Cloud computing and democracy: Amazon and WikiLeaks

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This week’s Observer column.

As Markus Kuhn, a computer security researcher at the Cambridge Computer Lab, pointed out to me, any work “prepared by an officer or employee of the US government as part of that person’s official duties” is not entitled to domestic copyright protection under US law. So, in the US at least, the leaked cables are not protected by copyright and it doesn’t matter whether WikiLeaks owns the rights or not.

But, in a way, that’s the least worrying aspect of Amazon’s behaviour. More troubling is what its actions portend for democracy. Rebecca MacKinnon, a scholar who has written incisively about China’s efforts to censor the net, wrote a sobering essay about this last week. “A substantial, if not critical amount of our political discourse,” she points out, “has moved into the digital realm. This realm is largely made up of virtual spaces that are created, owned and operated by the private sector.”

As far as the law of contract is concerned, Amazon can do what it likes. But this isn’t just about contracts any more. “While Amazon was within its legal rights,” MacKinnon warns, “the company has nonetheless sent a clear signal to its users: if you engage in controversial speech that some individual members of the US government don’t like… Amazon is going to dump you at the first sign of trouble.”

Yep. For years people have extolled cloud computing as the way of the future. The lesson of the last week is simple: be careful what you wish for.

Dan Gillmor has a good piece about this over on Salon.com. Excerpt:

That’s Strike 1 to our faith in the Internet. We are all, to one degree or another, forced to rely on the good will of larger enterprises that host and serve the media we create online. So when a company as big as Amazon — and it’s huge in the Web services arena — yanks down content this way, it is demonstrating that we cannot fully trust it with our content, either. And if Amazon, a powerful enterprise, can be bullied, which one can’t?

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: two challenges for journalism

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Simon Andrewes came to Cambridge last week to give an interesting talk in our Arcadia Seminar series on how the organisation of BBC News has changed over the last decade in response to the need to make financial savings and to address the demands of our emerging media ecosystem. One of the things that interested me particularly was his sketch of the powerful tools the BBC is building to enable its journalists to keep on top of complex, fast-moving stories. Among other things, these new IT tools enable the Beeb to create ‘story communities’ based on its staff across the world who are working on aspects of a big story.

The WikiLeaks controversy is, par excellence, such a story and, like many bloggers, academics and media commentators, I’ve been struggling to (a) keep up with it, and (b) make sense of it. Neither task is easy. Here’s a concept map I drew when first thinking about it. (Click on the map to see a more readable version.)

And this is just a very incomplete sketch of it. Yet onto each blob on the map I could map dozens of cogent references, commentaries and websites. So merely ‘keeping up’ with the story is a Herculean, not to say Sisyphean, task.

The second great challenge is how to make sense of all this. Most people cope with this problem by, effectively, reducing its variety. They decide to take a particular view — which enables them to slash a path through the thicket by choosing which aspects to pay attention to, and which to ignore. But what if one declines to take this simplifying route?

We need tools to help with this.

Sensemaking is what my Open University colleague Simon Buckingham-Shum has been working on for years. He calls it knowledge cartography and has developed tools like Compendium, a software tool for mapping information, ideas and arguments. This screencast gives a good overview of what’s involved in using the tool.

UPDATES:
1. The concept map has been updated to remove an incorrect reference to EasyDNS. Wikileaks’s provider of DNS services was EveryDNS. Thanks to everyone who pointed out the error.

2. Interesting visualisation of data about the leaked cables here.

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.”

YouTube stats

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According to this week’s Economist, “YouTube is now taking in 35-hours’ worth of video content every minute of the day, up from about six hours’-worth in June 2007”.

Wot — no links?

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The website Catholic Online has an excellent precis of my Guardian piece about the significance of the WikiLeaks row. But strangely, one thing is missing: a link to the piece itself.

This doesn’t stop the site recommending that readers pass on its own piece to friends, including a link to Catholic.org.

This is not just discourteous; it’s also insulting to readers because it doesn’t give them an easy way of reading the original piece. After all, they might not agree with Deacon Fournier’s summary of my views. They might even think he had been too complimentary. All in all, bad Karma.

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?