Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Daniel Gilbert, Harvard professor and author of “Stumbling on Happiness”, is someone I enjoy listening to even if I’ve heard his talk several times before. I’ve blogged his studies on happiness previously, but I’ll always catch his talks because he’s an astoundingly good presenter. (I had a chance to talk with Gilbert before his talk. I asked him to be brief, repetitive and boring so he’d be easier to blog, as I was recovering from writing 2500 words about Jason Clay’s talk. He didn’t oblige.)

His talk is called “The Four Answers”, and the answers are to the question, “Why are people so bad at knowing what makes us happy?” He reminds us that the US Declaration of Independence establishes as “self evident that people have inalienable rights; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The founding fathers thought that pursuit of happiness was difficult, but not complicated. Life in colonial times was hard: you got up in the morning and tried not to die. “Happiness is what happens when you get what you’re aiming for - and it doesn’t happen in this lifetime.” You weren’t assured the right of happiness, but the right to pursue it.

The world has changed very quickly. The agricultural, industrial and technological revolutions have transformed our reality, and now large populations have everything they could possibly need. And yet, Gilbert tells us, they’re not happy. “Happiness can’t just be getting what you’re aiming for,” or we’d all be happy. Or we could draw another conclusion, the one Gilbert argues for: “We must be aiming for the wrong things.”

The problem stems from our ability to imagine. Every animal learns from experience, from the single-celled up. Unfortunately, this can be a very expensive way to learn - the mouse that gets caught by the cat doesn’t live long enough to benefit from the lesson. Human beings are able to learn through a more sophisticated method than trial and error. We can imagine, and conclude whehter courses of action without actually engaging in them. This capacity is so important, it radically changed human anatomy, expanding the size of our heads three-fold, so we could grow huge temporal lobes, the brainspace we use to imagine.

Gilbert asks us to imagine a raw steak banana split. “Ben and Jerry’s didn’t have to make it to realize it was an error.” He offers the observation that “We are the only animal on the planet that learns from mistakes we haven’t personally made, because “imagination is a life simulator.”

There’s bad news: this simulator “is new, and still in beta testing”. Our life simulator fails in predictable ways. People make systematic series of errors when they try to predict how they will feel about the future. The heart of the talk are these four errors, the four answers to the question of why we’re so bad at knowing what makes us happy.

What we don’t imagine matters more than we imagine it does.

Who ends up happier? Assistant professors who get tenure, or those who don’t. We’d assume that tenured professors are much happier. Actually it turns out not to matter very much at all - a few years after the tenure decision, both the tenured and untenured turn out to be pretty sucessful. And “as it turns out, everyone is happier than assistant professors.” But in the moment before a tenure decision, assistant professors predict that the tenure decision will have a massive impact on their lives.

Gilbert calls this “a failure of the life simulator”, something that happens in study after study. To explain, he asks us to imagine buying a newspaper. Then he asks us for details: “What paper did you buy? What day of the week? What bill did you use? Where did you put the change?” None of us know because we imagine the central feature of a thing, not the inessential details. These inessential details matter a great detail. The professors are imaging the consequences of a tenure decision, but not other aspects of their lives, their relationships, where they live - these details have a profound effect on whether they end up happy or not.

Would you be happier in California. Everyone says that they would. And Californians tell us that they’re happier than the rest of America. But there’s no reliable correlation between California and happiness. When we imagine California, we imagine beaches and bikinis - we omit inessential details like smog, traffic and earthquakes.

You can improve the accuracy of people’s prediction of their happiness by asking them to imagine details. Gilbert explains a study where a group of football fans are asked how they’re going to feel after their team wins or loses a big game. They predict big swings, positive or negative, in happiness. Another group is asked the same question, but also asked to list things they’ll be doing the day after the game. This leads to a much narrower - and more accurate - range of emotional swings. This is a “wide focus” effect - if you ask someone to broaden their focus beyond the football game to their wider experience, considering those “inessential details”, they’re less error-prone in making predictions of their future happiness.

We can’t forsee what we’ll see once we’re seeing it

Gilbert shares some quotes from the New York Times, quotes from people happy and satisfied with their lives:

“I don’t have a minute’s regret. It was a glorious experience.”
That quote was from Maurice Bickham, who served 45 years in prison for fighting back against a KKK lynching attempt, and was eventually released.

“I am so much better off, physically, financially, mentally and in almost every way.”
That’s Jim Wright, years after he was forced to resign from Congress in disgrace.

“I believe it turned out for the best.” That was Harry Langerman, a man who’d had the opportunity to franchise McDonalds, but wasn’t able to borrow the money. He became a middle manager in the Black Angus chain of steakhouses… and seems pretty happy about it.

The most astounding of these examples is Pete Best, the drummer thrown out of the Beatles. He’s been recently quoted as saying, “I’m happier than I would hae been with the Beatles.” This seems crazy - it’s not like Best went on to become a restauranteur - he’s a session drummer. Who would want to be a footnote to musical history when they could have been part of the greatest band of all time?

Gilbert explains that our brain is wired to resolve ambiguity. He shows the Necker cube, an optical illusion that can be interpreted in two ways. Stare at a Necker cube, and you’ll see it shift between orientations. If a researcher provides even a modest reward - a gentle, approving “Mmm” when you announce that you see the cube in a particular orientation, you’ll lose your ability to see the cube in another orientation within two minutes.

Given an ambiguous situation - being thrown into prison or out of the Beatles - we’ll shop amongst interpretations and pick the one that feels best. Did Best lose the gig with the Beatles, or gain a great chance to spend more time with his family? “Our brains are good at finding the best way to see things.”

Gilbert posits a situation in which we might face rejection - we ask a girl out on a date and she says no. This is an ambiguous situation. Maybe she thinks I’m ugly, he offers. Or maybe she’s an anti-semite. Or perhaps I’m a lousy conversationalist. Or maybe she’s a lesbian. Given the ambiguity, we’ll conclude she’s an anti-semitic lesbian before we conclude our own unattractiveness.

Unambiguous rejection is much harder for humans to handle than rejection from a single person. Gilbert details an experiment in which students are invited to apply for jobs as ice-cream testers. They’re invited to taste ice-cream flavors and offer names for them. In the experiment, everyone is rejected, some by a single judge, others by a panel of judges, where each rejects the applicant. Before the test, students are asked how badly they’d feel if they didn’t get the job - they all predicted they’d feel pretty bad, because “rejection sucks and it will hurt”. But the students rejected by a single judge felt only a little bad, while those rejected by a whole panel felt truly lousy. It’s one thing to reject an ambiguous defeat - that judge didn’t like me - but unambiguous setbacks are far harder for the brain to rationalize.

In the future, we will live in the present
Another optical illusion shows us how a solid-colored grey bar can look like a gradient when shown against a gradient background. It’s a simple contrast effect - things change when you compare them to other things.

If you’re visiting a friend’s house for a dinner party, which bottle of wine are you going to buy? Given four choices, you’re doing to buy the second-least expensive bottle of wine - you’re not a cheapskate, who’d buy the least expensive, but you’re not going to buy the most expensive either. Wine stores get you to buy the $33 bottle instead of the $27 by adding a bottle of $115 “aspirational” wine. No one ever buys this wine, he argues - it exists solely to increase your chances of buying a slightly more expensive wine, which doesn’t look so expensive in comparison to the very expensive wine.

If that doesn’t ring true for you (it should - even Homer Simpson has verified the theory), Gilbert offers evidence from a study that shows that people will choose to get paid $90,000 a year if their peers are paid $80,000 rather than being paid $100,000 while peers are paid $110,000. We can’t resist making comparisons, and guessing at future happiness based on these comparisons.

There’s another lab study to demonstrate the phenomenon. Researchers invite students to estimate how much they’re going to enjoy eating a bag of potato chips. They then eat them and report how much they actually enjoyed them. Simple enough. But the experiment has a twist. One group is asked to estimate their enjoyment of potato chips while there’s also a plate of chocolates on the table. They tend to give lower estimates of potato chip enjoyment. On the other hand, a group making an implicit, unstated comparison between potato chips and Spam give high estimates of potato chip enjoyment.

Here’s the thing - when students actually eat the chips, they pretty much enjoy them at the same rate. “Once you eat a potato chip, it doesn’t matter what you’re not eating. No one ever says, ‘Man, this is so not Spam.’”

“How often do we have thoughts like ‘I could have had a V8′? Or ‘maybe I should have gone to a different lecture?’” Almost never, he tells us. We compare in our imaginations, but it reality, we live in the present and evaluate our happiness based on what we’re experiencing.

Your mother doesn’t know everything.

Gilbert tells us that his mother offered him the same advice everyone’s mother offers - find a good job, get married and have kids. Is Mom - and conventional wisdom in general - right or wrong?

Marriage, as it turns out, is an extremely good predictor of happiness. Married people make more money per capita, eat better, live longer, have more sex and enjoy it more. In terms of comparisons of happiness, you’d need to be making $100,000 more as an unmarried person to be as happy as a married person. (On average, and your mileage may vary, of course. And please, keep in mind, this is Gilbert talking, not me.) Is this a causal relationship? Maybe happier people are simply more likely to get married? That’s true, but studies over time reveal a very common pattern - people are less happy before marriage, experience a happiness peak shortly after marriage, and become slightly less happy a few years into marriage, though remain significantly happier than before marriage.

Money’s a little trickier - they’re related, but the relationship is asymptotic. Earning more money doesn’t give you much of a happiness boost after an inflection point. There’s an argument about where that inflection point is, but it’s lower than you think - somewhere between $40,000 and $100,000 a year in the US, less in developing nations.

Gilbert tells us that an economist friend reacted to this set of research with the quip, “If money isn’t making you happy, you’re not spending it right.” That may be true. People often make bad choices enabled by more money. If you get a raise and move into the country, you’re going to have a commute to work - that’s a daily negative effect that may well counterbalance any happiness effect you get from the fresh air and starry skies.

Comparative money is far more important than real income. He offers another quip: “Happiness is proportional to your salary divided by your brother-in-law’s salary.” He offers another useful observation - money given away almost always leads to happiness. In an experiment, students are given $20. One set is instructed to go out and buy something for themselves; the other set is instructed to buy something for someone else or give the money away. The first group comes back slightly happier than they were before, but the second group comes back beaming. (Did I mention that Global Voices is a non-profit organization and that we accept donations online?)

Here’s the tough news for those of us contemplating parenthood: people with children tend to be less happy than married couples without children. Parents with young children are even less happy. Again, perhaps there’s a self-sorting effect - perhaps happy people decide not to have kids. But time studies suggest a curve where couples are pretty happy, get very happy when anticipating a baby, get significantly less happy when the baby arrives and don’t really recover until the kid goes to college. Gilbert shows us a study in which mothers were asked several times a day to rate their happiness by being called on a phone at random - they reported what they were doing and their happiness levels. They reported being happiest when talking with friends or eating, less happy when shopping for groceries and least happy doing housework. Time they were with children ranked between housework and grocery shopping.

Gilbert acknowledges that none of us believe these studies. He asks, “What do we do when data shows us something we don’t feel?” He offers three hypotheses that might explain the phenomenon, each with a catchy analogy:

Happiness is Armani socks
If you buy a $250 pair of Armani socks, you’re probably not going to keep this fact to yourself. You’re likely to tell people how wonderful they are, how great they feel. “We value things a lot when we pay a lot of money for them… or suffer for them.”

Happiness is heroin

“Heroin is a great source of joy,” Gilbert tells us. The problem with heroin is that it crowds out other joy, lowering your average happiness. Children might have this tendency as well, crowding other things out of life that previously were sources of pleasure. These pleasures - travel, dining out, playing loud music that your kids hate - tend not to return until the kids leave home. “Empty nest syndrome is not a DSM category. It doesn’t exist. The only known symptom is smiling.”

Happiness is baseball

A Cubs and Sox fan, Gilbert knows something about how baseball and suffering can be correlated. But he postulates a near-perfect baseball fantasy: a day game at Fenway, Becket on the mound against the Yankees, a complete-game shutout, with a 0-0 tie finally broken by a Youklis walk-off in the bottom of the ninth. You’re going to tell everyone what an amazing game you saw. The truth is, shutout baseball is pretty damned boring. If we asked you moment to moment, you’d likely be bored through most of the game and thrilled at the very end. But our memory tends to record peak moments and eliminate the routine ones.

Parenting, he offers, is like this. You have a tough day with your kid, but you get a wave of love and affection when your kid tells you he loves you. “It wasn’t a great day, you had thirty really good seconds. Transcendent happiness wipes out the moment of drudgery.”

Gilbert has obviously talked to his mother about these issues and offers her response: “Maybe as parents we fail to get the right amount of joy out of parenting.”

As the audience is now ready to immediately get married, stop seeking a raise at work and put off having children indefinitely, Gilbert reminds us that “we’re designed to pursue happiness, not to find it.” Finding happiness is a really tough task, one where “we need to outmanuever our own brains which are designed as machines for their own replication,” not for making us happy.

Jeff Jarvis has a terrific, provocative post about the narcissism of newspapers in which he discusses a number of myths. The discussion afterwards is also really inte)resting. Here’s the comment I posted there (with a minor edit or two, all of which can really be reduced to the title of this post:

Terrific post and discussion. Thanks, Jeff.

May I add one more, related, myth to your collection, Jeff? Here goes: That it’s possible to cover the day’s events.

This is just a different way of putting your formulation “One man’s [sic] noise is another man’s news.” But I think it’s worth calling out since the promise of sufficiency is a big part of traditional newspapers’ promise of value to us: “Read us once in the morning, and after going through our pages, you will know everything you need to know.” (Do radio stations still make the ridicule-worthy “Give us 8 minutes and we’ll give you the world?” claim.) Yeah, no newspaper would ever maintain that claim seriously if challenged — they know better than their readers (or at least they used to) what they’re leaving out — but it’s at the base of the idea that reading a paper is a civic duty. The paper doesn’t give us everything but it gives us enough that reading one every day makes us well-informed citizens.

The notion that newspapers give you your daily requirement of global news — which works out to wondering, along with Howard, if there is such a thing as “news” — seems to me to be as vulnerable as the old idea of objectivity. Like objectivity: (1) It’s presented as one of the basic reasons to read a newspaper; (2) it hides the fact that it’s based on cultural values; and (3) it doesn’t scale well in the age of the Net.

Ultimately, this myth is enabled – as so many of the myths of news and knowledge are — by paper. Take away the paper and the newspaper doesn’t become a paperless newspaper. It becomes a network. That’s what’s happening now, IMO. From object to network … and networks are far far harder to “monetize” (giving myself a yech here) than objects.

(By the way, this is what I was trying to ask in the question I horribly botched at PDF. Sigh.)

[Tags: newspapers journalism everything_is_miscellaneous objectivity ]

Jonathan Lyons was a correspondent for Reuters for 21 years, the first American national to be based in Tehran after the revolution. He and his wife both wrote from Tehran, and between them, they published in Reuters, the Guardian, the Economist, and the International Herald Tribune, which made them very visible targets for the regime.

He tells us about talking to an ayatollah in Qom. He realized was receiving what might be the last vestige of an Aristotelian education in rhetoric and logic from this Shia cleric. He realized this didn’t jibe with our cartoon image of Iranian clerics. And he wondered what else there might be able to learn from this tradition.

This led him to the exploration of Islam’s influence on what we think of as western science and society. He focuses in particular on Adelard of Bath, wondering what kind of person goes to the Holy Land during the crusades not to kill, but to learn Arabic and bring back that scholarship?

His book, “The House of Wisdom“, starts with a description of the unschooled, barbarian European masses knocking on the gates of the learned and sophisticated Islamic lands. He explains that Fibonnaci’s father sent him to a Muslim family to learn his math - he would have learned double-entry bookkeeping, an innovation that hadn’t yet reached the North.

When European monestaries might hold a couple of dozen volumes, Arabic libraries held hundreds of thousands of books. When the sultan decided to donate books to a new school, he sent 80,000 from his personal collection.

The seat of knowledge was Baghdad, founded by the second Abbasid caliph, Abu Jahar al-Mansour. (Apologies on all transliterations - I’m blogging in a room without Wifi and I will certainly get terms wrong - please use comments to correct.) Lyons tells us that the calif was a student of Euclid, who wanted to build a palace in a circle so that people would be equidistant from his central palace. He ordered built a circle of cottonseed oil, which lit on fire, brought the city into relief in glowing fire. While Madina-al-Salam was a mathematically planned city, the magic of it came from a city governed by law rather than by tribal tradition.

Al-Mansour ordered translations of scientific works from Greek and Persian. Ordered the creation of the House of Wisdom - the Beit al Hikma. It was modeled after the libraries of great Persian kings. This effort was strongly supported by the general population, not just by the caliphs. If you weren’t a scholar yourself, you hired scholars who lived in your house and did work in your honor. And great translators were well compensated. The translation of Greek texts into Arabic allowed Arabic to become the language of the known academic world.

These translations were more than word for word paraphrasings - to translate these texts, the scholars needed to become deeply knowledgeable as scientists. They corrected, edited and revised these texts. The Arabic translation of a great Greek work was often better than the Greek original - this came to bite the West in the neck, when Renaissance thinkers developed a fetish for the Greek originals.

The desire for science wasn’t in conflict with relgious authority - there was deep Islamic support. And the precision of Arabic was a great advantage for scholarship. A great Persian scholar began writing in Arabic because it was more precise. Arabic has 42 words for the word that meant “to be” in Latin - this gets pretty important when you’re talking about metaphysics. Mohammed brought in a religious, economic and finally an intellectual revolution.

The requirement to know the Qibla - the direction of Mecca - for prayer, burial and preparation of halal meat - had a major effect on geographic technologies. When Mohammed left Mecca for Medina, he just needed to face south to pray. This was initially adopted by Muslims in the far flung empire. But the desire for scientific accuracy superceded religious tradition. Believers in Central Asia had four choices to determine qibla:

- Honor the niche in a mosque
- Face south and honor tradition
- Face the traditional pilgrimage route to Mecca
- Take the astronomers seriously

That final, scientific solution was the one adopted. Medieval religious opinion bowed to the scientists. And the qibla adopted wasn’t the straight line on the map, but the line that honored the curvature of the earth. By the 10th century, the Islamic world had accurate geometry of a spherical earth. A hundred years before, all six major triganometric functions were in wide use.

Urban mosques began to attract timekeepers - they were religious scientists paid by the mosques, and they compiled almanacs - al-manaq - rigorous time cycles of when to pray in different locales, from Morocco to China.

Religious injunctions called on doctors to heal the sick… a very different model than in Europe, where sickness was seen as spiritual weakness. The need for pilgrimage routes required complex cartography. And alchemists were doing basic chemistry, exploring the structural nature of compounds. From azimuth to zenith, algebra to zero, we use Arabic terminology.

The idea Lyons wants us to take away is the idea that we can understand the world scientifically without putting ourselves in opposition to God. St. Augustine, he tells us, rejects science and art in becoming a Christian. In the Christian world, we see bestiaries like Aesop’s fables. They tell us very little about animals and lots about Christian morality.

