This blog is taking a short hiatus to concentrate on other publications and assorted duties and obligations. Should be back online in August.

Here’s some of the things that we found interesting recently.

The Agency – Russian military strength, diplomacy, and modern culture is apparently all just 4chan now.

Broadband for the Poor – FCC still fighting the “digital divide” battles of the 1990’s

Sharing Data, but not happily – People don’t like the tradeoffs that they feel the must make in order to live in the digital age

Tech Boom Aimed at the Few – It isn’t the consumers we should be worried about, it’s the builders

The Cardinals Hack the Astros – Hacking?! There’s no hacking in baseball!

This isn’t directly related to technology, law and policy (well, not to technology anyway), but here’s my article, “The Catholic Case for Campaign Finance Reform,” recently published in America magazine.

In the article, I make a moral case for the reform of campaign finance and the related issue of how influence accrues in Congress. I think that reformers in the area make a lot of technical claims, but we need to address why the current system is wrong, morally and effectively, in order to get people interested.

My original title, reproduced above, was a play on 1 Corinthians 13, but I think the new one makes a broader statement, even if it lacks humor.

RadioShack, as many well know, finally declared bankruptcy this year. This is likely to finally give economists peace of mind, since the continued existence of the Shack had many questioning their own devotion to the tenets of the dismal science.

One interesting fact has come out of the bankruptcy proceedings – RadioShack customer’s private data may very well be one of the companies most significant assets.

Brief primer on bankruptcy: when a company can no longer pay its debts, it can seek protection from creditors from the federal judiciary. There are a number of ways to declare bankruptcy, but RadioShack chose Chapter 11, which doesn’t automatically lead to liquidation (that’s Chapter 7), but the reorganization can lead to something that looks a lot like liquidation anyway. And that’s what’s happening here. Amazon is likely to buy some of RadioShack, as are the major cell phone carriers.

In order for this process to work, however, a company going through the bankruptcy must lay all its assets on the table, open its books. Here, RadioShack has listed all the information it has on its past customers as an asset. Your personal information has, for a long time, been the implicitly valuable thing underlying the business model of almost every Internet company. Only here, that open secret has been rewritten explicitly.

And that is why this asset has drawn an objection, but not an objection that this personal data belongs to the consumers. Rather, Apple is objecting that the consumer information that RadioShack collected when it sold Apple products belongs to Apple and should not be considered an asset in this bankruptcy. Apple sees the value of this information and wants it.

As usual, Apple and companies like it have armies of lawyers looking out for their own interests. And, again as usual, consumers simply don’t. This is far from the first time that personal data has left the control of the person and it won’t be the last. Get used to being seen as an asset in someone else’s business.

Dale Lately has a though-provoking article in Slate today about how Facebook is trying to colonize social networking around the world within its own network while new start-ups abound that attempt to deliver anonymous or un-censorable communication among their users. What’s interesting is not so much the competition between communications tools that the article describes, but rather the vital, yet unasked, question of what we should expect from the creators and owners of these tool when they lock us into their digital platform.

These a theme running through this piece that we’re about to observe a ‘battle of the networks’ in which people start taking sides in choosing Facebook’s ubiquity versus Snapchat’s promise of ephemeral messaging versus Whisper’s anonymity. This action is the next wave of competition for your time and social ties, the article reasons.

That may very well be true, but the interesting thing that isn’t fully fleshed-out there is the fact that, while Facebook is the most overt of the builders, these are all just walled gardens (except for the mesh networks). If Lately’s version of competition is what’s in store, it is not communication over the public Internet, as we’ve had until now, but rather separate communications over separate networks, which do not communicate with each other, that we’re likely to experience in the near future.

This may erode the Westphalian geography of the world, at least with respect to these digital platforms, this new version of communication erects new, nigh insurmountable borders between types of communicators. If Lately is right, it will be as if, in the mid 20th century, the U.S. only used the telephone, Canada only the telegraph, and Mexico only fax machines – there’d be no way to communicate with anyone except your co-nationalists, with all the ensuing problems one could imagine.

The problem is best illustrated by an anecdote – while at Harvard, I took a class with Jonathan Zittrain and Larry Lessig on Digital Platforms. We were discussing IOS (a strongly walled garden) versus Android, where you could still side-load apps (install applications from somewhere other than the Google Play store). JZ mentioned, almost offhand, that if it led to more vulnerabilities for users, one day Google would likely shut down side-loading, “for our own good.”

