Transparency and Privacy: what we need, want and do not understand

Brett Horvath and Berit Anderson at SCOUT raise an important point about Apple’s new face recognition phone tool. “Face ID isn’t just about identity. It’s about mind-reading.” Brett is concerned about the possible combination of a) machine vision and predictive algorithms, b) micro expressions, and c) ubiquitous surveillance, which would allow oppressive regimes and bad actors not only to monitor the movement of dissident populations, but to actively read their emotions and predict behavior. “Now Apple is about to ship this technology stack to the world in what could be the most popular smartphone in history.”

Of course this only extends the lesson I taught in The Transparent Society. We will not preserve freedom by hiding. Nor will it ever be possible to conceal info from elites. Moreover, that is not how we got the freedom that we already have,

We will remain free by aggressively applying these tools upon all elites.  It is the only way we ever got freedom and it is the only way we can retain it.

Why, oh why, is this concept so incredibly hard for very bright people to grasp? I know some very high IQ individuals -- people who can clearly see that our brief, Periclean renaissance is in terrible danger of tumbling into an old-fashioned despotism, empowered by new technologies of control. In conversation -- or after reading The Transparent Society -- they claim to grasp the concept of reciprocal accountability and sousveillance...  the application of light upward at all elites and authorities. But then...?

Then, the very next time that they confront the latest modern information crisis of surveillance, or leaks or hacks or state or corporate control, their sole reflex is to prescribe vague and impossible refuge in hiding.

It cannot work. It never has. It never will. It is cowardly, too! But there's a method that does work. We see it in action, every single day... if we just open our eyes. And look.

== Withstanding and overcoming a toxin ==

Well, well. I’ve done many interviews but I never thought I’d be in FASHION Magazine! The article is serious though, about how we — as individuals, nation and species — are all-too easily poisoned by the addictive drug of self-righteous indignation. The writer brought in a number of interesting perspectives I had not seen or considered, till now.  I like it when that happens!

But do go to the source… my original call for research into indignation addiction, which was republished in Barbara Oakley’s tome Pathological Altruism.

This is a poison that can be especially ruinous in times like ours, when cynical oligarchs are deliberately raking coals to get us all riled up. 

Yes! There’s plenty to be angry about. But that has almost nothing to do with the thing we must seek calmly and rationally. Victory.

== Hold on to our vital victories ==

Danger, danger. The most important civil liberties advance in the 21st Century so far was when the Obama Administration joined multiple courts in declaring a citizen may record the police. I wrote about this in The Transparent Society (1997; see p.160) and how vital it is that we can exercise sousveillance at the level of the street, where power can most-directly affect us. 

Now: "In a free speech ruling that contradicts six other federal circuit courts, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a district court ruling that says Americans do not have a first amendment right to videotape the police, or any public official, in public."

Sure enough, in a deep-red state, this principle is under attack. Only... I blame the good side lawyers! They base their arguments for sousveillance on the First Amendment and sometimes the Fifth... when it is in fact the under-appreciated SIXTH Amendment that most clearly safeguards the citizen from true abuse of power, by granting us the power to compel revelation of facts in our own defense, allowing us recourse to the ultimate defense...

...the Truth.

Ah, but did breathless news reports exaggerate?  Robert Shore: "I have now read both the District Court's decision and the Eighth Circuit opinion affirming the District Court. Neither says what the article claims. The closest approach is a statement that the general public doesn't have a constitutional right to film citizens in the lobby of a police station, and that's a far cry from ruling that citizens can't film police stops executed in public. There's just no substitute for primary sources."

I hope so. Better that Brin be wrong in a “Danger!” alert.

== Doing is more important than knowing ==

You Are The Product: A good, long read by John Lanchester: "Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more bout you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens." 

Yes, and worrisome and I am glad that these facts are being revealed and chewed on, by the public.  Only note THAT these revelations and discussions are happening. And second always remember that something matters far more than what others know about you.  

What matters far more is what they might do to you!  

To control the latter, it is futile trying to stop others from seeing. Show us one time when that ever worked for long. Ever. Once. 

What will make a difference is making sure that we see everything about them.

== Worries & Concerns ==

 China doubles down on anonymity: “According to China’s new regulations, Internet companies and service providers are responsible for requesting and verifying real names from users when they register and must immediately report illegal content to the authorities…. Furthermore, a new cybersecurity law that went into effect at the beginning of June requires tech companies to store important data on servers within China. While this is supposedly meant to protect sensitive information, it can also make it easier for the government to track and persecute Internet users.”