Adelard of Bath was born around 1080 in England’s west country. His father was a powerful ally of the local bishop, and he was a wealthy, highly educated man who’d studied at cathedral schools in France. But he condemned contemporary learning and longed for an idealized past - “I judge the ancients eloqhent and call the moderns dumb.”

He had no interest in crusading. Instead, he resolved to learn Arabic and return with Arabic learning. We believe he was in Antioch in 1114, based on evidence of an earthquake he survived. He know he learned to wash a cadaver until the neural systems emerge from under the skin to study their structure.

He came home a changed man, determined to teach his peers about the wonders he studied in the East. He is worried that his peers reject modern scholarship from the Arab world at their peril and overfocus (as he had) on the classics of Greek literature. He brings back a book of alchemy which teaches how to tan leather, color glass and dye cloth green. And he brings back the astrolabe, the most powerful computer of its day, capable of telling time, defining true north, and measuring the height of a building. Alas, they only work if you know the latitude - we can read astrolabes based on what latitude they’re set up for.

The astrolabe, Lyons argues, is the perfect metaphor for Arab science. It’s based on Greek knowledge, advanced, done beautifully and brought to the west. People other than Adelard had gotten their hands on astrolabes and knew how to use them, but didn’t understand the cosmology behind them. Lyons sees Adelard as a cosmologist who understood the astrolabe as a scientist, not just a technician. “You can take for granted that the universe is not a rectangle or a square, but a sphere.”

Adelard advised King Henry II, and know he told him to rule through philosopher kings and to tolerate all religions. We don’t know how he died, but we think he survived into his seventh decade, and provided personal advice to the King throughout his days, based on extremely complex horoscopes provided through 1151.

Lyons calls Adelard the “first Western man of science”. He offers a quote from Adelard to explain this perspective: “Of course, God made the universe. But we may and should inquire into the natural world. The Arabs teach us that.” This is science - we can explore and understand the universe and still believe in God, and this is a little-known gift of Arab culture.

The Arabs, he concludes, are the first monotheists to get their hands on Greek and Latin texts and figure out how to use these things in a monotheistic universe. Their work preceded Maimonedes and other great thinkers responsible for this sort of synthesis.

So how do we have such a negative view of Islam today? 46% of Americans believe Islam is intolerant, and that 70% say it has nothing in common with their own faith. Most Americans see little or nothing to admire in Islam, but this is based on media impression, not on actual experience.

The culprit is anti-Islam discourse, which can be traced back to crusade-era propoganda. In the 11th century, the Church needed to create propoganda to get people to give up their lives and fight enemies they’d never met. Indeed, those church leaders had never met a Muslim. The discourse posited Islam as the opposite of Christianity. This turned Islam into a false form of Christianity, an unchaste religion, a violent faith, and in direct opposition to Christ. And we see the vision today - that Islam is anti-science, sexually perverse, undemocratic, and inherently violent.

Lyons believes that Arab contributions were slowly and steadily written out of history books. This inhibits the understanding of Islam, which makes it extremely difficult to diffuse global tensions. This distorts our domestic policy and leads to a war against Islam instead of a war against the criminals who attacked us. We’re holding what Lyons calls (quoting a Turkish saying) “a dialog of the deaf”.

I asked Lyons my best tough question, which made reference to the Arab Human Development report and the fact that there’s been very little translation from the rest of the world’s languages into Arabic over the past thousand years - languages like Spanish translate orders of magnitude more works. Why is this, and doesn’t this mean he’s putting too much of the blame for a Western/Islam misunderstanding on the West?

Lyons parses my question pretty bluntly: “In nicer language, you’re asking what happened, why the Islamic world fell behind and why they don’t currently dominate science.” He offers a variety of answers:

- We don’t know enough to date the decline of Arab science or define its cause or causes.
- We accept a notion of an Arab golden age, and the longer we study, the longer that golden age gets
- Copernicus’s work is based around two key theorems from the Arab world - perhaps this means that Arabic scientific influence lasted hundreds of years beyond when we commonly think
- Maybe we overvalue Western science - perhaps we’ve lost something in losing the integrative nature of Islamic medicine
- The Mongols killed most of the scientiss and scholars

The most satisfying answer was his last one - before admitting “this is a complex way of saying ‘I don’t know’” - current Arab states need to take blame for allowing science and learning to lapse. These states are insufficiently Islamic, not in the sense bin Ladn means, but in the sense that they do not recognize the finest examples of Arab culture and history, the love of science, art, exploration.

I’m sympathetic to this notion, much as I’m sympathetic to work on the African continent to recognizing the roots of complex, abstract mathematics in African culture as a way of reclaiming and rebuilding a love of science and learning. But it’s very hard for Lyons to keep this thread going in conversation in the audience - it very quickly turns into a discussion of terrorism… which, in turn, is an interesting example of Lyons’s key point, that our impressions of Islam tend to focus on intolerance and violence, not on the history of science and learning.

Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund gave a talk yesterday about video and social change, featuring the video below that tries to convince people to think through the impacts of their consumption, and what changes could be made to make use of resources more efficient.

His talk this morning looks at these issues in far more detail, asking hard questions about the sustainability of human life on a single planet in the wake of increasing consumption. This ends up being a conversation primariy about agriculture and food production, which Clay characterizes as the single largest threat to the planet.

Clay tell us that he grew up on a Missouri farm, which he ran for five years before going to college. He tells us that there’s an old midwestern saying: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” In environmental terms, we need to know where we’re going and where we are on the journey.

Ultimately, our population times consumption needs to be sustainable within the footprint of our planet - right now, we’re consuming roughly 1.25 earth’s worth of resources. If China consumes at the rate that the US population does, we need two new earths just for Chinese consumers. Clay asks whether consumers should have a choice about buying sustainable products. His answer - nope. They need to all be sustainable - consumers need to choose based on other metrics.

We need to focus on agricultural sustainability because agriculture is our major threat towards biodiversity. WWF chose 35 key biodiversity locations around the world to protect - the threat to all is human impact, and the threat of agricultural and ranching encroachment is twice as large as any other threat. We currently farm 33% of the world’s terrestrial surface, 57% of non-river and mountain land. An additional 12% of terrestrial land is protected. The fate of that remaining 30% will be determined in the next few years. Right now, we’re seeing agricultural encroachment into forest and wetlands at 0.6% a year.

Agriculture uses 70% of all water on the planet. One crop - rice - uses 14%. Water scarcity means that agriculture is becoming more unpredictable, more variable. This makes it hard for farmers to borrow against their future production. “If American and Brazilian farmers don’t get money to plant, we’re going to starve.”

We waste roughly 60% of the water allocated towards agriculture And we’ve lost half our topsoil in the last 150 years. Agriculture may provide 25-40% of greenhouse gases - we don’t really know because we don’t know how carbon is released from soil. And these ugly numbers all precede biofuels.

By 2050, we’ll have 3 billion more people in the world, and food consumption will likely triple. That’s because people spend money upgrading their diets before anything else, and “better” diets mean more animal protein. In the US, we’ve tried very hard to keep food inexensive - we pay less than 10% of our income for food in the US, eating out about 40% of the time. But we don’t necessarily pay for externalities. If you buy a large burger, the farmer gets paid about $0.25 for the ground beef. Growing that beef could require anywhere from 3000 to 15,000 liters of water - is that really a fair price for water? (Clay quipps, “Water is the new carbon - lack of water will kill you in a couple of days, unlike climate change, which takes decades.”)

The problem with getting a handle on these issues is that even big companies don’t have a huge amount of control over their carbon impacts directly - Coke, Clay tells us, controls less than 15% of their carbon impact directly, and the rest comes from the supply chain. “Generally carbon and water impacts aren’t under control of large brands or retailers - they occur upstream, in primary production of commodities.” That means that improving corporate efficiency doesn’t get the job done - you need to work with suppliers and their suppliers.

When WWF looks for places where they can impact supply chains, they look at these numbers:
- 1.4 billion producers of raw materials
- 6.7 billion consumers
- 15 commodities that represent the most potential for positive environmental impact
- 300-500 companies dominate 70-80% of trade in each of those commodities
- 200 companies represent 50% of 15 commodities, and 100 represent 25% of those 15

WWF’s take: let’s focus on those 100 companies. (Cargill is, by far, the most important of these companies.) The goal is to get them to commit to ensuring that 25% of one of these commodities will be sustainably produced, checked against third-party standards of sustainability, buy 2020. These goals need to be public and transparent to avoid greenwashing. And there’s a ton of interest in doing this - 21 companies have already partnered with WWF, and WWF is trying to bring in 15 more a year.

Mars has committed to making 100% of their cocoa sustainable. That’s important because they buy more cocoa that any other companies. Clay theorizes that 25% of the market is what it takes to “flip” a market - producers realize the economic benefits of sustainable production through higher prices and longer contracts and other producers will follow their lead in the hopes of reaching these markets.

WWF is focusing on cotton, palm oil, soy, sugar, bananas, pineapple, cocoa, coffee, wild fish, farmed salmon and shrimp, beef, pulp and paper, timber and biofuels. Bananas, pineapple, cocoa and coffee are critical to a number of regional economies, while the other are key global commodities. (Clay pauses to wax lyrical on aquaculture - it now produces more fish than wild caught, and the production goes in strange places. Turns out that Mars vastly more fish than WalMart… to make cat food.) Around each of these products, WWF convenes a roundtable to discuss global standards for impact, creating 4-8 key, measurable impacts that can be tracked and measurably reduced.

Once we start setting standards and monitoring impacts, we’re able to answer tricky questions, like whether we’re better buying local or not from a greenhouse gas point of view. It turns out that transport is only a tiny component in the carbon footprint of most products - 85% of greenhouse gas is attributable to production. So we’ve now got good studies that demonstrate that it’s far smarter from a carbon impact to raise lamb in New Zealand, freeze it and ship it to the UK than to grow locally.

This sort of analysis turns into uncomfortable news for environmentalists. Tesco looked into building more small stores and encouraging people to walk to them, rather than big stores with parking lots. They discovered that the carbon impact of the food people eat to power their walk to the store outpaces the gains from reduced car usage! The analysis of a grande latte - in the video above - shows that a company like Starbucks uses almost no water in producing a beverage, a few liters in producing a cup and lid, and hundreds in growing the coffee. You can bring a recyclable cup, and you’ll save some water… but if you really want to save water, you need to address the supply chain.

Clay looks closely at China’s increased consumption of pork - China has more pigs than the rest of the world combined. As China eats further up the food chain, they’re buying massive amounts of soy from Brazil. That soy is grown on former rain forest. Brazil is basically exporting soil and water to China in the form of soy, cotton and sugar.

We’ve got to find some way of increasing productivity if this trade is going to continue. There are eight key crops in the world which are responsible for 50% of the world’s calories. We need a 3% growth rate in production to meet our food needs - the two most critical crops, wheat and rice (which provide 80% of the globe’s calories), have less than a 1% growth rate. None of the crops with a growth rate over 2% grow in the tropics.

So we may need to get tricky. Mars discovered that 20% of cocoa trees were responsible for 80% of their suppliers’ crops. And they discovered that providing water during the dry season doubled production. Between careful irrigation and sequencing genes to discover the most productive cocoa strains, Mars predicts that their producers can grow 300-400% of their crops on 30-40% of currently farmed land. The rest can grow trees to sequester carbon, act as grazing land or as watershed. And it’s possible these techniques could be applied to oil palm and cassava, critical food crops in cocoa producing regions.

As meat consumption moves to the developing world, so does meat production. For meat to be 10% of the world’s calories, we can raise meat using nothing more than agricultural waste. But to bring meat production to 20% of calories, we need to double world grain production, which is just not possible. So we need to get more efficient. The humble fish stick is a miracle of engineering - it allows us to use 60-70% of the weight of a fish, and the remainer can go towards aquaculture feed. Fish will soon replace poultry, which was the previous miracle protein. (Think tilapia or catfish. Not much flavor, but the goal is to create a protein-rich substrate for spices.) Poultry efficiency - in terms of converting grain calories into protein ones - has doubled in efficiency every eight years over the past century. Now we need to look at other metrics. Producing a kilo of chicken requires 32 liters of water… Brazilian farmers figured out how to bring the numbers down to 16 liters. But the grain to feed the chicken requires 2500 liters per kilo - if we can reduce that 10%, we’ll see an amazing impact.

We get even bigger impacts through rehabilitating abused and abandoned land. In Brazil, farmers are buying land at 10 cents on the dollar and letting it grow grasses for five years. They’re able to borrow against the land, because when it’s rehabilitated, it’s more productive than agricultural land in use. In Borneo, farmers are buying land that was abused and planting oil palms - Clay says they’re selling carbon sequestration and palm oil simultaneously.

Business models that have multiple impacts at the same time are Clay’s obsession. He talks about conversations he’s had with Dupont about capturing sulphur from coal-burning energy plants. His idea - Dupont should capture nitrogen and sulfur and give it away to fertilizer producers. They’ll retain the rights to trade NOx and SOx credits. He predicts the model is so profitable that Dupont will be compelled to put the technology in for free in Indian and Chinese coal plants.

Making these systems work requires monitoring the commodities produced. When agricultural standards emerged, they came into play to allow people to make purchases sight unseen, defined by specifications - a bushel of #2 corn was a certain color, a certain quality and a cerain moisture. We’re now asking to buy products with values that aren’t verifiable through careful analysis. Was this organically produced? Does it contain GM materials? What’s the water usage? Is it fair trade? Was child labor involved? We don’t sell cocoa and child labor separately - we sell cocoa that’s free of child labor. We can - and need to - sell commodities bundled with cerain water and standards as well.

This won’t necessarily add cost - we’re capable of being more efficient with water and carbon footprints. But it will require third-party verification. Clay wants to see market standards emerge, before government standards come into play, because he believes markets will set a higher bar. He also believes we need to get over the idea of having completely separate supply chains. “You don’t buy green energy. You buy the bragging rights about green energy.” As long as a company is producing a certain amount of energy sustainably, you don’t care if your electrons come from coal or water. Perhaps a similar blurring can take place in agricultural markets.

I thought that this was one of the most revolutionary talks I’ve heard in a long time. Clay argues that, while consumers can have a modest impact on the environment, the real change needs to happen at corporate supply chain levels. This calls into question lots of well-meaning green orthodoxy. If it doesn’t matter all that much if you bring a recyclable cup to the coffee shop - at least in comparison to the coffee production - what other “truths” do we need to examine more closely?

One questioner asks whether we wouldn’t benefit from small, polyculture farms throughout the world. Clay administers “tough love” in response - polyculture’s great to feed a family, but it probably won’t get it out of poverty in the same way that selling commodities will. And small farmers have the biggest impact per ton of any on the planet. It’s not a scaleable way to produce food and address these issues of carbon and water.

I raised the concern that some of the well-meaning green efforts are paradoxically bad for the environment, citing Tesco’s “carbon count”… which encouraged consumers to buy less sustainable produce from Britain than more sustainable from Kenya. It turned an environmental good faith gesture into a retrograde action in green terms, as well as a damaging form of protectionism. On the other hand, people clearly want to do the right thing as environmentalists - they just don’t know what it is.

Clay suggests that it’s an and, not an or - we can take actions in our lives, but we need good data to make the right choices. But we also need to take actions as citizens. We can become informed on these issues and put thoughtful pressure on large corporations to change. He suggests letters to the Cokes and Nestles of the world, suggesting that a dozen letters is worth far more than thousands of Greenpeace postcards.

I was thrilled to see Saul Griffith - who gave the other best talk on these subjects I’ve attended in recent years - in the audience. That talk, at last year’s ETEch, looked closely at global power production and consumption and each of our personal footprints. Talking with Saul afterwards, I noted that he’d responded to his research by making massive personal changes in his life - travelling less, becoming mostly vegetarian. Clay’s talk seemed to suggest that the real impacts come at a corporate level, while Saul wondered whether there’s a moral responsibility that comes from understanding this sort of calculus. Saul assures me that the perspectives are compatible - I’d love to continue the conversation with them both to see whether the answer is that we should apply pressure for big changes at a corporate or government level, or whether we need personal change as well.

No small issue on the agenda here at Aspen Ideas Festival — the future of education, technology, and how people learn — but the panel assembled is in fact up to the task. Connie Yowell (MacArthur Foundation, whose brainchild is the $50 million Digital Media and Learning initiative), Howard Gardner (Harvard Graduate School of Education), and Will Wright (renowned game designer, of the Sims and Spore) are the stars at the front of the room, with lots of other experts in the “audience”: John Seely Brown introduced the theme overall, Beth Noveck, Eric Lander, Dorothy Zinberg, Idit Harel Caperton, and many other luminaries grace the back benches.

(As an aside, the sign of a truly great conference is often the strength of what we used to call the “audience”. People are hanging from the rafters, despite some stiff competition on the Aspen Institute’s campus.)

Gardner starts off with thoughts based on his 5 minds studies. 1) New digital media are plural: games, social networks, all manner of information sources. 2) The Digital Revolution may be as big a deal as the beginning of writing or publishing. The data that Gardner is grounding his work in interviews: with young people, teachers, and psychoanalysts. 3) The most important thing that we need to ask ourselves: what kind of minds do we want to be creating in today’s young people?

Gardner gives us the Five Minds in Under Five Minutes (pretty impressive speed here…): the five are the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind, the creating mind, the respectful mind, and the ethical mind. The disciplined mind is about becoming an expert in something. It’s hard to imagine that the digital media are helping in this respect. The synthesizing mind, some have said, is the most important in the digital era: to sort through lots more information than has ever before been available to human beings. Digital natives like to search, but it’s unclear that they are in fact good at it. The creating mind comes up with new approaches, new methods. Creating minds think outside the box — but you need the box first, which are from your discipline and your synthesis. One of the big questions: can these media help creativity, or might they instead inhibit creativity, by giving too much of a frame and discouraging going beyond that box.

The other two types of minds are in the human sphere. The respectful mind is about how we relate to others with respect. Most of us are raised to be related to 150 people, many of whom are related to us. How do we relate to more people, in the digital sphere. You can get on and offline quickly, in and out of touch quickly. The ethical mind is about how we fulfill roles: the role of the worker and the citizen, of our communities and of the world. The ethical mind asks: I’m a teacher, a researcher, a writer: what are my responsibilities given these roles? We should look for neighborly morality. How large is that circle of people to whom we have an ethical responsibility? The scale is so much greater today in a digital era. And the scope of citizenship is much greater than ever before: it is, for many, global. Gardner’s research shows that most young people do not have much of a sense of ethical issues, whether online or offline.

Will Wright asks us to step back and ask about the fundamental type of communication in play in a digital era. Kids are getting immersed in these new media, in ways that parents have a hard time understanding. Asynchronous
communications are leading to new techniques of moderation, with new community standards and rules for banning people from communities. There’s a mimicking of biology: instead of top-down control, we see a bottom-up, evolutionary-based set of rules, based on parallelism rather than serialism. Wright applies a Darwinian analogy, echoing the set of Darwin-related themes bouncing around Aspen this week.

Another big difference, per Wright: we each have the opportunity to become the expert in something. eBay flattened the flea market system. It drove people to specialize in specific markets.

