The Future of Free Speech - and Privacy

In an era when we have "weaponized narrative" and open warfare against every single knowledge or fact-based profession, my role as "Mr. Transparency" has mutated into fighting for the very concept of objective reality. And hence a break from our usual topics - science, science fiction and politice.

The Future of Free Speech: Trolls, Anonymity and Fake News Online: Pew released a report on social media and negative political trends with quoted bits from (among others) Brad Templeton and me. 

Yet, another Pew report  - The Future of Free Speech Looks Grim - dismally wrings its hands and declares there will never be a solution to the plague of trolls infesting the Internet. But you know me.  I find cynical gloom to be the surest sign of dullard minds.

How has awful human behavior been mitigated in the past? This report utterly ignores the lessons of 4000 years of human history, that the deterrent to abusive behavior is accountability. And sure, accountability that is pounded onto people from above -- by priests and kings -- became tyranny. Probably 99% of our ancestors suffered under either chaos - beset by bullies  around them - or else feudalism - repressed by king-lord-priest-bullies from above. But eventually we found -- (or stumbled into) -- a better way. Making accountability reciprocal so that it shines on everyone, including the mighty. 

In The Transparent Society - and in novels like Earth - I talk about how light is the great cleansing agent. Almost all harmful people - from industrial moguls to criminals to terrorists to trolls - are fatally allergic to it. On the first order, our solution is attributability, ending the cover of anonymity.

Oh, but there are second order effects. Much of the internet's charm and effectiveness comes from our ability to post or say some things safe from "being known as a dog." Must we lose that, in order to have accountability?

There are ways to get both... to have our cake and eat it, too. E.g. via mediated pseudonymity. But these solutions must start with rejecting the dour doomcasting of articles like this one.

== Spy fetishism... and a solution ==

Say hello to the camera; goodbye to privacy: A cogent article in the San Diego Union Tribune explores how Americans' compulsion to share everything online - especially video - collides with our concerns about privacy. I was interviewed for this piece, which features glimpses into our transparency-related anthology, Chasing Shadows. My co-editor of the anthology, Dr. Stephen Potts, and I were on radio (KPBS) discussing the book.... and the problem.

And you didn’t expect this? As if I haven’t warned you for night on 30 years? A hidden spy camera in an innocuous looking AC to USB wall charger plug.

And yet....   Founded by one of the fathers of the Internet, Vint Cerf, and MeiLin Fung, one of the pioneers of CRM software, People Centered Internet aims to assure that the Internet, and the data it creates, deliver economic, social and political empowerment, and permission-less innovation, for all humanity.  Envision a world where everyone is connected, and those connections, enriched by dialog and data, empower humanity’s thriving.

== Hazards & Worries ==

Charles Stross is a brilliant science fiction author, who also runs a cogent blog. Charlie combines these roles in a posting  that could make you laugh and cry at the same time. It takes the form of a rejection letter that he (supposedly) received for a novel proposal based upon the recent “WannaCry” ransomware exploit. The reviewer dismisses as implausible every single step along the path of this insanely hard-to-credit tale, from the NSA carelessly losing hold of its most precious tools, to the stunningly bizarre way that the thing mostly-ended, with the apparent discovery of a strangely unlikely deus ex machina off-switch.  And yes, life can be stranger than fiction!

What Charlie doesn’t mention is that those two cappers, the beginning and the ending ones, might have been intentional, all along. That opens up a whole 'nother realm of layers to the “real plot” of the story. Just sayin…

Still, have a look at this amazing way the WannaCrypt malware got substantially stopped by one white-hat fellow. An amazing tale and a prime example of why the default method for dealing with information age problems can only be transparency.

Meanwhile...

Facial recognition has progressed to a point where "dysmorphology" - the diagnosis of rare diseases - can be accomplished (initially) by computer analysis of a child's or adult's features.  This could be a valuable addition to the tools that were pioneered in the Tricorder XPrize contest, enabling quicker diagnosis and care in the field.  

Of course, it also raises chilling awareness of how far facial recog tech has come... and how utterly useless will be any vain efforts to ban or restrict the technology.  Especially when it becomes capable of some degree of lie detection.  These tools will either be monopolized by elites (leading to Big Brother forever) or else used by all of us to hold accountable lying politicians and so on (Big Brother never.)  You decide.

Tools to fake news: Reported on CRACKED… which is not The Onion, but should still be treated warily… “In November, Adobe demonstrated an experimental project they've been toying with called Voco. Voco allows you to "Photoshop" speech, changing what the speaker said to whatever you care to type. Based on a 20-minute sample of me speaking, someone could fabricate a pretty damn convincing facsimile of me saying, "I hate children" or "Earth should have a self-destruct button" or maybe even things I've never said.”  Oh, but if this is fake news it's cheap stuff, based on what we'll have next year. Or the next.

