With China’s Internet filtering back in the spotlight, this is as good a time as any to rewatch Clay Shirky’s excellent TED talk on the political implications of the ongoing media revolution—with a fascinating case study of a recent episode in the People’s Republic.
Two points that probably deserve emphasis. The first is that the explosion of user generated content in one sense makes the control of search engines even more important for a regime that’s trying to limit access to politically inconvenient information. You can block access to Amnesty International, and you can even try to play whack-a-mole with all the mirrors that pop up, but when the ideas you’re trying to suppress can essentially crop up anywhere, a strategy that relies on targeting sites is going to be hopeless. The search engine is a choke point: You can’t block off access to every place where someone might talk about the Tiananmen massacre, but if you can lock down people’s capacity to search for “Tiananmen massacre,” you can do the next best thing, which is making it very difficult for people to find those places. There are always innumerable workarounds for simple text filters (“Ti@n@nm3n”) but if people are looking for pages, the searchers and the content producers need to converge on the same workaround, by which point the authorities are probably aware of it as well and able to add it to the filter. It’s the same reason people who want to shut down illegal BitTorrent traffic have to focus on the trackers.
The second point, however, is that social media also erodes the value of the search engine as a choke point, because it transforms the community itself into the search engine. For many broad categories of question I might want answered, I will get better information more rapidly by asking Twitter than by asking Google. Marshall McLuhan called media “the extensions of man,” because they amplify and extend the function of our biological nervous systems: The screen as prosthetic eye, the speaker as prosthetic ear, the book or the database as external memory storage. The really radical step is to make our nervous systems extensions of each other—to make man the extension of man. That’s hugely more difficult to filter effectively because it makes the generation of the medium’s content endogenous to the use of the medium. You can ban books on a certain topic because a static object gives you a locus of control; a conversation is a moving target. Hence, as Shirky describes, China just had to shut down Twitter on the Tienanmen anniversary, because there was no feasible way to filter it in realtime.
An analogy to public key encryption might be apt here. The classic problem of secure communications is that you needed a secure channel to transmit the key: The process of securing your transmission against attack was itself a point of vulnerability. You had to openly agree to a code before you could start speaking in code. The classic problem of free communication is that the censors can see the method you’re attempting to evade censorship. Diffie-Hellman handshaking solves the security problem because an interactive connection between sufficiently smart systems lets you negotiate an idiosyncratic set of session keys without actually transmitting it. A conversation can similarly negotiate its own terms; given sufficient ingenuity, I can make it clear to a savvy listener that I intend for us to discuss Tienanmen in such-and-such a fashion, and the most you can do with any finite set of forbidden terms and phrases is slow the process down slightly.
This is a big part of why, pace folks like Tim Wu, I’ll still allow myself to get into the spirit of ’96 every now and again. They can, to be sure, resolve to shut down Twitter and try to throw enough people in jail to intimidate folks into “self discipline,” as they charmingly term it. But the strategies of control available become hugely more costly when the function of the medium is less to connect people with information than to connect them to each other.
Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC essentially stands for the proposition that free speech is free speech regardless of the speaker. The 5-4 majority for the Court ruled that “We find no basis for the proposition that, in the context of political speech, the Government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers. Both history and logic lead us to this conclusion.” (at 25) Echoing its early decision in Bellotti, the Court noted that “Political speech is ‘indispensable to decisionmaking in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation rather than an individual.’” (at 33) “All speakers, including individuals and the media, use money amassed from the economic marketplace to fund their speech. The First Amendment protects the resulting speech, even if it was enabled by economic transactions with persons or entities who disagree with the speaker’s ideas.” (at 35) “There is simply no support for the view that the First Amendment, as originally understood, would permit the suppression of political speech by media corporations.” (at 37)
Somehow this has proven controversial, even radical, to some. But, as George Will correctly notes, “This was radical only because after nearly four decades of such ‘reform’ the First Amendment has come to seem radical. Which, indeed, it is. The Supreme Court on Thursday restored First Amendment protection to the core speech that it was designed to protect — political speech.” Essentially, the decision gets Congress out of the game of picking who, or what platform, deserves full First Amendment protection when it comes to uttering political speech. And there’s nothing radical about that.
