Category Archives: Politics

Aaron Swartz: cannon fodder in the war on internet freedom

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This morning’s Observer column.

Even those of us who shared his belief in open access thought this an unwise stunt. But what was truly astonishing – and troubling – was the vindictiveness of the prosecution, which went for Swartz as if he were a major cyber-criminal who was stealing valuable stuff for personal gain. “The outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron,” wrote Lawrence Lessig, the distinguished lawyer who was also one of Swartz’s mentors. “It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behaviour. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterise what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The ‘property’ Aaron had ‘stolen’, we were told, was worth ‘millions of dollars’ – with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of academic articles is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.”

The phrase that came to mind when I first saw the indictment against Swartz was Alexander Pope’s famous rhetorical question: “Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” It would be possible to write off the Swartz prosecution (as some have done) as the action of a politically ambitious attorney general, but actually it fits a much more sinister pattern. It was clear that a decision had been made to make an example of this cheeky young hacker and in that sense this grotesque prosecution sits neatly alongside the treatment of Corporal Bradley Manning, not to mention the hysterical reaction of the US authorities to WikiLeaks…

Aaron Swartz’s Politics

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There’s been a lot already written about Aaron Swartz (much of it helpfully curated by Seb Schmoller), but this long post by Matt Stoller is simply wonderful at explaining how a clever, curious and agile outsider went about trying to understand the dysfunctional politics of the US. (Aaron worked with Matt as an intern in a Congressional office in 2009.)

Read it and despair.

As we think about what happened to Aaron, we need to recognize that it was not just prosecutorial overreach that killed him. That’s too easy, because that implies it’s one bad apple. We know that’s not true. What killed him was corruption. Corruption isn’t just people profiting from betraying the public interest. It’s also people being punished for upholding the public interest. In our institutions of power, when you do the right thing and challenge abusive power, you end up destroying a job prospect, an economic opportunity, a political or social connection, or an opportunity for media. Or if you are truly dangerous and brilliantly subversive, as Aaron was, you are bankrupted and destroyed. There’s a reason whistleblowers get fired. There’s a reason Bradley Manning is in jail. There’s a reason the only CIA official who has gone to jail for torture is the person – John Kiriako – who told the world it was going on. There’s a reason those who destroyed the financial system “dine at the White House”, as Lawrence Lessig put it. There’s a reason former Senator Russ Feingold is a college professor whereas former Senator Chris Dodd is now a multi-millionaire. There’s a reason DOJ officials do not go after bankers who illegally foreclose, and then get jobs as partners in white collar criminal defense. There’s a reason no one has been held accountable for decisions leading to the financial crisis, or the war in Iraq. This reason is the modern ethic in American society that defines success as climbing up the ladder, consequences be damned. Corrupt self-interest, when it goes systemwide, demands that it protect rentiers from people like Aaron, that it intimidate, co-opt, humiliate, fire, destroy, and/or bankrupt those who stand for justice.

More prosaically, the person who warned about the downside in a meeting gets cut out of the loop, or the former politician who tries to reform an industry sector finds his or her job opportunities sparse and unappealing next to his soon to be millionaire go along get along colleagues. I’ve seen this happen to high level former officials who have done good, and among students who challenge power as their colleagues go to become junior analysts on Wall Street. And now we’ve seen these same forces kill our friend.

Well worth reading in full. Thanks to Seb for pointing me to it.

The tyranny of Power Laws

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This morning’s Observer column.

Everywhere you look on the internet, you find power laws – yes, even in the Guardian’s online comment forums, where 20% of comments are provided by 0.0037 per cent of the paper’s monthly online audience. And, while there are millions of blogs out there, a relatively small number of them attract most of the readership. Various sinister explanations have been canvassed for this, but really it’s just an illustration of the power of power law distributions. As Clay Shirky once put it: “In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution”.

This is where the mathematical and political interpretations of “power” fuse into one…

So who will control the Net, in the end?

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My comment piece in this morning’s Observer.

It’s all about control. Of course, nobody uses that particular term. The talk is always about “governance” or “regulation”, but really it’s about control. Ever since the internet burst into public consciousness in 1993, the big question has been whether the most disruptive communications technology since print would be captured by the established power structures – nation states and giant corporations – that dominate our world and shape its development. And since then, virtually every newsworthy event in the evolution of the network has really just been another skirmish in the ongoing war to control the internet.

This year closed with two such skirmishes.

The N.R.A. Protection Racket

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Good OpEd piece by Richard Painter in today’s NYTimes.

