural broadband, it is hard to dispute that we have fallen behind:

On those few measures where we have reasonably relevant historical data, it appears that the United States opened the first decade of the 21st centuries in the top quintile in penetration and prices, and has been surpassed by other countries over the course of the decade.

Benkler also makes it clear that government policy has played a role in our decline.  The U.S. began lagging as soon as the FCC abandoned it’s position of “open access” and allowed telecom companies to lock down networks. (see page 12 of the report).

As our economy continues to lose mass in favor of information-based goods (U.S. exports lost 50% of their physical weight per dollar from 1993 to 1999*) and we continue to see the decoupling of workforce from workplace, connectivity is a critical factor in economic exchange and competitive advantage.  Countries that build wide, fast networks to the last mile will have a huge leg up.

If government works best when it creates the conditions that allow citizens the maximum opportunity to succeed, two things seem clear.  First,  broadband access is a key piece of infrastructure and a necessary condition to many jobs and opportunities.  Second, our policies should steer back towards open access to support that right.  Benkler is pretty clear that countries running half a generation ahead of the US (Japan, Korea etc.) are doing so as a result of open access policies.  Achieving these ends does not require the government to own the solution.   As Benkler notes on page 13 “there are models of high performing countries, like France, that invested almost nothing directly, and instead relied almost exclusively on fostering a competitive environment.”   On a personal note, I divide my time between the US and France and I can tell you, my French broadband (in a remote, medieval village mind you) crushes any corporate workplace connection in the US.

What do you think?  Should broadband access be considered a right?   Is “universal connectivity” just too big a job?   And what should government’s policy-making role be in all of this?

Stimuluswatch.org allows citizens to see local government requests for stimulus-spending projects, add details, vote projects up or down and generally discuss the merit of each.  It is a great example of how the Internet lowers the cost of developing software and allows citizens to collaborate in government.   Anyone from an Enterprise can learn a lot from Stimuluswatch about
1.    How complex software does not need to cost millions (your intranet, your website etc.)
2.    How quickly projects can now get off the ground (weeks not months)
3.    How people outside your company can contribute their talent to get things done (Open beats Closed)

For those of you less inclined to read, here is a screencast that covers most of these details

A bit of history.  Stimuluswatch began with this blog request from Jerry Brito,

Who can help me take the database on the Conference of Mayors site and turn each project into a wiki-page or other mechanism where local citizens can comment on whether the project is actually needed or whether it’s a boondoggle? How can we create an app that will let citizens separate the wheat from the pork and then sort for Congress and the new administration the project in descending order or relevancy?

I got in touch with two of the developers who responded to Brito’s blog request, Peter Snyder and Kevin Dwyer, to get details on their collaboration.  The final site included all of the functionality (and more) that Brito had asked for was launched after only two weeks of work conducted over seven weeks including the holidays (for more technical detail on how they achieved this, see my Radar post here).

None of these people knew each other previously.  They were brought together by blog post into a common effort.  They used open source tools in rapid development.   They plugged in off the shelf social technologies  (Disqus as a tool to enable forums and commenting on projects, Tumblr as a blog and publishing platform for updates from Jerry and Mediawiki as a tool to allow citizens to collaborate together on building a common definition around each project – much like wikipedia allows users to collaborate on defining the meaning of a concept).  They achieved this in a matter of weeks.

Results so far?  One week after launch Stimuluswatch had 20,000 unique visitors.   These visitors were actively voting, discussing and even cleaning up mistakes in the mayor’s original data. Total cost of the effort?  $40 per month for hosting.

I am not sure that Stimuluswatch is the right set of tools for citizen engagement in public works.   That remains to be seen.  It does demonstrate the power of the Internet to radically reduce the time it takes to create powerful software and lower the barriers to group collaboration. If you are a business being faced with a million dollar software price tag from a big consulting firm you should think long and hard about whether or not your money is being wisely spent.

FDR was our radio president, JFK was our TV president and Barack Obama will be our Internet President.

Quietly at noon yesterday, as the world was fixated on the televised inauguration of Barack Obama, some obscure IT managers flipped a switch (metaphorically) and transferred Change.gov to Whitehouse.gov…  While the inauguration spectacle was awe inspiring and the speech lived up to its promise, Whitehouse.gov is the herald of bigger changes.

Team Obama has shown a native fluency with the web – high engagement (personal video emails from David Plough), bottom-up organizing (empowering a thousand micro-campaigns to flourish via their social network), great use of data as a competitive advantage (they release voter lists to be called upon, scrubbed and returned to them by their members) and harnessing collective intelligence (during the get out the vote campaign they were feeding real time results of calls back into the system making it smarter with each succeeding call).

Thirteen million citizens joined MyBarackObama.com.  They gave money and time.  They occasionally rose up in protest of their man’s policies (see FISA).  MyBarackObama.com fulfilled the deeper, more democratic promise of social networking;  that people can organize around meaningful issues and coordinate action with near-zero barriers to entry. Change.gov was launched immediately upon Obama’s winning the presidency and we saw the same result – massive engagement and some surprises (the biggest topic members want answered is how Obama will deal with the issue of prosecuting torture).   And now  Change.gov has become Whitehouse.gov.

I applaud this use of technology to engage citizens in better government.   I also carry a healthy bit of skepticism (every citizen should).  To quote Barack Obama, “Power Does Not Concede” – It did not before the Obama  and it will not after the Obama administration comes to power.   But the responsibility for how this gets shaped over the coming years is ours.   An Internet president presides (if anyone can) over a loose network of citizens capable of mobilizing and flexing their power (money, petitions) in near real-time. But, like any network – the power is with the massive swarm of citizens staying informed and participating in the social technologies that now take democracy from an annual ritual to a daily activity.