Jennifer Jacquet, assistant professor at New York University and author of the newly released -- Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool -- explores issues of guilt, conscience, and conformity, proposing that we need new ground rules when it comes to public shaming, particularly in a new age of ubiquitous, and volatile, social media.

Yipe, it turns out that speech-recognition devices can understand and obey commands given at completely ultrasonic frequencies. You may not be able to hear someone hijacking your cellphone, computer, or home automation system, but they can.

Transparency and the Wisdom of ... Us

Crowd-sourced crime solving.... Geez can anyone explain why I wasn't a consultant on this upcoming new show - Wisdom of the Crowd? (Though for sure, I'm looking forward to it.) 

Second question: why do so many previews give away almost the whole story?  I hope this one will be as good as Person of Interest was... only with an important difference. I hope that its core message is one that we actually need. A confidence-building notion that we -- all of us working together in the open -- are potentially very powerful.

Speaking of New Era crime solving... how about..

== “Pre-Crime at South by Southwest! ==

Are any of you members of the fantastic culture/arts/tech festival South by Southwest?  If you, you get to help choose some of the events through the “panel-picker” page. Naturally, I hope you’ll vote for one that I’m scheduled to be on: “Pre-Crime: It's Not Just Science Fiction Anymore.”  Here’s the writeup … and a link to vote.

“In Philip K. Dick’s 1956 “The Minority Report,” murder was eradicated due to the “Pre-Crime Division,” which anticipated and prevented crime before it happened. Sixty years later, elements of pre-crime cybersecurity technology are already in place. But how do we toe the line between safety and Big Brother? This panel will discuss the history of predictive analytics, privacy implications of monitoring and how AI/machine learning will shape society in the future.”

== Should we fret about the cameras? ==

Back in the eighties, I witnessed video cameras sprouting like crocuses, all over Great Britain. The same thing happened in Paris, in the early nineties, and I began pondering the concepts that would later make their way into my book, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? Since then, The U.S. has become just as dense with cameras overlooking almost every street  -- one area where Moore’s Law is still in full force, as the cams every year get smaller, faster, better, cheaper, more mobile and vastly more numerous.

Only there’s a crucial difference. In most U.S. cities, the vast majority of cameras are privately owned. There’s still surveillance! (And elsewhere I talk about how important it is to keep and enhance our “sousveillance” power to look back!) But most of the time, the authorities must knock on doors and ask: “may we please see your footage?”

In the case of the Boston Marathon bombing, every single person or business that was asked fell all over themselves to help! 

On the other hand, during the highly controversial Seattle “police riot” some years back, many companies and private citizens muttered: “Hell no, go get your court order.” That difference could be crucial, positively or negatively. But citizens -- sorry "subjects" -- in Britain don't have the choice. Same number of cams, but a very different society.

Oh, but now we see change afoot. In Detroit, Project Greenlight encourages businesses to put up city operated, standardized surveillance units. Companies that are part of Project Greenlight send live video to directly to Detroit police. Police can access them, monitoring them from the real time crime center at Detroit Public Safety Headquarters. 

“Project Greenlight went into place in January 2016. According to city officials, a recent study shows the original eight Project Greenlight stations continue to see a nearly 40% reduction in violent crime. Project Greenlight was also the key to an arrest after a wild shoot out at a gas station in March 2016. Since then, it has expanded to more than 100 businesses and continues to grow.” reports local Detroit news.

Alas, as you might expect, they keep upping the ante.

“The city of Detroit and the Detroit Police Department are considering making Project Greenlight mandatory for any business that's open after 10 p.m. Police say it's helped to curb violent crime but the plan to make it mandatory is raising privacy concerns,” reports Ryan Ermanni. 

Is this trend inevitable?  Of course it is. The difference between the U.S. and Britain was temporary, after all.  Still, it is the habit that matters. We must maintain the habit of looking back.

== Open Science - Citizen Science  ==

I’ve been asked to comment on the rise of “open science,” a fascinating topic. There is an irony:

1. The one monotonic trend of the 20th Century was the professionalization of everything. This gave us spectacular benefits of both scale and specialization, but it could not be maintained because it is essentially zero-sum.  A skilled person must be one thing or else another.