The most blatant protection racket is orchestrated by the National Rifle Association, which is ruthless against candidates who are tempted to stray from its view that all gun regulations are pure evil. Debra Maggart, a Republican leader in the Tennessee House of Representatives, was one of its most recent victims. The N.R.A. spent around $100,000 to defeat her in the primary, because she would not support a bill that would have allowed people to keep guns locked in their cars on private property without the property owner’s consent.The message to Republicans is clear: “We will help you get elected and protect your seat from Democrats. We will spend millions on ads that make your opponent look worse than the average holdup man robbing a liquor store. In return, we expect you to oppose any laws that regulate guns. These include laws requiring handgun registration, meaningful background checks on purchasers, limiting the right to carry concealed weapons, limiting access to semiautomatic weapons or anything else that would diminish the firepower available to anybody who wants it. And if you don’t comply, we will load our weapons and direct everything in our arsenal at you in the next Republican primary.”

Uncomfortable thoughts about Leveson

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I’ve been thinking. Always a bad idea (as my mother used to say). And four uncomfortable thoughts come to mind.

  • The first is the sad fact that I mentioned in an earlier post, namely that as long as the great British public continues to buy newspapers that behave disgracefully, then newspapers will behave disgracefully, no matter how much self-regulation they undergo.
  • The second is that Leveson’s prescription is going to be applied to something that may be a sunset industry (printed newspapers) while being able to do little or nothing about the Internet and what’s published on it — at least by organisations and websites based in other jurisdictions.
  • To date the only really original thinking I’ve seen on this last point is Lord MacAlpine’s idea of — and method for — going after defamatory Tweeters. This seems to be a smart way of using existing statutes to ensure that people think carefully before tweeting or retweeting something that may be defamatory in the UK.
  • The Guardian reports that Cameron is thinking of using a Royal Charter to regulate the press. The model for this is, of course, the BBC, which is governed by just such a charter. What could be simpler: we’re all proud of the BBC and its journalism is (generally) a model of probity? There’s just one problem with this — as Professor Brian Winston pointed out in a letter to the Guardian:

    A far better indication of the consequential dangers of content regulation by the state is the Hutton inquiry. The content-regulated BBC was called to account for its actions in reporting on David Kelly while Paul Dacre and Lord Rothermere (who ran the same story) were not. The question of independence needs to be tested against broadcasting’s record of investigations of UK political power, and history suggests that this has been less than stellar. Over time, it has certainly been consistently more constrained than parallel probes by the printed press: witness, for example, Hackgate itself, and the Guardian’s crucial role in that.

    That’s true. There are some examples where TV journalism has indeed taken on the power of the state and won. Think, for example, of the investigative reporting which led to the freeing of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six. But mostly the journalists who did that were working not for the BBC but for the old ITV companies.

    Like I said, uncomfortable thoughts.

    • Philip Tetlock on political forecasting

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    Interesting interview with Philip Tetlock by John Brockman. Excerpt

    Let me say something about how dangerous it is to draw strong inferences about accuracy from isolated episodes. Imagine, for example, that Silver had been wrong and that Romney had become President. And let’s say his prediction had been a 0.8 probability two weeks prior to the election that made Romney President. You can imagine what would have happened to his credibility. It would have cratered. People would have concluded that, yes, his Republican detractors were right, that he was essentially an Obama hack, and he wasn’t a real scientist. That’s, of course, nonsense. When you say there’s a .8 probability there’s 20 percent chance that something else could happen. And it should reduce your confidence somewhat in him, but you shouldn’t abandon him totally. There’s a disciplined Bayesian belief adjustment process that’s appropriate in response to mis-calibrated forecasts.

    What we see instead is overreactions. Silver would either be a fool if he’d gotten it wrong or he’s a god if he gets it right. He’s neither a fool nor a god. He’s a thoughtful data analyst who knows how to work carefully through lots of detailed data and aggregate them in sophisticated ways and get a bit of a predictive edge over many, but not all of his competitors. Because there are other aggregators out there who are doing as well or maybe even a little bit better, but their methodologies are quite strikingly similar and they’re relying on a variant of the wisdom of the crowd, which is aggregation. They’re pooling a lot of diverse bits of information and they’re trying to give more weight to those bits of information that have a good historical track record of having been accurate. It’s a weighted averaging kind of process essentially and that’s a good strategy.

    Leveson: a regulator’s view

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    Alex Andreou, who used to work for an industry regulator, is not impressed by the hysterical response of the British press to Leveson’s prescription.