In chapter One of The Transparent Society, I talk about “The End of Photography as Proof of Anything at All: With sophisticated image processing, we may never again be able to rely on photos or videos as perfect evidence, but this may not be as calamitous as some fear.”  

This is just more of the same. No method other than openness and transparency can possibly solve it.

== Reality TV with a better than average premise ==

 Contestants try to drop out and hide, as if being hunted… and they are!  By retired or profession cops and such, on HUNTED. Of course science fiction has been there.

While I find so-called “security expert” Bruce Schneier vastly overrated, and often flat-out wrong, I will gladly avow when he says something wise. In this article, he criticizes the way that market forces and laziness and cheapness have combined to make our rising Internet of Things horribly susceptible to hacking, botnets and such: “Regulation might be a dirty word in today’s political climate, but security is the exception to our small-government bias. And as the threats posed by computers become greater and more catastrophic, regulation will be inevitable. So now’s the time to start thinking about it. We also need to reverse the trend to connect everything to the internet. And if we risk harm and even death, we need to think twice about what we connect and what we deliberately leave uncomputerized.”  

Alas, as usual, Schneier is very good at raising scary alarums… and stunningly vague in his recommendations.  Which basically amount to “get government to solve it!”  Riiiight. 

Encryption based security systems fail almost weekly, but this is a big one. A clever new way that hackers take over whole systems. “A rash of invisible, fileless malware is infecting banks around the globe.”

== Threats to Democracy ==

Daniel Dennett used to at least contribute value to the conversation, but that was years ago. This time (oh go read it!) -- Fake News Isn't the Greatest Threat to Democracy. Total Transparency Is -- his chain of assertions - any one of which is diametrically opposite to true - shows that the fellow's truly gone bonkers.  

Take this paragraph.: "Staying afloat in today’s flood of information means understanding the subtle relationship between transparency and trust. And it is not what you might think ― the more transparency, the more trust.The reality is the opposite: when everything is exposed, all information is equal, and equally useless. When no one knows things that others don’t know, and there are no institutions or practices that can establish and preserve credibility ― as is threatened today with the new dominance of peer-driven social media ― then there is no solid ground for a democratic discourse."

What a towering loony! Each and every assertion is patently false, and I mean every one! We already live in a largely transparent world, compared to our ancestors, and we have developed many systems for separating wheat from chaff, pearls from swill. In fact the whole "fake news" phenomenon and the deliberate lobotomization of the American Right depends utterly upon sabotaging all those systems. Systems that let us grant credibility to the credible and subtract is from the wrong or wrongheaded.

Fox-ism and Trumpism are part of a deliberate putsch to undermine the greatest tools humanity ever had, and the fact-using professions who wield them.  And those fact-professions -- from science, teaching and journalism to entrepreneurs and civil servants -- depend utterly on open flows of information.

Now as de-facto "Mr. Transparency" you might think I decry all secrecy, but that would be dumb. In The Transparent Society I repeatedly show that the few secrets that governments, businesses and private individuals really need - including privacy in the home and intimacy with loved ones - are far better protected if we live in a generally open world, wherein the skulks and voyeurs and spies and peeping toms are better caught! And where we can relax about abuse of power because the mighty face more light than the rest of us. 

Even when members of the Protector Caste are engaged in legitimate secrecy, there are ways to supervise and ensure that it stays legit.

Again and again, Dennett ignores the plain fact that we achieved almost all our modern miracles, including science, freedom, accountability and a cornucopia of wealth, because we are already more than halfway toward a transparent society, compared to every single other culture or tribe that ever existed.  He blathers that accountability and gradation of information is impossible, while ungratefully ignoring how much he has always depended on exactly those things, fostered and amplified by light.

Okay, I accept the sermon that he (unintentionally) preaches. That people who were right in the past won't always be. And pomposity is one of the warning signs.  So go to a mirror and tell that guy!  It's what I am about to stand up and do.

===========

Political addendum:

Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to help the legal case against the outrageously treasonous cheat called gerrymandering. He’s teamed up with Common Cause to help Crowdfund legal fees for the court case, and he’s matching every donation!  

Among all the fervid money and action calls out there, I can think of few as important as this one. Other than recruiting women ("She Should Run"), scientists (314.org) and retired officers to run, this is the biggie. If Alito and Roberts weasel out of this decision, then we'll know that they aren't Americans, anymore.