Category Archives: Politics

The neutering of the Net: what the FCC ruling means

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Dan Gillmor’s not impressed by the FCC’s pusillanimity. Neither am I.

The neutering of the Internet is now the unofficial policy of the Federal Communications Commission. Contrary to the happy talk from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski at a rule-making announcement today in Washington, the move is well underway to turn the Internet into a regulated playground for corporate giants.

Dan writes that:

Tuesday’s FCC vote on rules purportedly designed to ensure open and free networks was a 3-2 partisan charade, with Genachowski and the other two Democratic commissioners in favor and the two Republicans against. It did nothing of the sort. The short-term result will be confusion and jockeying for position. Genachowski’s claim that the rules bring “a level of certainty” to the landscape was laughable unless he was talking about lobbyists and lawyers; their futures are certainly looking prosperous. The longer-range result will be to solidify the power of the incumbent powerhouses — especially telecommunications providers and the entertainment industry — to take much more control over what we do online.

As I understand it (from the Wired report), the Commission has approved ‘compromise’ net neutrality rules that would forbid the nation’s largest cable and DSL internet service providers from blocking or slowing online services, while leaving wireless companies with much more latitude.

In other words, the Commission is imposing neutrality on the past (the old world of wired, cable connections) while leaving the wireless future open for all kinds of anti-competitive behaviour by corporations.

Net Neutrality is a concept like ‘transparency’ — something that most people are vaguely in favour of without realising what it really means. One consequence of this is that they are not motivated to defend it when it’s threatened: it’s hard to fight for something that you only vaguely understand. And yet, in principle, it’s not that complicated. Dan Gillmor articulates net neutrality as “the notion that end users (you and me) should decide what content and services we want without interference from the ISPs”. In other words, they provide the pipes (for which they get paid) and leave us free to choose what we want to pull down through them.

Neutrality is important because it’s the reason why the Internet has been such an enabler of innovation up to now. If you have a good idea and it can be realised with data-packets, then the Net will do it for you, no questions asked. But for that to work, all packets have to be treated as equals, unless there’s a good technical reason not to do so. What mustn’t happen is that some packets get preferential treatment simply because the outfit that creates them pays the provider of the pipes an extra fee because then the barrier to entry suddenly becomes a lot higher and disruptive innovation gets choked off. Which of course is exactly what the big multimedia companies and Telcos want to happen.

Given that in the future people will increasingly get their Internet connections wirelessly rather than through land-based connections, relaxing the rules for neutrality in the wireless arena is really worrying — as Tim Wu explained in this terrific interview that I blogged a few weeks ago.

Tim’s new book — The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires — provides the sombre context for all this. In it, he looks back at the history of information industries and concludes that they all go through a cycle (what he calls “The Cycle”) in which they start open and wind up closed. “History shows”, he writes,

a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely-accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.

Wu argues that this historical cycle is not just an academic concern. For if the Cycle is

not merely a pattern but an inevitability, the fact that the Internet, more than any technological wonder before it, has truly become the fabric of our lives means we are sooner or later in for a very jarring turn of history’s wheel. Though it’s a cliche to say so, we do have have an information-based economy and society. Our past is one of far less reliance on information than we experience today, and that lesser reliance was served by several information industries at once. Our future, however, is almost certain to be an intensification of our present reality: greater and greater information dependence in every matter of life and work, and all that needed information increasingly traveling a single network we call the Internet. If the Internet, whose present openness has become a way of life, should prove as much subject to the Cycle as every other information network before it, the practical consequences will be staggering. And already there are signs that the good old days of a completely open network are ending.

Spot on. Today’s FCC ruling represents a significant step down that road.

“Net neutrality” — now that would be a good idea.

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Dave Winer’s post about Net Neutrality reminded me of the story about Mahatma Gandhi arriving at Tilbury Docks in London and being asked by a reporter what he thought of Western Civilisation. “Ah”, said the Mahatma, thoughtfully. “Western civilisation — now that would be a good idea.”

The idea is that the transport layer, operated by telephone companies and cable companies, must transport all bits across their lines at the same rate and cost. Nice idea, but it’s hypocritical to demand that of their vendors when they don’t provide it to their users. For some reason they are never called on this hypocrisy by the tech press.

At the PDFleaks conference in NYC last Saturday I said that after Amazon booted WikiLeaks from EC2 that signaled very clearly that there is no such thing as net neutrality. Here’s a service provider, very analogous to Comcast and Verizon, that decided it wasn’t in its economic interest to carry a user’s bits. It wasn’t just about the level or cost of the service, they cut them off totally. Without adequate explanation of why. Saying they were doing something illegal is no explanation at all. That’s not for Amazon to decide, that’s for the courts. Due process is required to prove that something illegal is happening. And many legal experts believe that there’s nothing illegal about WikiLeaks.

