Twitter and the transformation (?) of democracy

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My Comment piece about news of Twitter’s impending IPO.

One of the most striking aspects of the epoch-making Commons debate on Syria was the way many MPs cited the emailed opposition of their constituents to armed intervention as a reason for voting against the proposed action.

In the United States, members of Congress told much the same story. It’s impossible to know whether MPs and congressmen were using constituents’ hostility as a way of legitimising their own, private, views, but their protestations gave a dramatic new twist to an old conundrum: are parliamentarians representatives (legislators who make up their own minds) or mere delegates (people who vote as instructed by their constituents)?

Edmund Burke famously raised the question in a speech to the electors of Bristol on 3 November 1774. “Government and legislation,” he said, “are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate, and another decide; and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?”

In Burke’s time, when Bristol was two days’ ride from London, the idea that constituents might determine the votes of their MP in Westminster in anything resembling real time was moot. So deliberative democracy was the only option available.

MPs’ recent rationalisations of their votes suggest that some of our politicians have embarked down a slippery slope. Technologies such as Twitter, which offer real-time tracking of public opinion, do make Burke’s nightmare realisable. Which means that a company that can regulate expressions of that opinion might be very powerful indeed. And that should make us nervous.

Eagle fouls its own nest

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This morning’s Observer column

‘It’s an ill bird,” runs the adage, “that fouls its own nest.” Cue the US National Security Agency (NSA), which, we now know, has been busily doing this for quite a while. As the Edward Snowden revelations tumbled out, the scale of the fouling slowly began to dawn on us.

Outside of the United States, for example, people suddenly began to have doubts about the wisdom of entrusting their confidential data to cloud services operated by American companies on American soil. As Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president responsible for digital affairs, put it in a speech on 4 July: “If businesses or governments think they might be spied on, they will have less reason to trust the cloud and it will be cloud providers who ultimately miss out. Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes? Front or back door – it doesn’t matter – any smart person doesn’t want the information shared at all. Customers will act rationally and providers will miss out on a great opportunity.”

Which providers? Why, the big US internet companies that have hitherto dominated the market for cloud services – a market set to double in size to $200bn (£126bn) over the next three years. So the first own goal scored by the NSA was to undermine an industry that many people had regarded as the next big thing in corporate computing.

Ye olde drunken louts

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As any university teacher (and administrator) knows, binge drinking by undergraduates is one of the curses of university life — which is why the decision by University College Cork to offer students the option of alcohol-free accommodation is such a good idea.

But then I was reading Parson Woodforde’s diary and found this entry for November 4, 1761 (when he was a Scholar at New College, Oxford):

“Dyer laid Williams 2s 6d that he drank 3 pints of wine in 3 Hours, and that he wrote 5 verses out of the Bible right, but he lost. He did it in the B.C.R. [Bachelor’s Common Room], he drank all the Wine, but could not write right for his Life. He was immensely drunk about 5 Minutes afterwards.

Plus ca change…

Mission Creep and the NSA

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The big question, it seems to me, is whether comprehensive surveillance of the kind we now know the NSA and its sister agencies conduct, is compatible with democracy in any meaningful sense. This is one post in that ongoing thread.

The NSA’s Mission statement says:

The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) leads the U.S. Government in cryptology that encompasses both Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Information Assurance (IA) products and services, and enables Computer Network Operations (CNO) in order to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies under all circumstances.

Note the phrase “a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies under all circumstances“. [Emphasis added.]

When the NSA was set up by Harry Truman on October 24, 1952, the mission involved monitoring all the electronic communications technologies of the time — radio, television, telex, telephone, telegraph. When the ARPAnet arrived in 1968, cellular telephony in 1973 and the Internet in 1983 it was logical to include monitoring of these systems within the NSA’s remit.

But, guess what? Exponential growth is more or less baked into the Internet because of its architecture. So it grows like crazy, and so — therefore — does the NSA’s remit. But surveilling the Net isn’t the same as doing the old wiretapping stuff with telephones. You can’t just dip into the firehose to pick out the stuff you’re interested in: you need the whole firehose. Or, to use another metaphor: if you’re looking for needles in a haystack, you need the entire haystack.

Which the NSA has been collecting. Which in turn means that mission creep is effectively built into the NSA’s remit. For if the Agency is conscientiously to fulfil its mission, then it too has to grow continuously, in line with the growth of the Internet. Of course Moore’s Law helps a bit, but only a bit: the incessant expansion of the Net — 2+ billion users today, the next five billion in the next decade or so — means that the NSA will always be running just to keep up. And that’s not taking into account the surges that will come from the “Internet of things”.

So if nothing changes, the NSA will continue to grow.

What forces might constrain this growth?

One is politics. Could it happen that lawmakers, driven perhaps by public revulsion at comprehensive surveillance, might decide to curtail the Agency financially. Its budgets might be frozen, or even cut.

Dream on. Post-9/11 hysteria and the ‘war on terror’ mean that instead of rational budgetary considerations coming into play, with the NSA having to tighten its belt just as other public agencies do in times of financial stringency, exactly the opposite happens: the NSA continues to get whatever public resources it claims to need — currently $10.8B. And I haven’t even mentioned the pressures coming from the powerful — and vast — military-industrial-information complex which is parasitic upon the US government (one of which parasites, ironically, employed Edward Snowden as a sysadmin.)

The obvious conclusion therefore, is that unless some constraints on its growth materialise, the NSA will continue to expand. It currently has 35,000 employees. How many will it have in ten years’ time? Who can say: 50,000, maybe? Maybe even more? So we’re confronted with the likelihood of the growth of a bureaucratic monster.

