The hut where the Internet began

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Interesting, slightly elegaic piece by Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic, reflecting on the life and career of Doug Engelbart and the networked world that we have inherited.

networked computing technology has had a similar privileged spot in American life for at least 30 years. Networked computers democratized! Anyone could have a voice! They delivered information, increased the variety of human experience, allowed new capabilities, and helped the world become more open and connected. Computers and the Internet were forces for good in the world, which is why technology was so readily attached to complex, revolutionary processes like the Arab Spring, for example.

But a broad skepticism about technology has crept into (at least) American life. We find ourselves a part of a “war on terror” that is being perpetually, secretly fought across the very network that Engelbart sought to build. Every interaction we have with an Internet service generates a “business record” that can be seized by the NSA through a secretive process that does not require a warrant or an adversarial legal proceeding. 

The disclosure of the NSA’s surveillance program is not Hiroshima, but it does reveal the latent dark power of the Internet to record communication data at an unprecedented scale, data that can be used by a single nation to detriment of the rest. The narrative of the networked age will never be as simple as it once was. 

If you’re inclined to see the trails of information Bush imagined future scholars blazing as (meta)data to be hoovered up, if you’re inclined to see PRISM as a societal Memex concentrated in the hands of the surveillance state, then perhaps, we’re seeing the end of the era Bush’s article heralded.

At the very least, those with the lofty goal of improving humanity are going to have to explain  why they’ve chosen networked computing as their augmentation platform of choice, given the costs that we now know explicitly exist. The con side of the ledger can no longer be ignored.

He’s right about one thing: the narrative of the networked age will never be as simple as it once was.

Technology vs. Democracy

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I participated in an interesting discussion last night at the Frontline Club on the topic of “privacy vs. security: have we got the balance right?” It was chaired by the BBC’s urbane Mark Urban. The other panellists were Professor Helen Margetts of the Oxford Research Institute, John Kampfner, former Editor of the New Statesman and now a consultant to Google, and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a former Foreign Secretary and now Chairman of the Commons Intelligence Committee which is currently looking into the Snowden revelations and their implications (if any) for the UK.

It was an enjoyable discussion with a packed and attentive audience. Malcolm Rifkind did a predictably good job of defending the proposition that the UK is doing a reasonable job of ensuring that its spooks obey the laws that apply to them (specifically the Intelligence Services Act, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and the Human Rights Act — though he said relatively little about the HRA). What he didn’t address — because it’s not in his Committee’s remit, was my question about whether GCHQ is a competent outfit which gives value for the oceans of public money that it consumes. And nobody really addressed my biggest concern, which is whether the level of comprehensive surveillance that we now have is, in the end, compatible with a democratic, open society.

Just before embarking on this post, a link popped up in my Twitterstream. It led to an astonishing post on the Economist blog. It’s entitled “America versus Democracy” and starts from the observation that FISC, the secret court that supposedly authorises NSA surveillance, has effectively become a parallel Supreme Court, because it is making law relating to the Fourth Amendment (which is the one that supposedly regulates the state’s ability to intrude on citizens’ privacy). And it’s doing this lawmaking entirely in secret.

But then the post begins to explore the implications of this.

That all the people of the Earth, by dint of common humanity, are entitled to the protections of democracy is an inspiring principle. However, its foreign-policy implications are not really so clear. To those of us who are sceptical that America has the authority to intervene whenever and wherever there are thwarted democratic rights, the advocates of democracy-promotion offer a more businesslike proposition. It is said that authoritarianism, especially theocratic Islamic authoritarianism, breeds anti-American terrorism, and that swamp-draining democracy-promotion abroad is therefore a priority of American national security. If you don’t wish to asphyxiate on poison gas in a subway, or lose your legs to detonating pressure-cookers at a road-race, it is in your interest to support American interventions on behalf of democracy across the globe. So the story goes.

However, the unstated story goes, it is equally important that American democracy not get out of hand. If you don’t want your flight to La Guardia to end in a ball of fire, or your local federal building to be razed by a cataclysm of exploding fertiliser, you will need to countenance secret courts applying in secret its own secret interpretation of hastily drawn, barely debated emergency security measures, and to persecute with the full force of the world’s dominant violent power any who dare afford a glimpse behind the veil.

You see, democracy here at home must be balanced against the requirements of security, and it is simply too dangerous to leave the question of this balance to the democratic public. Open deliberation over the appropriate balance would require saying something concrete about threats to public safety, and also about the means by which those threats might be checked. But revealing such information would only empower America’s enemies and endanger American lives. Therefore, this is a discussion Americans can’t afford to have. Therefore, the power to determine that this is a discussion the public cannot afford to have cannot reside in the democratic public. That power must reside elsewhere, with the best and brightest, with those who have surveyed the perils of the world and know what it takes to meet them. Those deep within the security apparatus, within the charmed circle, must therefore make the decision, on America’s behalf, about how much democracy—about how much discussion about the limits of democracy, even—it is safe for Americans to have.