Gardner asks Wright about Wikipedia and what it tells us about governance in a digital age. Gardner describes is as a yin-yang exercise between Jimmy Wales and a broader community, and that a tension exists between top-down and bottom-up control. Yowell adds a key note: what it means to move to a different kind of a governance system online is driven in key ways by the practices and theories of Open Source software development.

(As an interesting aside, much a hard problem in my own mind: Wright tells us that surfing is an interdisciplinary exercise. Much of the most interesting learning is happening at the intersection between what we think of as academic “fields.” Gardner disagrees with that statement. There’s room for interesting exploration here!)

Yowell notes that it’s crucial to distinguish between different types of participation. Friendship-driven and interest-driven kinds of participation are distinct, as Mimi Ito has shown. In friendship-driven participation, kids bring their offline relationships and ways of communicating across to the online space. In interest-driven communities, it works quite differently. Wright agrees. What he says games excel at is helping kids to develop a passion for something that may not have interested them quite so much before. Players also learn a great deal from one another in games, such as Spore. Wright pointed to the cooperative process of catalyzing learning that he sees through games. The computer acts as an amplifier on learning and creativity.

Gardner asks about how Wright’s gaming relates to what’s happening in schools today. The digital environments, Wright says, are much better at creating constructivist learning spaces. Yowell pushes back on Gardner: we should not see what’s happening in school and out of school as oppositional, but rather we should look to a larger learning ecosystem for kids.

Eric Lander, an MIT professor of genetics and founding director of the Broad Institute, jumps in from the back-benches of the room. His passion growing up, he tells us, was mathematics. Through peregrinations, he came to become a geneticist. There is a next step, once a passion is sparked, in gaining a disciplinary knowledge of a field. Lander doesn’t think the process of learning this field is in fact found on the web. You can learn facts from Wikipedia, but the online learning environment doesn’t cause the catalyzing effects that we need for learning. He cites MIT’s OCW as a “crummy version” of the university’s learning process. He is looking to the future where we can draw upon the best teaching processes that can be disseminated through digital media. What are the platforms that will lower the barriers to improving education in these promising ways? (Good question. JZ’s been puzzling about just this problem, from the H20 process and beyond.)

Gardner throws out a “good Aspen idea.” We each should know better how our own minds work, metacognition. This is the kind of thing that works for me, we ought to know. There is a lot of data about how we can continue learning, especially by nurturing our various intelligences. If you’re not so good spatially, you can learn that, and sometimes the Internet can help you to develop these intelligences over time. The Internet also provides scale: not everyone can get to Aspen in the summer, but many more people can access digital networked technologies.

Yowell presses the panel about what’s really helpful about games. She calls games “rails” that can push kids along a trajectory of learning, which she links to Gardner’s five minds. She references Katie Salen’s effort to create a school that MacArthur Foundation is funding to build a game-oriented curriculum. What is the design methodology? How can we deal with the engagement problem through game design, Yowell asks? Gardner says we have to continue to build in forms of “romance” all the way along the continuum after they get a discipline — back to the Aspen ideal. He cites Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi which helps us to understand what it takes to learn in key situations. Gardner describes how this works in the law school (Socratic method) and medical school (clinical) contexts for learning.

And on to a series of rapid-fire comments from the room:

The key to making learning work in these new media environments is to establish the proper engaging context, says one participant. Another says that we need short, viral things that engage kids off the bat. Someone else worries that students are not learning to write well. (Gardner says that his research shows that writing may well be getting less good, but that facility with other modes of communication are improving. He realized recently that he’s a writing teacher on some fundamental level.) Wright: he calls a “peak” to written literacy, with the new literacy having to do with multimedia. Idit Caperton builds on this insight, suggesting that the new literacy is game literacy, and suggests that a sixth mind ought to be added to the framework: an inspiring mind. Another person notes the revolution in the science museum world.

JSB: there should not be a false dichotomy here. There’s a role for a master. And there’s a role for the crowds, the cutting edge online, the gaming, the peer-based learning. We shouldn’t be exclusive in either respect. (There’s a great cathedral-and-bazaar analogy here, building on Yowell’s note about the open source and proprietary software development processes.)

• The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860-1960
  Extraordinary collection of early photographs from the colonization of East Africa.
  (tags: africa history photography colonialism photos library images historical kenya uganda tanzania britain)
• NEXT: latest news, sport and views from Nigeria
  New online newspaper in Nigeria
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//南都专栏的内容略有和谐，请好事者自行用绿坝比对（主要是最后一段）

也谈对话

毛向辉

胡泳因看到了一些“网络意见领袖”在线上争吵的背后伤害和未来社会结构之间的矛盾，由此对中国社会是否有对话精神产生了极大的隐忧，所言极是。 我在推特(Twitter)上转发了他对哈维尔对话精神的《八条对话原则》，引来了一大批的锐推（相当于邮件的转发）。其中有一条很有趣，作者也是一位知名网人。他为八条原则增加了一条杜撰的尾巴：“后来，哈维尔到了中国，体验了一把中国特色国情。回到捷克，哈维尔翻出《对话守则》，增加了第9条：遇到傻逼，还是要骂。”一句话道出真谛，再怎么样做出尝试对话的样子，最后还是终止于一个词--- “傻逼”。

所以中国人的国骂就是锁上对话之门的钥匙。话一出口，钥匙就断在了锁里，立刻失去了尊重的底线。门关上，就只能变成隔墙对骂。于是骂不绝口，口无遮拦。上至父母，下至体物。围观人群也是随时参战，一时间硝烟弥漫，战鼓喧天，一地鸡毛。这时候再拿什么冷静、理性来说话都为时已晚，如同用超七十码的车速根本刹不住一样。

这当然不是对话的方式，连辩论也都算不上。到了民主社会，辩论是必要的，因为其信息的最大呈现和逻辑推演，可以作为分歧存在，也是必要呈现手段和最优选择的基石。但是对话更是日常需要的，需要融合到生活的方方面面。没有对话，连辩论基础都无法达成，更不用说议事。中国现在有一批有热情的行动者，例如袁天鹏，正在努力推进罗伯特议事规则等议事方法。但是也时常因为对话文化的缺乏而无法进入到议事规则本身，这样就导致了难于前进的僵局。

对话为初，有对话，才有游戏规则的共识。然后才有辩论的氛围，此后才能谈到议事。对话之初的最大敌人就是威权，中国人在家庭内部就有压制的传统，进而延伸到教育和社会。“傻逼”其实就是威权的一种，是人们无法控制对方时所扔出的脏弹，和“老子要教训你”的直接控制没有差别。但是伤人一千，自损八百。父子无法对话，师生无法对话，官民无法对话，无不源自对这个“初”的损害。想建立民主社会，一方面要将威权解构，另一方面还要建构对话框架。

著名量子物理学家大卫·玻姆(David Bohm)对量子理论和神经科学贡献卓越，还参与了曼哈顿计划。但后来却因为臭名昭著的麦卡锡主义而被迫离开美国。于是他用其余生去研究对话的问题，这就是后来在学界商界政界都有深刻影响的“玻姆对话”(Bohm Dialogue)。其中包含了颇为人性的“不可协商”概念。他认为人和人之间差异过大，大部分情况下难以协商，也无法用逻辑和理性达成一致，很多不经意的争执都来源于此。既然承认“不可协商”的天然存在，却仍然要形成共识，就要用更有群体性和社会性的方法来转换“不可协商”的焦点。于是他和后来者（例如，彼得·圣吉等）也都提出过很多对话原则，经过教育体系的尝试，渐渐地影响了西方社会的很多层面。

玻姆对话中主要强调“自由空间”(Free Space)，保证能够得到最大程度的群体智慧(Collective Intelligence)。也就是在合适的对话尺寸下，所有的对话者应当遵循四个原则：1. 对话各方先不要做出任何决策；2. 暂停对别人意见的判断；3. 同时每个人应当足够开放透明（在第2点基础上才容易做到）；4. 在别人的基础上提出更多的建议。这几条原则看上去并不艺术，但是却时时能够帮助消解那些不经意的伤害，可以引导一个对话过程慢慢走上建设性。这些原则看上去简单，却很难在真实世界中得到实施，最好从很早期的教育中得到训练，这样才不至于出现难解的死结。当下中国社会，止损和维权虽然是第一位，从孩童就开始建构对话机制也刻不容缓。有了这些基础，才有更高水平的对话和群体的智慧，民主也就不是空谈了。 

“绿坝”事件是一个典型的对话失败案例。因为整个决策过程从一开始就不是一个对话过程，而政策制定者在事件被媒体披露后一再丧失了对内对话的良机。直到最后演化成为一个国际贸易争端，才不得不尴尬收局。这个暂停强制实施的结果虽然是受到欢迎的，可是过程的流血非常多，甚至严重地割裂了一个社会。免费的对话被推成了昂贵的与虎谋皮，不得不说是一个糟糕的反例。当然对老虎可以最终关进笼子进行教训，但是我们也完全可以不用笼子。相反要记得我们本来是为了打破笼子，所以眼下最需要的是一张张圆桌。■

Forget financial markets for a minute, and think about the directions money moves in retail markets. While much of it moves up and down the supply chains, the first source is customers. The money that matters most is what customers spend on goods and services.

Now here’s the question. Where is there more money to be made — in helping supply find demand or in helping demand find supply? Substitute “drive” for “find” and you come to the same place, for the same reason: customers are the ones spending the money.

For the life of the commercial Web, most of those looking to make money there have looked to make it the former way: by helping supply find or drive demand. That’s what marketing has always been about, and advertising in particular. Advertising, last I looked, was about a $trillion business. Now ask yourself: Wouldn’t there be more money to be made in helping the demand side find and drive supply?

Simply put, that’s what VRM is about. It’s also what Cluetrain was about ten years ago. It wasn’t about better ways for the supply side to make money. It wasn’t about doing better marketing. It was about giving full respect to the human beings from whom the Web’s and the Net’s biggest values derive. When Cluetrain (actually Chris Locke) said “we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.“, it wasn’t saying “Here’s how you market to us.” It was saying “Our new power to deal in this new marketplace exceeds your old powers to drive, lock in, or otherwise control us.” When Cluetrain said “The sky is open to the stars”, it wasn’t issuing utopian palaver. It was speaking of a marketplace of buyers and sellers whose choices were wide open on both sides. [Later... Chris Locke, who wrote that line (and those that followed), offers a correction (and expansion) below.]

On Cluetrain’s 10th anniversary, we have hardly begun to explore the possibilities of truly free and open markets on the Internet. They are still inevitable, because supporting those markets is intrinsic to the Net’s essentially generative design. Lock down users, or lock one in and others out, and you compromise the wealth the Net can create for you. Simple as that.

And that wealth starts with customers.

This is also what How Facebook Could Create a Revolution, Do Good, and Make Billions, by Bernard Lunn in ReadWriteWeb, is about.

I just wrote a brief response in Gain of Facebook, on the ProjectVRM blog.

No time for more. Not because it’s the Fourth of July, but because I’m in a connectivity hole (with latencies and packet losses that start at 1+ second and 15% packet losses and go up from there), but because I’m at my daughter’s wedding, and I need to get ready. Cheers.

In How Facebook Could Create a Revolution, Do Good, and Make Billions, Bernard Lunn of ReadWriteWeb has put forth a generous and highly understanding take on VRM. Sitting here in a big house amidst countless members of two extended families, on the morning of my daughter’s wedding, is not the ideal place to post at length on what Bernard and his many commenters have put forth, so I’ll keep it to a minimum now and pick up the thread next week when I’m back home in Santa Barbara.

The two most important questions Bernard brings up are,

1. What will it take for VRM to succeed?
2. What big companies are in the best positions to step up and make billions by serving VRM-equipped customers?

His initial focus is on Facebook as a company well-positioned to step up. And I agree with him. I also agree with him on the “the three horsemen of the consumer-clypse” (phone companies, health care providers and credit card companies) — plus Joshua Hall’s suggestion of ISPs as a fourth horseman. (Of course, phone companies are ISPs too.)

Of course we need big companies of many kinds to step up. I think in general the biggest winners will be companies doing Fourth Party Services. Facebook could easily do that. So could others among the many “horsemen.” The problem for all of them is that they see their “consumers” as an asset to “monetize,” rather than seeing themselves as services to be driven by users. For more about that distinction, see Joe Andrieu’s postings that begin with this one on User Driven Services.

To drive services, users need code. Standards. Implementations. These take time, and there are a number of projects underway. Check out The Mine! Project, including Alec Muffett’s latest — his slides from a recent Google Tech Talk. Check out what Iain Henderson says about his work with VPI (volunteered personal information) and what he calls the personal data ecosystem. Check out Media Logging, Listen Log and EmanciPay, all of which move toward providing an additional source of revenue for media that cost nothing but have values that exceed $0 (or €0, ¥0 or £0).

All this and much more work has been done voluntarily, by the way. None of these are businesses. Yet all of them can make a lot of money for businesses, once they’re in use and adopted. Which some or all of them (plus others, not mentioned or not yet discovered or adapted) will be.

Okay, I need to go rehearse for this afternoon’s wedding. Happy 4th, ya’ll.

Putting on her old red campaigning suit caused an unstoppable urge to call a press conference, and, well, she had to announce something.

Part of careful plan to capture the White House in 2012 by convincing Americans that she’s the leading incoherent, out of control Republican.

She can see crazy from her backyard.

That’ll show the world McCain made a great choice in picking her!

Only way to exorcise those chain-rattling Ghosts of Machine-Gunned Moose Past.

Bridge to Nowhere, meet Leaper.

Michael Jackson so needed to be knocked out of first place on Twitter.

You don’t understand? Just wait for Mark Sanford’s next press conference.

Face it: Alaska’s a dump. [Hey, these are her reasons, not mine!]

Desperate bid to be mocked by Tina Fey one last time.

[Tags: palin humor ]

Futurist and consultant John Hagel caught my attention with a talk titled “Shaping Serendipity”. He’s introduced by John Seely Brown, his frequent collaborator. Brown and Hagel are writing a new book together, and a chapter focuses on serendipity. (And as a chapter in the book I’m failing to write is also on serendipity, I made a point of attending…)

Hagel offers a definition of serendipity: “Unexpected encounters that surprise and delight.” He notes that, in telling people about the session, they’d react first with delight, and then with surprise that this could be an idea worth a whole sesson. “What can geeks, nerds and algorithms tell us about serendipity?”

He believes there are techniques we can use to shape serendipity. Deploying these techniques, we can increase the quality and the chance of these unexpected encounters.

To contexualize the idea, Hagel explains that he and Seely Brown are postulating a major shift in business climate between 1965 and today. They’re developing an index that tracks a business environment that looks increasingly competitive and difficult. They suggest that the economywide return on assets (in the US, focusing on publicly traded companies) has decreased sharply from 1965 to the present - return on assets is roughly 1/4 of what it was in 1965. This is true even within the set of highly succesful companies. And looking at the mean years of survival for companies listed in the S&P 500 has been reduced from 75 years in the 1930s to roughly 10 years now. In other words, corporations are under strong and increasing pressure. Competition is intensifying, through digital infrastructures and policy trends that favor competition.

To survive this change, companies need to move from a focus on knowledge flow, rather than on knowledge stocks. Corporations used to develop a sphere of knowledge, then monetized it by producing products. Now they need to embrace knowledge flow, and see that flow as the center of value. This means we’re always learning, always discovering and always refreshing our sphere of knowledge. This requires us to develop pull mechanisms, ways of pulling knowledge in from the world. Search is a basic form of pull mechanism, but it has its limits. How do we find things when we don’t know what we’re looking for, when we don’t know what’s out there?

Hagel suggests that we need to shape ourselves so that we’re attracting people and knowledge that we want to be surprised by. This requires us to adopt a different model for serendipity, one that doesn’t believe that serendipity is about pure chance. Within that model, all you can do is embrace it and be open to it, but you can’t attract more or better encounters. Hagel’s model involves making changes to environments, practices and your preparedness to maximize serendipity.

In understanding environments and serendipity, Hagel posits a conflict between Tom Friedman and Richard Florida. Friedman tells us the world is flat, that location doesn’t matter, and that we can access resources from anywhere in the world at any time. Richard Florida suggests that the world is spiky. More and more people are concentrating in urban settlements, in the US and around the world. If the world is so flat, why are people gathering in these places?

If you’re in a place where there’s a concentration of talent, your chances of serendipity increase radically. People move to cities in part because they realize the value of unexpected encounter. If location didn’t matter, why is travel increasing, globally? Physical environment matters and enhances serendipity.

Virtual environments can create serendipity as well. We have a choice of where we participate in virtual environments. One of the values of social networking sites is the likelihood we’ll encounter an unexpected link via a social connection. Other environments are created explicitly to generate serendipity - a platform like Innocentive, which invites unusual solutions to technical problems, can create unexpected connections. An MIT spin-off company, Sense Networks, is studying traffic patterns based on users who allow their mobile phones to be monitored. They’re able to track the flow of people as a result. If you choose to be tracked, Sense Networks will help you discover what “tribe” you belong to, and where your tribe hangs out.

Hagel cites a pair of people (both friends of mine) who have mastered the art of creating serendipity by carefully choosing their environments. One is Yossi Vardi, an Israeli technology entrepreneur who spends his life attending technology conferences and walking the halls. Another is Joi Ito, a legendary global traveller, who’s relocated from Japan to Dubai because he believes it’s emerging as a key global crossroads.

What a corporation does to enhance chances of serendipity will directly affect their chances of market success, Hagel argues. Creating online spaces that allow your customers and developers to interact, as SAP has done, can help create unexpected encounters. Unlikely online spaces like World of Warcraft can also be great spaces for serendipity, because the guild structure allows for the development of deep, trust-based relationships.

Hagel warns that you can go into these environments and not make connections. You need to learn how to rise above the noise in these spaces and attract attention so that the people you need to find will find you. He suggests that succesful actors find ways to influence conversations without direct contacts - they attract attention and sustain it, which allows connections to form when appropriate for all involved.

This, in turn, requires preparedness. He suggests that people either are disposed to finding encounters to be threatening and distracting, or to embrace and enjoy them. Hagel suggests that this probably isn’t a choice - it’s a perspective people bring to business. But if there is a way to cultivate connections that lead to serendipity is to develop passion around what you’re doing.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about serendipity over the past year (see here and here) and was intrigued to see how differently Hagel and I are using the term. A questioner in the audience observed that Hagel’s examples all involved finding serendipity by connecting with people, rather than encountering things or information. I’d suggest that Hagel’s examples almost all deal with creating a wider set of weak ties. Hagel explains that he believes this is the most efficient form of creating serendipity - by building new connections, you gain a source of serendipity over a long period of time.

Here’s my concern: building weak ties is great, important and helpful. We know that weak ties are incredibly useful in finding jobs, or in seeking out information within a large and complex company. But if our weak ties are largely to people we’ve got substantial common ground with - and they usually are - are these people really a source of surprise? When I get recommendations from my social circles - via Facebook or Twitter, for instance - there tends to be a lot of overlap in those recommendations. That makes sense - like everyone else, I fall into homophily traps and I flock with likeminded folks. But this means that my weak ties aren’t always the best place to find ideas that surprise and delight me, to use Hagel’s definition. Unexpected, perhaps, but I’m not sure serendipity is the right term to describe these connections.

