Category Archives: Talks & Conferences

Today's plan:

Don't like those prop planes….

I'm delighted to report that my proposal for a panel on “'The Transparent Society' — Ten Years Later” has been accepted for CFP'08, thanks no doubt to the sterling panelists I was able to assemble. Our panel is now scheduled to take place on Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 3:30-5:00(PM) in the George room at the Omni Hotel in New Haven.

Computers, Freedom and Privacy is the most fun conference I go to; the program can be variable, I admit, but the hallway conversations are always fantastic. Come – it's fun.

Here's the panel description:

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of David Brin's controversial book, “The Transparent Society”. The book argues that in the face of the explosion of sensors, cheap storage, and cheap data processing we should adopt strategies of vision over concealment. A world in which not just transactional information, but essentially all information about us will be collected, stored, and sorted is, Brin says, inevitable. The only issue left to be decided is who will have access to this information; he argues that freedom, and even some privacy, are more likely to flourish if everybody – not just elites – has access to this flood of data.

Brin proposes a stark choice: either the information will be “secret” and “private”—in which case only governments, always potentially repressive, will have access. Or, the information will be “open” and “public” and we will all be transparent to each other. Given this choice, Brin argues, better to be naked to each other than to empower a few with unique access to information about the many. The attempt to protect privacy as we know it carries too great a risk, as it leads if not inevitably than at least all too easily to a world of enormous information-driven tyranny in which the powers — primarily governments — with access to our 'private' information will abuse it. In contrast, a high-transparency world with very little privacy is one in which citizens have tools that allow them to monitor their governments.

Brin proposed a paradox which infuriated a good segment of the privacy community. It is normally an article of faith for privacy advocates that privacy empowers, and the removal of privacy is at least disempowering and at worst oppressive. Brin counters that privacy advocates have it exactly backwards: trying to maintain traditional ideas of information privacy in the face of technological changes he sees as (now) inevitable is what will disempower and perhaps oppress; only a program of radical information openness, nakedness even, stands a chance of leveling a playing field on which information is truly power.

The reception of “The Transparent Society” reflected the audacity of its claims. Some dismissed it; some attacked it; a few embraced it. What is striking, however, is that the ideas have had staying power: the book remains in print, it is regularly footnoted, and it comes up in discussion. Right or wrong, “The Transparent Society” has become more than a polar case trotted out as a good or bad example, but an as-yet unproved but also un-falsified challenge to how we think about privacy — one that demands continuing reflection (or, some would say, refutation).

The tenth anniversary of publication is an appropriate time to do that reflection at CFP.

About the presenters:

David Brin (remote participation)

David Brin is the author of “The Transparent Society,” the inspiration for this panel. He is a noted futurist and science fiction writer.

Alan Davidson

Alan is the head of Google's Washington, DC, government affairs office. Previously he was Associate Director of the Center for Democracy & Technology. Alan is a frequent speaker and presence in national privacy debates, and a frequent CFP participant.

J. Bradford DeLong

Professor of Economics, University of California at Berkely

In addition to his work as a macro and economic historian, Brad has written extensively about the economics of information and the Internet. He runs a very popular economics and culture blog, “Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Economist Brad DeLong's Fair, Balanced, and Reality-Based Semi-Daily Journal” at http://delong.typepad.com/. Brad served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy in the Clinton administration, 1993-95. He is also a founder-member of the Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill.

A. Michael Froomkin (Moderator)

Professor of Law, University of Miami

Michael has been writing about privacy, encryption, and anonymity for almost fifteen years. His writings include “The Death of Privacy?”, 52 Stan L. Rev. 1461 (2000). He is a founder-editor of ICANNWatch, and serves on the Editorial Board of Information, Communication & Society and of I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society. He is on the Advisory Boards of several organizations including the Electronic Freedom Foundation and BNA Electronic Information Policy & Law Report. He is a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. He is also active in several technology related projects in the greater Miami area.

Stephanie Perrin

Stephanie is the Acting Director General of Risk Management, Integrity Branch, Service Canada. She is the former Director of Research and Policy at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, and was prior to this a consultant in privacy and information policy issues, president of her own company Digital Discretion Inc., and a Senior Fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Centre in Washington.

She is the former Chief Privacy Officer of Zero-Knowledge, and has been active in a number of CPO associations, working with those responsible for implementing privacy in their organizations. Formerly the Director of Privacy Policy for Industry Canada's Electronic Commerce Task Force, she led the legislative initiative at Industry Canada that resulted in the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, privacy legislation that came into force in 2001 and has set the standard for private sector compliance. She is the principal author of a text on the Act, published by Irwin Law.

Zephyr Teachout

Visiting Asst. Prof. of Law, Duke University

Zephyr is one of the leading practitioners and theoreticians of online political organizing. She directed Internet organizing for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign.

Zephyr is noted for advocating the Internet as a tool for creating local offline groups. publications include “Mousepads, Shoeleather and Hope: Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics”(Editor) (forthcoming August 2007, Paradigm Publishers); “How Politicians can use Distributive Networks” (New Assignment, November 2006); “Youtube? It's so Yesterday,” (with Tim Wu) (Washington Post, November 2006), and “Powering Up Internet Campaigns,” book chapter in Lets Get This Party Started (Rowan and Littlefield, 2005.) She is currently writing about the meaning of corruption in the American constitutional tradition.