Yep. That’s why one of the long-term implications of the WikiLeaks row will be a re-evaluation of the value and risks of cloud computing.

Biden loses it

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I blogged yesterday about the contradictory hysteria implicit in the Obama Administration’s reaction to WikiLeaks. But it turns out that Vice-President Biden’s remarks on Meet the Press were even more absurd than we had been led to believe.

The US vice-president, Joe Biden, today likened the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to a “high-tech terrorist”, the strongest criticism yet from the Obama administration.

Biden claimed that Assange has put lives at risk and made it more difficult for the US to conduct its business around the world.

His description of Assange shows a level of irritation that contrasts with more sanguine comments from other senior figures in the White House, who said the leak of diplomatic cables has not done serious damage.

Interviewed on NBC’s Meet the Press, Biden was asked if the administration could prevent further leaks, as Assange warned last week. “We are looking at that right now. The justice department is taking a look at that,” Biden said, without elaborating.

It’s interesting, also, to see how Obama has been keeping out of this — so far, anyway. But if he thinks that the muck raked by Biden won’t stick to him, he’s wrong.

The Anonymous protestors are not zombies

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As usual, Richard Stallman gets to the point.

Calling these protests DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attacks is misleading, too. A DDoS attack is done with thousands of ‘zombie’ computers. Typically, somebody breaks the security of those computers (often with a virus) and takes remote control of them, then rigs them up as a ‘botnet’ to do in unison whatever he directs (in this case, to overload a server). The Anonymous protesters’ computers are not zombies; presumably they are being individually operated.

No – the proper comparison is with the crowds that descended last week on Topshop stores. They didn’t break into the stores or take any goods from them, but they sure caused a nuisance for the owner, Philip Green. I wouldn’t like it one bit if my store (supposing I had one) were the target of a large protest. Amazon and MasterCard don’t like it either, and their clients were probably annoyed. Those who hoped to buy at Topshop on the day of the protest may have been annoyed too.

The internet cannot function if websites are frequently blocked by crowds, just as a city cannot function if its streets are constantly full by protesters. But before you advocate a crackdown on internet protests, consider what they are protesting: on the internet, users have no rights. As the WikiLeaks case has demonstrated, what we do online, we do on sufferance.

In the physical world, we have the right to print and sell books. Anyone trying to stop us would need to go to court. That right is weak in the UK (consider superinjunctions), but at least it exists. However, to set up a website we need the co-operation of a domain name company, an ISP, and often a hosting company, any of which can be pressured to cut us off. In the US, no law explicitly establishes this precarity. Rather, it is embodied in contracts that we have allowed those companies to establish as normal. It is as if we all lived in rented rooms and landlords could evict anyone at a moment’s notice…

Diplomatic and Internet protocols

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Interesting openDemocracy piece by Luis de Miranda.

In what way are the Internet and diplomacy similar? Both are governed by very strict protocols, but their strictures are somehow each others’ opposites. Diplomatic protocol lives on the surface of things, a layer of varnish that actually allows all the treachery, hypocrisy and dirty dealings to go on. The protocol is theatre, while shenanigans play out in the shadows. The rigor of the Internet, on the other hand, operates in all that is invisible: the source code, the programming language standards, the networking standards (TCP/IP, HTML, RFCs). What is on the surface on the web is joyful chaos, depravity, free expression, every manifestation of the kaleidoscope of humanity. We have all been somewhat aware of the stuffy old world of diplomatic protocol, the attention to etiquette and to the rank of governments and their envoys. We are less familiar with the new world of digital protocol…

WikiLeaks and the Innovator’s Dilemma

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Very thoughtful essay by David Rieff in The New Republic. He sees WikiLeaks as a disruptive innovation in the sense that Clayton Christensen used it to describe “business innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, usually either by lowering the price or redesigning for a different market or a different set of consumers”. At first glance, Rieff writes,

Wikileaks would seem to be far from this world of business innovation. And yet it isn’t. To the contrary, what Wikileaks does is exactly what a disruptive product does: As with nanotechnology, it supersedes the way information is made available to the general public; and, as with open source software, it challenges the idea of what the public can know and how it can know it.

In the former case, Wikileaks breaks the established transmission network of office holders and diplomats leaking some information to trusted journalists and pundits, who then transmit it to the public. And, in the latter, it insists that there is simply no such thing as proprietary information, which in the context of diplomacy means it does not acknowledge the state’s right to keep secrets. Here, the state is like Microsoft, with its closed-source technology, while Wikileaks is the open-source alternative.

And, again as with open-source software, there is no going back. Julian Assange may go to prison in Sweden, or even be extradited to the United States, and, though it is far less likely, Wikileaks itself may be shut down. But, for better or worse, the Wikileaks model is here to stay. For, as it turns out, the web is not just a place for shopping, or searching for pornographic images, or finding virtual communities of like-minded people, it is the new bloody crossroads of our politics.