2. Cracks began to appear in the late 20th as hobbies, pastimes, avocations began to burgeon in positive-sum ways. ("I can be several things - a professional in my day job and almost professional at one or more pastimes.") Today, amid a burgeoning Age of Amateurs, we see the worst rigidity of professional castes crumbling. Most sciences now have processes that welcome input and data collection and even analysis by
individual and affiliated amateur scientists, participating in well-organized mixed projects with professionals.

Moreover, this trend refutes all the hoary accusations that we are "decadent" or losing contact with older wisdom. There are more blacksmiths, sword-makers and hand looms today than at any point in 100 years. Heck, more horses!  While those who are critical of the modern era have (on average) tended toward obesity, many (perhaps most) of the supposedly decadent modernists engage in rising amounts of physical activity. Some of those activities -- like jumping our of airplanes with surfboards -- may be clinically crazy... but ain't it cool?

3. There is a dark side to the amateurism trend. Scurrilous forces in society are now waging propaganda war against all skilled, fact-using castes.The "war on science" is only the tip of the iceberg, as expertise itself is slurred.

So here's the irony.  We needed the reduction in guild categorization that was threatening to hamper progress. The Age of Amateurs and opening of fields, like science, to input from bright and earnest outsiders, will benefit civilization. This is a point that I raise in my book: "The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us ChooseBetween Privacy and Freedom?"

On the other hand, the 20th Century's professionalization of expertise was what brought us to this party. Waves of amateurs can augment skilled elites usefully, and challenge them beneficially! But it is pure suicide to denigrate every clade of people who know their fields and have spent their lives developing stunning levels of skill. Scientists, teachers, journalists, doctors, civil servants, law professionals, military officers... they can be mistaken, from time to time! And they always merit watching...

... but it is the critic who bears the burden of proof, when he says: "I read a couple of articles on a political site, and now I know more about this than folks who have spent their life gathering data and comparing competing models and understanding the field."

See more of my missives:

   Crowd-sourcing and Citizen Science 

   The Future of the Amateur Scientist

   The Age of Amateurs

  

== Artificial intelligence ==

Get ready for the first robot empathy crisis: Generally a not-bad summary about my talk at the AI Conference in San Francisco, if oversimplifying in a number of ways..  The one glaring error is that I never said you should join a dozen NGOs to save the world for you for $50/month each! 

That's a lot for most people! 

What I said was that you can find a dozen organizations that will actively represent your interests in how the world can be improved, and set them to work doing what you think needs doing for $30 to $50 each per YEAR, annual membership dues.  That's a big difference!

Sure, lots of folks can and should give more.  But if you are a middle class person and not doing that much - that basic, minimal engagement - then you have no right to bitch about the state of the world.  See more about this in my article: Saving the world through Proxy Activism.

But go to the source, of course, of course. For this talk -- How Might Artificial Intelligence Come About? -- I squeezed the topics - if not the details - of my hourlong AI talk for IBM's World of Watson into half an hour.  Could only do that with a very elevated audience.

And finally... This essay makes a case that there is a difference between a “leaker” and a righteous “whistle blower.” Citing both James Comey and Reality Winner as recent examples, the author suggests a discrete difference that is actually (I assert) much more murky and part of a very broad spectrum.

Perceptive and myopic views of our transparent future. Especially police cameras.

Let's veer from either science fiction or politics into our politically science-fictional new world of light. Starting with a reminder that my new anthology (with Stephen Potts) Chasing Shadows, is released this week by Tor Books, featuring contributions by William Gibson, James Gunn, Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge and many others, offering stories and insights into a future when light flows almost everywhere. Prepare yourself!  This might be a good start.

Steve and I will be signing copies, along with Scott Sigler, at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego, on January 27!

== Floundering gradually toward wisdom ==

In a vivid article - Should We See Everything a Cop Sees? - McKenzie Funk of The New York Times describes the wide cast of characters in Seattle who are grappling with a pressing modern problem, how to comply with a court order to make police camera footage available to the public.

It's a can of worms, because the police department is also legally required to redact or blur personal details such as faces or identifiable voices, for the sake of privacy. While Funk's article makes for entertaining reading, the story is murky about the context for it all. That context is a proliferation of cameras, getting smaller, faster, cheaper, better, more numerous and mobile at rates much faster than Moore’s Law.  

Short-horizon myopia is common to every person I've seen weigh in - even very bright folks - on this topic.  Sure, a few of us predicted all this back in the 20th Century - e.g. in EARTH (1989) and The Transparent Society (1997) - yet the very notion of lifting one's gaze beyond this month, following trend lines instead for three or five, or ten years ahead, seems impossible even for intelligent and critical observers like McKenzie Funk.