“Content may be King, but the customer is G-d.” (From the Sarnoff & Weiss panel)

“The revolution may not be televised, but it will be uploaded” (Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., CEO, Hip Hop Caucus at the “Power To Change The World ” panel)

“I'm just old enough to remember what it was like before the internet” (audience member)

“The title of this panel is a tough one for anyone from the mainstream media to sit on” Jim Brady, panelist (“the power to change the world”)

“Show me a health IT guy, and I’ll show you a guy who’s sitting in the second string.” (Don Jones, Qualcomm, quoting a friend stating what he says everyone believes)

“News doesn't break—it oozes.” Amy Garhan, Content Strategist and Independent Journalist

This session was, for me, the most interesting thing so far. I'm afraid the following is only some of it. The chair starts with what he calls a “party trick”: he types “power outage” into Google Search … and the first item is from the Boston Globe. Why, he asks, Boston? (Note that he used regular search, not “news” search — which, he says, is what Joe Average would do. Search, he concludes, has room for improvement. The speakers are all people working achieve that.

The first speaker, Mary Hodder, Founder, Dabble, gave a very good case for the use of microformats, an approach to organizing stuff that was new to me and seems, at first blush, to be really really sensible. Old-style standards approaches just don't scale to the magnitude of the task.

Fabrice Florin, Executive Director, NewsTrust, talked about trying to do better things with metadata, which might even involve metadata about metadata to provide metrics of trust and authoritativeness. It sounds hard. But it clearly sang to session chairman Jim Kennedy, VP Strategy, The Associated Press, which was an interesting datum.

Josh Cohen, Director, Business Development, Google News, talked — surprise — about the problem of scale. Classic publishers, he noted, are a tiny fraction of the content online. So a trust metric optimized for helping consumers navigate publishers may not scale for Google News, which he says now has 20 different languages and 40 different editions. Google's approach has to algorithmic, but all of these types of data could be used by an algorithm. [Although personally, I be very surprised to see Google relying on any 3rd party tags or metadata.]

Hodder notes that many people use the a Yahoo standard, Media RSS (MRSS) which they pioneered and open-sourced for tagging video content — but there are many varied (confusing) uses of it.

Kennedy asks how we tag without falling prey to the gaming of the system that killed metadata 1.0. Florin says, reasonably, make it visible to users. And attribute the source of the metadata. Hodder says, yes, but that's really hard to keep track of — how do you cross-check to find out what

Florin jokes that all we need is distinguished names (he doesn't call it that, but that's what he means). I start flashing back to the early days of digital signature discussions in the mid-90s…. Bob Jueneman, call your office …

Question from the audience suggests Everything2 is a better model – it self-polices.

(Meanwhile, in the background, it sounds as if the heavens have opened up and it's pouring. )

Hodder says she worries about relying on systems like Digg, because they are too easy to game.

Reuters person in audience asks about business models to pay for all this. Google's Cohen suggests that if replies to search are more relevant, higher quality, then they are more valuable.

Why doesn't Google announce a standard? Because it's not clear people would follow it [and, I'd add, there's the gaming issue]. Yahoo is having a meeting in two months regarding news and technology — an open-space style meeting — might that be an occasion for building out the MRSS spec to go to more news?

I’m not going to liveblog the WeMedia conference – they’re doing a fine job of that on their blog. Instead I’ll free associate a bit. Forgive any snark – I’m not going to have much time to edit myself.

There’s an evangelical aspect to this event which seems strange to me: the first speakers seem to think that they need to convince the audience of things that the communities I hang with pretty much take for granted: everything is digital, information communities are localizing, the Internet enables individuals as news creators, gatherers, organizers and sharers. Trust matters. I suppose that the reduced relative power of big centralized media may be a bitter pill for some of the old media moguls, but surely they have to have faced it by now? Then again, there’s lots of grey hair in the room. I often feel like Methuselah at tech events – here I’m middle of the pack, if that.

More encouraging is the next question – “what’s next?” But they don’t answer it.

They tell us content isn’t the only king– access matters too. [For a contrary view, see “context is king”.]

One thing that’s very noticeable: they sure have more beautiful slides with better transitions than the geeks do; and much better than the lawyers; but the pretty slides don’t actually say much.

OK, here’s some data: 2/3 of Americans think journalism is out of touch; 2/3 are dissatisfied with quality of journalism in their communities; 48% say the Internet is their primary source of news and information.

Conclusion: “The digital age is here”. I had guessed that.

Next Session: “Print is Dead”

One of the speakers is Jeff Gomez, who wrote a book called “Print is Dead”. It sold well. He has an interesting-looking blog. He’s engaging, but again, I’m not sure where I’d find the news hook if I were covering this.

If newspapers are dead, who killed them? I say it was suicide: they took a dive on the war and just about every other difficult issue in the last six years. Media consolidation destroyed competition and made them dull and complacent – no more newspaper wars or even am/pm rivalries. Meanwhile TV (sometimes cross-owned by conglomerates that owned the paper) gave us years of “a white woman is missing” and dumb trials. No wonder people don’t take them seriously. (Cf. Yesterday's News Tomorrow (Literally))

Interestingly, the guy behind me – an old media honcho with a law degree – is doing his work. I asked him what he thought of the speakers, and he says he’s heard it all before. (“Listening to Lazarus” he says.) I suspect the audience is ahead of the presenters. In fact, I suspect the presenters know a lot more than they let on.

I should note that, so far, the next session, “Print reincarnated” (Richard Sarnoff & Willam C. Weiss) has a lot more interesting content about things that print media are doing to tie in to new media and make the two work together — from my perspective it's lots of smart small stuff, though, as much as any one big idea beyond “connect”. Perversely, the value of this session means there's a good chance I won't write as much about it, because I'm too busy listening. Random fact: they don't have slides.