And that gives rise to the question we need to ask about all these walled gardens: who decides what’s “for our own good” and how? Without very clear answers to those question, and virtually no one is clear about it now, we should be deeply suspicious of this turn in networking. At the very least, if we are to carve up the formerly borderless Internet, we should be clear about why we’re doing it and who this fragmentation serves.

Verizon announced that it is buying AOL today. I hope, for the good of the world economy that it works out better than when Time Warner bought AOL for $165 billion, but there is a history to that albatross.

More importantly, there’s a history to Verizon’s interactions with the media.

We who rely on tech journalism should be worried about the sale of the parent company of sites like Engadget and TechCrunch to a firm that has shown no compunction about censoring media reports in the past. These are popular and widely-read sites even by non-tech-elites and that is why this is problem. There will always be information out there to the savvy, but AOL’s sites were seen by a wide variety of people who might not have cared about some of these issues had they not appeared in a place like Engadget or even HuffingtonPost (which may actually be spun off now). As journalism gets more and more fragmented, we need places that bridge the gaps between interests groups to be as neutral, or at least as transparent, as possible. This purchase puts some of that transparency and neutrality into question.

We should also be wary of Verizon’s past with regard to media in general, and its complicity with privacy-eradicating government agencies.

Likely stories to cease appearing on AOL’s sites:

Net Neutrality
Privacy and “Perma–Cookies”
The Mobile Web (except for ads touting 4G(!))
State-Corporation collusion and invasions of privacy
The Negative side of Big Data

And potentially more as Verizon finds other things that are best kept secret for the business model to thrive.

ACLU v. Clapper took a long time to get to the right answer. And that’s OK.

It’s not really a surprise that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in NY would find that the NSA cannot legitimately use the shield of the Patriot Act to cover its continuous and pervasive data collection. Neither should it be a surprise that it took so long to get here. The courts, after all, are not the speedy actors of our system, in fact, the alacrity of the judiciary is really in third place, close behind the legislature and far behind the executive.

That being said, it seems that the pendulum, pushed wildly out of place by the events of September 11, 2001 and continually propelled by our fear of unknown technology, is starting its slow swing back toward something like a normal state where privacy and dissent are able to push against authoritative overreach. Part of this is because public opinion is slow, legislation is slow, and, as we said above, the courts. who are supposed to weigh our values against our actions, are slow.

In its own attempt to weigh those values, the Second Circuit reaches back to the Church Committee as its intellectual forebearer – because this is the last time that we had to bring secretive intelligence agencies back under control.  Now, same as then, we are not willing to trade off values. We are not willing to trade values like privacy or liberty for vague promises of security (put aside the fact that we haven’t seen evidence that the NSA’s activities enhance our security). To do otherwise would be to create a Ship of Theseus problem with our republic – keep replacing values and when does it become something wholly different from the country we though we knew and that we’ve struggled for generations to perfect?

After almost 15 years, we’ve come to the point where we can definitively say that the trade the NSA is offering is a bad trade and we reject it. And this is all to the good.

[this is one of a series of posts that I did while a student in Nicco Mele‘s class at Harvard in 2013]

Techno-Utopians exist because new technology almost always brings the promise of a new, hopefully better world. This is especially true of the disruptive technologies of the Internet, which seem to hold the opportunity to disrupt rapidly calcifying class structures throughout the world.

But why haven’t Internet technologies had more of a leveling effect? Are they really so different from everything that’s come before when it has become clear that the elites have co-opted largest share of technological gains to support their own position. Sure, there has been a shuffling of the elites with nerds-from-privileged-backgrounds rising and the standard bankers, dictators, and CEOs forced to make room. If all the Internet has done is allow the children of millionaires to become billionaires, there’s a lot more it can do to change society.

Part of the problem, the thing that turns our utopia into a potential distopia, is that traditional elites have been, by far, better positioned to take advantage of the new technologies than the people at the bottom of the social ladder – and these vested interests have used those technologies, not to level the playing field, but to shore up their own positions. The Internet held the promise of allowing people, regardless of class, to take control of their own destinies by forming new and strong networks to help them advance their own interests. It is fundamentally important to ask why that hasn’t happened yet (if it hasn’t), whether it can, and if so, how.

[this is one of a series of posts that I did while a student in Nicco Mele‘s class at Harvard in 2013]

What’d I read?

This week’s readings dealt with the disruptive impact of Internet technology on mainstream journalism, mostly newspapers.