Indeed, as Justice Kennedy noted for the majority, there is nothing surprising about this reasoning once you realize that almost every other type legislative or regulatory speech restriction has been struck down as a violation of the First Amendment. “The law before us is an outright ban [on political speech], backed by criminal sanctions,” Kennedy noted (at 20). “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.” (at 33) Think about this for a second: Criminal sanctions or jail time for political speech! How in the world did we get to the point in this nation where criminalizing political speech became acceptable to our legislators? Ignoring the obvious answer—it’s all about protecting incumbents—what is really “radical” here is not that the Supreme Court setting us back on the right path, but that our legislative branch has veered so far off of it.
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Following up from Adam’s post on Hillary Clinton’s speech on global Internet freedom, here’s an interesting blog post from Nora von Ingersleben at ACT. Nora was the lucky (and only) person at the event to ask a question to our Secretary of State. Her question centered upon the practical–while it is well-and-good that companies should “do the right thing”, there are real-world consequences when a company doesn’t comply with a legal request. How can off-shore employees be protected?
QUESTION: Nora von Ingersleben with the Association for Competitive Technology. Madame Secretary, you mentioned that U.S. companies have to do the right thing, not just what is good for their profits. But what if I am a U.S. company and I have a subsidiary in China and the Chinese Government is coming after my guys for information and, you know, we have resisted but now my guys have been taken to jail, my equipment is being hauled away. In that situation, what can the State Department do? Or what will the State Department do?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, we obviously speak out on those individual cases. And we are, as I said, hoping to engage in a very candid and constructive conversation with the Chinese Government. We have had a positive year of very open discussions with our Chinese counterparts. I think we have established a foundation of understanding. We disagree on important issues with them. They disagree on important issues with us. They have our perspective; we have our perspective. But obviously, we want to encourage and support increasing openness in China because we believe it will further add to the dynamic growth and the democratization on the local level that we see occurring in China.
This morning at the Newseum in Washington, DC, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered remarks on Internet freedom and the future of global free speech and expression. [Transcript is here + video.] It will go down as a historic speech in the field of Internet policy since she drew a bold line in the cyber-sand regarding exactly where the United States stands on global online freedom. Clinton’s answer was unequivocal: “Both the American people and nations that censor the Internet should understand that our government is committed to helping promote Internet freedom.” “The Internet can serve as a great equalizer,” she argued. “By providing people with access to knowledge and potential markets, networks can create opportunities where none exist.”
Unfortunately, however, “the same networks that help organize movements for freedom… can also be hijacked by governments to crush dissent and deny human rights.” Echoing Winston Churchill’s famous “iron curtain” speech, Sec. Clinton argued that “With the spread of these restrictive practices, a new information curtain is descending across much of the world.” She noted that virtual walls are replacing traditional walls in many nations as repressive regimes seek to squash the liberties of their citizenry. That’s why the Administration’s bold stand in favor of online freedom is so essential.
Importantly, Sec. Clinton made it clear that the Obama Administration is ready to commit significant resources to this effort. She said that, over the next year, the State Department plans to work with others to establish a standing effort to promote technology and will invite technologists to help advance the cause through a new “innovation competition” that will promote circumvention technologies and other technologies of freedom. Sec. Clinton also challenged private companies to stand up to censorship globally and challenge foreign governments when they demand controls on the free flow of information or digital technology.
That is particularly important because Secretary Clinton’s speech comes on the heels of the recent news that Google and at least 30 other Internet companies were the victims of cyberattacks in China, which raises profound questions about the future of online freedom and cybersecurity. Sec. Clinton’s remarks will make it clear to online operators that the U.S. government stands prepared to back them up when they challenge the censorial policies of repressive foreign regimes.
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Can the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) just do anything it wants? If it wants to bring the entire Internet under its thumb, or regulate any speech uttered over electronic media, can it just do so on a whim? The agency’s recent actions on the Net neutrality and free speech fronts seems to suggest that the agency thinks so.
I don’t need to rehash here what the FCC has been up to on the Net neutrality front. Most everyone is familiar with how the agency has essentially been trying to invent its authority to regulate out of thin air. If you want the whole ugly history of how this charade has unfolded over past few years, I encourage you to read these amazing comments filed today in the FCC’s net neutrality NPRM proceeding by my PFF colleague Barbara Esbin. Barbara simply demolishes the FCC’s argument that it can do anything it wants under the guise of its “ancillary jurisdiction.” As Barbara argues in her comments, the FCC’s position “is akin to saying that the FCC can regulate if its actions are ancillary to its ancillary jurisdiction, and that is one ancillary too many.” She notes that:
The proposed rules regulating the services and network management practices of broadband Internet providers must rest, if at all, on the Commission‘s implied or ancillary jurisdiction and the NPRM fails to provide a basis upon which the exercise of such jurisdiction can be considered lawful.
