Toward a Transparent World

Okay, time for an update for you all on news from the transparency front.  The one that matters most, because it is the only way to find our mistakes as we plunge into a rapidly changing future.

Hang on.  We're about to veer among many sub-topics.  All of them together paint an interesting picture of fast-changing times.

First, remember the Panama Papers leak? The Swiss anti-corruption expert, Mark Pieth, has told the BBC that he resigned from the panel that was set up by Panama's government in April 2016 to improve transparency, because of government interference. "We can only infer that the government is facing pressure from those who are making profits from the current non-transparent financial system in Panama," he said.   Surprised? Hey we know this... no one hit ever gets the bullies to admit that things are changing. 

But they'll learn that everything eventually leaks. Including scary stuff that the uber-experts thought they had locked up. Take a cache of hacking tools with code names such as Epicbanana, Buzzdirection and Egregiousblunder that appeared mysteriously online in August, apparently key tools used by the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO).  Tools that “would undermine the security of a lot of major government and corporate networks both here and abroad.” 

The tools were posted by a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers using file-sharing sites such as BitTorrent and DropBox.  Tweeted Edward Snowden from Moscow: “Circumstantial evidence and conventional wisdom indicates Russian responsibility.”

But there's also good transparency news. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, a growing army of confidential informants — better known as whistle-blowers — has helped federal securities regulators identify and prosecute wrongdoers. Now the same thing is happening at the state level. 

== Save us from advertising! ==

Did you see this piece on "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver?"  It relates to the idea of people being able to make micro-payments to read journalistic content.

Yes, micropayments could save journalism. They could also ease many of our modern aggravations with a world run by advertising.

 The New York Times is investing in a Dutch company, that seems to be getting micropayments better than previous attempts, but still misses several key points.  Points that anyone could get -- ahem -- by reading my own work on the topic. 

The hot new Evonomics site ran my extensive exploration of a way out of this era when advertising noxiously controls the Internet and why all past micropayment systems failed. … and  the "secret sauce" that may empower the next one to work. See: Advertising alone cannot maintain the internet. and Beyond Advertising: Will micropayments sustain the internet?

== On the internet and encryption ==

Okay, let's veer onward to encryption. While urging you all to join EFF (The Electronic Frontier Foundation) and the ACLU and all sorts of activist orgs, I am also known for disagreeing with these paladins of freedom over tactical matters. E.g. I assert that we'll do better by insisting that elites be naked to supervision, rather than (futilely) demanding that elites not-see. 

Nevertheless do join EFF! (And the ACLU and SierraClub/Greenpeace and Doctors Without Borders… (see my essay on "Proxy Activism.") Here are just two examples of important issues where the EFF heroes are fighting for a sensible, accountable future.

(1) "How DigitalCopyright Law Is Being Used to Run Roughshod Over Repairs" getting in the way ofletting folks tinker with or fix things they legitimately own.

(2) "Tell Your University: Don't Sell Patents to Trolls."

Aaaaan let's veer again! For a quarter of a century I have been inviting “cypherpunks” or fans of encryption, to show us an example when it ever consistently and reliably worked.  Edward Snowden - who has his admirable aspects, especially as a ‘social T-Cell and a coal mine canary - falls apart when it comes to future recommendations, falling back upon the standard romantic crypto-twaddle, instead of stepping back and noticing what has actually worked.  What is actually working right now, on our streets! Citizens insisting not on hiding, but upon seeing. 

Now…?

“Hackers obtained the mobile phone numbers of 15 million Iranian users of the Telegram encrypted messaging app, and hacked the accounts of more than a dozen of them, security researchers say.” 

A crypto system designed specifically and carefully to protect the IDs of dissidents, trivially slashed open!  As happens monthly, weekly, even daily to banks and insurance companies, political parties and government agencies. Fools — Information leaks… by its very nature!

You could decide to work with this trait, instead of standing athwart history with your hands up, yelling “stop” at a tsunami.  I've been trying to show you how.

== Cameras extend Citizen Power ==

As forecast in The Transparent Society  (1997) -- especially p. 160 -- cameras are fast becoming the critical extensions of either police power or citizen power… or both.  

If it is only the former, then we’ll get a police state. 
If only the second, then we’ll have chaos.  
If both… well… there’s a real chance we’ll get the win-win, the positive sum outcome, in which good cops find their work increasingly effective, catching and convicting real villains with rising facility – while bad cops soon find themselves in real trouble, at-best seeking some other employment, somewhere with less accountability. (Good luck with that.)

I have called it the most important advance of civil liberties in our lifetimes -- certainly in thirty years -- even though it was hardly covered by the press. It happened when, 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?

And yet, despite the clarity of this basic principle, tussles over this mini-revolution are ongoing, down in the details and at the level of the street. For example, will we citizens get access to footage taken by the body-cameras worn increasingly by street cops? While civil libertarians demand instant access under all circumstances, a bill just passed the North Carolina General Assembly will empower police to withhold body camera and dash camera footage. 

It may surprise you that my own stance is intermediate and more patient than the ACLU’s. So long as the police bodycam, dashcam and drone recordings are uninterrupted, comprehensive, protected and available to defense attorneys, I see no urgent need for rapid release. Transparency that is only delayed can still achieve its main purpose: accountability. With that key proviso, I am willing to grant cops some breathing room.

