Do we want ISPs to be censors?

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This morning’s Observer column.

In a way, identifying and barring the truly horrible content is the easy part, at least in legal terms. If downloading or viewing certain kinds of online content is deemed illegal, then internet companies know where they stand, and they will obey the law. If a site contains illicit content, then Google et al will find ways of not pointing to it.

The problem is that this alone will not stop people who are willing to take the legal risk implicit in accessing illegitimate sites. The next logical step, therefore, is to make access impossible by forcing internet service providers to block them, using the same technology that the Chinese government employs to make sure that nobody in China learns anything about, say, Falun Gong.

Not surprisingly, nobody in the industry likes this idea. Apart from the extra costs it would impose, it also places companies in the uncomfortable position of deciding what their customers can read and view. And it would effectively put the UK in the same boat as China, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan and other countries whose governments decide what citizens can access.

Nevertheless, the ISPs are feeling the heat from a government desperate to be seen to be “doing something” about porn…

Plugging away

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This is just wonderful. Beyond parody — especially the “network hygiene” bit.

File this under “F” for futile: The Army is restricting access to the Guardian website to try to crack down on leaks, the Monterey County Herald reports. The Guardian was the first to write about the extent of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program earlier this month, and it reported details about a separate spying program yesterday. The Guardian’s reports are based on classified documents leaked by former government tech contractor Edward Snowden, who is now wanted by U.S. authorities.

The access restriction is part of the Department of Defense’s routine preventative “network hygiene,” Gordon Van Vleet, spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM), told the Herald. The censorship/network hygiene is meant to prevent the downloading of classified documents — like the kind the Guardian has linked to on its website and which presumably has already been seen by many people. “Until declassified by appropriate officials, classified information — including material released through an unauthorized disclosure — must be treated accordingly by DoD personnel,” Van Vleet wrote.

Solutionism rules OK

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My favourite newsagent has begun selling coffee. Today, a sign has appeared outside his premises. It’s headed “Coffee Solutions!” and includes a list of the various kinds of coffee on offer inside. Which led me to think about what kind of problem is it to which coffee is a ‘solution’? Sleepiness? Boredom? The need for a break from work?

Of course, in a literal sense coffee is a solution — defined as “a homogeneous mixture composed of only one phase”. But I don’t think that’s the sense envisaged by the person who composed the newsagent’s notice. S/he was simply parroting the almost-ubiquitous abuse of the term in contemporary commercial life. Once upon a time, people sold products or services. Nowadays they sell only solutions.

And ‘solutionism’ (to use Evgeny Morozov’s term) is everywhere in the tech industry.

If a ‘solution’ is “a means of solving a problem”, then often it isn’t really a big deal. Many years ago, Donald Schön, in a wonderful book entitled The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (Arena), pointed out that, in the grand scheme of things, problems are not the biggest difficulties that confront us. That’s because, in essence, a ‘problem’ is a pretty straightforward thing: a perceived discrepancy between a known present state and a known desired state. It may be difficult to find a ‘solution’ but at least in principle it’s clear what needs to be done.

Most of the really difficult, intractable things in organizational, political and ordinary life, however, do not fit that description, because we usually are unsure or in disagreement about where we are, and even more so about where we want to go. They are not ‘problems’ but something else: messy, unclear, contentious. And what professionals do, Schön argued, is to take these messy difficulties and do some work on them to extract some of their constituent ‘problems’ for which known solutions exist.

So, for example, if I want to write a Will that will be fair to my children from different marriages and wish to minimise the amount of inheritance tax that they will pay, I take that to a lawyer who will analyse my current situation and my (vague) wishes and suggest some legal ‘solutions’ (perhaps Trusts) which will meet some of my needs or desires.

In Schön’s view, therefore, professionals are not problem-solvers, but problem-creators. Reading his book changed my life, because it made me look at the occupational world in an entirely new way.

And, having written all that, I definitely need a coffee.

What Ed Snowden has achieved so far

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Roger Cohen has a terrific column in today’s International Herald Tribune listing the things we wouldn’t have known if Edward Snowden hadn’t revealed them.

Here’s a summary of Cohen’s list:

We would not know:

  • how the N.S.A. has been able to access the e-mails or Facebook accounts or videos of citizens across the world
  • how it has secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans
  • how through requests to the compliant and secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (F.I.S.A.) it has been able to bend nine U.S. Internet companies to its demands for access to clients’ digital information

    • We would not be:

  • debating whether the United States really should have turned surveillance into big business, offering data-mining contracts to the likes of Booz Allen and, in the process, high-level security clearance to myriad folk who probably should not have it
  • having a serious debate at last between Europeans, with their more stringent views on privacy, and Americans about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies

    • We would not have:

  • legislation to bolster privacy safeguards and require more oversight introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee
  • a letter from two Democrats to the N.S.A. director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, saying that a government fact sheet about surveillance abroad “contains an inaccurate statement” (and where does that assertion leave Alexander’s claims of the effectiveness and necessity of Prism?)

    • In short, without Snowden’s revelations we would not be having

    a long-overdue debate about what the U.S. government does and does not do in the name of post-9/11 security — the standards applied in the F.I.S.A. court, the safeguards and oversight surrounding it and the Prism program, the protection of civil liberties against the devouring appetites of intelligence agencies armed with new data-crunching technology — would not have occurred, at least not now.

    That just about nails it.

    Regrets in life’s departure lounge

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    Extraordinary piece in the Guardian, based on what an Australian palliative care nurse learned from listening to terminal patients. According to her, their five “greatest regrets” are:

    1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

    2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

    3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

    4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

    5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

    The open society and its (internal) enemies

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    Very judicious New Yorker comment piece about the Snowden revelations by Henrik Hertzberg. I was particularly struck by this passage:

    The critics have been hard put to point to any tangible harm that has been done to any particular citizen. But that does not mean that no harm has been done. The harm is civic. The harm is collective. The harm is to the architecture of trust and accountability that supports an open society and a democratic polity. The harm is to the reputation and, perhaps, the reality of the United States as such a society, such a polity.

    On May 23rd, President Obama made clear in a passionate speech his readiness to reconceive the so-called war on terror. “This war, like all wars, must end,” he said. “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us,” he said. One aspect of that struggle, “expanded surveillance,” he said, raises “difficult questions about the balance we strike between our interests in security and our values of privacy.” Given the month’s disclosures, Mr. President, you can say that again.

    He’s right. The harm is civic in the first instance.

    The coming Chinese credit bust

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    One of the most interesting things I’ve read in the last few days is this fascinating blog post by Robert Peston in which he suggests that the recent turmoil in China’s money markets, the sharp reduction in the flow of credit between banks and the rising cost of loans between banks might presage the kind of financial collapse that countries like Ireland experienced in 2008. As I was pondering the implications of this I read in today’s Observer that Bentley (whose 19.2 mpg Flying Spur retails at £140,000) plans to open 45 dealerships across China in the next two years, and doubt hardened into certainty: the Chinese are locked into a credit bubble, and we all know how those end.