I’m interested in questions of how we stumble onto information and ideas we’d be unlikely to find within our present sphere of weak ties. One possibility is to radically expand that circle of weak ties - start paying attention to the perspectives and opinions of people far outside our realms of ordinary experience. This isn’t easy to do - it tends to require the assistance of bridge figures, who’ve got connections to our circles and to very different circles. I also wonder whether serendipity always needs to focus on personal connection - I think we often get serendipity from media, from pop culture, from news.

All that said, I like Hagel’s idea that we can change environments to increase serendipity. I’m not sure the strategy of advertising our interests is the most important step, though it’s certainly worked for me in some ways - blog on a topic and you’re bound to find people more knowledgeable on the subject who will correct and steer you. But I’m very glad that such a prominent thinker is looking at the challenge of increasing serendipity, opening the possibility that serendipity isn’t just luck, but something we can analyse, understand and get better at.

The conviction of Lori Drew, the mother whose  Myspace impersonation of a 13-year-old boy was followed by the suicide of Megan Meier, has been set aside by the judge in the case.  There being no anti-cyberbullying statute ore anything else under which she could be charged in Missouri, where she and Meier lived only a few blocks apart, a federal prosecutor in California (where MySpace is located) charged her under a federal law meant to criminalize hacking into bank accounts and credit card sites. The prosecutor reasoned that lying to MySpace on its registration form was sort of the same thing. By that standard, as we noted on this blog, everybody would be a federal criminal — especially as most social networking sites reserve the right to change their terms of service without telling you. And that is exactly the reasoning Judge Wu used in dismissing the case, even though a jury had returned a guilty verdict. You can’t throw someone in jail under an interpretation of a statute so broad that pretty much everyone would be eligible for incarceration. It’s unconstitutional.

There are legal questions here that I am sure are going to be analyzed. Would jury nullification have been a possibility here, had some juror spoken up to say that the statute was ridiculous if this is what it implied? If not that, what should the jury have done?

But the scary part is the prosecutor’s explanation for what he acknowledges was a “risky’ strategy. He heard a cry “for someone to do something,” and he responded. In other words, he thinks there are parallel universes, the universe of law and the universe of justice. His job is to figure out what’s just and to find a law that can be stretched to fit the facts. That is a really scary attitude on the part  of a federal prosecutor. Lori Drew perhaps should fry in hell, but that is not the business of the temporal sphere. Missouri should perhaps rewrite its laws to make it easier to prosecute the next cyberbully, and the legislature has in fact done that. But if it were the job of the state’s attorneys to decide what is right and wrong independent of the laws, we wouldn’t need the laws at all, we could just rely on their judgment of good and evil.  That’s not how democracies work.

I jogged (yes, me, jogging!) from Tim O’Reilly’s talk to a session on immigration reform at Aspen. I was still late, so I arrived during David Kennedy’s historical perspectives on American immigration. He reminds us that, despite our myths about people coming to the US out of a love of freedom, before World War 1, 44% of immigrants to America went home. Immigration was at a historical high, which dropped sharply between the wars and after WWII. During that period of time, less than 5% of population was foreign born. We tend to think of this as “normal” in terms of our national history, but it may just have been a historical anomaly.

For the last four decades, we’ve been living under immigration reform undertaken in the Johnson administration. We’ve now got roughly 36m Americans who are foreign born - that’s less in percentage terms than we had in 1910, around 13%. Around the world, we’re a less popular destination than we were 100 years ago - then, 40% of global migrants came to the US, while now it’s about 18%. And we’re low in immigrants compared to Canada (19%) or Australia (24%).

People migrate now for the reasons they did years ago. He quotes an old Roman saying, “Where there is bread, there is my country.” The industrialization of an economy tends to send people looking for new lifestyles and often towards becoming migrants. What’s different, in part, is that so much migration is coming from one state, Mexico. There’s the possibility of a “chicano Quebec”, a cultural state within a state. And the notion of illegals is pretty new - before 1924, there really wasn’t illegal immigration to the US since migration was legal.

Alan Greenspan suggest that there are major economic imperatives to act on immigration reform. He’s careful to pull immigration into two problems - one affecting low-skilled labor, and another involving some of our most skilled jobs. In the low-skilled sector of the US economy, there’s a very strong concentration of illegal immigrants. Roughly half of this at-risk group are illegal immigrants. On the high end, 40% or more of our science PhDs are foreign born, and many of the entrepreneurs are foreign born. This is an indictment of our primary and secondary schools, which are inadequate to cope with our labor needs. Greenspan tells us that we tend to overfocus on the low-skill illegals. “If we fail on the high-skill issues, we’re going to have a very hard time reestablishing hegemony.”

Alex Aleinikoff tells us that we’re still a nation of immigrants, but that the system is basically broken. We shifted enforcement of immigration to the worksite, but we’ve got no deterrance there. In the meantime, we’ve got ossified categories of permitting skilled labor, and long backlogs in reuniting families.

We tried to fix the system a couple of years ago, with a Republican president and a Democratic congress. It failed for a set of reasons - strong opposition from the right on legalization (with rhetoric around the idea of “amnesty”), opposition from important constituencies like AFL/CIO who didn’t want a guest worker program, and very little effort to create a “theme” that got Americans to embrace the idea of immigration change.

It may be hard to work on immigration in the current environment. But we’ve got a Democratic congress and President, a recognition of the importance of the Latino vote, and an economic crisis, which can be a double-edged sword. It sounds difficult to legalize 10 to 12 million workers in a situation of 10% unemployment, but with this unemployment, illegal immigration is falling sharply.

Greenspan reminds us that we tend to argue against immigration for economic reasons. We worry that immigrants lower the salaries of American wageworkers. But academics are pointing out that these sectors of our economies are shrinking - we simply don’t have many low-education, low-wage jobs… and there’s a set of jobs we need to fill and might be in trouble if we lost our illegal migrants.

Alexander points out our odd belief that people come here undocumented to avoid paying taxes. This isn’t true, and immigrants pay payroll, real estate and sales taxes. But by legalizing immigration and linking it to taxpaying, we could turn this into a tax and law enforcement issue.

Kennedy (I think) tells a funny story from southern Arizona, a massive fence with a six mile hole in it. “It looks like border patrol by Christo.” The wall ends at the Indian reservation, which won’t let the border patrol build a wall or enforce border security.

As it turns out, walls may have a paradoxical effect. When we tighten border security, transaction costs rise. The effect? People still immigrate, but they stay… and they try to bring in their families. It’s a perverse consequence of increased border security.

We get GREAT questions, including:

- Ambassador Karim Kawar, whose biometrics firm IrisGuard uses iris scans to enforce deportation from the UAE - why is the US using this sort of technology?

- A Kansas schoolteacher wants to know how to give bilingual students more time to graduate

- A Mexican-American advisor to Calderon who points out that we need to think of the US and Mexico in dialog - we supply guns and buy drugs, and we need to take ownership of parts of our border security problems.

Pioneering technology publisher Tim O’Reilly tells us that “government as a platform” is the definition of government 2.0. To explain to a non-technical audience what this means, he explains that his company specializes in finding innovations at the edge and amplifying them, through events, publishing and market research. This involves watching alpha geeks like Rob Flickenger. Tim says he knew Wifi was important when he saw Flickenger on the roof of the O’Reilly building using a cantenna to bring Wifi to his favorite coffee shop. Similarly, they were able to anticipate web services by watching developers build screenscrapers, using other websites as data sources.

Tim helped coin the term “web 2.0″ and offers a definition of the term. “Top internet sites are built on huge databases which get better the more people participate,” This is a new paradigm - “data, not some sort of hardware, is the ‘intel inside’, the source of lock-in” to appealing platforms.

As an example of how this works, Tim points to Google Voice Search. It gets better each time we use it, learning from user input. And it coordinates three databases - speech recognition, a search database and a location database linked by the Internet into a common platform.

Innovators have begun bringing government into this new paradigm. Carl Malamud helped put the SEC online, using a small NSF grant, data from the SEC and a lot of persistence. Fifteen years later this has helped turn into a vast movement for government transparency. In the UK, Tom Steinberg founded MySociety, and introduced tools like They Work for You, which increases parliamentary transparency, and Fix My Street, which allows individuals to report potholes and ask the government to fix them. This has now been picked up by 311 services throughout the US.

Our new president appears to understand this in a deep and fundamental way. His campaign platform was a self-service organizing platform much as Craigslist is a self-service advertising platform. The question is whether we’ll actually see this in governance. Tim reminds us that “government has always been a platform for collective action,” reminding us of Ben Franklin’s quote, “We must all hang together or we will assuredly all hang seperately.” Franklin’s version of government invited lots of citizen participation, including ideas like a government matching grant - citizens could raise a certain amount of money, and government would match the funds raised.

Somehow, Tim says, we got lost and turned to “vending machine government”, a model where we put in taxes and take out services. Can we undo this, and build government that enables four types of interaction:

- Government to citizen - providing services and information to citizens
- Citizen to government - citizens report on probelms that need government assistance
- Citizen to citizen - not every problem needs to be solved by government
- Government to government - we need better cooperation within government agencies

Tim suggests that there are some lessons from the technology space that could be useful in building Government 2.0

Build open, expandable systems
The rise of the IBM PC platform had to do with the fact that anyone could build compatible hardware, or that Michael Dell could built his own low-cost machines. The web succeeded because Tim Berners-Lee allowed anyone to use his code and build their own website. This is an example of what my colleage Jonathan Zittrain calls “generativity” - the “capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions…”

In open government this might mean open, portable health records, or open data that allows competition by third parties on government contracts.

Build simple systems and let them evolve
The original sketch of Twitter, Tim shows us, was half a sheet of legal paper. The system’s incredibly simple, but there are now 11,000 applications running on top of it, written by third parties. Simple systems like the Internet Protocol can act like hourglass models - they run on a diversity of systems, and support a diversity of applications around a simple protocol.

“Complex systems built from scratch never work. You need to build a simple system and let it grow… Complex problems paradoxically require simple answers.”

Design for cooperation
The Unix operating system was built around the idea that we could join together independent programs with no more than a protocol that allows these programs to work together. This allows for a very different school of software development than in Windows, where 90,000 developers need to figure out how to work together. In Linux, thousands of loosely coordinated little groups build the system together.

The notion of governance via loosely coordinated groups is a Jeffersonian one. And a system like the Internet domain name system looks decidedly Jeffersonian (as David Post points out in his new book.) We can build complex systems, like DHS Virtual Alabama, by encouraging people with lots of data to cooperate and share and build complex maps that allow for recovery from natural disasters.

Learn from your users
Google was late to the game in mapping. But Google is used by 45% of all mashups online. That’s because when innovators started building mashups of Craigslist and Google Maps data, Google didn’t shut the door, but hired the first guy to build a mashup, and then released an API to make the task easier.

Fedspending.org was a site built by OMBWatch, an NGO funded by the Sunlight Foundation. Their tool was so good, it ended up obviating a system the government was building for much more money - the government ended up throwing out their system and using theirs instead.

Lower the barriers to experimentation
The government tends to treat projects like the Apollo 11 rocket launch: “Failure is not an option.” It should be. We fail all the time, and we need to learn from it. He quotes Edison: “I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations that did not work.”

Much innovation comes from a single engineer within an entity like the New York Times, putting archives up on an inexpensive, rented server from Amazon. The low cost of failure made it easier to experiment.

Build a culture of measurement
“If it works, do more, if it doesn’t, stop doing it.” We need to watch how our systems succeed and fail, and build systems that respond to user stimuli. And we need good metrics which we can watch carefully. As Atul Gawande demonstrated with his recent, brilliant article on healthcare, we need to ask quesitons like “How do we measure the success of healthcare?”

Google runs auctions almost continually for it ads, taking advantage of “realtime economics”. Walmart runs a system that connects a consumer purchase to an order from a factory within 14 seconds. Realtime data is the backbome of these “living organisms, responding in realtime to stimuli.”

Throw open the doors to partners
Tim celebrates the iPhone ap store, suggesting that it worked vastly better than more controlled models for aplication development on the Blackberry or Nokia phones. Governments need to stop using tools like earmarks, sole source licensing, and no-bid contracts, which lead to a less open ecosystem.

We also need to make sure eople understand what data comes from the government. He quotes an unnamed congresscritter who asked him, “Why do we need NOAA when we’ve got weather.com?” We need to show what the government can provide and what people can build on top of it. The government launched satellites, and many companies built great GPS tools on top of it.

Tim closes with the idea that government needs to be a vehicle for collective action,
a convener first, and a problem-solver second. He references an effort in Kauai, Hawaii where local businesses faced the closure of a state park due to a washed out road. “They could protest - shaking the vending machine - but instead, they coordinated.” They brought in materials and workers and fixed the road within three days.

Fixing complex problems requires figuring out what government needs to do, what private entites can do and what coordinated citizens can do. If we build systems that allow all these behaviors, we’ll see a great deal of positive change through Government 2.0

Please see John Palfrey’s notes as well for another perspective.

Tim O’Reilly is telling the Aspen Ideas Festival crowd about the history of Government 2.0. He starts it with Carl Malamud and SEC data online; next, he cites the Brits and TheyWorkForYou.com; gives Sunlight Foundation their due; and says that then-candidate Obama’s claim that we would connect people and ideas to transform government as the final breakthrough (not to mention all that great web 2.0 work in the campaign).

The hard question, as O’Reilly rightly notes, is whether these tools can work as well during times of governance as it does during the time of campaigns (or crises). To get it done, he says, we should build from a set of principles, which sound great to me:

1) We need to embrace open standards, because it leads to generative systems (with a very nice shout-out to JZ and his book, The Future of the Internet);

2) Build a simple system and then let it evolve. Twitter has 11,000 applications now build upon it — in no time (another nice shout-out to JZ here and his “hourglass architecture” slide is shown). One such simple intervention: by default, make government information open and accessible to the public.

3) Design systems for cooperation. Presume that people can work well together, even if they don’t know one another. Think of the difference between Linux development and traditional software development within a single firm. Think also of the DNS. O’Reilly also credits Cong. John Culberson, R-TX, as a leading user of social technologies in DC and someone who gets the need to set up systems that allow for cooperation (and who cites a Jefferson letter of the early 19th c. for inspiration). Make rules like: the only requirement for participation is that you participate.

4) Learn from your users, especially ones who do what you don’t expect. In the mash-ups world: 45% are built on Google Maps, with only 4% on Microsoft Virtual Earth, 3% from Yahoo! O’Reilly says the others were too slow to open up APIs; Google just went for it. One of the first hackers to do this was HousingMaps, which a hacker name Paul did using Maps (in a contravention of the Terms of Service, O’Reilly says). Did Google sue Paul? Nope. They hired him.

5) Lower barriers to experimentation. Failure has to be an option. He quotes Edison: “I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations which wouldn’t work.” O’Reilly says that Amazon’s cloud services make this kind of rapid experimentation, iterative development, and parsing through huge data sets possible.

6) Build a culture of measurement. Systems should respond automatically to user stimuli. Real-time measurement is crucial. Throughout his talk, O’Reilly credited Vivek Kundra, the new federal CIO, as a wonderful leader in making a great deal happen already within the Obama government. As Google and Wal-mart do, the government needs to be close to a living organism, responding in real-time to extensive stimuli. We need to instrument our world to be able to respond to useful data.

7) Throw the door open to partners. Apple’s iPhone has given rise to more than 50,000 applications in less than a year. The App Store made a fine tool into a phenomenon. More than 1 billion applications have been downloaded as of April, 2009. Everyone else in the smartphone business is eating their dust, at least in the apps business. And yet, O’Reilly says, the government is still making no-bid contracts. Government has to get out of its own way. Throw it open, and let everyone compete. Apps for Democracy is much in the right direction. (He gets a big laugh when he cites a Congressman who asked: why do we need NOAA when we have Weather.com? Pretty impressive case of some people in Washington still not getting the point…)

Fundamentally, government is a vehicle for collective action. O’Reilly is right, here, too. That also happens to be what distributed digital networked technologies are good at doing — supporting collective action.

All these principles together can lead us to the Digital Commonwealth. (Hear, hear!)

Bottom line: I think O’Reilly nailed it. These are great principles and a fine time to be discussing them.  Turns out, Beth Simone Noveck, deputy CTO in the White House, and others in the Obama Administration are actually now DOING all this right now. My only amendment to the O’Reilly talk would have been a cite to Beth’s brand new book, Wiki Government (Brookings, 2009) which includes a terrific commentary on these and related themes.

Look to EthanZ’s blog for his better-live-blogging than mine here.

Elliot Gerson of the Aspen Institute introduces a conversation titled, “Your life in a surveillance society”. The discussants are Jack Balkin, legal scholar and philosopher at Yale Law School and Admiral Mike McConnell, former director of the National Security Agency. Gerson offers examples of surveillance in our lives, including the airport, cameras to detect speeding, but also activities like Twitter. He suggests that there’s an increasing acceptance of devices and mechanisms which we might have past thought as totalitarian.

Balkin rejects the term surveillance, and breaks the term down into the collection of information (which is possible via many different means), the collation of information (because the collection of information alone isn’t all that valuable), the analysis of information and producing new information out of it. The power often comes from collation, not from collection - the fact that a man bought a pork chop isn’t very interesting until we figure out it was Rabbi Bernstein.

We’ve got more powerful tools than ever before for collection, collation, analysis and, ultimately, for control. If you have an information society where problems are solved via information, you automatically have a surveillance society. The question is who’s doing it - the government, private entities, or you and me.

McConnell suggests that money won’t work without surveillance - the ability to operate transactions around the world in under a second implicitly requires surveillance. He suggests that WalMart’s success is based on surveillance, careful watching of their supply chain. In the intelligence community, he tells us, “surveillance” is a passive term, while “reconaissance” has an active connotation, of going out and seeking information.

Balkin is asked whether government or corporate surveillance is more important. He answers, “Yes”. He notes that there’s a relationship between private companies that collate data and sell it to government entities. “When you think surveillance, you think NSA… but you should be thinking about the delivery of healthcare benefits.” We’re primed to think about government information collection as a threat, but we should be thinking more broadly about powerful actors in society. This includes Walmart and Choicepoint… but this might also include the person next to you with a cameraphone, or anyone you interact with online. We should consider “democratic surveillance”, where surveillance tools are placed in everybody’s hands. Democratic surveillance sounds much nicer, but that’s not necessarily the case.

McConnell is asked “Who watches the watchers?” He offers the truism that “we’re a nation of laws, we’re governed by the Constitution” and that oversight needs to be in the law. Asked whether we got the law right in the Patriot Act, he observes that it was passed very, very quickly and is likely to be changed at some point. But he points out that there’s been government abuse of surveillance as far back in history as we know. He reminds us of FBI surveillance of chief Justice Earl Warren under Hoover.

He looks at the complexity of our FISA laws. In 1978, at the heart of the Cold War, the structure seemed pretty easy: if it’s foreign, it’s okay to surveil, but if it’s domestic, it has to be for foreign intelligence interests and needs to be of an agent of a foreign power. But technological change forced a three-year process to change the laws to reflect technological change. That said, “we don’t even know how to think about surveillance.” As such, the danger is that “bureaucracies will define reality in their own interest”, and may prevent the changes we need in telecommmunications as a whole.

