I’m heading out of town for about a week, and after that am in the middle of a final review of my MA thesis. As a result, my posts are going to be less regular - I’ll try to post some items, but this blog is going to be reasonably dark for the next little bit
The past couple of days have been interesting, to say the least, when looking at recent shifts and decisions in American legislatures. Specifically, the House is looking to shield bloggers from federal investigations by providing them with the same protections as reporters, and that after the telecommunication companies that ‘theoretically’ (read: actually) cooperated with NSA spying activities have refused to cooperate with Congressional investigations that they have been let off the hook. Let’s get into it.
Federal Journalists and Professional Bloggers Shielded
The US has had a long history of journalistic freedoms, but in the face of recent technological advances they have refused to extend those freedoms to users of new journalistic mediums. Bloggers, in particular, are becoming a more and more important source of information in the US - some dedicate their lives to blogging and use it for professional gain. Until recently they have (typically) been refused the same status as traditional journalists, which has made it risky for bloggers to refuse to disclose their sources if hauled into courts of law.
This stance might shift with the coming of the Free Flow of Information Act , which would “offer protection of sources and documents to journalists (including professional bloggers) caught up in federal investigations, and could put an end to images of reporters led from court in handcuffs after refusing to testify.” (Source) Despite the fact that it has cleared the House President Bush may refuse to sign it, citing concerns that it would limit or preclude investigations of criminal events because authorities could not effectively gather facts needed for prosecution.
I think (optimistically) what this shows is that it is possible for law to ‘catch up’ to technology - laws can be developed that recognize new digital mediums are oftentimes extensions of past activities. That said, simple extensions are oftentimes not enough; the decentralized nature of digital communications creates a raft of difficulties in asserting these laws, should law enforcement try to evade the spirit of the law when pursuing suspects. That said, I don’t know how hard law enforcement really has to try to evade the spirit of the law given NSA spy activities . . .
Shielding the Telecomms
If you hadn’t heard, the NSA ran and continues to run some reasonably invasive covert surveillance right now . They’re (effectively) piping into major American telecommunications hubs and recording and/or analyzing all traffic that is not purely American traffic. As a massive amount of the world’s digital traffic passes through American hubs, this is scary - your communications are likely being monitored, and it’s uncertain as to what, exactly, is being done with the data collected.
In response to this activity, Congress has begun looking into the NSA spy operation. (As a note: Congress is concerned because American’s are being surveyed - they aren’t terribly worried about the surveillance of non-Americans.) After repeated discussions on the Hill, Congress has effectively given up on their hopes to learn anything from the telecommunications companies that are expected to be involved - AT&T in particular has refused on the basis that sharing their information of the project, were the project to exist, would be in violation of state secrets privilege - and has just turned to the executive branch to extract information.
While I can’t be *certain*, I’ll bet that Congress gets about as much from the executive as from the American corporations they have been pressuring; the NSA wiretaps will continue, and God knows what will be done with the information. It’s this fear or uncertainty of what will be done with the information that is the real issue - it creates an environment where peoples’ personal concerns and shames threaten to limit their free speech, the lifeblood of a democracy. While I hope that the next president would abolish the program, I honestly have to wonder if the current American candidates would, if they weren’t be forced to do so.
As of this week I’m working with a series of incredibly smart, erudite individuals to set up and run a graduate student conference - I’m excited, but nervous! I want to quickly note what technology we hopefully will be using, and then note some of the immediate challenges standing before all of us, and invite any comments on how to overcome/run around them.
First, I think that we may have found an online conferencing system that would really make life easy - the Public Knowledge Project provides a FOSS conference system that is really awesome. I’ve used their open Journal system when submitting a paper to a University of British Colombia undergraduate journal (Prolegomena) and it was a really slick system. I think that (for me at the time) the most awesome part of the system was that I could log in and see how far along the process my paper was. It kept me from harassing the journal editors, which I’m confident is a reasonably common problem with other methods of harvesting and selecting papers.
Below are some of the challenges that stand before us:
These are just a few of the (non-technical) questions that we’re facing. There was a suggestion that the conference occur around January, but I think I’ve found a better time for it, that will give time to prepare for it and generate synthesis between another graduate conference that (traditionally) has a very low turnout.
I’m planning on recording any momentous shifts/developments surrounding this experience here, both so I have a reference point for later on in my career, and so that I can (hopefully) refer others who are interested in developing graduate conferences here to avoid the mistakes that we will inevitably make and benefit from what worked well. Wish us luck!
In the past several months there have been more and more fractures in the carefully maintained facades of the RIAA and EU’s democratic openness. They have also been the formative months of Nicholas Negroponte’s dream of putting inexpensive notebooks in the hands of the most disenfranchiased youth in the world, a dream that will be realized in a few short weeks. I want to quickly elaborate on the first two ‘bombs’, and then quickly comment on Negroponte’s dream.