First up, Nicco Mele’s The End of Big describes how the era of big newspaper conglomerates is essentially over. The problem, this chapter points out, is that professional, watchdog-style journalism is vitally important to accountability within our self-governing republic. Luckily, Mele describes several potential models for the future of professional journalism. [Full Disclosure: the author of this book is going to grade this blog post]

“Readings from News Execs” by Dave Winer makes the case that the people running large newspapers don’t understand how the internet will affect their business models. His metaphor of the cardboard box is very useful: if the box is the editorial structure and its filled with news, the execs think they can simply take that box and move it from the print space to the internet space, but that’s not going to work for many of the reasons the other articles in this section flesh out.

Patricia Gray’s article “Owner Mark Cuban Trades Stocks on Sharesleuth’s Findings Before They’re Published” in Wired fleshes out one alternative journalism model in which very wealthy special interests finances the kind of journalism that interests him. This is exactly the type of journalism we need to be done, but it raises serious questions about the motives of the parties involved.

Our friend Clay Shirky’s blog post on “Newspapers and the Unthinkable” is, like the Winer piece, an interesting description of newspapers’ “forward thinking” as really just attempts to preserve current business model. His framing shift is an important one – we shouldn’t worry about saving newspapers, rather about saving journalism and saving society. The business model can go, we need that content, though.

Peter Daou’s article introduces the notion of the Triangle, an interesting take on the relationship between internet journalists and “the old guard” of MSM and establishment figures. Daou convincingly argues that, in order to spread one’s message, political figures need to establish a triangular alliance, a unifying blogs, traditional media, and the political establishment.

Finally, Dean Starkman’s “Confidence Game” attempts to counter the Shirky-style future-of-news (FON) consensus by spelling out the important societal role of professional journalism. The article functions as an apologia for institutions like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Was it any good?

Mele’s point that professional journalism is complicit in it’s own downfall is an especially powerful one. The average mainstream newspaper in the run up to the 2003 Iraq War and the 2008 Financial Crisis certainly “abdicat[ed] its traditional duties as objective, impartial newsgathering organization[].” Just as striking is the recurring theme of the vital importance of professional journalism in ensure that the people can hold their government accountable. It’s therefore a great relief that the chapter ends on a hopeful note, describing potential methods of protecting professional journalism while the newspaper business as we know it slowly collapses.

I wish Clay Shirky had answered the burning question of why someone would want to pirate Dave Barry’s columns. That being said, he did a  better job than Winer did of describing why newspaper owners’ opinions are so retrograde. His (and Mele’s) contention that print journalists’ work is used by everyone and is important is a valid one, while the related notion that “‘[y]ou’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!’ has never been much of a business model” puts the entire downfall of the newspaper industry, which supports such an important societal function, into context.

The Triangle article is great, but it fails to predict (and really, it should’ve) that the battle for Bush’s legacy does not end with him leaving office. In a world where there are so many voices so willing to keep harping on a theme, this is impossible. Things that used to be considered givens are now up for grabs again. So legacy is really a constant battle of revision in which the triangular alliance one has established to make policy or political headway has to be constantly stoked to defend the history you’ve made, apparently forever.

I actually agree with Starkman’s point (if you can find it) that journalists should be empowered and that good journalism involves knowing the issue you’re covering (borrowed from Rosen). That being said, his style is so snarky and off-putting, his straw men so obvious, and his conspiracy theory (that Jarvis and Shirky are out to get him and professional journalists) so weird that I wouldn’t blame anyone for stopping after section two.

So?

In another class, we’re discussing the importance of framing as a way of getting issues in front of the global community. In a nutshell, framing is a concept taken from cognitive psychology: we see the world through “frames” which are points of view loaded with moral and ethical constructs reaching deep into our basic ideas about how the world is meant to work. I think these articles set up an interesting framing question.

If we frame professional journalism as a business model, then, as good capitalists, we can rejoice in its downfall as transactions costs plunge and amateur journalists eat the professionals’ lunch. This, I think, is Starkman’s problem. He’s defending for-profit institutions by claiming public good. I think that its quite a stretch to say that the only way to ensure the public good of journalism is by continuing a clearly inefficient, monopolistic business model.

If, on the other hand, we look through the Shirky/Mele frame – which I think is generally right – then professional journalism should be nurtured as a public good. The newspaper industry as we know it is welcome to fail, but journalism itself must be preserved. The problem then becomes ensuring that the new versions of journalism are trustworthy. Like so many things relating to the Internet, the answer is to encourage diversity and transparency. Corporate or wealthy interests may well bankroll some of the new journalists, but as long as the reader is sufficiently apprised of the conflicts he or she can consider the validity of his or her source. Diversity is then important to ensure that everyone has a plethora unbiased (or at least differently biased) news sources to read.