Balkin suggests that it’s hard for legislative branch to oversee surveillance. The executive branch tends to stonewall these inquiries, and so “the executive branch is where the action is.” We may therefore need checks and balances and internal policing within the executive branch on these issues.

McConnell mentions that the Navy has never initiated changes internally. Shortly before Pearl Harbor, the Navy’s football program featured a battleship and the legend, “No one has ever sunk a Navy battleship.” The Pearl Harbor attacks moved the Navy from battleships to aircraft carriers. Congressional pressure in the 1980s forced the armed forces into joint command, which made the US military the strongest in the world. With these examples, he suggests that it’s Congress’s responsibility to hold the executive responsible.

Asked a question about tradeoffs between privacy and surveillance, and the willingness of youth to sacrifice privacy, Balkin again parses a question into parts. He suggests that, if you have the benefits of an information society, these security concerns come with the services you demand. You adjust to the information sharing that comes with these new services. He mentions that feelings about privacy have a great deal to do with your age cohort: what technologies did you grow up with, and what do you use? Some of these technologies require trade-offs - Facebook requires some information sharing, but it allows people to do things they never did before. Finally, we experience “privacy myopia” when we encounter tech we don’t understand. We don’t know what GPS in our mobile phones could be used for, so we let it slide and hope that nothing bad happens.

McConnell makes the point that, to participate in the intelligence community, you need to pass a security clearance. To pass a clearance, you subject yourself to extreme surveillance and scrutiny. That work is currently done by contractors - while those contractors are under the same laws as the intelligence community, it’s potentially a concern to all of us.

The panel is asked a question about the US government’s “cybercommand”. McConnell takes ownership of the idea: “The Cybercommand was created because I recommended it.” He argues that we need the capacity to do more than just passive surveillance of bits - we need to seek ways to exploit holes in enemy systems so we can shut down their air defenses. We need to protect banks, so we need to figure out how people are attempting to break these systems and block those attacks before they happen. This need to be a function build on the NSA, McConnell argues, because we need their unique codebreaking talents. He reassures us that domestic surveillance needs to focus on international targets - domestic surveillance must be of foreign targets and needs to be warranted. But he sees a domestic role for cybercommand in supporting the department of Homeland Security. (He doesn’t address whether the militarization of cyberspace is a more appropriate paradigm than crimefighting, or an engineering paradigm of repairing holes.)

Balkin suggests that forgetting may be harder than remembering in our current digital environment. He suggests that we may not want institutions to remember forever - we may want them to have a form of institutional amnesia. He’s challenged on this point from an audience member - why would we want to forget information that could help solve a long-cold murder, for instance? Balkin’s answer involves distinguishing between different kinds of information states. Authoritarian states are information gluttons, in the sense that they want to know everything about you, and information misers, in which they don’t reveal data about their own operations. We want a democratic information state, which is an information gourmet, not a glutton. We need some government collection of data to operate social services, but we don’t want a government to know and remember everything. If it does, we want it to either forget or forgive. And we want it to be an information philanthropist, offering as much information as possible about its own operations.

This morning at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Brian Lehrer show is being broadcast live as we act as breakfast-eating studio audience. The first guest is Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty. Lehrer introduces Pawlenty as the Republican’s Obama - young, smart, charismatic and a party leader, who was considered a front-runner for McCain’s running mate.

Pawlenty admits that he didn’t get the result he would have liked in the Coleman/Franken recount, “but the process was fair.” The problems, he says, weren’t with the voting process but with absentee ballots - rather than seeing interest groups encourage people to abuse the absentee ballot problem, he argues that we’d be better served with limited early voting.

Framing Pawlenty as a likely frontrunner against Obama, Lehrer asks how he governor thinks the President is doing. He concedes that Obama inherited a tough situation, but worries that the federal government has allowed spending to get out of control. “They’re not even trying to balance the budget anymore.” Asked whether this spending is necessary for stimulus, Pawlenty argues that most stimulus money isn’t directly benefitting the economy. Asked whether Minnesota considered refusing stimulus money, Pawlenty points out that Minnesota is 5th lowest recipient of federal money.

In reference to the future of the Republican party, Pawlenty concedes, “the Republican party’s in a rebuilding year. We need draft choices, maybe some trades…” Lehrer wonders whether the Republicans simply need some new ideas - Pawlenty’s new idea is a very old one, nuclear power.

Lehrer points out that perhaps Pawlenty’s most radical idea is “unallotments”, unilateral actions by the governor to eliminate spending approved by the legislature. “This has been aroud since 1939, and we believe we’re on solid legal ground,” he says, but concedes that there are likely to be some lawsuits from public interest groups.

Pawlenty is here to talk about educational innovation. Lehrer asks whether Minnesota would sign up to a national educational standards test that’s indexed against an international standard. Pawlenty’s hesitant about signing up, because he’s worried about federalization of education, but he concedes that there’s a problem with state-based standards. He favors a voluntary standard, not a federal mandate. Lehrer quipps, “Republicans don’t like federal standards because they’re federal. Democrats don’t like them because they’re standards.”

Te heart of Lehrer’s show is a conversation about digital natives and how a new generation is using the internet. The discussants on stage are legendary game designer Will Wright, University of Washington learning expert Dr. Patricia Kuhl and my colleague John Palfrey, author of “Born Digital”. To frame the conversation, Lehrer calls on four high school students at the Ideas Festival as visiting scholars. They tell the audience that they spend hours online a day, at least half on social networks, notably Facebook. One sees a difference between how she uses the internet - a quiet, isolated process - and how a sister from Ethiopia does, favoring personal contact over online.

Lehrer asks John Palfrey whether digital natives are a different species, as one reviewer of his book suggests. He admits that “digital natives” is an uncomfortable term, one that he and Urs Gasser tried to reclaim in the book. He argues that it’s a population, not a species - digital natives are based on access, not just on their generation. He’s especially interested in gaming, because it has a “flattening effect”, crossing socioeconomic groups.

There is, he argues, an emerging global culture of digital natives. And there are common problems for digital natives, problems of privacy and safety. Asked the impossible “a good thing or a bad thing” question, JP suggests that the internet and computers are incredibly powerful tools for creativity, enabling kids to do things that parents find literally unbelievable. On the downside, he worries that kids could get a less good education online because they don’t have navigation skills to find the information they need. This could lead to a problem of “driving a larger digital participation gap.”

Will Wright sees “a tidal wave of change” in how people are using technology, moving into a different way of thinking. Digital natives are surfing the top of the wave. Educational users know they need to be riding the wave, but might be in the middle, while others are being washed over. His games, he concedes, are influenced by a constructivist approach to education. Kids connect to the things they’ve made, and revel in the ability to create.

The students in the audience seem to agree. While none play Spore, they’ve all played Sims, and they admit that they enjoy the building creation aspects, as well as the ability of bringing digital characters into conflict.

Dr. Kuhl is asked how computer gaming is affecting learning. She mentions that there’s an enormous amount of learning that happens in informal settings, implicit learning, rather than through explicit, classroom learning. People learn an enormous amount from reading each other’s intentions - it “feeds the social brain”. Kuhl is running an experiment on language acquisition, seeing how 9 month old children learn second languages. She’s got graduate students who are native speakers of Chinese and Urdu. They play with one set of children for 12 in person sessions. Another set hears the second language on television, a third on tape. She then does brain studies to see whether brain centers are activated by the sounds or words of the language. Kids who learned in person show the same patterns as native speakers of these languages - kids who watched TV or listened to the tape showed no effect. “Under age two,” she says, “don’t put the kid in front of TV to get them into Harvard.”

The scholars in the room tell the audience that they watch almost no television - one admits to being a Top Chef fan. John Palfrey addresses the issue of multitasking, suggesting that most digital natives are watching television while doing homework and using the Internet. Palfrey tells us that “multitasking” isn’t a word kids identify with. He prefers the term “task switching”, moving rapidly between different activities. Students at Harvard Law, he tells us, are often switching between note taking, Twittering, answering email. Those who are focusing on something other than the class - checking email - don’t learn as much, where as those who are using the laptop to research and participate often learn more.

Brooke Gladstone offers a question from the audience, worrying about the lack of in-person connections in virtual environments. Dr. Kuhl acknowledges that the research isn’t definitive, but reminds us that “People need people to learn.”

The Department of Justice has now confirmed rumors that it was taking an interest in the draft settlement between Google and the Authors and Publishers, now before federal judge Denny Chin (who just sentenced Bernie Madoff to 150 years). Presumably the question for the DOJ is whether the proposed settlement is anti-competitive; Google responds “It’s important to note that this agreement is non-exclusive and if approved by the court, stands to expand access to millions of books in the U.S.” Which is true, but may well not be sufficient to avoid anti-trust issues.  See the Digital Daily post here, which includes a link to the actual correspondence between the government and Judge Chin. Judge Chin notes that he is still planning to hold a Fairness hearing on October 7, and if the government wants its views known in writing, it has to submit something by September 18.

Ethan is once again knowledgeable and provocative, this time about what it takes for a coup to get some attention in this country. He compares the media’s interest in Honduras’ institutional coup (as a guy called it last night on The News Hour) with the almost complete ignoring of various coups in Africa.

Ethan concludes (but read the whole thing):

So why does Honduras get the Iran treatment, while Niger is ignored like Madagascar? Proximity? Strategic importance? (though Niger’s got massive uranium reserves – you remember yellowcake, right?) It’s not population – Niger’s roughly twice the size of Honduras. Expectation? Perhaps we’re sufficiently accustomed to African coups (Madagascar, Mauritania and Guinea in the past year) that Niger’s not a surprise.

Or perhaps all the pundits are still trying to figure out which one’s Nigeria and which one’s Niger…

Ethan conspicuously leaves out racism — the soft racism (as that ol’ phrase President George W. Bush once put it) of not knowing, not caring, and not bothering to develop a narrative.

(By the way, be sure to click on the link in the quote from Ethan. It leads to one of The Onion’s funniest videos ever.)

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman africa niger honduras racism media ]

A federal judge yesterday tentatively acquitted Lori Drew, the Missouri woman convicted for her involvement in a MySpace “cyberbullying” hoax that allegedly resulted in a young girl’s suicide.  If it sticks, the acquittal will help reverse the momentous change in online liability that Drew’s earlier guilty verdict threatened to set in motion.

Last November, a jury convicted Drew of three misdemeanor violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), 18 U.S.C. § 1030, which is essentially an anti-hacking law.  Commentors widely criticized the convictions, as the case’s logic seemed to criminalize any violation of a website’s Terms of Service (see Marc’s Satyricon post, CMLP, Threat Level, and numerous links therein).

As Judge George Wu pointed out in announcing his tenative decision, such a result is probably unconstitutional.  Terms of Service include an infinite variety of provisions — most of which have little bearing on criminal acts — and few web users ever read them.

Stripped of the emotionally charged facts regarding the fraud and suicide, Drew’s crime was nothing other than failing to submit “truthful and accurate” registration information when creating a MySpace profile.  She would have been no less liable for misstating her height.

Note that the acquittal will not take effect until Judge Wu issues a written decision.  Until then, keep an eye out for the flood of commentary that will no doubt arise regarding the issue.

(Matt C. Sanchez is a recent Harvard Law School graduate and was formerly the CMLP's Legal Threats Editor.  Matt also writes for Florida Media Lawyer and the Legal Satyricon.)

One of the best things about living in (or just following) Santa Barbara is reading Nick Welsh’s Angry Poodle Barbeque column each week in the Independent — one of the best free newsweeklies anywhere. This week’s column, El Corazón del Perro, is a classic. One sample:

For those of us without the heart to pursue our own dream, or even the imagination to have one, Jackson provides cold reassurance. If someone so rich, so famous, and so hugely adored could wind up so agonizingly wretched, maybe the moral of the story is that one’s bliss was never meant to be followed.

This, however, isn’t just another knock on the late Jacko. It’s a column about afterdeath effects in Santa Barbara County, which was home to Jackson through his Neverland years:

This past Tuesday, a coterie of key county executives from law enforcement, public works, fire protection, public health, planning, emergency response, and communications spent the better part of the day shuttling from one emergency meeting to the next, trying to figure out what was real and what to do about it. No less than five employees of the Sheriff’s Department spent their day fielding calls from media outlets around the world. Associated Press dispatched a reporter to stake out the County Administration Building all day. By 7 p.m., Tuesday, no actual communication had taken place between county government and the Jackson camp. Instead, Sheriff’s officials relied upon contacts they have with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department for whatever vague rumors and rumblings they could get. Somehow through this opaque and osmotic chain of communication, county officials are hoping to persuade the Jackson clan to call it off, if in fact it was they who started something in the first place.

Some in the Sheriff’s Department expressed confidence that the whole thing has been an exceptionally expensive and elaborate fire drill. Personally, I like the idea that the whole thing is a big fake-out, an angry practical joke on the county that prosecuted Jackson. When Paul McCartney’s former wife, Linda McCartney, died several years ago, I remember how rumors were strategically planted that she died in Santa Barbara County. In fact, she did not. The County Coroner complained he spent so much time fielding media calls that he couldn’t get any work done. Cadavers, he said, were piling up in his coolers like firewood. Ultimately, we would discover the whole thing was an elaborate dodge so that the McCartney clan could grieve unmolested by the paparazzi. But not before Santa Barbarans — ever willing to embrace the rich and famous, even if they never lived here — held a solemn and tearful candlelight vigil at the County Courthouse’s Sunken Gardens.

Some of the worries in the piece are stale now (a Neverland funeral appears unlikely), but it’s still a good read.

Yup. Pretty damn creepy.

[Tags: cluetrain advertising ]

In the closing “conversation” today at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Charlie Rose interviews former Secretaries of State Madeline Albright and James Baker and current deputy secretary James Steinberg. The conversation, unsurprisingly, begins with the recent protests in Iran.

Secretary Baker saw the protests as encouraging, despite the violence against protesters. The protests were fueled by dissatisfaction, and they may be exposing that the Iranian government is less of a theocracy, and more of a hardline military and security government. This might give us options we otherwise might not have, but we don’t have much we can do on the ground. “I’m the only person here to serve in a Republican administration and I think President Obama has handled this just about exactly right.” In Hungary in 1956, “we called people out but weren’t in the position to help them.” We don’t want to make the same mistake in Iran. And we cannot be the whipping boy for the Iranian government.

The violent crackdown can’t stop us from talking, Baker argues. During the Cold War, the Soviets were “equally committed to doing damage to the US, to wiping us off the earth… and we talked to them for forty years.” He gets strong applause for the line, “You don’t need to make peace with your friends, you need to make peace with your enemies.”

Secretary Albright notes, “For a long time, I thought Iran had won the war in Iraq. That may have shifted. Iran, as Persia, wanted to be regional hegemon.” In their confusion of what they’ve done, she argues, they have changed the dynamic of the whole region.

It’s comfortable to say that we’re never going to deal with this government, but not very helpful. The problems are practial - who do we talk to and about what. And the possibility that Iran could acquire nuclear weapons is a genuine national security problem.

Steinberg acknowledges that the most powerful aspect of the Iranian protests “is that the protests were made in Iran - it wasn’t somehow protesters implementing outside policy.”

Baker suggests that the US has options other than doing nothing. He references “sanctions that really bite, financial sanctions,” and then intriguingly reminds the audience that the US still has thousands of nuclear weapons. “We’ve got all these nukes, it doesn’t take but twenty seconds to reaim ‘em at Iran. We need to let those hardliners know - they may be flaky and crazy, but they don’t want to be blown off the face of the earth.”

Albright notes that it’s a mistake to equate protests in Iran with certain historical precedents. “The people seeking freedom in Europe were pro-American. That’s not what we see in Iran. People want to be noticed, but not necessarily embraced by the US.” She notes that the past embrace of Iranian politicians has weakened them.

Steinberg is clear that the US isn’t reaiming nuclear weapons any time soon. “There’s no question we can deter them. But our fear is Iranian nuclear weapons as a shield, not as a sword,” allowing Iran to take aggresive action in the region without fear of retaliation. And if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it’s likely to provoke other countries to acquire them.

The conversation shifts to Israel, and Steinberg points out that the US is making preliminary overtures to Syria, engaging to a new degree. Baker suggests that Syria is critical because it has influence with Hamas. He remembers a conversation with Syrian officials in the past - he asked whether Syria could get Hamas to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist in exchange for the Golan. He believes Syria will do it. The trick may be finding ways to talk to Hamas indirectly - he recollects talking to Palestinians who were obviously speaking for the PLO, but maintaining the fiction that the US doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. Albright reminds us that Hamas is so powerful because they actually provide services - we need to acknowledge that they’re more complicated than just a terrorist organization.

We move into a rapid tour of hotspots around the world. Asked about whether the US should restrict air strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Steinberg steers the conversation to nationbuilding. “We’re not going to do nationbuilding - we’re going to allow Afghans to build their own nation.” Baker’s got a different plan - he suggests we should pay off and “flip” members of the Taliban, suggesting that this is a common local practice and will be well-received.

Albright has no easy answers for Pakistan, but has a great line: “I think Pakistan is everything that gives you an international migraine.” She lists problems including corruption, its location, its interconnection to other conflicts, and notes that we’re at a point where we can’t even succesfully deliver humanitarian aid and support to the Swat Valley.

The topic of Russia inspires spirited conversation. Albright notes that in her past trips to Russia and nearby countries, she sees a huge mistrust of the US. She feels that they’re deeply worried about US influence in the “post-Soviet Sphere”. We need to make it clear that NATO isn’t against them, and we’ve got an added complication with missle defense: “I personally wish we’d never gone towards missle defense. It’s hard to persuade the that the missles and NATO aren’t against them.” Albright notes that the new generation in power in Russia, people in their forties, are anti-American for the most part.

Charlie Rose leads the conversation to North Korea via China. Baker reminds us that China owns us, or will soon. “If we don’t do something about our current account deficit, we’re going to be in big trouble.”

Steinberg sees increasing distance between North Korea and China. He believes that the recent provocative acts have been a shock to China as well. “The Chinese are worried about destabilizing North Korea, but are fundamentally committed to seeing the de-nuclearization of North Korea.” They see it as a threat to them - if the program continues, it’s going to change the face of Northeast Asia.

Our world tour includes a quick stop in Europe - though none in Africa or Latin America - before we move on to health care. This quickly turns into a conversation about the difficulty of bipartisanship. Albright offers multiple diagnoses, including the zinger, “With due respect, the Republican party is not exactly functional.” Baker offers a practical suggestion. Given the hatred between Republicans and Democrats in the House, bipartisan initiatives actually need to be written by the President.

Asked about the future, Baker predicts that the US will still be the preeminent power in the world in twenty five years. We’re not falling behind, he tells us, but others are catching up in part by embracing our models. But he worries about our financial future. Albright reminds us that we’re a nation that doesn’t like to go it alone and predicts a future of state to state partnerships. And Steinberg is silent, perhaps because it’s easier to be opinionated on this topic when you’re no longer in office.