She shows how farcical it is for the FCC to concoct its supposed authority to regulate from provisions of the Communications Act that have nothing whatsoever to do with Net neutrality or even expanding regulation in general. Specifically, the agency’s reliance on sections 230(b) and 706(a) of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is completely outlandish. Anyone who knows a lick about telecom law and the nature of those two sections understands they were never intended to serve as the basis of an expansive new regulatory regime for the Internet. As Barbara puts it:
This exercise—searching for snippets and threads of regulatory authority over a communications medium as significant as the Internet in multiple, unrelated statutory provisions—should signal to the Commission that no credible source of authority to regulate Internet services exists.
All I have to say is, thank God for checks and balances. I believe the courts will put a stop to this nonsense, but it will take some time. Until then, I suppose the FCC will continue to act like a rogue agency, hell-bent and tossing the constitution to the wind and concocting asinine theories about why they should be allowed to do anything they want. But there are signs that the courts are ready to start holding the FCC more accountable. Continue reading →
If this robotic girlfriend—unveiled last weekend at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo and costing $7-9k—actually goes mainstream, I’ll bet it’s only a matter of time before we see some state lawmaker somewhere propose to ban the toys. The FCC well, no doubt, follow suit, by demanding the incorporation of parental control tools into the devices so Junior doesn’t have his way with Ms. Roxxxy (or her soon-to-be-released male counterpart, Rocky) while Mom and Dad are out at NASCAR the opera.
Laugh if you will, but if Moore’s Law holds true, such robots will become smarter, cheaper, and probably sexier as microchips continue to plummet in price and meaningful artificial intelligence becomes marketplace reality. Move over, Roomba, Roxxxy has arrived—and she ain’t no Rosie the Robot Maid from The Jetsons! Telegraph reports that there’s a whole book about this:
In a 2007 book, “Love and Sex with Robots,” British chess player and artificial intelligence expert David Levy argues that robots will become significant sexual partners for humans, answering needs that other people are unable or unwilling to satisfy.
But the most interesting part of the telegraph article is creator Douglas Hines’s motivation:
Inspiration for the sex robot sprang from the September 11, 2001 attacks, he said, where a friend died and he vowed to store his personality forever.
This sounds an awful lot like the plot of Caprica, the new SyFi television series, a prequel set 58 years before the beginning of Battlestar Galactica, the cult phenomenon that even seduced hardened TV-refusenik like me. Continue reading →
Connect Safely, which is great parenting and online child safety resource run by my friends Anne Collier and Larry Magid, has just released some excellent “Virtual World Safety Tips for Parents of Teens.” Tons of good advice in there worth checking out, especially the thing I always focus on in all my online safety work—talk to your kids!! Here’s Anne and Larry on that point:
Talk with your teens about the virtual worlds they use – ask them to show you around. See what their avatars look like and what screen names they’ve chosen to represent themselves. What do their profiles and the appearance of their avatars say about them? Try to hold back snap judgments (long-term guidance usually works better than control if the goal is learning rather than short-term compliance – see this). Are their virtual-world profiles linked to social-network ones, and how much do those linked-up profiles together reveal about them – too much? Are their in-world friends mostly friends they know in real life? If not, do they know that they can’t really know who people are online unless they know them offline?
It’s about getting a dialogue going with your kids. That is so absolutely essential and it would help head off about 90% of the problems that develop online today with kids. Kids need mentoring, whether its in meatspace or cyberspace. But make sure to read all the Connect Safely tips. They are excellent.
Incidentally, I talked about some of these issues when I did a virtual guest lecture in Second Life last October hosted by Metanomics. The show was called “Live Free and Prosper: Government’s Place in Virtual Worlds and On-line Communities,” and I posted all the video clips here. I also encourage those of you interested in these issues to check out these recent TLF guest posts by Joshua Fairfield an Associate Professor of Law at Washington & Lee University School of Law. He recently posted and interesting essay entitled, “Virtual Paternalism” as well as a summary and discussion of the recent “FTC Report on Kids and Virtual Worlds.” Worth reading.