How will such a body be subjected to democratic oversight and control? Let me rephrase that: can such a monster be subjected to democratic control?

Optimists might answer ‘yes’ and point to the FBI as an example of a security apparatus which is under fairly tight legal control.

On the other hand, those with long memories recall the fear and loathing that J. Edgar Hoover, the founder — and long-term (48 years) Director — of the FBI aroused in important segments of the American polity. The relatively restrained Wikipedia entry for him claims that even US presidents feared him and quotes Harry Truman as saying that “Hoover transformed the FBI into his private secret police force”. “We want no Gestapo or secret police”, Truman is reported as saying. “FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail. J. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him.”

Hoover’s power was based on a combination of astute PR, sycophantic or intimidated mass media, his absolute control of an army of agents, and the databases they could compile using the relatively crude tools of the time. He assiduously collected information about the private lives of politicians, public figures and journalists and used it to secure their approval or silence. When the journalist Ray Tucker hinted at Hoover’s homosexuality in an article for Collier’s Magazine, he was investigated by the FBI and information about his private life was leaked to the media. When this became known, other hacks were frightened off, with the result that his sexual activities were never disclosed to the American public during his lifetime — despite the fact that he effectively blackmailed public figures who were themselves homosexual. Under him, the FBI investigated many Americans –like Martin Luther King — who held what Hoover regarded as dangerous political views; the Bureau also investigated protestors against the Vietnam war and other political dissidents.

The idea that the FBI, under Hoover, was subjected to tight democratic oversight is, well, fanciful. That doesn’t mean that the Bureau didn’t also do excellent law-enforcement work during Hoover’s tenure — just that, even in those technologically-limited circumstances, the level of democratic oversight was patchy.

Now spool forward a decade or so and imagine a Director of the NSA, a charismatic ‘securocrat’ imbued with a mission to protect the United States from terrorists and whatever other threats happen to be current at the time. He (or she) has 50,000+ operatives who have access to every email, clickstream log, text message, phone call and social-networking post that every legislator has ever made. S/he is a keystroke away from summoning up cellphone location logs showing every trip a lawmaker has made, from teenager-hood onwards, every credit- and debit-card payment. Everything.

And then tell me that lawmakers will not be as scared of that person as their predecessors were of Hoover.

Coase and the Penguin

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This morning’s Observer column remembering Ronald Coase.

When the news broke last week that Ronald Coase, the economist and Nobel laureate, had died at the age of 102, what came immediately to mind was Keynes’s observation that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”. Most of the people running the great internet companies of today have probably never heard of Coase, but, in a way, they are all his slaves, because way back in 1932 he cracked the problem of explaining how firms are structured, and how and why they change as circumstances change. Coase might have been ancient, but he was certainly not defunct…

The NSA never takes “no” for an answer

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Terrific column by Jack Shafer.

The NSA’s techno-dodges give civil libertarians a choice of two large pitches on which to throw their fits. Should they be more angry about the national security bureaucracy first seeking the public’s consent to drink from the national information stream and then, when told “no,” ignoring the thumb down? Or is the greater outrage the fact that the vast and secret surveillance program was established at all, and not how it was established? As a fit-throwing civil libertarian, I intend to alternate from one field to the other. On even days I’ll scream about the basic outrage. On odd days, I’ll stamp my feet over the “you asked for permission, I said ‘No,’ and you went ahead and did it anyway” transgression.

Who made the U.S. government’s decision to bootleg its expansive surveillance system into place? To compromise the Internet and the devices we use to connect? To intentionally weaken the existing security systems by installing secret “back doors,” thereby making us all more vulnerable to a hostile cyber-attack by foreign powers or individuals who discover them? To reverse the popular will — or least the politically possible — without any further discussion? That last move would smack of totalitarianism, except that totalitarians make no pretext about needing the consent of their citizens to rule.

And there’s more…

Can somebody explain to the NSA that Snowden has merely done to the NSA what the NSA has been doing to U.S. citizens and business for decades? Snowden deceitfully ignored the legally binding promises he made to the NSA; the NSA similarly runs roughshod over both the letter and the spirit of surveillance legislation (and systematically lies about it, something Snowden doesn’t do). Snowden stole secrets; the NSA steals secrets (and encryption keys, according to yesterday’s reports), only at a more colossal level. Snowden took it upon himself that he, not the NSA or his government, knows best; the NSA and its governmental partners believe they know best; Snowden creatively exploited the technical weaknesses in the computer matrix to accomplish his goals; so does the NSA.

Neatly highlights the question that’s been bothering me for months. Is it possible to have the kind of comprehensive surveillance that the NSA and its overseas franchises operate and also have democracy. My answer: no.

If Big Data is “the new oil” then we’re the wells

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This morning’s Observer column.

Should you be looking for an example of hucksterish cynicism, then the mantra that “data is the new oil” is as good as they come. Although its first recorded utterance goes as far back as 2006, in recent times it has achieved the status of an approved corporate cliche, though nowadays “data” is generally qualified by the adjective “big”. And if you want a measure of how deeply the cliche has penetrated the collective unconscious, ponder this: a Google search for “big data” turns up more than 1.5bn results. And a search for “data mining” turns up 167m results.

The idea of big data as a metaphor for oil is seductive. It’s also revealing in interesting ways. Given that the oil business is one of the biggest industries in the history of the world, for example, the metaphor hints at untold future riches. But it conveniently skates over the fact that oil wealth overwhelmingly benefits either ruling elites in corrupt and/or authoritarian countries, or huge corporations in democratic states.

But at least oil is a physical, non-renewable resource that is extracted from the earth. Big data, on the other hand, is extracted from the activities of people and machines…