Anna Deveare Smith holds a conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Alexander, who was the inaugural poet at President Barack Obama’s election. Smith notes, “When I heard she’d been asked to compose a poem for the inauguration, I hollered out loud, but I wasn’t surprised.” Smith has brought three poems for Alexander to read, and invites her to pick one - she selects “Absence”, an excerpt from an epic poem about the Amistad, a slave ship that is seized, makes its way to Connecticut, and where US authorities declared the captives on board free Africans, not slaves and property of the Spanish. Alexander’s poem imagines the voyage from the captive’s perspective, the blue notes that come from moaning. It closes:

“in the absence of women in the middle of the ocean
there is no deeper deep, no bluer blue”

Asked about the official role of inaugural poet, the transformation of poetry into a new form of language, with the authority of its inclusion in an inaugural ceremony, Alexander reflects, “Poetry isn’t meant to resolve everything - it’s meant to open us up. And official language doesn’t have the power to do that.”

Alexander is heavily influenced by poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and she says, “Gwendolyn Brooks is the bard of the south side of Chicago. She’s the one who should be delivering the poem, because she’s from Obamaland before it became Obamaland…” How do you write a poem for a mall that used to be a slave market? Looking at a stretch of grass edified by Walt Whitman? How do you put this moment in a timeline?

She reads the inaugural poen, “Praisesong for the day“. It’s a praisesong in the West Africa tradition, but it doesn’t invoke Obama. Alexander sees this as a continuation of a campaign that invited people to look beyond the candidate, towards us, to the movement. A praisesong that served one person wouldn’t be true to the moment.

“‘Love’ is the one word we probably won’t hear President Obama say.” We might misrust him if we heard it a lot - it’s not a politician’s word. She quotes “Work is love made manifest”, and the room struggles to remember who the quote is from. “Kahlil Gibran,” someone yells out. “Good. I wanted it to be Gandhi, but I was worried it might have been Britney Spears.”

I’m a bad blogger today, but a good conversationalist. Aspen isn’t bloggable in the same way as a conference like TED or Pop!Tech - we’re in a large music hall without wifi or power, and I’ve got the only laptop out in sight. And I’ve been spending less time transcribing sessions and more catching up with old friends.

But fortunately I ducked back into the “tent” to catch the end of a talk I’d really wanted to hear, a dialog between Secretary Madeline Albright and scholar Hernando de Soto. De Soto is a proponent for property rights. He argues that a key towards economic development is ensuring that people in the developing world can document ownership of their houses and land. This is critical for economic development - in the US, most entrepreneurs fund their businesses based on mortgaging their houses. You can’t do this if you can’t document your ownership…

Secretary Albright connects these issues to the problem of failed states. “Failed states come about when we don’t know who owns things, who’s in charge, or who’s responsible.” It sounds absurd to push for property rights in a place like Darfur, she tells us, but that’s how we prevent state failure and a critical piece of recovery from crisis situations.

De Soto observes that much of the world’s agricultural production is being produced by a small set of nations - the US, China, Canada, Australia - the breadbasket of the world. There’s far more space available in Latin America and Africa, and countries like China are now acquiring huge swaths of land in Africa, as are companies like Unilever and Hershey. (Or Daewoo in Madagascar.) People argue that property rights are a right wing concept and that we shouldn’t be emphasizing them in the developing world. But if we don’t, De Soto argues, we’re going to end up with an African continent owned by large corporations with no rights for the current landowners. This may sound like a right-wing movement, but it’s the way we give people sufficient rights that we don’t end up with peasant insurgencies like the Shining Path.

Albright suggests that we need to consider the role of women in property ownership, including inheritance and property rights. The interlocutor (whose name I didn’t catch, alas) references the participation of women in the recent street protests in Iran - they’ve got more at stake and less to lose than the men do.

DeSoto argues that it’s easier to grant property rights than we think. You’re giving poor people what they’ve already got - “Law is already there in a semotic stage.” He tells a story of visiting with the Indonesian government after spending a vacation in Bali. The government asked him, “How do we find out who owns what? We want to avoid another revolution.” DeSoto’s advice - take a walk. Every two hundred yards or so, a different dog barks. “There may be no records, but the Indonesian dogs know where the borders are.”

We might also look towards models that have worked before. In Colorado, in days past, if you cut down enough trees, you’d have a legal claim to the land. DeSoto tells us, “There’s practice, then you codify it.”

I’m at the Aspen Ideas Festival and still trying to get a sense for how this conference works. I arrived late last night and spoke in one of the early sessions this morning, along with Brooke Gladstone and Clive Thompson. Good fun, but it means I’ve only experienced the conference as a speaker, not as a guest.

There are competing sessions during lunch, and I passed through a standup routine by Louis Black to make it into the basement to hear George Dyson talk about Darwinian critic, Samuel Butler. The Butler in question is a somewhat obscure Victorian figure. He wrote novels, translated, and engaged in a fierce, lifelong debate with Charles Darwin. Dyson tells us that George Bernard Shaw observed that a man who managed to alienate both Darwin and the church wasn’t goint to make a lot of friends.

Dyson sees a lot to like in Butler’s view of the world. When Butler fled England - and a debate with his father over the value of baptish - he found himself in New Zealand and was fascinated by a telegraph line that connected a harbor and the town of Christchurch. The experience of being able to transmit news to town that a ship had been sighted radically changed the life of the town, and Butler reflected on the development in a way that anticipated much of the contemporary internet, including e-commerce. His observations were wide-ranging, including reflections on the possible evolution of machines, including the idea that machines might reproduce through humans, much as humans use biological subsystems to reproduce. His critiques of Darwin focused on the question of how Darwinian processes actually came about. He ended up postulating a form of intelligent design that was bottom up - based on the motivations of cellular and molecular mechanisms, rather than on a top-down intelligent designer. In his work, Dyson sees anticipation of Dawkins and the idea of the selfish gene.

Darwin and Butler sparred throughout their lifetimes, though Darwin didn’t directly address Butler’s critiques - his advisory board, however, wrote ferocious criticism of his work, including a memorable passage where Butler is refered to with the drawing of a dog. Dyson worries that we dismiss his thinking, especially about bottom-up strategies of evolution, at our peril.

Asked who’s the most important critic of Darwin today, Dyson cited Carl Woese, who discovered Archaea, a new kingdom of life that includes extremophiles, life that thrives in deep undersea events in environments that appear unsustainable. Woese sees a great deal of genetic transfer across species within the Archaea kingdom - deeply separated orders or families might manifest large, similar sequences. This suggests a model of genetic spread that’s different from conventional Darwinian evolution. It might look more like the way languages borrow from one another. Woese - and Dyson - speculate that Darwinian evolution might just be one possible ways in which organisms share genetic information. It might be have been an earlier form of evolution, and perhaps horizontal genetic transfer, as we see in virii and in Archaea might be more common.

Dyson ends with a slide of his father, poking at eddies in a British stream. “You can poke an eddy with a stick and it will just reform. Perhaps species are like this - we somehow eliminate lions, but we see similar prey behavior in housecats. Maybe species are like eddies, emerging through Darwinian selection, through horizontal gene sharing… but the behaviors inevitably emerge.

Asked about his feelings on intelligent design, Dyson admits that he dislikes the dogmatic response the scientific community tends to have to the line of thought. Intelligent design, he says, shouldn’t be taught as a theory equivalent to Darwin’s, but no scientist should dismiss something entirely out of hand.

Dyson offers the idea that Richard Dawkins errs in believing that you need to be an atheist to be a good scientist. There have been many excellent scientists who are “dual citizens” of the world of science and faith.

The questions close with queries to Dyson about how science should be taught in schools. He remembers a science class where he and fellow students were given a year to study the Grand Canyon and try to determine how old they thought it was. They ran experiments to test erosion, built instruments to test mass, and generally learned how to do science. There were some parents who disliked the class - they pointed out that students didn’t learn much about grods. “But you were extremely well prepared to learn about frogs.”

The afternoon session at Aspen Ideas Festival today is a four hour “conversation”, involving a remarkable set of discussants. To give us a sense for gravitas, we open with “Fanfare for the Common Man”, played on timpani and brass. I guess this is to prepare us for speakers like Attorney General Eric Holder… who, unfortunately, wasn’t able to join us due to a dental emergency. (I’m not making this up.) Instead, we get the new Israeli Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, in dialog with Bob Schieffer.

(A reminder for all my readers - I just try to get the notes down - there’s no implied endorsement of anything said or not said here.)

Oren was born, raised and educated in the US - he gave up his US citizenship to become Israel’s ambassador to the US. He explains that this is a long tradition in Israel - the United States forces people to give up US citizenship, not Israel.

Schieffer asks the Ambassador to comment on a rumor today, that Israeli officials have indicated willingness towards a freeze in settlements as part of a larger peace process. Oren won’t confirm this, and reminds us that Israel reserves the right to coninue to expand existing settlements, but doesn’t plan not to acquire new land for settlements. This is not, though, just a negotiation between the US and Israel - he reminds us that this is a negotiation towards the whole Arab world. If there were indications that the Arab world was starting to accept Israel, perhaps there’d be more willingness. He says that Israel is looking for “baby steps”: overflight rights, visas for visiting scholars.

Trying to explain why the settlement issue is so difficult, Oren says, “These are our tribal lands… You can’t say to jews ‘You can’t live in the land of your forefathers.’” On the other hand, “that right can only be qualified by the right of another people,” and he acknowledges that the Palestinians have rights to these territories. The hope is to find mutual recognition, comity, prosperity, a recognition of parallel, opposing claims to these lands.

Oren served in the Israeli armed forces during the operation to move settlers out of Gaza. He talks about how difficult it is to remove people from their homes on land they believe they have a right to.

Schieffer asks about Palestinian reaction to the recent plan put forward by the Israeli Prime Minister - a recognition of a Jewish state, no right of return, and no joint control of Jerusalem. Orem asks us to back up - Israel is acknowleding a Palestinian claim to land, with a requirement that there’s a mutual acknowledgement in turn. Israel is demanding a demilitarized state - it will be allowed a police force, but the fear is that past attempts to allow Palestinian authorities to have weapons have led to attacks on Israel, particularly rocket attacks. And Jerusalem, he says, is not off the table - it’s simply only for the last stage of discussions.

Schieffer wonders why Jerusalem couldn’t be a shared, international city. Oren argues that international cities don’t work, and argues that the city wasn’t possible for jews until Israel took over in 1967. As for refugees, Oren wants to see refugees repatriated to a former Palestinian state, not to Israel, as it would change the Jewish character of the state. He reminds Schieffer that Israel has repatriated jews from around the Arab world who’d been expelled or threatened.

Oren draws a distinction between Palestinian groups seeking the elimination of Israel and a new generation who want economic ties with Israel. He points to security successes, with US forces training Palestinian police, which have enabled parts of the West Bank which had been closed to reopen. And he notes a changing tone in the region - Israel is no longer the enemy to Sunni states - it’s Iran, and Israel is agreed that Iran is a threat.

Schieffer asks point blank, “Will Israel tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran?” Oren sees “multiple existential threats” from a nuclear armed Iran. Not only is there the chance of a direct strike, there’s the possibility of transfer of the bomb to terrorist groups. Israel loses its ability to retailate for terrorism. And he argues that if Iran gets a bomb, other states will immediately seek them as well. “Israel will take whatever actions are necessary to protect its citizens from this multiple existential threat… Israel has the military means to defend itself under all conditions.” (This last line gets applause, perhaps because it’s an elegant dodge to a question of whether Israel has nuclear weapons.)

“The Gilad Shalit story tears my nation apart… the country that tears its heart out over a single soldier is not going to let a government threaten it with nuclear weapons.”

Asked about recent unrest in Iran, Oren says, “This is a regime that shows no compunction in killing its own citizens. It will show no compunctions in killing our or other citizens.” Israel is concerned that a “so-called moderate leader will emerge in Iran, and continue to support Hizbullah, Hamas and continue to seek nuclear weapons.” Only with a change in Iranian policy will Israel be comfortable.

Oren argues that great American leaders, including Jefferson, Lincoln and Wilson, were Zionists, and suggests that the US/Israeli relationship is like no other two-state relationship in history. As a centerpiece of US and Israeli foreign relations, it’s not going to change.

Oren ends on a light note, hoping that his next vacation can be in Riyahd. He wants to see a resolution to the settlement issue, a resumption of talks with the Palestinians, and talks with Syria, hoping that Syrian leaders will follow in the steps of Sadat and come to Israel. “The people of Israel have demonstrated again and again that when there is a sincere effort from an Arab leader, Israelis are willing to make enormous sacrifices.” He references Israel’s 1979 peace treaty with Egypt as an example.

Not (or not only) through sharing information on censorship tactics. Instead, as a mapping of the .ir domain by the firm Lumeta found, “one router in the .ir domain that passes the most traffic is physically located in Russia. Iran is apparently outsourcing a significant portion of its routed infrastructure.” This implies that Russia could also cut off that information, through that ‘choke point,’ if it wanted. According to Information Week, Lumeta also found that only about 10% of US-based traffic into Iran is blocked.

Lumeta also has a map of the Internet in the Middle East.

Which you can compare to our map and study of the Arabic blogosphere.

Hat Tip: Middle East Studies at Harvard

BERKMAN BUZZ:  A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations.  If you'd like to receive this by email, sign up here.

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“Three can keep a secret, if two are dead.” – Benjamin Franklin

Private thoughts are a dying breed. You may recall the story of the city government of Bozeman, Montana, which mandated that job applicants turn over their social networking passwords. Another “give me (voluntary) access to your private life or I will hurt you” case has appeared, this time in a Houston’s Restaurant in New Jersey.  

After the management at Houston’s learned that two servers, Brian Pietrylo and Doreen Marino, had set up an invite-only MySpace group as a venting forum for their dissatisfied peers, the bosses demanded that a hostess and member of the group, Karen St. Jean, give up the password. She did. They did not like what they read (e.g., “let the shit talking begin" “stupid corporate fucks" and "dick suckers"). And then management fired Pietrylo and Marino for failure to exhibit “a positive mental attitude.”

Pietrylo and Marino thought they might have a right as Americans to call their boss a son of a bitch, so they sued on invasion of privacy, wrongful termination in violation of free speech, wiretapping, and unauthorized access grounds. The judge threw out the free speech count and Pietrylo and Marion voluntarily dropped the wiretapping counts after it became clear that Houston's "did not intercept any electronic communications as required by the federal and state wiretapping statutes." (Opinion at p. 4) The court did not kick out the privacy claim as there was "a disputed issue of material fact as to whether St. Jean provided authorization . . . access the website." (Opinion at p. 12) However, the court cautioned that  the privacy interests of Pietrylo and Marino "will be balanced against the employer's interests in managing the business." (Opinion at p. 11)

On June 18th, a jury found that the managers had violated federal and state telecommunication laws -- the federal Stored Communications Act (18 U.S.C. 2701-11)  and the equivalent New Jersey statute (NJSA 2A: 156A-27) -- finding that they improperly pressured St. Jean for her password, accessed the MySpace group, and then acted on that information.  These statutes protect "electronic data while it is in electronic storage" and make unauthorized access of that data illegal. The jury found in favor  of the defendants on Pietrylo's and Marino's claims for invasion of privacy, finding that the plaintiffs had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the MySpace group. Thank god for technicalities, as this case against employer snooping likely fails but for the telecommunications protections. Even with this sorta happy (but not really) ending, I find myself terrified.

The trend of password querying was scary enough when it was limited to public employment. Now that it has spread to the private sector, I am at orange alert. The time has come for a blanket prohibition on employer mandated disclosure  of cyber identities. If we allow the practice, the boss will always have the power to pressure employees to volunteer for a head-spinning cyber possession/debriefing. When it comes to private passwords at the work place, it should be “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

A password gag order from on high is necessary, even in light of Pietrylo’s recent victory.  Pietrylo prevailed not on any First Amendment grounds (there is no state actor here), but merely because the company was viewed by the jury as coercing St. Jean into providing managers with her password to access the private page.

If instead Houston’s had an explicit policy requiring employees to print out and hand over posts concerning work in exchange for continuation of the at-will employment relationship, the case might have gone the other way. New Jersey courts have typically read NJSA. 2A:156A-27 as a narrow protection of  “transmission.” White v. White, 344 N.J. Super. 211  (N.J. Super. Ch., 2001). 

How much would you like to wager that most corporate offices WILL NOT begin to include “work-volunteer-print” clauses in their form contracts? Or that when the first batch of these unconscionable contracts hits the front lines, the workers of the service industry (what with their immeasurable bargaining power in this bull-economy) will reject the anti-privacy clause? At this rate, it won’t be long before we are required to attach copies of our keys and a standing invitation to enter to any job application.     

Benjamin Franklin assumed that secrets would survive in private thoughts. He could not predict a world where only a password would shield personal diaries from public view. If our dear kite flyer were alive today, his proverb on secrecy would be slightly less elegant: “Three can keep a secret, if two are dead and the surviving one does not willingly give his/her MySpace, Facebook, Gmail, etc. password to his/her employer(s) or sign an employment contract that requires disclosure and explicitly created a diminished expectation of privacy.” Just doesn’t have the same ring to it.  For the good of the proverb (and incidentally, ourselves), we should protect our right to our private lives by banning password querying.

(Andrew Moshirnia is a rising second-year law student at Harvard Law School and a CMLP legal intern.)

The Obama administration has turned its “online town hall” events into a parody of what they were intended to be, which specifically were supposed to include a genuine effort to include questions from the citizens of this nation in an open process, not the bogus pre-selection system that is turning into an Obama trademark. Yesterday’s health care event, for example, included just three questions from online contributors (and only eight in all, notes the TechPresident blog) in an event that makes some of George W. Bush’s staged events seem almost spontaneous.

When called on this by White House journalists, Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs responded with arrogance. He demonstrated not just contempt for the Washington press corps (which does often earn contempt) but also to the administration’s promises of openness and bottom-up accountability. A shabby performance, and worrisome if you care about how this White House will behave when its current public favor diminishes, as it surely will.

So when you watch one of these events in the future, be aware that there’s barely a shred of the give-and-take we were promised. This White House would rather rely, at least for now, on the kind of staging that previous presidents used so often, and which candidate Obama and many of his aides and supporters found so correctly offensive.

a href=”http://www.buzzmachine.com/”>Jeff Jarvis led a discussion at PDF among 1,000 people about what government could learn from Google, and, more generally, what a bunch of techies would do to make government better. Jeff’s got this rare cross of skills as a writer, teacher, entertainer and provoker. If you haven’t seen him at work, you should grab the next opportunity. And, yes, Jeff is a friend, so I’m biased. But I’m also right.

So, here’s a way the government is becoming like Google. Remember how a few years ago, Google was grabbing the best and the brightest techies of every stripe? Every time you turned around, someone else you admired had moved there. Now the same thing is happening with the federal government. It’s the glamorous place many of the best and the brightest — including some from Google — want to work. The government is becoming a center of innovation. It may not be as wild as the garages of Silicon Valley and the Charles River, but it’s dreaming big and its heart is pure. These positions are being filled with the diametric opposites of lobbyists. It’s pretty amazing.

Note to self: Re-read The Best and the Brightest to see if there are lessons for the new federal techies.

