Technology, Thoughts, and Trinkets

As an initial aside: Linux betas really are betas, nothing like the relatively polished (in comparison) betas that Redmond released.

Piracy or ‘Avast Me Mateys!’

I don’t spend a lot of time talking about software or music piracy, largely because I think that there are alternate sources that more effectively aggregate and deliver news about it. That said, I couldn’t resist commenting on Jennifer Pariser’s (head of litigation for Sony BMG) statements surrounding digital technologies. When under oath, Pariser responded to Richard Gabriel’s (the lead counsel for record labels) question of whether it was wrong for consumers to make copies of music they have purchased, stating,

When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ’steals just one copy’ (source).

Her comments directly point to why fair use is under such duress. More importantly, however, even when we apply the principle of charity to her general position, her comments seem to defy the public’s position on the matter. I don’t want to suggest that because people generally believe something that the law should reflect their beliefs - if that was the case then racial segregation would be more prominent than it is - but that when extensive public discourse has been undertaken and a common position is held by the deliberative participants, that their shared consensus should operate as the basis for developing legitimated law. I think that this discourse has, and continues to, occur in North America.

While there are some consumers that rabidly resist the notion of ‘paying the man’, I think that most are willing to pay a price that is in close relation to a product’s value. It’s possible that the decreased desire to pay for music has to do with its perceived value - not simply financial, but cultural, as well. The 50s-70s saw music that literally influenced the shape of the world; is this still the case with contemporary music? If it was perhaps more true, would people be willing to pay for the music they were interested in? Perhaps more to the heart of Pariser’s comments, should culture be relatively accessible without being unfair to the production teams that provide the mechanics that facilitate cultural development, or should musical culture be entirely privatized, kept away from the members of the public who lack sufficient market agency?

Privacy, eh? Let’s Talk Price…

Let’s say you’re applying for a job. Moreover, let’s say that you don’t think your boss and the rest of the world should be able to gather a quick digital profile on you - you think that your constitutional right to privacy should be recognized, even if it means that you have to do something to substantively realize that right. In light of your strong views, you look to the private sector companies that will work to keep you from the public eye as much as is possible.

These kinds of ‘privacy services’ exist, but what’s interesting is that even though people are ‘concerned’ about their privacy they’re generally unwilling to pay a private body to protect their privacy. I want to briefly suggest a few reasons why this might be the case:

1. Implicitly, citizens feel as though they shouldn’t have to pay a private company to perform an action that allows citizens to substantively realize their rights to privacy. It’s the role of government, not corporate America, to protect people’s rights.
2. Without apparent and persistent threats to their privacy people are unwilling to take out the equivalent of privacy insurance plans. If breeches are taken to include the unwanted and unwarranted collection of personal information to develop digital dossiers, then individuals experience dozens of breeches every day without ever being made aware of them - secrecy is central in preserving the value of these databases. Thus, their unwillingness to adopt these services is because they don’t realize the value of adopting them
3. People just don’t know about these services.

Those are the first reasons that hop into my head - feel free to add others.

Orwell, aka The United Kingdom

Given the genuine possibilities/likelihoods of having one’s personal information disclosed to others, it has become a (relatively) common practise to encrypt personal communications. As the practise of data encryption has become more commonly known about and used, government bodies have experienced difficulties when trying to extract particular information about individuals without the individuals becoming aware of the surveillance - in the case of terrorists especially it is important that the surveillance be secretive.

In light of these difficulties, the UK recently saw laws imposed that made it illegal to refuse to provide authorities with the keys to encrypted data. It is important to note that this law only affects data that is held on UK servers, and does not pertain to encrypted data that transmitted “on the Internet via the UK” and cannot be used to coerce foreign citizens to decrypt their communications under the auspice of jail time.

The fact that the data would be decrypted is not the real source of the problem - what is a problem is the power of the UK government to gain access to keys that are (potentially) involved in global telecommunications. Consider this: if you’re a banker in London, and your bank is a transnational body that uses the same underlying encryption system, this would allow the UK government access to the entirety of the bank’s communications and records. That’s genuinely a frightening issue. Whereas historically having to relinquish an analogue (i.e. physical) key required the authorities to arrive at each locked door to open it, in today’s digital era authorities can access the entirety of a corporate or private database without an agent ever leaving their chair.