Regarding just the zoomed-in dilemmas of 2016, Funk's article does a good job of showing us the trees (the dilemmas faced by police, prosecutors, attorneys and citizens in adapting to these court decisions), without even noticing the forest. The context of why this is all happening and how this amounts to - for all the tsuris and aggravation - a huge victory for our kind of civilization.

I have called it the most important civil liberties victory of this century so far -- perhaps in thirty years -- even though it was hardly covered by the press. In 2013 both the U.S. courts and the Obama Administration declared it to be "settled law" that a citizen has the right to record his or her interactions with police in public places.

No single matter could have been more important because it established the most basic right of "sousveillance" or looking-back at power, that The Transparent Society is all about. It is also fundamental to freedom, for in altercations with authority, what other recourse can a citizen turn to, than the Truth?

But the forest is rapidly changing! Next year, the same scene that was today only visible on a cop-cam’s footage will have been covered also by the suspect’s auto-record phone app, or a passerby’s dash cam. Or a store’s security system, or chains of cheap button cams pasted on lamp posts or bridge overpasses by activist groups, or even hobbyists. Follow the price curve a bit farther and you have the sticker cameras that I describe in EXISTENCE, stuck to any surface by 9-year olds who peel them from great, big rolls, each with its own code in IPV6 cyberspace and powered by trickles of sunlight.

In that context, not a single issue wrangled-over in the NY Times hand-wringing article will seem anything but archaic - even troglodytic - just half a decade from now. If there was ever an era in desperate need of the Big Perspectives offered by science fiction….

== The pattern continues ==

After which I listened to NPR's To The Point broadcast about the regulation of police body and dash cams. And despite generally liking Warren Olney - he always asks good questions - I must say I was disappointed in how this topic makes everyone myopic. The only interviewee who applied two neurons to a bigger view was the former Redlands police chief, who gave thoughtful, logical answers... though like the others, only focused on the here and now. (All right, the ACLU guy got a little better, across the interview.)

Not one of them contemplated how technology made all of it possible - this entire topic would have been (and was!) science fiction five years ago - and every interviewee on Olney's show ignored how tech will be utterly different five years from now. None contemplated the proliferation of ever smaller, faster, cheaper cameras.

How could they have gone an hour without mentioning the one fundamental... that other people than police have cameras? More and better ones, every day. This will -- and already has -- empowered citizens on the street.

Listen to the broadcast, then tell me how many hand-wringing statements will be even remotely relevant, as a skyrocketing percentage of police-citizen encounters will be recorded from more than just the police perspective, with both the suspect and onlookers loading their files into the cloud.

How, oh how, can we have such bright folks, who mean well and who want to solve problems, yet absolutely refuse to lift their gaze beyond the near-sighted today? Don't answer. We all know the greatest recent example: the entire political caste of the Democratic Party. 

A much smarter article that actually tries to peer ahead is this one in the Atlantic - Even the bugs will be bugged - by Matthew Hutson.

See a more in-depth analysis of central surveillance, predictive policing and tools for accountability from the new Scout site: Should the Future of Policing Look Like This? by Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath.

Futurist Glen Hiemstra discusses The Future of Policing -- looking at some of the problems and possible solutions for policing in the fast-changing world of today and tomorrow.

== Another try ==

More hand-wringing. Even when a writer tries to look beyond the immediate horizon, the usual result is short-sightedness.  As in this case: “Should Police Bodycams Come With Facial Recognition Software?”  Jake Laperruque, on Slate, warns that such technologies loom just ahead and will be used… unless serious efforts go into privacy protection.

Three plus points to Mr. Laperruque for at least trying.  And five more for an article that brings us up to date on current efforts to either introduce or construct facial recognition use by authorities… 

... then minus thirty points for failure to peer just a little farther, asking: “What on Earth do you think could possibly prevent this, over the long run?”

Take into account a crucial factor, technological drive. Reiterating a point made above: as cameras get smaller, faster, cheaper, better and more mobile at a rate much faster than Moore’s Law (sometimes called Brin’s Corollary ;-) cop cams will get too small to see and the facial recognition databases will proliferate far beyond your ability to limit them with well-meaning, ACLU promoted regs.

This needn’t be a disaster, if common citizens share in the new powers of vision, able to scrutinize and criticize when no cop action can remain unobserved. If we can not only recognize any harm doer, but also catch and chastise eavesdroppers and gossipy peeping toms, who stare too closely, then a surprising side-benefit will be more, rather than less privacy. 