What we cannot allow is limitations on what citizens themselves may record, in public spaces. Here is just one of many sites online that coordinate citizen images of police in action – both behaviors meriting scrutiny and meriting praise.  

What about that thing I alluded to above... a patent filed by Apple, for a utility allowing some outside entity to shut down your phone’s camera? Giving Apple the benefit of the doubt, we can hope it is a ‘blocking patent’ aimed at preventing this feature from every appearing in real life.  Yes, concert venues claim a need to prevent covert and illegal recordings by members of the audience… as if real video pirates cannot bring in more sophisticated devices? Indeed, we’re now all behooved to purchase and maintain some old-fashioned cameras, just in case.

This is simply the crucial moment of decision in our civilization – more important even than the 2016 US elections.

I’m a stockholder, but I deem this invention patented by Apple — allowing remote control or shut down of the camera on your phone — to be an Orwellian nightmare.There are some possible compromises - e.g. letting venue owners set up a zone wherein phone cams degrade down to “Citizen Mode” at say 1 megapixel. But no, I don’t want anything at all.

== Sousveillance and freedom ==

Said it before.  Will keep saying. One of the chants at Black Lives Matter rallies should be “Give Us MoreTech!” Which is short for: “Oh so NOW you believe us, now that we can take pictures of what we went through for generations?”  

Well, yes.  Then become nerds! Use cameras to fight back, a lot safer and more effective and modern than guns.

But none of that will be possible when elites - like the state - can shutdown our phone-cams.  So make a habit of keeping some old fashioned cameras around!  And count on technology to give us so many eyes that this trick will sink into obscurity.

Oh, speaking of which. Edward Snowden, in collaboration with Andrew Huang and the MIT Media Lab announced the design for a case-like attachment to monitor an iPhone, alerting the owner when its radio transmitters are operating suspiciously, whether hijacked by hackers, the government, or Apple. 

== Philosophers at work? ==

 Cory Doctorow advocates two core tenets to take up in the fight for a non-Orwellian cyber-tomorrow:

1.   Computers should be designed to obey their owners. When devices receive conflicting commands from both a manufacturer and an owner, the owner’s desire must always win.

2.   True facts about computer security should always be legal to disclose.

Though his meta rule is -- Don’t give in to nihilism (it’s all hopeless) or denialism.  I, too, have been fighting these for ages. He and I disagree in many areas of tactics and over the plausibility of encryption as a cure-all. (It can be useful, short-term, and it will cure absolutely nothing, over the log run), but I approve of his vigor and passion in the world.  Nevertheless, I’d add a third core tenet:

3.  If your computer systems have been taken over by a botnet, and you did not take reasonable efforts to ensure that you are not a source of infection to others, then you share legal liability for the actions of the controllers of the botnet.  Now that’s gonna be less popular sounding!  Because it says, “You don’t just have rights, you have responsibilities.

Okay this is bizarre.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has handed down a very worrisome decision on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Facebook v. Vachani. According to one online pundit, it says that if you tell people not to visit your website, and they do it anyway knowing you disapprove, they’re committing a federal crime of accessing your computer without authorization. But I am not sweating this.  Common accepted values will triumph.  

Scout quoted my colleague Eliot Peper, citing my friend and Wired founder Kevin Kelly's new book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future about an interesting suggestion to deal with a modern problem. Humans are very tribal and we do not like the cognitive dissonance of actually thinking about intelligently different points of view. 

In olden times, it was easy to dismiss and drown out those differing perspectives. Keep to your own kind! Drive that other church out of town! Attend Nuremberg rallies. Today, though? A million diverse viewpoints surround you, with eloquent advocates eager to offer you discomforting evidence that might threaten to rock your comfortable convictions? Maybe make you realize you're only 60% right!

What's a true-believer tribalist to do?

Well, it turns out  there are lots of ways to filter out dissonance and drown out disagreement, by wallowing in the online equivalent of Nuremberg rallies. Human nature makes this inevitable. In my 1989 novel EARTH I forecast crude versions of 21st Century echo-chamber social media. Kevin Kelly now calls for hacking the for newsfeed and other social networks... adding a dedicated algorithm that occasionally drops in content that challenges your preconceptions or predilections. By coincidence, this is exactly what I portrayed happening in EARTH, when hackers break through citizens' protective preference walls to show them information outside their habitual comfort zones. 

This interesting article suggests an easy to activate “emergency” button or App on smartphones that would unleash your GPS, your emergency contact and a number of other functions without having to focus on details. “Among current phone makers, Samsung is the only one to implement anything like a comprehensive emergency setting on their S5-and-later flagship phones. If you set up this feature beforehand, pressing the power button three times quickly sends an “SOS message” with your location, a photo taken with the front and rear cameras, and 3 seconds of audio to 3 emergency contacts.”  It’s a start. Our phones will become so sophisticated that the “phone” aspect will be an add-on.

Oh, heck, while I'm at it... that novel also portrayed “Tru-Vu Goggles” that gave folks VR and AR overlays while they were out and about -- and citizens using their AR cams to hold authorities accountable. That element disqualified Earth -- for all its tech-wow prognostication -- from acceptance in the community of cynical cyberpunk, whose core premise, preached relentlessly, is that "my fellow citizens are sheep."  

And for that reason the novel is never cited by the with-it, cynical crowd.  Ah well.