Because of the global expansiveness of modern corporations and (oftentimes) private databases, this law highlights one of the challenges to nation-states in asserting their laws and expecting that they will remain constrained to the nation-state. Without developing some kind of a federated or supranational body, it is questionable whether nation-states will be able to continue the practise of legislating laws that affect constituents in other areas of the world, regardless of whether they consent to the imposition or not. The EU was born out of the need to develop a relatively harmonized capital and juridical block capable of meeting the advances of capitalism and intensification of globalization - one has to wonder if it will be enough.

In recent years we’ve seen some of the most powerful men in the world decide to turn their gaze towards the third-world. What has been surprising is that their intent has not been to solely dominate and exploit the most economically disadvantaged peoples in the world, but to try and relieve some of the ills that they face.

Techno-magnates - Bill and Nicholas - and their projects

The two most prominent individuals that have turned their attention to the third world have been Bill Gates, who is spending billions through the Melissa and Bill Gate’s Foundation to try and raise standards of living by improving literacy and fighting disease. The foundation is best known for its in work fighting disease - it has targeted Acute Diarrhoeal Illness, Acute Lower Respiratory Infections, HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and Tuberculosis (to name a few) as their primary targets.

Nicholas Negroponte, the magnate and visionary behind the One Laptop Per Child Program, want to bring the digital revolution to poor children and let them enjoy the ensuing benefits of the digital revolution. The theory is that, by distributing textbooks electronically, by giving children a way of learning to program, by giving them rugged pieces of technology that can be powered by a bicycle or foot loom, children can receive top-rate education despite living in Less Economically Developed Countries (LECDs).

Why magnate-projects are oftentimes destructive

The magnates receive a lot of press. Usually the emphasis is placed on the amount of money being spent, the commitment involved, the numbers of people that will be positively affected, and questions about what kinds of legacies will be left behind by some of today’s ‘great people’. I’ve talked about the OLPC program before on this blog, and don’t feel like I want to get too into it right now. Suffice it to say that I’ve become a fan of the program, and I think highly of the Mr. and Mrs. Gates for their efforts.

That said, I’m concerned by the these world spanning projects. While I think that (by and large) their respective goals are altruistic, the effects of targeted projects are not necessarily entirely positive. I was listening to a CBC broadcast a few weeks ago, and the CBC interviewer was talking to front-line medical workers in LECDs. The workers were noting that, while it is good to see the first world starting to genuinely give a damn about the third world, that; (a) foreign aid rarely arrives in the quantities announced (usually for bureaucratic reasons, and because foreign aid is commonly used as a slush fund to assist struggling national companies produce goods that Western consumers won’t buy at the prices these companies sell their products) and; (b) that techno-magnates, and other wealthy individuals, who are providing money to countries to fight off particular illnesses often lead to degradations in those countries’ abilities to fend off other diseases. For example, as soon as the Gates’ foundation give X millions to Ghana, and requires the country to immunize Y thousands of children for Z disease, the physical resources (i.e. doctors and nurses) are unable to provide other, perhaps more immediately necessary, services because health centre directors don’t want to lose the money that is flowing to the centre. This means that doctors and nurses aren’t as free as they were previously to assist the ill and dying.

In addition to this, when was the last time that Bill and Nicholas sat down and talked about common resource allocation? When was that last time that LEDCs have had all of the magnates, not just Bill and Nicholas, in a room and they worked with magnates to develop a comprehensive strategy that was sensitive to each locality? Until these kinds of meetings take place, where a global allocation strategy that is inherently sensitive to the groups that are receiving assistance is developed, I have to question the underlying principles of social justice lying below these programs. Until these programs are legitimized and authorized by those receiving the assistance - until they can recognize themselves as principle agents of their own recovery - any assistance is, in a sense, tyrannical. Strategic decisions get made by private individuals, decisions that affect millions. This isn’t to say that some degree of cooperation doesn’t take place between these foundations and localities, nor that these charitable foundations aren’t performing independent research so that they can work with localities and remain sensitive to their differences. What it is to say, is that unless the affected people are given a dominant hand in shaping how NGOs operate in their localities it is (essentially) a form of semi-polite colonialism.