The increase in light flooding the planet could be prodigious, searing the harmful and helping drive trends toward our crucial victory condition. In other words, technological trends seem to work in our favor.

But first, our well-meaning paladins of freedom must get better glasses, and start looking beyond next year.

Transparency: Watching and Watchers

Veering back to more important issues...

We are increasingly surrounded by “always-on” devices with microphones that listen for our voice commands. Most require a "trigger phrase" or wake word to begin recording or actively computing responses, but that means they must analyze every sound to parse whether it is that word. 

As if that weren't a murky enough boundary, fraught with possible paths for misuse or abuse, now many devices can team up to follow you around and obtain a great deal of info , using technology, called ultrasonic cross-device tracking. Ultrasound "beacons" emit high-frequency tones (inaudible to humans) embedded in advertisements, web pages, as well as in some brick and mortar stores. Currently, most Android and iOS phones require permission to access a user's microphone and receive these inaudible inputs. 

The Federal Trade Commission evaluated ultrasonic tracking technology at the end of 2015, and the non-profit Center for Democracy and Technology wrote: 'the best solution is increased transparency and a robust and meaningful opt-out system. If cross-device tracking companies cannot give users these types of notice and control, they should not engage in cross-device tracking,” reports L.H. Newman in Wired. 

In the biggest post-election transparency news... Britain’s new surveillance law will force internet providers to record every internet customer's top-level web history in real-time for up to a year, which can be accessed by numerous government departments; it will force companies to decrypt data on demand. Intelligence agencies also get the power to hack into computers and devices of citizens. This represents the most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy.

Despite having lived in Britain in the 1980s and seen the proliferation of camera surveillance then, I still remain puzzled by the blithe acceptance of one way snoopery over there. In contrast to which...

Even the Bugs will be Bugged: I was quoted in this article in The Atlantic: Big Brother society results not from being watched but from one-way observation.

== Light fights corruption ==

The Helvetia Cold War deepens. An automated private system, using public records, has applied itself to tracking planes used by authoritarian regimes flying in and out of Switzerland. The system has been set up to potentially provide evidence of money laundering. "Swiss investigative journalist François Pilet and his cousin Julien Pilet set up the GVA Dictator Alert Twitter bot to track planes registered to “authoritarian regimes,” as defined by the 2015 Democracy Index.The aim is to bring transparency and accountability to the leaders." 

The bot currently tracks the movements of more than 80 aircraft from 21 countries, including Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia. Since its launch in April, the bot has logged more than 60 arrivals and departures from Geneva International Airport by planes that belong to the regimes, and few had anything to do with legit business or diplomacy. Of course dictators and kleptocrats will find a way around this. The overall kleptocracy problem is only getting worse and it will only be solved with major new treaties imposing transparency on the mighty cheaters of the world. For that to happen, the world's powers will have to fear something much worse than light.

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and Transparency International (TI) are joining forces in a new initiative. The Anti-Corruption Initiative "will connect investigative journalists turning a spotlight on the secretive shadow economy with anti-corruption activists able to translate complex information into compelling campaigns for change. This project will build on the best of cross-border independent investigative journalism. The already substantial impact of such work can be amplified by activists who use information uncovered by quality reporting to create pressure on governments and kleptocrats around the world.”

I can think of nothing more important… or quixotic, given the entrenched power interests lined up against this.  But it is wholly in keeping with what I’ve said humanity needs, if we are to avoid catastrophe. It's needed for the children of the rich – and poor – to actually benefit across this century.  In The Transparent Society, in EARTH and in EXISTENCE and many other places I’ve emphasized that only light disinfects against error, of the sort that made every feudal state a living hell. 

Alas, my SF'nal powers only see this breaking through if several honest, developing world presidents join together to do something utterly unexpected and unprecedented.

Apparently the attack on Liberia’s internet access was not as complete as at-first thought… though the Mirai-based botnet denial of service ploy was pretty harsh and still seen by some as a rehearsal for a bigger assault upon the West.

For years I have been urging this: “The next U.S. administration should take immediate steps to prevent and, when possible, eliminate computer attacks like one that recently crippled some of the key systems that run the internet, a presidential commission recommended on Friday.”

== Society and the future ==

I was interviewed by Brett King for his Breaking Banks podcast about the future of banking and transparency: Fintech and IBM World of Watson.