This is another example of the thoughtful writing that has emerged as the implications of Cablegate begin to sink in. We really have passed an inflection point. When the history of this period comes to be written, my guess is that the last few weeks will be seen as the point where the established order finally wike up to the fact that it has a serious challenge on its hands.

Quote of the week

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“In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new.”

Jay Rosen.

WikiLeaks: five expert opinions

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The New York Times has a thoughtful set of contributions from various experts on the significance of the WikiLeaks disclosures.

Evgeny Morozov, a Stanford scholar who has a book about the “dark side of Internet freedom” coming out in January, ponders the likelihood that WikiLeaks can be duplicated, and finds it unlikely.

A thousand other Web sites dedicated to leaking are unlikely to have the same effect as WikiLeaks: it would take a lot of time and effort to cultivate similar relationships with the media. Most other documents leaked to WikiLeaks do not carry the same explosive potential as candid cables written by American diplomats.

One possible future for WikiLeaks is to morph into a gigantic media intermediary — perhaps, even something of a clearing house for investigative reporting — where even low-level leaks would be matched with the appropriate journalists to pursue and report on them and, perhaps, even with appropriate N.G.O.’s to advocate on their causes. Under this model, WikiLeaks staffers would act as idea salesmen relying on one very impressive digital Rolodex.

Ron Deibert from the University of Toronto thinks that the “venomous furor” surrounding WikiLeaks, including charges of “terrorism” and calls for the assassination of Julian Assange, has to rank as “one of the biggest temper tantrums in recent years”.

Many lament the loss of individual privacy as we leave digital traces that are then harvested and collated by large organizations with ever-increasing precision. But if individuals are subject to this new ecosystem, what would make anyone think governments or organizations are immune? Blaming WikiLeaks for this state of affairs is like blaming a tremor for tectonic plate shifts.

Certainly a portion of that anger could be mitigated by the conduct of WikiLeaks itself. The cult of personality around Assange, his photoshopped image now pasted across the WikiLeaks Web site, only plays into this animosity. So do vigilante cyberattacks carried out by supporters of WikiLeaks that contribute to a climate of lawlessness and vengeance seeking. If everyone can blast Web sites and services with which they disagree into oblivion — be it WikiLeaks or MasterCard — a total information war will ensue to the detriment of the public sphere.

An organization like WikiLeaks should professionalize and depersonalize itself as much as possible. It should hold itself to the highest possible ethical standards. It should act with the utmost discretion in releasing into the public domain otherwise classified information that comes its way only on the basis of an obvious transgression of law or morality. This has not happened.

Ross Anderson, who is Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge and the author of the standard textbook on building dependable distributed information systems, thinks that the WikiLeaks saga shows how governments never take an architectural view of security.

Your medical records should be kept in the hospital where you get treated; your bank statements should only be available in the branch you use; and while an intelligence analyst dealing with Iraq might have access to cables on Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia, he should have no routine access to information on Korea or Zimbabwe or Brazil. But this is in conflict with managers’ drive for ever broader control and for economies of scale.

The U.S. government has been unable to manage this trade-off, leading to regular upsets and reversals of policy. Twenty years ago, Aldrich Ames betrayed all the C.I.A.’s Russian agents; intelligence data were then carefully compartmentalized for a while. Then after 9/11, when it turned out that several of the hijackers were already known to parts of the intelligence community, data sharing was commanded. Security engineers old enough to remember Ames expected trouble, and we got it.

What’s next? Will risk aversion drive another wild swing of the pendulum, or might we get some clearer thinking about the nature and limits of power?

James Bamford, a writer and documentary producer specializing in intelligence and national security issues, thinks that the WikiLeaks disclosures are useful in forcing governments to confess.

A generation ago, government employees with Communist sympathies worried security officials. Today, after years of torture reports, black sites, Abu Ghraib, and a war founded on deception, it is the possibility that more employees might act out from a sense of moral outrage that concerns officials.

There may be more employees out there willing to leak, they fear, and how do you weed them out? Spies at least had the courtesy to keep the secrets to themselves, rather than distribute them to the world’s media giants. In a sense, WikiLeaks is forcing the U.S. government into the confessional, with the door wide open. And confession, though difficult and embarrassing, can sometimes cleanse the soul.

Fred Alford is Professor of Government at the University of Maryland and thinks that neither the Web operation WikiLeaks, nor its editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, is a whistle-blower.

Whistle-blowers are people who observe what they believe to be unethical or illegal conduct in the places where they work and report it to the media. In so doing, they put their jobs at risk.

The whistle-blower in this case is Bradley Manning, an United States Army intelligence analyst who downloaded a huge amount of government classified information, which was made public by WikiLeaks. Whether or not Manning’s act serves the greater public interest is a contentious issue, but he has been arrested and charged with unlawful disclosure of classified data.