Colonizing language, and local cultures by extension

Colonialism revolved around the belief that underdeveloped nations were less rational, less culturally advanced, and generally more barbaric. It happened at a time where the underlying political associations of Europe were constitutionally recognized, which mean that there was an inclusion/exclusion tension built into colonization, and which acted as a central theoretical weakness in the colonial project. While magnates are now (presumably) more sensitive to LEDCs, there is the belief that Western tools are the tools that can elevate LEDCs from their suffering.

Why not instead of focusing on how to draw these groups into a Westernized way of doing things, investigate how individuals in LEDCs would prefer to resolve particular problems, resolutions that may draw on the cultural and medicinal histories of their people, and which stretch backwards for centuries or longer? Why not work with them to develop technologies that are sensitive to their needs - i.e. many cultures have rich oral traditions that thrive on the difference that each person brings to a narrative when they tell it; the idea of data archives that are static are entirely foreign (and not necessarily appreciated) by them. When we impose hierarchical learning, when we take away from verbal traditions, when we replace the content rich systems of discourse and speech with logically precise languages of .NET, C++, and other programming languages, aren’t we running the risk of molding the shape of foreign cultures so that they ‘fit’ the normative criteria for what culture is, as assumed in the technologies that we are providing them?

I don’t think that the potential undermining of native cultures is an intentional objective - techno-magnates generally see technologies they are deploying as something that should be massively positive - nor do I think that any culture can (in today’s global environment) exist in a vacuum. As cultural minorities increasingly struggle to identify their own histories and reassert their own ethical-political narratives their native governments are turning to the oldest democracies to learn how to overcome the challenges of integration and legitimacy. The West must critically evaluate its own normative democratic stances and policy initiatives so that it can provide the best models possible - without adequate models, these burgeoning democracies can emerge (effectively) still-born, leaving citizens without a political voice over how their past is read, the present is defined, or the future is written.

Some time ago a friend and I got talking about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, and I haven’t gotten it off my mind since. The OLPC program aims to deliver sturdy, low-power, low-cost laptops to children under the age of 12 in developing countries. The visionary of the program, Nicholas Negroponte, wants to introduce these laptops into second-world, rather than third-world, countries. The difference? Second-world countries face poverty and a host of ills, but possess the resources to purchase these notebooks, to feed their people (at some level), and build roads. The OLPC program is not currently aimed at absolutely poverty-stricken nations - those nations have other, more pressing, concerns, and their resources can be allocated to more effectively than by providing affordable laptop computers for children.

The computers are incredibly simple, providing basic computing. What’s important is that they are almost entirely open-source; kids can take them apart and learn about every element of the computers through trial and error. They’re rugged enough (both physically and code-wise) that kids can put them through hell and they’ll keep on going. While the laptops can be charged by plugging the computers into electrical outlets, they can also be powered by converting physical action to electricity - ride a bike attached to the thing and you’ll be able to charge it. The initial roll-out doesn’t have this, but it’s in the overall specs of the project.

I’ve been looking at using online tools for teaching and guiding students, and in the process I wondered about whether the tools that are often talked about now (i.e. forums, online document collaboration, sharing calendars, wikis, blogs, and social networking sites) can really fulfill some of the learning opportunities that kids getting these laptops have before them. Are blogs and wiki’s a suitable replacement for technology, or just as something to integrate with regular technologies (i.e. books and blackboards).

At the moment, I’d definitely hesitate to say that webtools, or any digital tools for that matter, they are a replacement for analogue technolgies - we’re usually looking at 2.0 apps to focus on how to improve the teaching to particular students in Western nations, and aren’t really considering the need to focus on students outside of our locality. I’m not criticizing this - I think that education often operates best when it’s targeted to particular individuals in particular situations - but I do wonder if, rather than focusing on the current stream of tools that facilitate communication across a particular group, we might be better off in the long-term to focus on how developing infrastructure that allows indiviudals across the world to understandabily and actually communicate with one another.

I’m not suggesting that we just use global social networking systems, but am wondering if our current iterations of social networking sites (a) adequately account for diversity and (b) enable individuals to communicate across linguistic chasms. I think that we can work on (a) reasonably easily, but only after we figure out a way of overcoming (b).

Now, why is this important? Why not just focus on local applications that work well for particular students in particular situations? I have to wonder whether or not some kind of disservice is done when we dominantly focus on the local - we live in global environments, where my actions have the potential to affect dozens of others across the globe. In light of this, should online apps focus on localities, continuing to emphasize the local with a bit of foreign tossed into the mix when it’s a handy teaching tool, or should these applications be developed to enable at least rudimentary discussions across different cultures and languages.