Speaking of banks. An interesting article from The New York Times on how food banks, with their somewhat socialist mind-set, incorporated "market" forces to help them allocate food donations not only where they were needed but where they are wanted-most. Apparently, so long as equity and generosity are factors in the general outline, market forces and even competition help to get resources to the right place, efficiently.

Are we bound for “Mad Max,” “Star Trek,” “Ecotopia” or an Orwellian super government? The answer may depend upon on how information flows across society. I was quoted in this interesting perspective on future governance on Earth. The model presented by Peter Frase in his newly released book Four Futures: Life After Capitalism -- is unusual (e.g. calling Star Trek an example of post-scarcity, abundance-propelled communism).  Both intriguing and a harbinger.  

A Harbinger? Because we will soon start to hear again names that had passed out of familiarity, in the West. Like Karl Marx. Far from being cast into irrelevance, Marx will be discussed more and more – rising back into pertinence – as the Rooseveltean middle class melts away and 6000 years of class war resume.  

The issue Frase raises is whether new technologies will, as in Star Trek, spare us all violent class struggle, by restoring a vast and healthy middle class that encompasses everyone?  Or will a rising feudal oligarchy unintentionally resurrect Marx as an icon for their victims?

== Shallow but sincere ==

New America Weekly devotes whole issues to special topics. This one is about transparency in government -- which has engaged me a bit for only 25+ years or so. Articles include how to make the modern invention of think tanks more effective by being more open:

"In the Digital Age, governance, technology, education, science, platforms, and more are being pushed to become more “open.” Open movements are working to remove barriers that prevent the public from fully accessing these institutions, systems, and fields. Open education, for example, aims to broaden access and increase opportunities for learning. In the United States, open government strives to improve transparency, increase collaboration, and facilitate public participation in our democracy. Open science accelerates the pace of inquiry and discovery in academic research. Underlying each of these movements is one critical need: open use of information."

==Transparency-related miscllany ==

First Apropos to our earlier posting on Whether Government (especially government paid research) is useless, which was reprinted as a feature on the Evonomics site, See this cogent example... A timely article from the BBC lists the advances that led to the iPhone and how government research enabled all of them.

Who is on your side? According to Lindsey Tepe, a senior policy analyst with the Education Policy program at New America:"In 2009, the administration made a modest request that each federal agency identify three high value data sets to make openly available to the public; now data.gov is the home for government data, housing nearly 200,000 datasets on education, health, energy, governance, and more. Today, every agency that funds more than $100 million in research and development grants has put in place a plan to make that information more accessible."

Other articles from New America Weekly deal with tradeoffs of intellectual property rights and use of personal information, posing vexing questions that are too seldom asked by myopic pundits, as in “what will happen with my data 10 years from now?”...

... and how openness can have unexpected side effects in grassroots democracy. Comments author Heather Hurlburt, "It should be noted that open government did make an appearance in international policy when the Obama Administration launched the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The U.S. joined an initial 7 countries—now up to 69—in holding civil society consultations, drawing up national action plans, and making commitments to increase transparency in areas from legislation to policing to using town criers to share budget data with the public. In addition to those changes on the government side, OGP has offered civil society groups a spark and a mandate for their work. Still, the appearance of open government as a foreign policy tool abroad has not changed the reality at home. The open government agenda sits uncomfortably with traditional ideas about secrecy and expertise in foreign affairs." 

Heather Hurlburt goes on to describe how: "“Multi-stakeholderism” —the trend toward non-governmental entities, both civil society and private sector, joining national and international authorities at the negotiating table."  And yet, "an irony that the Administration which has made open government a byword at home and internationally has been more aggressive than any predecessor in protecting information in the national security space—and has suffered more embarrassing failures to protect information."

== Final Thoughts ==

Well-meaning dopes. I mean those activists who (1) are right to fret that Big Brother might use surveillance against us… but who then (2) rave that the solution is to hide! To shout at elites not to look at us! Or to somehow conceal ourselves and our information.  

For two decades I've asked these dear people (and they truly are fighting the good fight… in the wrong direction) when has that prescription ever worked? Even once. Ever? In the history of our species?

Each of us fizzes with biometric identifiers! Go ahead and fabricate fake fingerprints. Your unique walking gait might be altered (for a short time) by a pebble in your shoe. But can you change the specific ratio of lengths of bones in your hand? Or the speckles on your iris, or the pattern of blood vessels in your retina?  How about the oto-acoustic tones that many humans emit from their own eardrums, and that can be uniquely identified by sensors? 