That’s the argument I was trying to make last night, but much more eloquently stated. It’s why this stuff really matters.

On the way home on the train, I was reading the New Yorker, still one of the great treasures of journalism, when I came on a cartoon. It shows two NSA operatives sitting before a wall of computer monitors. “After we read every e-mail that’s ever been written”, one is saying to the other, “I’m gonna start on that new Dan Brown novel”.

How not to do ‘research’

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I get lots of emails like this one, which just popped into my inbox.

Dear Mr. Naughton,

I am an intern in [name of publication] and am writing an article about
Google Glass.

Could you please be so kind and answer my following questions, so that I can
metion it in my article?

I suppose you have already watched this video

with first fight and arrest captured on Google Glass. Do you think it is a
start of new citizen journalism?

Can Google Glass affect our everyday life? In what way?

Thanking you in advance.

What always takes me aback about queries like this is the nature of the request. I’m not sure what exactly it signifies — some combination of naivete, innocence, laziness or ignorance, perhaps.

My reply is always a variant on the same theme.

Dear xxx

Thank you for your inquiry.

I’m afraid I’m not going to respond to it for two reasons: (1) your question is too broad and unfocussed, which (2) suggests to me that you haven’t done much research on the subject yourself.

What do you mean by “citizen journalism”, for example? Do you mean “citizen media” or “user-generated content”? This topic has been a major one for nearly ten years. There are lots of interesting books and publications — online and offline — about it.

(Journalism isn’t just about posting something to the Internet — it’s about fact-checking, corroborating, evaluating, doing quality-control on information before publishing etc.)

I suggest that you first do some research into Google Glass yourself (after all, that’s what the Internet is for) rather than expecting experts to do it for for you. Then, if you have identified some focussed questions for which you really do need expert answers, by all means come back to me.

Best

John

Another interesting thing about today’s inquiry is that I don’t think the inquirer had seen this blog. If s/he had, then s/he would have noticed the post immediately below this!

The least one should expect is that people who ask questions of someone should Google them first.

I’m not being deliberately snooty, by the way. When students (or interns) write to me with carefully thought-out questions, or if they provide some convincing evidence that they have tried and failed to find something, then I try to be really helpful. But I am not doing donkey-work for some rich kid whose daddy has arranged a nice cushy internship for him or her.

The unbearable wearable

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Great blog post by about Google Glass by Jason Calcanis.

I’ve run into several friends wearing Google Glass in the past three months, and I have three words of advice for them:

Take. Them. Off.

First, you look like an idiot.

Second, you’re killing the party.

Third, are you recording me right now?!?

Great, illuminating post. Worth reading in full.

Might driverless cars reshape cities?

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Needs to be taken with the mandatory dose of salt but still…. If autonomous vehicles do become an everyday reality, then lots of other things will start to change.

While driverless cars might still seem like science fiction outside the Valley, the people working and thinking about these technologies are starting to ask what these autos could mean for the city of the future. The short answer is “a lot.”

Imagine a city where you don’t drive in loops looking for a parking spot because your car drops you off and scoots off to some location to wait, sort of like taxi holding pens at airports. Or maybe it is picked up by a robotic minder and carted off with other vehicles, like a row of shopping carts.

A test of Google’s self-driving car.

Inner-city parking lots could become parks. Traffic lights could be less common because hidden sensors in cars and streets coordinate traffic. And, yes, parking tickets could become a rarity since cars would be smart enough to know where they are not supposed to be.

As scientists and car companies forge ahead — many expect self-driving cars to become commonplace in the next decade — researchers, city planners and engineers are contemplating how city spaces could change if our cars start doing the driving for us. There are risks, of course: People might be more open to a longer daily commute, leading to even more urban sprawl.

So the answer to the question is: a definite maybe (as Sam Goldwyn used to say).

Why FISA has become a (secret) rival to the Supreme Court

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Amazing report in the WSJ.

The National Security Agency’s ability to gather phone data on millions of Americans hinges on a secret court ruling that redefined a single word: “relevant.”

The National Security Agency’s ability to gather phone data on millions of Americans hinges on the secret redefinition of the word “relevant.”

This change—which specifically enabled the surveillance recently revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden—was made by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a group of judges responsible for making decisions about government surveillance in national-security cases. In classified orders starting in the mid-2000s, the court accepted that “relevant” could be broadened to permit an entire database of records on millions of people, in contrast to a more conservative interpretation widely applied in criminal cases, in which only some of those records would likely be allowed, according to people familiar with the ruling.