Over at Mashable, Ben Parr has a post (“Facebook Turns to the Crowd to Eradicate Offensive Content“) expressing surprise that Facebook has a crowdsourcing / community policing solution to deal with objectionable content:
Did you know that Facebook has a crack team of employees whose mission is to deal with offensive content and user complaints? Their ranks number in the hundreds. But while most websites have people on staff to deal with porn and violence, none of them have 350 million users to manage… Now the world’s largest social network found a way to deal with this shortage of manpower, though. Facebook has begun testing a new feature called the Facebook Community Council [currently invite-only]. According to a guest post on the Boing Boing blog by one of the council’s members, its goal is to purge Facebook of nudity, drugs, violence, and spam.
The Facebook Community Council is actually a Facebook app and tool for evaluating content for various offenses… The app’s tagging system allows council members to tag content with one of eight phrases: Spam, Acceptable, Not English, Skip, Nudity, Drugs, Attacking, and Violence. If enough council members tag a piece of content with the same tag, action is taken, often a takedown.
What Facebook is doing here is nothing all that new. Many other social networking sites or platforms such MySpace, Ning, and many others, do much the same. Video hosting sites like YouTube do as well. [See my summary of YouTube’s efforts down below]**
No doubt, some will be quick to decry “private censorship” with moves by social networking sites, video hosting sites, and others to flag and remove objectionable content within their communities, but such critics need to understand that:
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The negativity of political advertising is a constant complaint and has given rise to no end of proposals to regulate purely political speech despite the plain language of the First Amendment and obvious intention of the founders to prevent government from censoring criticism. The importance of this issue extends well beyond politics: With U.S. political advertising for all media expected to hit $3.3 billion in 2010, political ad spending constitutes a significant source of advertising revenue for all kinds of publishers. To put that number in perspective, it’s just 1.4% of the $241 billion in advertising spending expected for 2010, but is nearly half as large the total spent on display advertising revenue (which makes up 1/3 of total online advertising revenue) in 2008. So as advertising revenues continue to decline and more advertising moves online, political ad spending is an increasingly important source of revenue for publishers of both traditional and new media.
But one of the more powerful arguments against such advertising is that it diminishes the effectiveness of advertising in general for all products and services—and potentially lowers revenue for publishers even more than is spent on political advertising. That’s why some advertisers and even publishers could conceivably support restrictions on negative campaign ads. The problem with this argument is that it’s just not true. That’s the conclusion of this very interesting 1999 Stanford study by Shanto Iyengar and Markus Prior I just stumbled upon: “Political Advertising: What Effect on Commercial Advertisers?” The authors conclude:
Despite the inherent bias of all forms of advertising, people perceive product ads as generally truthful and interesting. In contrast, political ads are dismissed as dishonest, unappealing, and uninformative. When judged against political advertising, product advertising enjoys considerable public support….
They suggest two explanations for “the significant reputation gap between the two genres of advertising”: Continue reading →
One of the themes you come across again and again in public policy debates about privacy, advertising, marketing, or even free speech battles, is the notion that the public at large is made up of mindless sheep being duped at every turn. And, as Berin Szoka and I noted in our paper “What Unites Advocates of Speech Controls & Privacy Regulation?” if you buy into the argument that consumers are basically that stupid then it logically follows that people cannot be trusted or left to their own devices. Thus, government must intervene and establish a baseline “community standard” on behalf of the entire citizenry to tell them what’s best for them.
But there are good reasons to question the premise that consumers are blind to efforts to persuade or influence them — regardless of what type of media content or communications efforts we are talking about. I was recently reading Communication Power by Manuel Castells and liked what he had to say about how so many media critics make this false assumption. Castells rightly notes:
Interestingly enough, critical theorists of communication often espouse [a] one-sided view of the communications process. By assuming the notion of a helpless audience manipulated by corporate media, they place the source of social alienation in the realm of consumerist mass communication. And yet, a well-established stream of research, particularly in the psychology of communications, shows the capacity of people to modify the signified of the messages they receive by interpreting them according to their own cultural frames, and by mixing the messages from one particular source with their variegated range of communicative practices. (p. 127)
That’s exactly right, and it is even more true in an age of ubiquitous, interactive communications technologies. “The people formerly known as the audience” have the unprecedented ability to talk back, to compare notes, to collectively criticize and hold accountable those who previously held all the cards in the mass media age of the past. Most consumers are perfectly capable of judging the merits of advertising, commercial messages, or other content on their own; they cast a skeptical eye toward most claims but process those claims alongside other counter-claims, independent judgments, informational inputs, and “cultural frames,” as Castells rightly argues. We need to give the public some credit.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.