Oh but it goes on and on. Spend any time in a well-monitored room and the micro-biota of your farts may give you away. And now researchers have “fingerprinted” the white matter of the human brain using a new diffusion MRI method, mapping the brain’s connections (the connectome) at a more detailed level than ever before. They confirmed that structural connections in the brain are unique to each individual person and the connections were able to identify a person with nearly 100% accuracy.  

This could be good news, in giving us an ultimate fall-back against ID thieves — or very bad news for any revolutionary movement against Orwellian tyranny. So? Never let it get to that point! There is one way to do that.

Shall we trust encryption, as governments acquire quantum computers? Anyway, how will that stymie the mosquito drone that flew into your keyboard last week, recording every letter that you type?

Then there are cameras, getting smaller, faster, cheaper, better and more mobile at rates far faster than Moore’s Law. If you find a clever way to evade them now, will it work next year, when there are four times as many of them and harder to spot? 

Hiding won’t work. It cannot. Nor will shouting “don’t look at me!”

Only one thing has ever worked.  Only one thing possibly can work. 

Transparency: The battle is far from over

First... I have two political pieces on the hot new site American News X. One is about the most harmful pundit in America, silken-tongued George F. Will, who finally admits that something has gone wrong with a movement that will nominate fellows like Trump or Cruz. Nothing about the warning signs, of course, like a 20 year outright war on science, and every other knowledge profession in American life. Except fact-averse opinionated "commentators." Glory days for that profession!

My second piece on American News X appraises the diagnosis made by Dilbert creator Scott Adams that Americans are so stupid they will all fall for Donald Trump's emotional manipulations and make him president. Half-right, Scott. But fortunately just half.

Veering from the absurd to the sublime, here’s Thomas Jefferson explaining why information is a potential public good: 

 ‘He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space  ... and like the air in which we breathe ... incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.’ 

Yes... well... that's how reasonable citizens do it.  May we start remembering.

== Can we learn to look-back? ==

The Ethics of Intimate Surveillance: An insightful and informative article by John Danaher about how transparency is affecting intimacy, that cites both me and Steve Mann for our work on Sousveillance.  And yet, this article manages to evade the core question: Is it possible to create positive sum conditions, wherein individuals, relationships and society all gain the benefits of light, without many disadvantages?  

Or will we be stuck in zero-sum war-gaming of all against all? Alas, nearly every pundit who attempts to theorize in this field appears to implicitly assume the latter.  Or else the question never occurs to them.

The core point that Steve Mann and I have pushed is to consider the words Reciprocal Accountability.  It may be hopeless (utterly) to deny surveillance powers to the mighty. But their ability to harm us with what they know about us can be limited by sousveillance that keeps their palpable, consequential or real world actions accountable. 

Cell-phone cams have not improved citizen power by blinding the state. They have  improved citizen power by empowering us to look back - at least at power-minions on the street - doing far more good for civil liberties than marches or protests.

Likewise with lateral transparency or co-veillance. The worst and most harmful online behaviors tend to be those wherein the perpetrator can act anonymously. These behaviors moderate when trolls can be "followed home," or when the victims can tell their moms.

Do we then lose the virtues and advantages of anonymity online? The reflex is to assume so, but that is just silly and unimaginative.  One can envision services that rent you pseudonyms, temporary identities that will be used to protect core identity... unless you use the pseudonym to wreak harm on others, in which case back-tracking and accountability can apply. Preservation of reciprocal accountability does not have to mean living under a perpetual glare. If you assume that, it's a sure sign of zero-sum thinking.

This is where "intimacy" comes in. If we are human, we will want some space and leeway. We also want safety from harm and the ability to tell pushy neighbors "MYOB!" Or Mind Your Own Business.

The most difficult quandary I have faced in this issue is not how to stymie would be Big Brothers... for that, transparency and sousveillance are the only things that can possibly work. By comparison, "encryption" is a transcendentalist religion of stunning technological myopia and romanticism.  No, the question I have wrestled with is this: "Suppose transparency does eliminate Big Brothers. Won't we then face a completely legal and open oppression by majority rules? By 51% bullying 'little brothers'? Judgmental gossips and nosy busybodies enforcing conformity?"

It may surprise you -- given my authorship of The Transparent Society -- that I admit a decent future cannot be accomplished by transparency and coveillance, alone!  Transparency and accountability can protect you from most harms, yes even tyrants, but not the harm of nosy busybodies and prurient voyeurs who act within the bounds of law.  And we do not want the law to impede most vision.