The ‘relevant’ language was added to the Patriot Act when it came up for reauthorization; it was signed by President Bush in 2006.

In interviews with The Wall Street Journal, current and former administration and congressional officials are shedding new light on the history of the NSA program and the secret legal theory underpinning it. The court’s interpretation of the word enabled the government, under the Patriot Act, to collect the phone records of the majority of Americans, including phone numbers people dialed and where they were calling from, as part of a continuing investigation into international terrorism.

“Relevant” has long been a broad standard, but the way the court is interpreting it, to mean, in effect, “everything,” is new, says Mark Eckenwiler, a senior counsel at Perkins Coie LLP who, until December, was the Justice Department’s primary authority on federal criminal surveillance law.

Concentration

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OK, I know you’re busy, but if you have eight minutes to spare, given this a play. (And skip the ad.)

Thanks to Desmond Hanlon for the link.

It’s the metadata, stoopid – part 2

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This morning’s Observer column.

Over the past two weeks, I have lost count of the number of officials and government ministers who, when challenged about internet surveillance by GCHQ and the NSA, try to reassure their citizens by saying that the spooks are “only” collecting metadata, not “content”. Only two conclusions are possible from this: either the relevant spokespersons are unbelievably dumb or they are displaying a breathtaking contempt for their citizenry.

In a way, it doesn’t matter which conclusion one draws. The fact is that, as I argued two weeks ago, the metadata is what the spooks want for the simple reason that it’s machine-readable and therefore searchable. It’s what makes comprehensive internet-scale surveillance possible.

Why hasn’t there been greater public outrage about the cynicism of the “just metadata” mantra?

Understanding Douglas Engelbart

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After Doug died, when I was thinking about a topic for my Observer column, I asked my editor if I should do a piece on him. His recommendation was that there would be lots of obits on the Web, so better to do something else. So I did.

But reading through the obituaries, I was struck by the fact that many of them got it wrong. Not in the fact-checking sense, but in terms of failing to understand why Engelbart was such an important figure in the evolution of computing. Many of the obits did indeed mention the famous “mother of all demonstrations” he gave to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in 1968, but in a way they failed to understand its wider significance. They thought it was about bit-mapped, windowing screens, the mouse, etc. (which of course it demonstrated) whereas in fact that Engelbart was on about was the potential the technology offered for augmenting human intellect through collaborative working at a distance. Harnessing the collective intelligence of the network, in other words. Stuff we now take for granted.

The trouble was that, in 1968, there was no network (the ARPAnet was just being built) and the personal computer movement was about to get under way. The only way Engelbart could realise his dream was by harnessing the power of the time-shared mainframe — the technology that Apple & Co were determined to supplant. So while people understood the originality and power of the WIMPS interface that Doug created (and that Xerox PARC and, later, Apple and then Microsoft implemented), they missed the significance of networking. This also helps to explain, incidentally, why after the personal computer bandwagon began to roll, poor Doug was sidelined.

The only blogger I’ve found who has picked up on this in the wake of Engelbart’s death is Tom Foremski who wrote a lovely, insightful piece. He recounts how he went to a Silicon Valley party for the launch of John Markoff’s book about the PC revolution.

The event was supposed to be about the book, but it quickly turned into a tribute to Doug Engelbart, as John Markoff, and many members of the Homebrew Club, and former colleagues of his spoke about his incredible influence on their work, ideas, and how he changed their lives.

It seemed as if he was the Buckminster Fuller of Silicon Valley in terms of how insightful and how brilliant he was, in story after story shared by people at the event. Others compared him to Leonardo DaVinci.

I was astounded when an elderly man sitting behind me, was given the microphone and started to speak. It was Doug Engelbart. I’d assumed he had passed away a long time ago by the way everyone spoke about him in the past.

I was invited to a post-event dinner for the speakers and press at a local restaurant. I was late in arriving and everyone was already seated. Everyone had crowded onto a large circular table trying to be as close as possible to where New York Times reporter John Markoff was sitting.

I couldn’t believe my luck. Over on another large circular table, half-empty, sat Doug Engelbart. I asked him if I could sit next to him and we talked for hours. I walked out with a great story, a story that no one had written before, a story of a genius whose work was largely killed by the personal computer “revolution” and how he’d spent decades trying to find companies to fund his work and research.

It’s a story that shows Silicon Valley’s ignorance of its own history and its disgraceful treatment of truly inspired visionaries such as Doug Engelbart, in favor of celebrating PR-boosted business managers who say they are changing the world but don’t come close.

Yep. As it happens, I also told this story in my History of the Internet. You can find the relevant excerpt here.