Information Technology

… welcome the knowledge that, as a US non-person, the NSA is charged with monitoring all my emails, phone calls and other activities, without all those pesky 4th Amendment limitations applicable to people who are (on the balance of probabilities) located in the US.

I don’t have the time and energy to monitor all my emails for potential security threats. Just the other day, for example, I received an email from an Abdul Hameed, offering “Deep Cycle Maintenance Free Batteries Directly for Importer”. Abdul sounds genuine enough, but he seems to be located in Pakistan, which is a bit dubious. And who knows what can be done with batteries? Then there are the regular emails I get from genuine ladies seeking relationships. Perhaps these are the kind of “honey traps” I read about in spy novels.

The debate about PRISM has confused me as to whether these emails are being properly monitored. So, instead of waiting for NSA to go through cumbersome FISA court procedures, I’m going to set my email preferences to forward all such emails (and, when I get around to it, all my emails) automatically to the NSA “Acquisition Resource Center” at nsaarc@nsaarc.net. Hopefully, they will sort through them to determine which are genuine, and which need further investigation by professionals. If we all do likewise, the world will be a much safer place. Perhaps readers could suggest other addresses that should be copied in.

Responding to concern about PRISM and the issue of whether intelligence collaboration with the US enabled British agencies to circumvent legal restrictions, Foreign Secretary William Hague told us that “law-abiding citizens” have nothing to fear. Not only do I not wish to be the kind of person Hague thinks of as “law abiding”, more generally it is social movements that willfully break the law that are most likely to bring about change and to threaten established power and privilege. And it is just such movements, and their leaders, who are at risk from pervasive state surveillance of our communications.
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A small demonstration, from the 1770s.

In August 2012, the US House of Representatives voted 414-0 against governments trying to control the Internet

The House resolution calls on U.S. government officials to tell the ITU and other international organizations that it is the “consistent and unequivocal policy of the United States to promote a global Internet free from government control.”

I wonder if we will see more resolutions like this. It wouldn’t surprise me.

Lee Rigby, a soldier from the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, was mown down by a car and hacked to death by two men in Woolwich, London two weeks ago. The public theatre of flowers in the street, weeping family press conference, and puzzled interviews of have-a-go heroes was still in progress when the right ‘response’ to the murders emerged as if from nowhere: ‘We must force Internet and mobile service providers to capture customer data and provide it to government agencies, no matter what the cost to democracy or in cold hard cash.’

What an utter non sequitur.

When an army family’s soldier is deployed, every call from an unknown number or ring on the doorbell is a cause for alarm. Last summer, when my husband’s battalion was in Helmand, I made the mistake of ringing a friend’s front doorbell instead of tapping on the back door, when I went round for coffee. I will never forget the look of pale horror on her face as she yanked back the door, heavily pregnant and with a child on her hip, to see at once who was outside. And how her face cracked into the silent movie version of happiness and relief to see it was only me, and not the welfare officer with news of the worst kind.
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“All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.” – J. K. Galbraith

Kickstarter is glorious insofar as it is a well-earned kick to a rotten door.

That’s why a lot of people are griped about Zach Braff funding his Garden City sequel this way.

The idea – and it’s a great one – is that Kickstarter allows filmmakers who otherwise would have NO access to Hollywood and NO access to serious investors to scrounge up enough money to make their movies. Zach Braff has contacts. Zach Braff has a name. Zach Braff has a track record. Zach Braff has residuals. He can get in a room with money people. He is represented by a major talent agency. But the poor schmoe in Mobile, Alabama or Walla Walla, Washington has none of those advantages.

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Larry Lessig, in his “justifiably angry post”:http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully on Aaron Swartz’s death says the following:

bq. Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured “appropriate” out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the “criminal” who we who loved him knew as Aaron.

I have heard the same thing from other people – those involved in trying to help Aaron believe that if MIT had said it didn’t believe that Aaron’s acts were felonies, it would have been extremely difficult for the Department of Justice to proceed in pressing its preposterous charges. Had MIT done the right thing, Aaron Swartz would almost certainly be alive today.

There was certainly internal debate within MIT. David Glenn, in his “last piece for the Chronicle”:http://chronicle.com/article/Rogue-Downloaders-Arrest/128439/ reported:

bq. “What Aaron Swartz did was a clear violation of the rules and protocols of the library and the community,” says Christopher Capozzola, an associate professor of history and acting associate dean of the school of humanities, arts, and social sciences. “But the penalties in this case, and the sources of those penalties, are really remarkable. These penalties really go against MIT’s culture of breaking down barriers.”

There was also pressure from prominent alumni:

bq. “MIT has a duty to get down on its knees and beg that this prosecution be dropped,” says Richard M. Stallman, a Boston-based programmer and prominent “free culture” advocate who attended graduate school at MIT in the 1970s.