Trent Reznor is a brilliant salesperson. Over the course of his last album he used some incredible guerrilla marketing to generate (more or less) free advertising for his album . . . only to have the RIAA threaten to sue his fans! Reznor has been incredibly critical of the record labels for some time, but now he’s free of them! On the Nine Inch Nails’ website he has written;
Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the
following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally
free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have
been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the
business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very
different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a
direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate.
Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008.
Exciting times, indeed.
NIN, along with Radiohead, are expected to release their music directly from their websites, skipping the middlemen, and directly addressing their fans. This is a stark blow for the RIAA and other yester-decade industry giants who are desperately clamouring for a total re-envisioning of what copyright is so that their industry can remain vibrant despite the significant changes in technology. NIN’s leaving a label, and prominently and actively berating the music industry, is without a doubt a bomb on the doorsteps of the recording industry. Only time will tell if it has any real effect.
I’m a big fan of the EU on the whole. I spend a lot of time writing about its very positive effects, and the real challenges that it may be able to overcome as the world’s first legitimated supranational organization. That said, I don’t know exactly what to think of their proposal to ban their citizens from using the Internet to distribute bomb-making instructions.
This proposal is, of course, being made under the auspice of preventing the dissemination of information that terrorists could use to spawn terror, but I think that it (like many such proposals) misses that terrorism thrives, in part, by striking against the civil freedoms people have. Terrorists succeed when they cause such terror that citizens are willing to restructure their basic law based on fear instead of the democratic principles that were needed to found and subsequently preserve the nation-state.
I, along with most people (I think), would be happy if bomb-making instructions weren’t readily available to bad people, but I fear that censoring information is neither effective in limiting terrorist attacks, nor is such censoring necessarily in line with EU nations’ democratic values of free speech.
Nicholas Negroponte is the visionary behind the One Laptop Per Child program, a program that aims to put a notebook in the hands/laps of children all over the world in the hopes that it will:
These laptops will be in production as of November and will soon be in the hands of children all over the world. The New York Times has produced an excellent review of the laptops, and praises Negroponte’s project - I’d highly recommend that you take a look at it if you want some decent balanced information about the project and the notebooks themselves.
Academic environments are (theoretically) places where students come to be educated - they arrive on campuses after (typically) being cocooned for 16+ years - universities are where students emerge from their cocoons fundamentally transformed.
I’ve had the distinct privilege of working with students for more than two years now; the past year and a half as a teaching assistant and the time before that as a tutor. When you work with students, you realize that most of them have incredible potential, potential that you can see pent-up inside of them, but potential that they’re either unable to, or afraid to, release and realize. To address the latter concern in the first day of my tutorials this session I talked briefly about Plato and the straight-from-the-text reading of how absurd men appeared when laughing at the women who trained to become philosopher kings alongside men. The point was this: laughter in the classroom threatens to injure your comrades and, more importantly, marks that the person laughing can’t comprehend the purpose/form of laughter - their mirth demonstrates just how little they themselves understand.
I haven’t had a single person (that I’m aware of) be shamed by having other students laugh at them.
The former issue, that of releasing inner potential, I haven’t ’solved’ (if that’s even possible). Recently what I did find, however, was a particularly insightful blog post by halfanacre. She writes,
Today was my second lecture of the semester. I decided I needed to tell my students that if they were to do good work in my classroom, they would have to be brave. I put a slide up that read: “Read History. Be Fearless.” And then I told them that it was more important to be right than to look right, more important to reach for a full, astounding understanding of a text than to settle for mediocrity. I think I trembled a little. I wanted them to know. I wanted to remind myself. What we do takes courage. It’s not a take bullets kind of courage. It’s personal, private, intellectual. It’s courage all the same.(Source)
I’m uncertain that sharing similar thoughts would necessarily cause my students to realize that they were in a safe environment to realize their potential, but perhaps what it would do would be to acknowledge the challenges in being right, rather than looking it - it is hard to release your potential when in releasing it you appear out-of-step with one’s peers. It recognizes that shame typically emerges as a micro-politic of power that derides the individual from within; external declarations of a person’s shame are far less effective in blocking their communications or reflections. Maybe some kind of combination of my Platonic diatribe in tandem with something resembling that halfanacre did might make educational environments just a bit safer for students to realize their potential in.
Something that I myself have found in the past 18 months is that in the process of learning history, it becomes possible to see linkages and commonalities in texts that I had thought I was reasonably familiar with. As a result of my readings, I’ve sometimes been able to express myself and add to conversations in ways that (I think) improve the discussion. That said, it’s terrifying when introducing ideas or interpretations that you know are different, that you know deviate from those of your classmates and even the seminar leader. I admit that, in a few cases, a petrifying fear overtakes me, as I question whether what I’m about to suggest is even historically accurate, let alone right. What if it isn’t? What if I’m not right? What if, what if, what if? I try to capture those moments, and save them for later reflection.
Then I jump - I say what I believe to be right, and experience the frenzy of learning that ensues.
As an initial aside: Linux betas really are betas, nothing like the relatively polished (in comparison) betas that Redmond released.
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?
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:
Those are the first reasons that hop into my head - feel free to add others.
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.
