Camille's Notebook

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[MozFest - Keynote] Freedom in our Information Society

On Oct. 26th, I gave a keynote at the 2013 edition of Mozilla Festival, in London - Mark Surman, Mozilla's wonderful Executive Director, had invited me to talk about Privacy. 

The video is available here, and my preparatory notes for the keynotes are there:

FREEDOM IN THE INFORMATION SOCIETY, AND THE CHALLENGES WE FACE

DIGITAL NATIVES, DIGITAL IGNORANTS

It's always great to hear Internet pioneers talk about the web they initially built, and how it evolved. I can't do that. I'm not an Internet pioneer. I'm more part of this generation that has been labelled "Digital Natives". It's an odd situation to be in, notably because two things are often said about digital natives:

1 - It's a generation of people who grew up with the Web - the assumption that comes with this is: they must know how it works.

2 - The Web for them is some sort of very stable environment - it has always been there for them, they will always be able to count on it. For younger people today it's even more so - the Web now relates to their first girlfriend, and also they've probably never done homework without the Web.

So it is true that I am part of one of the first generations to truly live in the Web. I think of the amount of personal information that has transited there - all my emails, my searches, and all of the things I rely on the Web for.

The rest though, the two assumptions, is bullshit.

The whole "Digital Natives must know how it works" thing is an illusion - the Web comes more and more pre-packaged and people see less and less incentives to look inside the box. That's not good. That's the path towards being increasingly dependent of mechanisms we don't understand. That's not the path towards freedom. That's one of the many reasons why I admire the Mozillians' constant efforts to open the box, and show how the Web works to enable people to keep on building it.

The whole "The Web has and will always be there for you as it is" thing doesn't make much sense either. It changes too much. It evolves too much. For most people, today's Web has little in common with what Tim Berners Lee built in the 90's, and even has little in common with what it looked like 5 years ago - it's what Anil Dash was describing this morning with the idea of "The Web we lost".

To talk about this Web that has been lost, I would like us to read some 1996 political poetry. In 1996, John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the grateful dead and co-founder of the EFF, was writing "The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace". It's a beautiful text opposing the users to the States and to Industry's giants, and it goes: "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not

welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather." And then Barlow goes: "I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear."

How does this text feels like today? The least we can say is "optimistic", "hopeful", and "not exactly accurate". Today, "Cyberspace" does look more like a power struggle, that very much so implies both the States and the Industry. Somehow, we can understand why, as it's also not the same "Cyberspace". Today on the Web there is more to protect, more to steal, more to sell - more at stake.

A GLIMPSE AT THE PRESENT

Sometimes, we wish we could get a glimpse at the future to see how that power struggle is going to play out. A couple months ago, in June, when Edward Snowden leaked the NSA documents, we got better than a glimpse at the future. We got a glimpse at the present. So what did we see?

We saw a Web in which the power was very, very centralized. We see that people are handling more and more of their online lives to less and less actors.

To illustrate that, let's play a little mind game together. If we manage to make a sentence that only refers to three actors and that dramatically affects billions of citizens and create a global crisis, then we can say we have an over centralization problem. So how about: "The NSA has been collecting and storing quite a lot of data from Google and Facebook"?

The other thing we saw is that the legal framework supposed to set the democratic boundaries to the collection and analysis of all this data - for instance the law that gave the US Government an obligation to justify the means it employed in that domain - was formulated in very broad terms - and was secretly interpreted. That seemed to have create quite a bit of confusion.

Of course, we don't see a malicious intent behind these programs. But is this a reason not to worry? Of course not. This has never been a democratic criteria - we don't judge by intent only, we care about the means.

Our plan cannot be: "We will technically, legally and politically allow the creation of a massive, stored, durable and searchable database of everything all these people have ever said on the Web - - and then hope no one comes to use this weapon against our freedoms."

Instead of malicious intents and scary political projects, we see confusion. Confusion gives us this important opportunity to have a dialogue about freedom in the information society. There are many signs of the confusion, in the US and internationally, and I could start with two of them:

When the leaks broke in June 2013 and when the NSA programs began being discussed in the press, a couple of the US Senators who voted from the laws providing legal legitimacy for these programs stood up and said: "I never voted for such a system!". That's

worrisome. That speaks to their inability - and truly, our inability as a society - to consider the whole puzzle. As we say here: these people need a view source on democracy.

What has been revealed about Tor also is an interesting example of that confusion. Tor is a software that people can use to anonymize they traffic on Internet. For that reason, it is used by many peace activists within dictatorships that monitor and censor the use of Internet - this is the main reason why 60% of Tor's funding come from the US Department of State. Yet on the other hand, in the meantime as we have learned from the Guardian, the NSA circulated presentations nicely called "Tor Stinks", and spends a lot of effort trying to find vulnerabilities to break into that system. (And then complain about Mozilla effortlessly fixing the vulnerabilities they found in software updates. Fun story). This is confusing.

CROSSROADS AND PLUMBERS

So, where does all of that that put us? At a crossroads.

We got a glimpse of the present and it is our duty to say: "That does not look like the future we want!". This does not look like a Net respectful of the principles we hold as sacred.

Often people say that democracy is like plumbing. You only care about plumbing where there are bad smells. Democracy in our information society doesn't smell so good right now, and we need some plumbing.

Mozillians, we are the great and heroic plumbers of the Information Society, (and the architects, and the painters, and the evangelists, and the priests, if plumber sounds bad to you) - what I mean is that this community in good shape to solve these problems, well equipped with our knowledge, our motivation and our values.