This is where we need add one element.  A social element.  A general and rising consensus that people should leave each other alone, when no actual harm is afoot. 

A consensus that eccentricities and embarrassments (teenage photos posted back when you were rash and stupid) are not held against you, over time. That there is a sin worse than any quirk or stupid posting or awkward sex-selfie... the sin of gossipy bullying.

The good news? We are clearly heading in that direction. Every year, young people - and many older ones, too - make clear their intention to live in a society of forgiveness for harmless stupidities... while becoming less tolerant of harmful judgmentalists.

The bad news: this battle is far from won. It struggles uphill against ten thousand years of conformity pressures and zero-sum reflex.  And there are major nations on Earth, today, whose leaders want to leverage those ancient reflexes to enforce conformity and obedience. 

But those millennia are our greatest ally, in this revolution of light. We can look back on their darkness and say: "Not that. We tried that. It's no good."

== (non) Hollywood does transparency ==

* A new, Indie film takes on some ideas I’ve been pushing for quite some time… for example that the proliferation of cameras is unstoppable.  And that public agencies need to get citizen involvement and supervision, or the social contract will collapse.  “FOR ALL EYES ALWAYS” takes these concepts and blends them with “reality television” in interesting directions:

“In a time of widespread distrust of our government, the CIA creates a fully transparent reality tv show to win back the faith of the American public. Audiences go undercover on black ops missions around the globe and see real world effects from the narrative the showrunners create. As the first season unfolds, we wonder – how much is real and how much is propaganda? Our charismatic host “Swamp Fox” leads us down the rabbit hole the showrunners write for him, and it becomes impossible to distinguish fact from fiction as the lines blur between reality, television, and movies in an age when everything is on camera.”

Writer of the film, Rob Bralver comments: “The film takes place in a world in which there is no longer such a thing as secrets. Everyone, from the most secretive of government agencies to the smallest individual, lives transparently — whether deliberately or by being exposed. In such a world, how can we expect our intelligence professionals to operate effectively and influence events as they have in the past?”  Huh. Interesting. At least it seems so from the vivid web site.  I look forward to seeing the film, some time

== We are in the future - tidbits from next week ==

Trying out Virtual Reality at UCSD

* Longtime colleague Kevin Kelly takes us on a detailed tour of the varied (and many) endeavors in Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality that are looming at us from companies like Magic Leap, Occulus, Microsoft, Apple and many others.  Kevin’s fascinating account introduces the innovators who will change everything, as much as they were changed by the arrival of the computer monitor, then the laptop, the web browser and the cell-phone.-

* An interesting study of Wikipedia, whose perfect record of all transactions offers up a cornucopia of data for web anthropology/sociology.

* Using a little play-dough and dental mold, you can clone someone’s fingerprint and fool a modern phone. “As hacks go, it ranks just a little harder than steaming open a letter.” Other methods include 3D printing a fake from just an image.  Which brings home a point I made in The Transparent Society (1997). “unlike a passcode, you can’t change your fingerprint, so a single credential theft creates a lifetime vulnerability. What looks like a security upgrade turns out to be something much more complex.”

* An amazing, almost Kafa-esque story about how one company’s carelessness has created aggravation for scads of innocent people. A service that associates Internet IP addresses with real world locations has a default answer for those IPs it can’t figure out.  A default location in the geographic center of the US… or the center of any state in question.  And hence, there are now over 600 million IP addresses associated with that default US coordinate. “If any of those IP addresses are used by a scammer, or a computer thief, or a suicidal person contacting a help line, MaxMind’s database places them at the same spot: 38.0000,-97.0000.” Which leads to one little farmhouse in Kansas and a world of trouble.  Others on the top default list have had police raids, death threats.  A Monty Python-level problem that can only be (and now is) solved by transparency.

Because of good investigative journalism, the company has scurried to fix the problem and shift the default locations to the very middle of large lakes.  And Nessie is getting perturbed by strange calls in the night.

* And now... SkySafe has developed technology that will allow institutional users to disable drones flying in areas that are off-limits, or those in accessible areas that may be flying dangerously. The technology leverages radio waves to override the instructions from a drone owner's remote control unit, thus taking control of the airborne device. And so it begins.  The arms race.

Finally. Some of us have tried hard to portray these future possibilities, going back to 1980s cyberpunks. Vernor Vinge took things to new levels of possibility and plausibility in Rainbows End… as I tried to do, in Existence. We are in for interesting times.