As more and more children who live in poverty get their hands on the laptops the OLPC program provides there is the possibility for more and more voices to be heard online, but how many of these voices will be understandable by Western citizens? If we have tools that let students talk to one another, right through K-12 and into university, isn’t it likely that they’ll grow up with a deeper understanding of themselves, their subject matter, and the challenges and opportunities present across the globe?

Imagine if students in Canada, when learning about northern Brasil, could talk to and teleconference with other students in Brasil; imagine the texture that would provide, and how all aspects of social studies would change. Instead of reading about northern Brasil, students would be talking to residents of that area of the globe, giving the students the ability to critically evaluate the analogue texts and Westernized history they were provided with.

Unfortunately, before we can add that kind of texture, we need to be able to speak with one another - aren’t these interlinguistic discussions the real possibility of the ‘net, not particularly targetted services and content that appeal to native speakers?

In recent months more and more attention has been directed towards Google’s data retention policies. In May of 2007 Peter Fleishcher of Google’s global privacy counsel established three key reasons for why his company had to maintain search records:

1. To improve their services. Specifically, he writes “Search companies like Google are constantly trying to improve the quality of their search services. Analyzing logs data is an important tool to help our engineers refine search quality and build helpful new services . . . The ability of a search company to continue to improve its services is essential, and represents a normal and expected use of such data.”
2. To maintain security and prevent fraud and abuse. “Data protection laws around the world require Internet companies to maintain adequate security measures to protect the personal data of their users. Immediate deletion of IP addresses from our logs would make our systems more vulnerable to security attacks, putting the personal data of our users at greater risk. Historical logs information can also be a useful tool to help us detect and prevent phishing, scripting attacks, and spam, including query click spam and ads click spam.”
3. To comply with legal obligations to retrieve data. “Search companies like Google are also subject to laws that sometimes conflict with data protection regulations, like data retention for law enforcement purposes.” (Source)

Since posting on this topic Fleischer’s positions have come under fire - why can’t Google use anonymized data to determine the accuracy of search results? Why must events that limit corporate profits be included as a reason to override personal data privacy? Why is Google subjecting themselves to laws that are not yet in place, and will not be applied retroactively?

Google has since attempted to clarify their position in their public policy blog by reflecting on the balance between privacy (they are specifically referring to digital privacy, though they don’t explicitly distinguish between digital and analogue privacy) and security. The corporate blog is particularly concerned with the European Union’s data retention directive, which imposes retention obligations to accessible data that is processed or generated using communication services. Fleishcher indulges in a bit of Euro-bashing in his analysis of the data retention directive that may appeal to some people but that ultimately displays his insensitivity to the complicated process of EU politics.

He begins by calling the directive, which calls for harmonization of data retention policies by the member states, an oxymoronic document on the basis that any harmonization between member-states must remain sensitive to the plurality of value structures embedded throughout the EU’s members. He notes that;

On a practical level, the likelihood of seeing a consistent implementation of the rules across the EU is effectively zero. The timing of the implementation – due by September 15, 2007 – will certainly vary. 16 of the 27 EU Member States have already declared that they will delay the implementation of data retention of Internet traffic data for an additional period of 18 months, as permitted by the directive. The compulsory retention period for each type of data will also vary from country to county (e.g. Germany has proposed 6 months, the UK 12 months, and the Netherlands 18 months). The interpretation of other key elements, such as “serious crime,” “competent national authorities,” or “electronic communications services” will be different across jurisdictions too. (Source)

The EU is a newfound political body - nothing of its scale and competencies have been successfully established since Rome and, with the dramatic intensification of global processes and demands for respecting cultural, legal, linguistic, and religious dignities (to name a few), the EU must meet challenges that never faced Rome. Each of the member nations have long-seated legal traditions that are born from their unique constitutions. Constitutions establish the basic law of nations. These basic laws were created in light of particular citizenry’s values and needs. As such, when reflecting on the actions of a supranational it is important to realize that it must operate in a fashion that does not intentionally or unintentionally discriminate against its members and their constitutional traditions. The EU itself lacks a fully legitimized constitution, leaving Europe without a legal citizenship - until these factors change all legal proceedings and directives must proceed cautiously to respect the dignity of its various members.