Tags: pdf09 e-government e-gov egov experts

• Broadband Initiatives Program and Broadband Technology Opportunities Program
• State Broadband Data and Development Grant Program

• Ars
• Fierce Wireless
• Harold Feld
• Public Knowledge
• Broadband Census
• Network World
• GigaOm

In a New York Times op-ed piece today, Harvard Law School Professor and Berkman Center Faculty Co-Director Jack Goldsmith called on the federal government to regulate consumer-level PC security:

Our digital security problems start with ordinary computer users who do not take security seriously. Their computers can be infiltrated and used as vehicles for attacks on military or corporate systems. They are also often the first place that adversaries go to steal credentials or identify targets as a prelude to larger attacks.

President Obama has recognized the need to educate the public about computer security. The government should jump-start this education by mandating minimum computer security standards and by requiring Internet service providers to deny or delay Internet access to computers that fall below these standards, or that are sending spam or suspicious multiple computer probes into the network.

Obviously we at StopBadware agree strongly with the first paragraph. Rather than taking a position on the second, I pose these questions that would have to be answered about Prof. Goldsmith’s policy recommendations:

• Would computer security standards be based on technology (e.g., computers must have real-time anti-virus scanning), principles open to interpretation (e.g., computers must be kept updated with security fixes), or something else? In any case, who decides on these standards and how do we ensure that they are kept current and do not benefit the software industry more than they benefit national security?
• If ISPs are expected to play gatekeeper, how do we build transparency and a fair, responsive appeals process into the system? What happens when an ISP blocks my connection because they think I’m sending spam, when in fact I’m operating a high-volume, opt-in mailing list?
• If the government "jump-starts this education," who will actually provide the education? After all, blocking a user from the Internet because his computer is infected does not educate the user, it just creates a motivation for the user to become educated. Is the responsibility of helping the user to clean up and protect his PC the ISP’s? The government’s? StopBadware’s? Or is the user just expected to be on his/her own?

These are not trivial questions, but there is precedent for answering all three successfully. Our Badware Guidelines have been a helpful tool in identifying applications that dip below a certain level of community expectations. Our independent review process keeps a check on our data partners’ autonomous detection of badware websites. And our BadwareBusters.org community and StopBadware security tips have proven a useful educational resource for website owners with compromised sites.

Despite these successes, there are many differences between Prof. Goldsmith’s proposal and StopBadware’s independent, voluntary system. And setting minimum security standards for computers is a different animal than setting behavioral standards for applications. It remains to be seen whether the questions above can be adequately answered within a system like the one described by Prof. Goldsmith.

palfrey deposition01

and then i twittered

and when we came back from the break oppenheim objected. sorry i didn’t get my recorder back on for his words. the recording picks up with palfrey asking for clarification of the publication constraints he is under.

after my tweet

The summer months of 2009 have already played host to game-changing elections in the world’s largest Hindu and Shiite Muslim nations, India and Iran respectively. On July 8, Indonesia – the world’s fourth-largest by-population nation, the world’s largest Muslim country as well as largest Muslim democracy– will hold its presidential elections.

On July 8, Demokrat party incumbent Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono will face off against the incumbent Vice President Jusuf Kalla, now the Golkar party presidential nominee, and against 2001-2004 Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, also daughter of Indonesia’s first President Sukarno. Megawati is the leader of the opposition party known as Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan, or PDI-P. Her controversial career soldier running mate, Prabowo Subianto, is the son-in-law of Suharto and the well-heeled founder and former Presidential nominee of the Gerinda party.

30-day domestic relative data on most popular candidate terms

While the perennial elite continues to vie for Indonesia’s top office, political engagement is moving from the streets to the information superhighway. Despite religious differences, the most salient non-domestic interest in the Iranian elections came from Jakarta, where –according to Google Insights for Search– Indonesian (Bahasa) trailed only Persian as the language of choice for entering Google search queries on Iranian presidential candidates. Outside of Iran and its diaspora, Indonesian interest in Iranian politics underscores religious trans-national solidarity, and an increasingly politically active youth demographic.

Within Indonesia, primary interest during the Iranian elections of early June stemmed from Internet users in the Javanese cities of Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Bandung, and Surabaya, and in the Sumatran capital of Medan. Prior to the July 8 Indonesian elections, increased online circumspection in these cities could impact domestic voting patterns. Though Internet penetration in Indonesia is low, limited to 13M –or 5.4 percent of its 240M people– its use is strong in young demographics, evidenced not least by the fact that seven of the 90-day Indonesian top-ten growth Google search terms relate to Facebook or Friendster.

Indonesia is an immensely diverse and complex country comprised of a rich history, and 922 inhabited islands, each multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, and multi-religious. Internet penetration is not ubiquitous, its use is not widespread across demographics, and Internet Service Providers are centralized predominately in hub cities.

Even accounting for such gaps, understanding the use of new online media such as search, social networks, and micro-blogging adds a necessary –if not sufficient– layer of analytical firepower for deciphering trends. One week before Indonesian presidential elections, search volume data yields interesting information. While incumbent Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono leads by 10 points according to a June 11 poll, aggregated search on iterations of his name –“sby,” “boediono,” “budiono,” “pd” (after his party)– show him leading by 6:1 over Megawati, and by even wider margins over former Vice Presidential incumbent Jusuf Kalla. Putative opinion in Indonesia is that “Mega” –as she is known– is out of the running. In certain regions such as Jawa Timur (East Java) “SBY” leads both in search and in political stronghold. Online “Mega” appears competitive until one realizes that predominate queries are, by “Breakout” proportions, “say no Megawati.”

Top Megawati search terms in Indonesia over last 90 days

But illustrative online activity must be conjoined with offline knowledge. Coupled with an understanding of demography, geography, language, religion, and domestic influence, the political application of this data can be at a minimum indicative of desultory intrigue, but potentially a leading indicator of alteration in public opinion. It must be understood in the context of its influence on domestic social and political institutions. Only if being informed translates to being influential, and only if political will moves from router box to ballot box, will those observations made online be indicative of likely political change. With the most recent polls indicating a spread in public opinion of no more than 10 points, should relative online search volume be correlated with votes cast, Presidential incumbent Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono will be re-elected, and the Indonesia of next Wednesday won’t look all that different from the Indonesia of today.

wayne\'s tweets

no ruling yet on whether wayne will be allowed to testify

but please, read this
thank you wayne, however this goes

The Pirate Bay is now getting acquired by Swedish firm Global Gaming Factory X AB (GGF), according to announcements by both companies. The price tag is 60 million Swedish kronor ($7.83 million, 5.5 million euros at current exchange rates). GGF disclosed the intended buyout in Stockholm this morning.

congratulations on bringing us so far. let the process of innovation go on. we don’t compete with money. selling out is not a sin

PDF was an unusually rich conference. Great folks there and an especially good year to be talking about the effect of the Net on politics and governance.

My take-away (although having a single take-away from a conference I just said is rich is rather contradictory, don’t you think?): The Web has won in a bigger way than I’d thought. The people President Obama is appointing to make use of the Web for increased citizen participation and greater democracy (well, at least as access to the Web and the skills required are distributed more evenly) are our best, brightest, and webbiest. And they are doing remarkable things.

Douglas Rushkoff interviewed me for his radio show yesterday or was it the day before? Anyway, here it is. We talked about PDF and about my presentation there, which was about transparency and the changing role of facts.

[Tags: pdf obama rushkoff e-democracy e-government e-gov egov pdf09 ]

These photos of bubbles bursting may be old (or not), but I just stumbled across them, and they’re pretty amazing.

[Tags: bubbles ]

Steve Myers at Poynter has a good story about NPR’s crowd-sourcing Dollar Politics project. One element of it was a request for help identifying 200 people who attended a Senate hearing, some percentage of whom were lobbyists.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous media crowdsourcing npr ]

Inadequate journalism often leads to worse journalism. A case in point is Wired.com’s follow-up on a dubious Wall Street Journal story about alleged “deep packet inspection” (DPI) — an invasive digital surveillance method — on Iran’s mobile-Internet users.

Here’s how the Wired Threat Level blog posting, “Deep-Packet Inspection in U.S. Scrutinized Following Iran Surveillance,” begins:

Following a report last week that Iran is spying on domestic internet users with western-supplied technology, advocacy groups are pressuring federal lawmakers to scrutinize the use of the same technology in the U.S.

The Open Internet Coalition sent a letter to all members of the House and Senate urging them to launch hearings aimed at examining and possibly regulating the so-called deep-packet inspection technology.

Two senators also announced plans to introduce a bill that would bar foreign companies that sell IT technology to Iran from obtaining U.S. government contracts, legislation that is clearly aimed at the two European companies that reportedly sold the equipment to Iran.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture between Germany’s Siemens and Finland’s Nokia, recently gave Iran deep-packet inspection equipment that would allow the government to spy on internet users.

According to the Journal, Iranian officials have used deep-packet surveillance to snoop on the content of e-mail, VoIP calls and other online communication as well as track users’ other online activity, such as uploading videos to YouTube. Iranian officials are said to be using it to monitor activists engaged in protests over the country’s recent disputed presidential election, though the Journal said it couldn’t confirm whether Iran was using the Nokia Siemens Networks equipment for this purpose or equipment from another maker.

Nokia Siemens has denied that it provided Iran with such technology.

But similar technology is being installed at ISPs in the U.S.

The piece goes on at some length to discuss the reasonable concern about the threat posed by deep-packet inspection by ISPs, acting on their own initiative or for government-mandated surveillance.

But wait. The Journal’s weasel-worded original story itself (buried far down in the piece) acknowledges that the DPI may not be happening at all, at least not in the way the story strongly suggests or by the company it implicates. Read David Isenberg’s detailed explanations (here, here) to understand why the Journal story is so problematic.

Consider the sequence in the Wired follow-up:

1. Cite the Journal story and describe its contents with no hint that credible outside observers, such as Isenberg (a friend of mine), have major questions about its accuracy.

2. Add a sentence saying that the company accused of providing the gear to the Iran dictators flatly denies the report. (Don’t bother to mention that the only named source in the original Journal piece loudly denounced it on his own blog.)

3. Then pivot: Talk about US companies that are installing DPI equipment at ISPs, as if this proves the original point.

If Wired wanted to write about American ISPs using DPI — a topic that deserves wide attention — it shouldn’t peg the story to a Journal report that is so open to question, at least not without noting that people who understand the technology have raised serious questions about it.

Iran’s dictators are a murderous bunch; I have no doubt about that. Nor is there doubt that western telecom companies are selling dictators surveillance tools; they’ve been doing it for years — and in my view they are morally culpable in the misuse of those technologies. In the matter at hand, we don’t know for sure what’s going on.

For what it’s worth, I consider Wired’s Threat Level to be a normally credible and well-reported blog. But journalists should try harder to be careful on matters like this. Sloppiness in these circumstances can undermine our trust in everything else they report.

Ben Wikler from Avaaz.org discusses how nimbly aggregating small actions by individuals around the world can build effective online campaigns for issues like conflict, human rights, and climate change.

Download the MP3

Ben Wikler from Avaaz.org discusses how nimbly aggregating small actions by individuals around the world can build effective online campaigns for issues like conflict, human rights, and climate change.

There are countless ways to screw up a fragile democracy. Two aspects of the democratic process seem to be especially vulnerable - elections, and term limits. Recent events in Iran have reminded us that elections are surprisingly easy to rig if you’ve got adequate control of electoral commissions. (Ideally, you should never need to rig an election. With state control over media, it should be easy enough to marginalize opponents and consolidate the image of a strong executive. The mistake in the Iran elections may have been the televised debates, which established Moussavi as a credible threat to Ahmedinejad…)

And there are a lot of rigged elections. In Africa, we’ve seen recently seen a thoroughly corrupt Zimbabwean election leading to an uncomfortable power-sharing arrangement, a rigged Kenyan election leading to violence and a bloated power-sharing government, a massively flawed election in Nigeria being accepted largely because it didn’t erupt into violence. Even in Ghana, where the 2008 elections were rightly celebrated for providing a peaceful transfer of power (the rare and celebrated “double alternation“), some of my friends affiliated with the ousted NPP claim that the election was flawed, but their party stood down rather than risk Kenya-style chaos. (I have no way of validating these claims, but I’m fascinated that an election celebrated for its smooth running is being questioned by some participants.)

Recent events suggest that we may need to pay close attention to the moment when leaders realize they’re constitutionally obligated to step down. It’s a legitimate concern in fragile democracies that a leader may be fairly elected, and may then manipulate the levers of power to remain in office indefinitely. (The running African joke about democratically-elected strongmen has the punchline: “One man, one vote, once.”) So many constitutions include strict term limits for executives. And popular leaders often try to ammend constitutions to allow them to rule indefinitely - Hugo Chavez proposed such ammendments to Venezuela’s constitution and was narrowly defeated in a referendum in late 2007.

Honduran president Manuel Zelaya is facing the end of his term in office and can’t currently stand for another term due to term limits. He sought a referendum allowing a constitutional change which would allow him to stand again. An hour before polls were scheduled to open, he was seized - in his pajamas - by military officers acting on a Supreme Court order and spirited off to Costa Rica.

That sounds a lot like a coup to me - the military has seized power and ousted an elected leader before the end of his term. On the other hand, the military was acting under court order, which leads to an argument that the presidential ouster was legally mandated. There’s been lively online debate on the topic of coup/no coup - readers on Reddit yesterday morning were greeted with an angry comment, “I am from Honduras. It was NOT a COUP” and a long comment thread debating events. The back and forth on the English-language wikipedia has been fierce enough that the Honduras page is currently protected from future edits (thought the Spanish-language page is not protected at present.)

While the Honduras situation is gaining some media attention - notably because both Hugo Chavez and Barack Obama have protested the events that have transpired - a very similar situation in Niger hasn’t moved beyond the back pages of the newspaper. In Niger, President Mamadou Tandja has been seeking an additional term in office, which has required constitutional changes via a referendum. The constitutional court ruled against his proposed referendum, and earlier this week, he declared he would rule by decree, dissolved the court that ruled against him and appointed 8 ministers who agree with his referendum plans. It’s not technically a military coup, as the military has stayed neutral… but an Nigerois opposition figure has called the situation a coup and been arrested for his troubles.

Mark Leon Goldberg, writing in UN Dispatch, asks “If a coup falls in Niger, does it make a sound?” While Tandja is earning brickbats from ECOWAS and from the EU, the story isn’t getting much play in international media. I can’t find evidence that Obama’s specifically condemned Tandja’s actions (BTW, I do not recommend searching for “obama niger” - it’s depressing, and won’t enlighten you on this story), and there certainly aren’t media pundits demanding an Obama stand on events.

It’s interesting to think about what democratic stresses attract international attention and which fly under radar. Protests in Iran were going to be front-page news, even before demonstrators displayed uncommon persistance and courage. Iran’s a founding member of the “axis of evil” - the Beatles of international media attention - a country that’s always red hot on attention maps. That Iran has a thriving blogosphere and a tech savvy population, many of whom knew how to evade the government firewalls that have been in place most of this decade, helped turn exciting, inspiring political developments into an international media phenomenon.

Other countries can have profoundly strange goings-on and healthy citizen media coverage, and won’t get a fraction of the coverage. See Madagascar, which has been in the throes of a deposed government, where bloggers have emerged as a key alternative to mainstream media. Or Fiji, where the military has been in control since late 2006, the fourth coup in recent years, and where recent restrictions on freedom of the press has been called “coup 4.5″ and turned bloggers into outlaw media outlets. We’ve covered both crises closely at Globa Voices, but we’ve not had the mainstream media interest we’ve received around Iran.

So why does Honduras get the Iran treatment, while Niger is ignored like Madagascar? Proximity? Strategic importance? (though Niger’s got massive uranium reserves - you remember yellowcake, right?) It’s not population - Niger’s roughly twice the size of Honduras. Expectation? Perhaps we’re sufficiently accustomed to African coups (Madagascar, Mauritania and Guinea in the past year) that Niger’s not a surprise.

Or perhaps all the pundits are still trying to figure out which one’s Nigeria and which one’s Niger…

Much enthusiasm surrounds the opportunities made available by digital media for people to express themselves and participate in the public sphere without having to go through traditional gatekeepers. While the enthusiasm about new opportunities is thus warranted, little is known about who is actually participating, who is not, and what participation patterns may imply for the democratizing potential of new tools and services. This talk draws on unique survey data collected in 2009 to explore these questions.

Much enthusiasm surrounds the opportunities made available by digital media for people to express themselves and participate in the public sphere without having to go through traditional gatekeepers. While the enthusiasm about new opportunities is thus warranted, little is known about who is actually participating, who is not, and what participation patterns may imply for the democratizing potential of new tools and services. This talk draws on unique survey data collected in 2009 to explore these questions.

Download the MP3

By Dmitry Epstein, Karina Alexanyan and Bruce Etling

The Public Opinion Foundation (or Фонд Общественное Мнение in Russian) recently released a new report from their quarterly series Internet in Russia (started in 2002) which places discussions of the booming Russian language internet in context and allows for both domestic and international comparisons. A few key themes emerge from the report. One is the significant disparity between Moscow and the rest of Russia. Another is the impact of socio-economic factors – age, education and income – on internet use in Russia and around the world.

The report (PDF in Russian), co-sponsored with the Russian search engine giant Yandex, is based on a massive nationwide survey of 42,000 respondents and 8000 face to face interviews, conducted in the first quarter of 2009. The report provides data and charts on internet penetration in Russia nationwide, as well as breakdowns by region, places of access and various socio- economic factors. The data is presented in numerous charts and graphs, including growth and changes since the reports began in 2002.

Russia Compared to the Rest of the World
Russia’s current internet penetration of 33% can be compared to Brazil’s (which is at around 29%), most of Europe (around 60%) and the US (70%). At the same time, internet penetration in Moscow is currently at European levels. As a comparison, in the US, internet penetration was at 35% in 1998 (remember the internet euphoria of 1998?) and reached 60% in 2004.

From another angle – Russia’s 33% internet penetration adds up to almost 38 million internet users – more than all of England’s internet users, yet far less than the US’s 200 million internet users (which is more than the entire population of Russia) and China’s 298 million. Moscow alone has 5.4 million internet users.

Another issue to consider is what constitutes a “user”. According to this report, anyone who has used the internet in the last six months qualifies. How would you define an internet “user” – at least once a week? Once a day? Weekly users in Russia number around 30 million or 27%, and daily users shrink to 20 million, or 18%. Again, in Moscow the figure is drastically different – 92% of Moscow’s users go online at least once a week, and 80% - over 4 million people – are online every day.

Moscow vs. the Regions
The disparity between Moscow and the “rest of Russia” becomes clearer when one looks at the regional data. Moscow has 8% of the country’s population, 14% of its average internet users and 25% of Russia’s daily internet users! The Central region, which includes Moscow, has 28% of the population and 32% of the internet users - almost 12 million people in all. The Northwest region, which includes St. Petersburg, has 10% of the population and 13% of the internet users- almost 5 million people in all (while an impressive 50% of those in St. Petersburg are online, demonstrating the importance of the urban-rural divide when looking at the regional data.) In the remaining 5 regions, the percent of internet users is generally slightly less than the percentage of the total population. The Volga region, for example, has 22% of the national population, but only 19% of its internet users – which is still over 7 million people.

