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.