Fleischer continues to raise a series of rhetorical and hypothetical questions that are intended to cause the reader to amusedly snort at the ineptitude and disarray of the EU’s position. He writes,

Is a country more democratic than its neighbour because of its shorter retention period? Or do the citizens of that country face a greater security risk for the same reason? If there is something about the data retention directive that can be called into question is its proportionality – not necessarily in terms of financial cost to service providers, but in terms of privacy and anonymity loss. And what will Internet companies do in practice, especially if they operate one data architecture that cannot vary from one country to another: apply the longest retention period, or the shortest, or some “average”? (Source)

Rather than just breezing past these statements and questions, let’s examine them. Is a country more or less democratic based on its retention periods? This is supposing that democracy is wholly based on anonymity, which is not the case. Democratic environments persist because individuals experience a reasonable expectation of privacy, which allows them a space to informally communicate and associate with members of society without fearing illegitimate governmental oversight and supervision. Retention periods alone do not identify whether or not individuals’ privacy is being invaded; it is retaining and analyzing archived data without clear purposes or citizen consent that threatens free speech in democratic states.

Fleischer follows on this threat to democracy by asking whether democracies might be undermined if different terrorist threat valuations in different nations lead to divergent heterogeneous retention policies. While I can appreciate that this is a possible side-effect, by clearly asserting national laws that accord with the EU data retention policy this particular ‘threat’ can be avoided. Moreover, in the case where citizens feels that their national retention policy violates their basic rights they can appeal to their national court system to try and overturn the law and if that fails they can turn to the European Court of Justice. While it’s ‘nice’ for Fleischer to look out for EU member nations, they do have a reasonably sophisticated system for dealing with inconsistencies between EU and member-nation laws.

His last comment is perhaps the most confusing. Google, Yahoo!, and other major search companies routinely provide data to some localities and not to others based on geographic filtering technologies. I fail to see why an ISP cannot similarly filter their retention policies, only making retained French information available to French authorities, retained German information available to the Germans, et cetera. Perhaps I’m missing a key element of this argument, but it certainly isn’t a simple problem that can be tossed out in a single sentence. For it to hold weight more time and consideration must be given to it.

I can certainly appreciate the risks that are involved in retaining and distributing digitized data - the potential for harms for democratic participation motivate my thesis project that is entitled Technology, Communication, and Western Pluralistic Democracies: Realigning Digital Privacy to Facilitate Citizen-Solidarity. Unfortunately it appears as though Google’s defense of privacy is a thinly concealed attempt to justify their own retention policies, and not to provide a genuine defense of constitutional rights or the value of privacy to democratic nations.

Ask yourself a question: Why does having private space matter to you? When it comes right down to it, why is it important to maintain the public-private distinction?

Some might immediately assert that the distinction establishes a space where government interests cannot easily intrude, and that the private domain is where individuals develop themselves while hidden from the nation-state’s coercive gaze. When we can speak privately and associate off-the-record we can more easily develop friendships that we might have otherwise shied away from. Moreover, without this private space individuals might not be comfortable talking to one another about radical political, ethical, or cultural issues - if the state could be recording our discussions, then we would have to evaluate whether or not we really wanted to discuss topics such as the value of overthrowing the present government, the importance of weakening the authorities’ scopes of legitimate action, or the value of weakening national rhetoric in favour of plurality.

While there have been clashes about where the division between public and private should be, those clashes often relate to where a line should be drawn rather than about abolishing the line entirely. Some, of course, insist that the public and private are mere phantasms, and that they only exist because we perpetuate a myths of their existence, but for this position to gain traction it must grapple with the necessary co-originality of public and private that is revealed in an examination of the nation-state’s founding. Feminists (accurately) focus on the harms that the strict division between public and private have caused, such as the suppression of women’s issues and the criminal discrimination against women and their labours, but this demonstrates that there is a porous boundary between public and private that must be examined rather than asserting that it absolutely does not exist.

Since the turn of the 19th century countries in North America have been increasingly concerned with how individuals’ private affairs can remain private. This has led to groups and individuals working to protect citizens from overzealous investigations and unwanted publicity. These attempts have been as successful as the translation of constitutional values onto new technological mediums - there have been cases where the law has protected individuals’ privacy more successfully than in other cases. Regardless, the general intend has (generally) been to preserve constitutional values in the face of technological change.