    The Leveson report did not arise out of someone getting up one fine morning and thinking “I know what I’ll do today; curtail the freedom of the press”. It sprung forth from an industry’s repeated and miserable failure to regulate itself. It is a direct result of an industry’s totally out-of-control behaviour.

    In my many years work for a regulator, I never once sat across the table from an industry facing any kind of change in the rules that hasn’t claimed this would bring about the death of said industry and/or the demise of western civilization as we know it. In my experience, this is usually a knee-jerk reaction with little logic behind it.

    One thing I can tell you with certainty is that the market players that come out best, are invariably the ones that are first to concede a change is needed, embrace it and work with the body seeking to regulate them to ensure it is well crafted.

    This brings me to my most contentious and most positive point: The Leveson recommendations may be the best thing that has ever happened to this industry.

    Spot on. Taken as a whole (there are a few exceptions) the British newspaper business has been one of the worst-managed industries in the industrial world. Its response to Leveson confirms that.

    Leveson report: the nub of it

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    Andrew Rawnsley nails it.

    Imagine we were talking about a 16-month, £5m, government-commissioned inquiry into abuses perpetrated by doctors or lawyers or members of the armed forces. Imagine that this inquiry had catalogued repeated illegality, systematic breaches of the profession’s codes, the corruption of public officials, the compromising of political integrity and outrageous misconduct that had maimed innocent lives. Imagine that the report had arrived at the verdict that, while this profession mostly “serves the country well”, significant elements of it were “exercising unaccountable power”.

    Imagine the prime minister who had set up that inquiry then responded that it was all very interesting, with much in it to commend, but he was going to park this report on the same dusty shelf that already groans with seven previous inquiries and allow this disgraced bunch one more chance to regulate themselves. We know what would be happening now. The newspapers would be monstering the prime minister as the most feeble creature ever to darken the door of Number 10. But since this is about the newspapers themselves, David Cameron has received some of the most adulatory headlines of his seven years as Tory leader.

    On not giving the clock to the monkey

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    Given that WCIT-12 is being seen by some as a conspiracy in which Russia, China, Iran and other repressive regimes use the ITU as a Trojan horse to begin the process of bringing the internet under adult supervision, you can see why people are becoming agitated about it. Secretive horse-trading between governments is not what created the internet. Cue Google’s efforts to launch a global campaign involving internet users. “A free and open world depends on a free and open internet” declares the front page of the campaign website. Which is true, and the fact that Google’s prosperity likewise depends on that selfsame net doesn’t undermine its veracity. “But not all governments support the free and open internet,” it continues. And “some of these governments are trying to use a closed-door meeting in December to regulate the internet. Add your voice in support of the free and open internet.”

    Right on! As we ageing hippies say. The basic complaint is that while an outfit like the ITU, whose voting members are all nation states, might be OK for deciding the allocation of international dialling codes, it’s completely inappropriate to allow it to regulate the internet. The argument is that entrusting the governance of the network to an organisation in which Robert Mugabe’s vote counts for as much as the UK’s would be like giving a delicate clock to a monkey.

    That’s not to say that there isn’t a serious problem here. The old adage — if it ain’t broke, then don’t fix it — isn’t entirely helpful. The difficulty is that the present system of Internet governance — which, for largely historical reasons, gives the US an unduly large role in Internet governance — works pretty well. But now that the Net is a genuinely global system, then it’s getting harder and harder to justify. Given that the main system for international governance that states recognise is the UN, then it’s understandable that they would turn to a UN agency — the ITU — to take on the governance task. But that’s misguided for several reasons, only one of which I had room for in the column: that UN agencies are states-dominated and therefore top-down decision-making institutions. Other good reasons are that: the ITU is essentially a technical-standards organisation, not a governance one — and governance is about freedom, human rights and politics; government-dominated organisations tend to be secretive rather than open; and the RFC-IETF method for discussing and deciding on Internet technical issues has an impressive track record.

    So whatever the question is, the ITU is not the answer. The problem is that those who dislike — or are rightly fearful of — it need to come up with a more imaginative solution that meets some demanding criteria. Here are a few that come to mind:

  • Respect, preserve and enhance the openness of the Net
  • Protect the network’s integrity and technical effectiveness
  • Prevent the Balkanisation of the network
  • Ensure that technical decisions about the network are made on technological and not political or ideological grounds
  • Increase the availability of the Internet to the poor people of the world
  • Embody governance principles which do not privilege any one country or bloc

    • And they’re just for starters.