Internet Users by Russian Region (Source: FOM Report)

These numbers highlight the danger of extrapolating from Moscow to “all of Russia.” Moscow holds a central position as the nucleus of political and economic power in Russia, but it certainly does not represent the country as a whole.

Internet Growth Impressive
While a national internet penetration of about one third may not seem very impressive – the rate of growth has been steady and exponential, especially in the areas outside Moscow. So, for example, during the seven years between 2002 and 2009, the percentage of internet users in Moscow more than doubled from 27% to 60%. During that same period, in most of the rest of the country, the pace of growth was even faster, with the percentage of internet users increasing almost six fold– from around 5% to around 30%. As a comparison, in the US during that same time period – 2002 to 2009, internet penetration increased only 10%. The US was experiencing Russian type growth during the heady 1990’s. In addition, the place of internet access has shifted dramatically, with far more people (almost 80%) going online at home, rather than at work or other locations (friend’s, internet cafes, school etc - the categories, are, of course, not mutually exclusive). In 2002, only 32% went online at home, while the number of people going online at work dropped from 41% in 2002 to 34% in 2009. This could be attributed to improvements to the quality of internet connections at home, and the increase in personal land lines, or other forms of access.

Who’s Online (and Who’s Not)
Socio-economic demographics – gender, age, education and income – contribute to the sense of an “internet boom.” In Russia, as elsewhere in the world, the higher the income and education, the higher the rate of internet access & use. The percentage of internet users with advanced degrees (about 17% of the total population) is significantly above average – about 65%. For roughly 70% of the population, those with a secondary education and a high school diploma, internet penetration is at or below the national average – from 33% to 24%. And of the remaining 12%, only 5% are internet users. In other words, for the relatively elite, it may seem that virtually everyone they know is online. For others, the internet may appear as a “luxury item” or even something that has no significant relevance to daily life.

In terms of internet use, Russia has achieved the gender equality much touted in Soviet times – the split between male and female users is roughly at 50%. This is especially interesting compared to users globally, where men are usually a significantly higher number of users, especially in the Middle East. In some areas, there are more male users than females, in others, the females outnumber the men. The average Russian blogger for instance, is female. This may be connected to the fact that women slightly outnumber men in Russia.

“Working woman are actively involved in all aspects of working and social life of the country!”

The breakdown of internet users by age reflects the usual assumptions – the younger age group (18-24) which accounts for only 14% of the population, has the highest internet penetration at 67%. In Moscow, as elsewhere, internet penetration decreases with age, but to a much lesser degree than in other parts of Russia. It is also interesting that while in the early part of this decade most users gained access to the Internet at work, now the vast majority (almost 80%) prefer to access the Internet at home.

Finally, as a sobering counterbalance to all this, it seems, from the report, that most of the people who are offline do not have any plans to change their status in the near future - in other words, less than 3% of those who are not online plan to start using the internet anytime soon. Maybe they have something else – like an economic crisis - on their minds?

(Hat Tip: Veronica Khokhlova, Global Voices Russia Editor)

This week brings word of two new cases testing whether state shield laws apply to user comments posted on news websites.  In Texas, a Taylor County District Court judge ruled that the Abilene Reporter-News may refrain from disclosing the identities of commenters who posted comments to articles about a murder victim and the teenager charged in connection with his death. According to a follow-up story by the Reporter-News, defense counsel in the criminal case had sought the commenters' identities to make sure they weren't chosen as jurors in the trial, which began last week.

Details of the Texas court's decision are sketchy, but reports indicate that the Reporter-News invoked Texas's newly minted shield law, as well as the commenters' First Amendment rights to speak anonymously. The new Texas shield law expressly covers Internet news media and grants protection for both the identity of sources and unpublished materials obtained or prepared while acting as a journalist. See Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code §§ 22.021, -.023; Tex. Crim. Proc. Code § 38.11, Sec. 3(a)(1)-(2).  (For more details on the Texas shield law, see RCFP's informative post.) When we get a hold of a transcript of the court's ruling, it will be interesting to see whether the court characterized the website commenters as "sources" and, if so, how the court justified this characterization.  

In Kentucky, a college student filed a John Doe lawsuit and subpoenaed The Richmond Register, seeking the identity of a commenter going by "12bme," who posted a comment on a forum linked to an August 12, 2008 story on the newspaper's website. The news story reported on the college student's ejection from a local mall for wearing a dress -- which she had purchased there -- that mall security deemed too short.  According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, 12bme's comment claimed that the student actually was removed because she "had exposed herself to a woman and her children who remarked on the dress."  The student maintains that this comment was false and defamatory and seeks 12bme's identity in order to proceed with her lawsuit.

According to press accounts, The Richmond Register seeks to quash the subpoena and argues that 12bme is a "source" protected by the Kentucky shield law (Ken. Rev. Stat. § 421.100).  The argument is buttressed in this case because one of The Register's reporters used the comment in writing a subsequent article about the student's lawsuit.  Kentucky's shield law is of an older generation than its Texas counterpart and protects only sources of information "published in a newspaper or by a television or radio broadcasting station."  This restrictive language might well exclude from coverage most Internet news publishers, but The Richmond Register, as a print newspaper with an online edition, may fit within the statute's terms.  The court has not yet ruled on the motion to quash. 

This is not the first time courts have struggled with the applicability of state shield laws to user comments.  Last fall, courts in Montana and Oregon ruled that their respective shield laws protected the identity of anonymous posters. More recently, an Illinois court came out the other way, declining to protect commenters as "sources" under the Illinois shield law.

(Taken at Personal Democracy Forum)

By John Kelly and Bruce Etling

While Twitter is getting a lot of attention in the current Iranian crisis, it’s good to know that the robust Iranian blogosphere also remains active in the face of the government’s interference with the Internet. The figure below shows new blog posts on blogfa.com, the dominant Iranian blogging platform, over the past three weeks. While some Blogfa users are outside Iran, the vast majority are inside. We can see significant, through sporadic, disruption of Iranian blogging for a period of about two and a half days beginning a day after the disputed election. After that, posting returns to roughly pre-election levels.

What are bloggers talking about? A scan of text reveals high levels of discussion about politics. Many bloggers continue to link to websites supporting Mousavi (such as mirhussein.com), whereas linking to the main site supporting Ahmadinejad  emtedadmehr.com) has nearly stopped, including among conservative political bloggers.

One harrowing story lately has been how the Revolutionary Guards have been posting pictures of protesters and asking readers to identify them. Perhaps hearteningly, the Guards’ site for this, gerdab.ir, is being linked to by a relative handful of bloggers [gerdab.ir map below], even among the conservative bloggers who mainly support Ahmadinejad. In fact, the site is being linked to by reformist bloggers, presumably calling out the practice, at nearly the same rate as the conservatives.

As for Twitter, we see a dramatic rise in the number of Iranian bloggers linking to Twitter in the first 15 days after the election [first map below], as compared to the same period a month earlier [second map below]. Interestingly, this linking is localized to a cluster of the map featuring longstanding opposition (as opposed to merely “reformist”) and expatriate bloggers. As we showed in our paper last year, this is also the portion of the map that is most frequently filtered by the Iranian government.

In a post last week about the Open Translation Tools summit in Amsterdam, I mentioned a “book sprint” that was working to put together a book on Open Translation.
Well, they did it. It was released today, and it’s a damned fine piece of work. (I say that independent of the fact that they used my Polyglot Internet essay as the introduction to the book!)

In five days, a team led by the indefatigable Adam Hyde put together the definitive starting point for people who want to learn what Open Translation is, what tools open translation communities use, what models are working for translation communities, and what the unsolved problems are in the field. The book includes case studies of notable translation communities, including Global Voices, Meedan and Wikipedia, as well as extensive lists of tools useful for localization and translation. It’s available, for free, both as a website and a printable PDF, and will both be published as a paper book, and continue to evolve as a project you can register for and contribute to. (It’s licensed under the GPL version 2.)

As with earlier book sprints, the project demonstrates that it’s possible to make a good stab at a guide to a field of work if you’ve got the right people willing to assemble in a room for five days. The first book sprint was instigated by my dear friend Tomas Krag, who got sick of spending all his time on the road in developing nations teaching people about wireless networking. He knew he’d never write a book by himself, so he held a book sprint, based on the idea of a code sprint, at the annual gathering of the developing world wireless community. Participants spent a long, difficult day arguing over the structure of the book, then went to their respective corners to write, edit, repurpose and recycle content from around the web into a comprehensive guide. The model worked well enough that Adam Hyde from FLOSS Manuals adopted it and has used it as a strategy for building new books around conferences.

I’m off to the Aspen Ideas Festival tomorrow, which looks exciting, celebrity-studded, and worth my careful blogging. But I seriously doubt that a team of smart and crazy people will get a useful book out of it, at least not in five days.

Frank Rich: Yes. But someone is going to have figure out how to pay for it. I suspect it will be figured out. There are always these fears during dislocations.

Karen Tumulty: It’s a terrifying time for traditional newspapers, but there are models that work. E.g., I watch Marcy Wheeler’s thermometer.

Dan Gillmor: I’ll channel Clay Shirky. The cost of experimentation has gone to just about zero. There are thousands of experiments, including in business models. We need even more.

Scott Simon: We need to be open to social media. Journalists tend to get jaded. People are now their own editors. A tweeter in Iran said “Tell all your friends: You are the media.” I think that’s true, but there’s work to be done to recreate the best values of journalism all over again.

Rich: We’re so obsessed with new media. Let 1,000 tweets bloom in Iran, but we forget that people are still repressed. The happiness with Iranian’s use of social media has led us to distort the coverage.

Simon: With social media you can overhear people talking with one another, in a way that is very hard with traditional reporting.

Gillmor: The issue of verification can be pretty slippery. We’re having to relearn media literacy. We have to be skeptical of everything … including the NY Times. But we also have to learn how to be not equally skeptical of everything. I’m not worried about supply but we have pretty crappy demand…people who grew up as passive consumers. It’ll take work on our parts, as former consumers and now users, to figure out what to trust.

Tumulty: You may wobble on line but ultimately you get to what the truth is because so many people demand it.

Rich: The people in this room are obsessed with this stuff. We want to find out what’s really going on. But a lot of people, especially those who aren’t upper middle class, don’t have the time.

Andrew Rasiej: People weren’t waiting for the journalists to get news about Iran. The NYT is old by the time it’s printed, especially since now we can sometimes go to the source of the news. It’s not a business model.

Gillmor: Yes. We’re not going to have gatekeepers like before. We now tell one another story. But this is so new. We need to get reputation combined with this.

Rich: But there’s only so much we can absorb. We saw home radios consolidate. Some conglomerate will want to have a big brand, and they’ll set the brand. I think there will be a consolidation. There will always be a component that seeks out minority views…

Gillmor: I don’t see that. The only conglomerate that worries me the is duopoly of the cable and phone companies.

Rich: We’re saying the same thing.

Gillmor: That’s a different kind of consolidation that we’ve seen…

Rich: With the same effect, and from the same people.

Tumulty: We should worry about the Google consolidation. SEO distorts the way you frame things

Simon: Journalism has to make the case for why it’s its own ism. There are left and right invesetigative journalism sites. A real news org sometimes upsets its audience.

Rich: How do we get people to eat their spinach? A lot of people want only celebrity news. That’s always been true. Does this new structure make it easier to have the masturbatory news that they want?

Gillmor: For the first time it’s easy to go deep. Even if it’s celebrity culture, the act of going deeper is instructive to some percent of that group. If we can increase the small percentage of people who create news, that’ll make a big difference.

Rich: People who watch ESPN are not going to start following Iran. And the paradox of the last decade: The whole growth of the new media occurred during a time when the Prez sent us to war on a fiction. Even though some of the fiction came from the NYT, the Prez got away with it. Even though people had more news sources, they were susceptible to a propaganda campaign.

AR: But Gonzalez might still be the attorney general…

Rich: Small potatoes compared to swallowing the war propaganda.

Gillmor: Traditional media still have enormous sway, and it was moreso 5 yrs ago. This isn’t an overnight transition. You’re right that that was a catastrophe. The traditional media walked in lockstep with deceptive people in DC. It’s going to take some time. It’s also instructive that the Guardian web site became enormously more popular because English-speakers wanted the other sides.

Simon: One of the hopes for new media is that it’s easier to be interested in both sports and politics and crocheting.

Gillmor: Traditional media were about producing, creating, distributing stuff. That’s not what we do online. We create it. We make it available. People come and get it. That’s really different. Viewers of Fox don’t have a link to what the other side says. Right wing blogs have links to the people they’re criticizing. If we can encourage people to click that link, people can see there are multiple facets…

Tumulty: But the people who land on that blog are not open to persuaded. The Net reinforces people in their beliefs.

Rich: People didn’t want to believe that Sadam didn’t have WMDs. We shouldn’t assume we’re automatically in a Renaissance.

Simon: There’s a still lot to be said for people seeking out variety. I think they’re not going to be satisfied with narrowcasting.

[I stood on line to ask a question and thus missed some live bloggage. There was a long discussion about the value of covering live events, for which there still seems to be demand.]

Q: [me] What’s the future of the idea of coverage? Coverage implies a value-free decision that we know is value-full, and it doesn’t scale well. [I had to say this twice because I didn't put it well]
Rich: We’ll keep providing it so long as people want it.
Me: I’m suggesting it’s going the way of objectivity: a value no longer valued.
Rich: Papers have never pretended to offer full coverage.

[The session ran over; I had to leave before it ended.] [Tags: media journalism pdf09 ]

Earlier this month, the United States House of Representatives passed H.R. 2765, an amendment to Title 28 of the US Code that would “prohibit recognition and enforcement of foreign defamation judgments.”  The bill goes beyond H.R. 6146, which passed through the House last year in a number of ways (elucidated below).  Both bills were introduced by Rep. Steven Cohen.

This bill (and others, including the U.S. Senate Free Speech Protection Acts of 2008 and 2009 and state statutes in New York and Illinois) is a response to the problem of “libel tourism,” whereby plaintiffs file defamation suits in foreign countries against US-based defendants, often on shaky jurisdictional grounds.  England is usually the country of choice, due to its highly plaintiff-friendly defamation laws.  We have blogged about this problem (and proposed legislative solutions) previously here at CMLP. 

Most attribute the recent spur to action on this issue to a suit won in Britain by Khalid Bin Mahfouz against Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, a US citizen and author of Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It. In that case, a British court awarded a £110,000 default judgment to bin Mahfouz, even though the book was not published, marketed, or sold in the UK (although 23 copies purchased online or by special order had made their way to England). 

The new bill expands the reach of the previous House effort (H.R. 6146) in a number of ways.  First, its scope has been expanded to preclude recognition of foreign defamation judgments where the issuing court’s exercise of personal jurisdiction over the defendant failed to comport with due process requirements of the U.S. Constitution, or where the defendant would be immunized from suit as an interactive computer service under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act ("Section 230").  Second, the burden of establishing that the foreign judgment is consistent with either the First Amendment or Section 230 lies on the “party seeking recognition or enforcement of the judgment” (i.e. the foreign defamation plaintiff).  Third, the bill explicitly states that making an appearance in a foreign court – for any purpose – that later issues an unfavorable defamation judgment does not deprive a party of the right to oppose that judgment in a domestic court under the bill.  Finally, if a party brings an action to enforce a foreign defamation judgment in a domestic court and fails, the court may award attorney’s fees to the prevailing party.

The House bill does not go as far as the similar New York state law, which explicitly provides New York courts with personal jurisdiction over foreign libel-tourism plaintiffs with assets in New York, allowing a victim of libel tourism to counter-sue the foreign plaintiff.  The House Committee on the Judiciary, in their report on H.R. 2765, notes its concern that such a provision might circumvent due process requirements for assertion of personal jurisdiction.  Since the House bill specifically bars recognition of foreign defamation suits where assertion of personal jurisdiction does not comply with American due process, the inclusion of this provision would be ironic, as it would authorize U.S. courts to engage in the same activity for which the bill chastises other nations' judiciaries.

Although H.R. 2765 has passed the House, it still needs to pass through the Senate, where it may face problems being harmonized with the Free Speech Protection Act of 2009, currently under consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee.  The Senate bill contains provisions similar to those found in the New York state law authorizing counterclaims, which so concerned the House Judiciary Committee.  Whether such provisions will appear in the final iteration of this legislation – assuming such legislation makes it through the Senate and a potential conference committee – remains to be seen.

Despite the seemingly broad sweep of this bill, in reality it does little.  As the House committee report states, the enforcement of foreign judgments is a matter of state law, and most states bar foreign judgments that contravene its public policy – including, presumably, judgments inconsistent with the First Amendment.  Nevertheless, there may be some advantage to having a clear rule that applies uniformly across all U.S. jurisdictions, and explicitly incorporates Section 230 immunity.  Of course, the bill protects only those assets held in the US, and does nothing to prevent an English court from seizing assets held in England in order to satisfy a defamation judgment.  Complete relief from libel tourism can only come from a change in British libel laws.  It is thus encouraging to see that some British Members of Parliament are beginning to call for reform of such laws, and that the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the U.K. Parliament is holding an inquiry on the topic of press standards, privacy, and libel. 

(Lee Baker is a rising second-year law student at Harvard Law School and a CMLP legal intern.)

From the StopBadware blog:

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Tuesday, June 30, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person (rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET.

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Mark Pesce is talking about the new global power. [I didn't liveblog Michael Wesch's talk because it was too hard to. It's was close to his popular YouTube lecture about YouTube. He got and deserved a standing ovation.]

The distribution of power has changed but it comes with a loss of control, which means our culture might start hydroplaning. We need to watch the collisions, but remember that people are going to get hurt. We need a political science for the 21st century.

Last month, Wikipedia banned Scientology from editing WP. The Scientologists compared WP to Nazis. Scientology is highly hierarchical. WP is a social agreement to share what we know for the good of all. What happens when they crash? Scientology uses law suits. How does Scientology deal with a social agreement. If Scientology wanted to declare war, it would attack the social agreement, wearing away at the bonds of trust. ckobama,

Mark points to the phenomenon of “communication overload.” E.g., the NY my.barackobama site was overwhelmed by supporters, so O supporters moved elsewhere, using older media. We haven’t yet seen a hybrid beast that can operate hierarchically but interact with the ad hocracy. Project Houdini (tracking who voted) crashed on Election Day, overwhelmed by info. These both were “friendly fire” incidents. We need to learn how to crush the gulf.

“The next decade will be completely hellish” for parties and campaigners.

Hyperempowered communities face a mismatch with the hierarchical mechanisms of the state, even with the best of intentions. But the catastrophes are the first sign of success. So, the state has to radically reform its means of communication, moving out of hierarchies, becoming more chaotic. But this is asking the leopard to change its spots.

We need to watch hyperintelligences emerge and see how governments react. The rules of the game are changing. “The best first step is observation.” The O administration provides the “perfect lab.” This will give us the first snapshot of a political science for the 21st century. Powerful, hyperconnected communities wil sometims struggle against or work with hierarchical institutions. But in each case the hierarchical will have to adapt itself to a new order.

[Tags: pdf09 egov e-gov e-government e-democracy ]