The digital millennium has brought with it new frontiers for law to navigate, new challenges for privacy advocates overcome, and the need for new governmental regulations to establish well discussed and well considered social and legal norms. Whereas the ‘net was initially seen as a euphoric environment where national laws could not constrain its inhabitants, subsequent events have demonstrated the hollowness of these early notions of cyberspace. As demonstrated in the repeated actions of Australia, the United States of America, Germany, France, Brazil, and other nations, law can effectively limit anonymity and speech in digital environments by targeting local service providers. The ‘net is only as free as governments choose to let it.

Of course, the argument can be made that for every countermeasure deployed by the nation-state, savvy individuals can evade surveillance and punishment by deploying their own electronic countermeasures and by engaging in ‘mixing’. They can use Internet browsers that are designed to encrypt all data, they can use dark-nets to communicate, they can use proxy servers, and they can secretly infiltrate digital communications networks to transmit their data on the backsides of other data transfers. Another potent means of evading detection involves ‘mixing’, or associating illicit or illegal content with condoned content to the extent that to effectively ban disliked content would cost the nation content that it wanted to spread in digital environments.

These countermeasures and counter-countermeasures are developed and deployed daily, but their advanced use is beyond the comprehension and technical capability of most users. Deploying counter-countermeasures has recently become even harder for those ‘regular users’ because of deep packet inspection (DPI) hardware. To help us understand this technology, we can turn to Ars Technica;

The “deep” in deep packet inspection refers to the fact that these boxes don’t simply look at the header information as packets pass through them. Rather, they move beyond the IP and TCP header information to look at the payload of the packet. The goal is to identify the applications being used on the network, but some of these devices can go much further; those from a company like Narus, for instance, can look inside all traffic from a specific IP address, pick out the HTTP traffic, then drill even further down to capture only traffic headed to and from Gmail, and can even reassemble e-mails as they are typed out by the user. (Source)

This has an important effect: it allows Internet Service Providers (ISPs, such as Shaw, Rogers, Bell, and AT&T) to identify what exactly being transmitted along their network: it enables them to (in real time) identify what is being written in an email being composed in Microsoft’s Hotmail or an instant message being transmitted to a friend, or listen to a conversation happening over Skype. This information could be stored in corporate databases if and only if they were flagged as ‘questionable’ or ‘illegal’ according to governmental laws and regulations, and subsequently be transferred to the authorities. Suddenly joking about how great it would be to toss a pie in the Prime Minister’s face isn’t quite as safe as it used to be, nor is sharing a hot new track of music or even talking about sharing a track of music. The private vanishes, and all that is performed online becomes potentially public. While the providers of DPI technologies insist that they are providing individual packet inspection rather than packet flow inspection. That said, the step to flow inspection isn’t far. I guess it doesn’t matter though because, as the age old argument goes, if you’re never doing anything that could ever be possibly thought of as questionable or illegal, no one would mind having this technology deployed. The same would be be true if corporate agents were hired by the government to follow every person around, and monitor everything that a person did, said, didn’t say, and didn’t do - there would be no public outcry, because nothing has anything they see as personally shameful that they perform on a daily basis. Right?

DPI itself is raises concerns because it lets ISPs filter and discriminate against packets without letting the consumers know about the discrimination while simultaneously benefiting their partners’ digital services. Thus it becomes much easier for Yahoo! to have faster search speeds on networks that it has signed contracts with (such as Rogers) at the expense of Google’s traffic. Different search engines have different search algorithms, index sites differently, and actually list some websites that other engines do not. By discriminating against search technologies, it becomes possible to slowly alter the flow of information and create information cocoons - once people get used to finding certain sorts of data, that becomes the norm, and all other data is immediately suspect regardless of its legitimacy. This is search engines - imagine if CBC or CNN or Agence France was a preferred partner - using DPI people could get caught into news cocoons, and thus limit the scope of public debate on national and international matters.

DPI threatens to change the relationship of public and private spaces. In addition to monitoring what people are doing over digital networks, DPI technologies allow for information mediation by privileging some services over others, which runs the risk of artificially changing the development of interpersonal discourse as a result of corporate interference. DPI technologies not only exist, but they are already deployed. The colonization of private zones of speech is accelerating as quickly as analogue systems are being digitized - the job now is to find new privacy archetypes that can guide laws and resist the process of colonization before it is too late.