Some have compared the role of WikiLeaks to that of The New York Times in the publication of the Pentagon Papers several decades ago. WikiLeaks is the publishing platform that leverages the vast and instantaneous distribution capacity of the Internet.

The WikiLeaks data dump challenges a long held belief by many of us who study whistle-blowing — that it is important that the whistle-blower have a name and face so that the disclosures are not considered just anonymous griping, or possibly unethical activity. The public needs to see the human face of someone who stands up and does the right thing when none of his or her colleagues dare.

But he also thinks that “for better and worse, this changes whistle-blowing as we’ve known it.”

Amazon: why we dumped WikiLeaks

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First of all, here’s the company’s explanation.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) rents computer infrastructure on a self-service basis. AWS does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them. There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that “you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.” It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy. Human rights organizations have in fact written to WikiLeaks asking them to exercise caution and not release the names or identities of human rights defenders who might be persecuted by their governments.

Analysis:

1. Amazon asserts that WikiLeaks didn’t own the content it was publishing.

2. Amazon asserts that its T&Cs require one to “warrant that … use of the content you supply … will not cause injury to any person or entity.” The company then goes on to state it is “not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy”.

I don’t have a problem with 1, which seems perfectly factual. By definition, WikiLeaks didn’t own the content of the cables. I’m no constitutional lawyer, but Claim #2 seems much more problematic. Amazon merely asserts that something is “not credible” and on the basis of that restricts WikiLeaks’s freedom of speech. On what grounds may a commercial company make a decision like that, in the US?

Assange and the herd instinct

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What, one wonders, is the difference between “news values” and the herd instinct? I’ve long been puzzled by the way in which hundreds of news editors, all of whom are apparently independently-minded and intelligent beings, can all magically home in on a consensus that a particular event or individual is “the” story. Over the last few days, this is what has happened with WikiLeaks: the most important aspects of the story are increasingly sidelined while the mass media focus on a single individual — the Founder.

The obsession with Julian Assange would be comical if it weren’t so misleading. One can see why news editors go for it, of course. First of all there’s a handsome, enigmatic, brooding, Svengali-like hero/villain allegedly pitting himself against the world’s only superpower. Add in allegations of sexual crimes, a handful of celebrity supporters and a Court-side scrum and you’ve got a tabloid dream story. Or — as Sean French muses — a new kind of thriller.

Assenge is undoubtedly an interesting figure, but to personalise the crisis in these terms is a failure of journalism. It’s the mirror image of the mistake that Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Bill Kristol & Co are making — the fantasy that if you cut off the head then you kill the snake.

The truth is that even if Palin’s wet dream came to pass, and some goon were to succeed in assassinating Assange, I suspect that it would make little difference. For WikiLeaks is not a snake. First and foremost it’s what Manuel Castells calls a “networked enterprise” — in the same way that, say, Al Qaeda is (at least according to Philip Bobbitt). And the thing about networked enterprises is that they are comprised of widely-distributed, autonomous nodes which use the Internet for communication and (sometimes) co-ordination.

But WikiLeaks, in addition to being a networked enterprise, is also a project and an architecture of considerable technical sophistication. The inescapable conclusion, therefore, has to be that WikiLeaks is bigger than Assange, and it would survive his disappearance, whether by imprisonment or worse – just as Al Qaeda would survive the death of Osama bin Laden. (Assuming, of course, that that hasn’t already happened.)

I’m not trying to imply, incidentally, that there is some kind of moral equivalence between WikiLeaks and Al Qaeda, only that Bobbit’s analysis of the difficulty the West has in dealing with Islamic terrorism seems relevant here. In order to deal with an adversary the first requirement is to understand him (or her). But because network thinking is alien to most of our established authority structures, they can’t cope when faced with a properly networked foe.

Bobbitt’s analysis is also eerily applicable in another aspect of the current crisis. The tone of much public American discussion about WikiLeaks is increasingly “extra legal”, to put it politely. The spectacle of public figures and elected representatives calling for the assassination of Assange is revealing, given Bobbitt’s assertion that the reason why the United States is not itself a terrorist state — even though its warfare brings suffering and destruction to many innocent persons, including civilians — is that it acts within the law. To which the only reasonable response is: let’s see. Clay Shirky made precisely this point on Newsnight last night when he mentioned the Pentagon Papers case. Publication of the papers in 1971 was held by the government to be illegal; the New York Times disagreed, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided in favour of the newspaper. This, Shirky argued, is the way a law-abiding society does business. And it should do exactly the same with the WikiLeaks releases, rather than trumpeting about “National Security”, the danger to service personnel, etc.

En passant, this argument about leaks putting lives in danger comes oddly from people whose overt policies and covert manoeuvring have been responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands of US and allied troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and God knows how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. People who live in glass — or even White — houses ought not to throw stones.