Academic administrators read the _Chronicle_ with some attention, especially when it comes to their own institution. They can’t possibly have been unaware of the potential fallout – not the risk of suicide, but the risk both of sending someone to prison for the crime of mass-downloading journal articles, and of condoning “legal theories which criminalize a wide variety of activities in breach of terms of service”:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=399740, activities that have been committed by nearly every quasi-sophisticated network user at some point.

Capozzola’s description of the issues seems to me to have been an entirely reasonable position. I can understand how administrators in the university would reasonably have been royally pissed at what Aaron did, if the facts were more or less as they have been presented. What I cannot understand is why they didn’t publicly adopt a position along these lines – saying, quite clearly, that Aaron’s actions were unacceptable abuses of the network, but also stating, equally clearly, that they did not merit felony charges, on stretched and dubious interpretations of the law, that potentially had decades of jail time attached to them. I _particularly_ cannot understand why MIT – an institution which as Cappozola says, has a tradition of openness and of tolerating (and indeed celebrating) creative rule-breaking didn’t step up to the plate. Again – it didn’t have to condone what Aaron did. It merely had to make it clear that these actions did not constitute major felonies, and that prosecuting Aaron as a felon was wildly inappropriate.

I know that MIT faculty, MIT students, and MIT alumni read this blog. I respectfully suggest that they start contacting the people that they know at the university looking for some answers from the administration. Why did MIT not take action on this when it could have done some good? Is MIT’s official position that breaches of terms of service do indeed constitute felonies with decades of associated prison time? Or that they sometimes do, and sometimes don’t? Or some version of quod non scripsi, non scripsi? I don’t think that MIT can slide through this without explaining its inaction, since that inaction had quite clear, and quite predictable results (not leading predictably to Aaron’s suicide, but leading, extremely predictably to the Kafkaesque situation which precipitated his suicide).

Update: two commenters point to this “email”:http://pastebin.com/eFa8GdGp apparently circulated internally within MIT, in which the university’s president promises an internal investigation of how MIT made its choices, and whether better choices might have been available. So consider this post revised to a request that people hold the administration’s feet to the fire, and circulate the report externally as well as internally.

Very interesting – and long – bloggingheads discussion on the future of higher education in the age of MOOCs – Udacity, Coursera – between Tamar Gendler and Clay Shirky. Shirky’s thesis: Napster got killed but its brief and dramatic algae-bloom of a life changed the ‘story’ of music distribution. No going back. So now we have iTunes and other stuff and record companies don’t look like they once did. Likewise, maybe Udacity isn’t the future, but the ‘story’ changes after recent, dramatic successes. That’s a wishy-washy way for me to put it, but it is one of those ‘the revolution is coming but we can’t know what it will be like yet’ prophecies, which are inherently – and sensibly! but frustratingly! – bet-hedging. Here’s a slightly more concrete way to cash out ‘story’: we tend to operate with notions of the proper form and function of the university that are too closely tied to pictures of the ideal college experience that are, really, too atypical to function as paradigms. ‘We’ meaning pretty much everyone still: academics, our students, their parents. Shirky’s idea is that MOOCs are going to unbundle a lot of stuff. You don’t have to buy the 4-year package to get some learning. It’s pretty obvious there’s more unbundling to come – it’s gonna make buying individual tracks on iTunes seem a minor innovation – and it will put pressure on current higher education’s strong tendency to bundle a lot of functions together to the point of indistinguishability (teaching, research, socialization, credentialing). Beyond that, the success stories about these MOOC’s are going to shift our sense of what is ‘normal’ to such a degree that there will be no going back. It has a lot to do with how previously under-served populations will inevitably be much better served; that’s going to become too obvious for old ways of doing it to continue to seem at the center of higher education. (Now I’m back to being vague, while also sounding radical. Sorry about that. Read Clay’s piece on all this – probably you’ll have to wait for his blog not to be down, which it appears to be at the moment.) [click to continue…]

I’m thinking about getting a “Samsung Chromebook”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009LL9VDG/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B009LL9VDG&linkCode=as2&tag=henryfarrell-20 as a replacement laptop (primarily for light text editing and web browsing). The con appears to be a not very widely used operating system (although I use Google products a lot), the pro is that it looks to be both adequate for purpose and relatively very cheap. Before buying though, I wanted to see whether the hivemind has any useful information on how well ChromeOS stacks up etc. Opinions and information gratefully received …

Another Crooked Timber seminar, albeit on an issue rather than an author. Last month, Tom Slee wrote “two”:http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2012/05/why-the-open-data-movement-is-a-joke.html “posts”:http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2012/05/open-data-movement-redux-tribes-and-contradictions.html on the Open Data movement which got a lot of interesting argument going. To push the contradictions further, we’ve invited a number of people with differing perspectives to write short pieces on the theme of when and how, if ever, open data makes for better politics. Contributors are:

Henry Farrell (blogger at Crooked Timber)
Steven Berlin Johnson (author of _Emergence_, _Where Good Ideas Come From_, and the forthcoming _Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age_)
Tom Lee (director of Sunlight Labs at the “Sunlight Foundation”:http://sunlightfoundation.com/)
Beth Noveck (professor at New York Law School, author of _Wiki Politics_, and former Deputy Chief Technology Officer at the White House)
Clay Shirky (author of _Here Comes Everybody and _Cognitive Surplus_)
Tom Slee (author of _No-One Makes You Shop at Walmart_)
Victoria Stodden (assistant professor of statistics at Columbia, Big Data public intellectual)
Aaron Swartz (in no need of introduction to CT readers
Matthew Yglesias (author of Slate‘s Moneybox column).

As per the last seminar, posts will be put up (nearly) every weekday for the next several days. And yes – as commenters will surely notice, the sex ratio is off again (all I can say is that this is not the result of any lack of effort, I’m not happy about it, and I’d be grateful for suggestions in comments).

Some more IT-in-Education nerdery. I want to rebut an idea that’s been doing the rounds as people have been thinking further about Apple’s strategy in the education market. On last week’s Hypercritical, John Siracusa discussed a recent post by McKay Thomas which argued that Apple is following a “brilliant strategy” in education of “going high school first [and] applying the heat to university textbook publishers and bookstores”. John Gruber linked to it as well. Here’s Thomas:

The new iBook textbooks are being marketed in a way that circumvents the university bookstore. Brilliant. Go right to the student in high school. Make them a true believer. Give them an amazing textbook experience starting in 9th grade. By the time these students hit university in 4 more years they aren’t going to know how to not use an iPad while studying.

I don’t think this is right. The bookstore isn’t nearly as important as Thomas imagines. In fact, colleges are much more open to adoption of new technology and curriculum than grade schools for the simple reason that university faculty decide the content of their own courses. This isn’t to say every worthwhile innovation is widely and rapidly taken up, or that everything that diffuses is worthwhile. But when it comes to textbooks, colleges are far more porous than schools.

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Yesterday Apple launched some new applications and services aimed at the education market. They extended the iBooks app to include a textbook store; they announced some deals with major textbook publishers; and they released a free application you can use to write textbooks, and which allows you to publish them on the store. They made their iTunes U service a separate application. The app replicates what’s already available on iTunes, but also seeks to replace some or all of what’s offered by course management systems.

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Yesterday, in protest at draft US laws that would harm the Internet ostensibly to fight digital content piracy, websites including Wikipedia, Flickr, BoingBoing and many thousands more went voluntarily dark. Crooked Timber was proud to be one of them.

Why should a global blog care about American legislation?

For all the talk of the unintended consequences of SOPA’s anti-piracy measures, it is no accident that Crooked Timber could one day end up as collateral damage of this legislation. SOPA/PIPA are the latest in a long line of laws that seek to externalize the enforcement costs of a beleaguered business model.

We could lose our domain name and more, and with no effective recourse, simply because a commenter posts a link to allegedly pirated content. Or because a touchy content owner doesn’t like us linking to them, and doesn’t like what we write. I say these unintended consequences are not accidental because to the intellectual property zealots who privately draft our public laws, Crooked Timber would simply be an acceptable level of road-kill. Funny how ‘tough choices’ are bad things that are done to other people, eh?

More broadly, you should care because SOPA/PIPA are explicitly extra-territorial. SOPA degrades the domain name system in ways that have been repeatedly and explicitly spelt out to US politicians by Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf, two of the guys who invented the DNS the Internet. They were ignored.

(Somehow, it’s ok for law-makers to screw up part of the critical infrastructure while cheerfully admitting they have no clue how it works. Think how that would go down with, say, healthcare or the economy. I know most of them have no clue, but can you imagine them announcing that to a hearing and everyone laughing sympathetically? Yes? Welcome to my world.) [click to continue…]

The Internet Society (ISOC) is twenty years old in 2012. ISOC is a nonprofit with offices in Washington DC and Geneva, and operations around the world. It was created almost as an afterthought by two of the people who helped start the Internet itself; Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. This was a far-sighted act to help keep the Internet open and evolving, not just in Europe and North America, but all over the world. Ten years ago, a deal was struck to channel into ISOC the surplus funds from running dot ORG. ISOC has expanded rapidly since then, but kept a tight focus on doing more of what it does best.

ISOC does essential work campaigning for public policies that keep the Internet open and offering technical training, especially in developing countries. It has hundreds of local chapters around the world that teach people how to build out the Internet and develop their own professional and technical leadership skills. The chapters push for open and ready access in their own countries and feed in information and viewpoints to ISOC’s global advocacy work.

But let me step aside from how ISOC would probably describe itself, and put some less modest flesh on these bones.
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