Which problems? We talk about Privacy, but truly, it's about freedom, about democracy. What's this thing we call "Privacy"?

Privacy is a fundamental right. It is in many constitutions, its in our Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, the European Convention on Human Rights. We, citizens of the 21st century, inherited the idea that humanity needed to hold privacy as sacred for peace to be ensured. Why, how, when, are all fascinating questions that I encourage us to pursue.

But today, in 2013, in the Information Society, privacy gains a new kind of importance. Privacy is what enables a lot of other fundamental freedoms: in the Information Society, there is no Freedom of Press, no Freedom of Association, of assembly, no freedom to protest, without Privacy.

It's though to think about Privacy, it seem very abstract.

NO PRIVACY, NO FREEDOM

I like Eben Moglen's definition of Privacy because it makes the stakes more clear. Moglen says: "There are three components to privacy".

It's secrecy, anonymity, autonomy. And when we consider each of them individually, we understand better why we care, and better better what we fear.

Secrecy is simply the ability for two people to communicate without others being party to their communications. That's part of what creeps us (and Angela Merkel) when we hear about the NSA programs and we say: "Stop watching us!".

Anonymity is the ability to communicate without the source or the recipient being known. It's not abstract at all for journalists and activists, who say they can't do their work without such a possiblity.

Autonomy is the ability to control who knows what about you and holds data about you. This morning, someone said to me: "I am alarmed when I think someone has all this data on me, they might know more about myself than I do, I don't want anyone to use this data to change my behavior, and it creeps me out to think they might." That's an autonomy issue. Autonomy is also what ensures free will and self determination in our societies.

So these are the pipes we need to fix.

TECHNOLOGY, POLICY AND EDUCATION

Fixing the pipes takes a constructive debate, and also takes many people taking small steps in the right direction. All these steps, we are taking them together by engaging with at least three types of actions. We build technological solutions. These solutions can be plugins that reveal what's in the box and that teaches us about what is going on, they can be encryption tools made easier, they can be anything.

Technological fixes preserve our own freedoms, and that of those who need them the most - the journalists, the activists, for instance. This is why they are so crucially important. This is also why they are not sufficient: this would leave behind all those who lack incentive or knowledge to use them to protect themselves.

To achieve "freedom for all" rather than "freedom for those who care", we will need to engage in the policy dialogue. In doing so, we should oppose the idea that we are facing "new technologies" bringing "new problems" upon this world, and feel empowered by the old wisdoms and age-old principles of the peace builders to whom we owe the freedoms we now stand to protect. An example: in the past, people and their Governments have successfully stood up to say "It's not because the States and the Industry have new technical abilities that the armies of this world should weaponize them", "because we can" is not a sufficient rationale to authorize Governments to engage with the full powers of the technologies - that's somewhat how we achieved nuclear non-proliferation. Phrasing what

peace feels like and designing a framework enabling it is the debate we must engage with - again.

The last piece I want to talk about today is a crucially important one - it's education. It's our duty to explain and frame all these issues for the generations to come. This morning, someone told me: "I have a nine years old using Facebook and Gmail. What do I tell her for her to understand the stakes behind what she does on a daily basis?" Providing answers to that question is fundamental.

People rightly fear that it will be complicated. Privacy is technical, is legal, is political, and operated on so many scales: it's an everyday life matter, it's a State matter, it's even an international matter! But framing, teaching, explaining these types of challenges are things we have proved to be able to tackle!

Today, very few nine years old can talk about the international legal framework for sustainable development.

But almost all of them know about pollution. They know "it's bad", and they know some sort of personal fixes: maybe they even recycle. We can achieve an understanding of how freedom need to be protected in the information society, even if it is abstract, we can achieve it because it is crucially important.

Let's make some plumbing, let's build and teach the web we want, let's build Cyberpeace. I was part of the first generation to live in the Web and I would like to be part of the first generation to see it at peace. 

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Teaching "Cybersecurity and Society" at MIT

Dr. Abel Sanchez, invited me as a Guest Lecturer in his "Applied Cyber Security" course at the MIT to give a class on the policies and privacy issues in Cybersecurity. I titled my lecture "Cybersecurity and Society: It's Complicated" and tried to frame the debate by presenting the different actors, their agendas, the most pressing issues and what prevented us from having a constructive debate about them today. 

I was intimidated, but Abel was great and MIT students are an awesome crowd: they were very focused and engaging. 

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[The Guardian - Interview] Dilma Rousseff is pioneering an important debate about Nations' expectations from each other in the realm of cyber espionage

The Guardian was kind enough to call me for an interview on "Brazil's controversial plan to extricate the Internet from US control": I told them that President Dilma Rousseff was pioneering an important international debate on what Nations should expect from each other in the realm of cyber espionage in times of peace. I'm glad to see that the debate is now going beyond the fingerpointing and the "Brazil is going to Balkanize the Internet" argument, and I am pasting Amanda Holpuch's article below. Original link is here.

Brazil's controversial plan to extricate the internet from US control

President Rousseff expected to bring the conversation about the continued role of US-based supernetworks to the UN this month

Brazil's president Dilma Rousseff is proposing a controversial set of measures to wrestle Brazil's internet from US control. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

When Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff postponed her official visit to the US in protest of National Security Agency spying activities on Tuesday, it seemed like a routine bit of diplomatic posturing.

But another one of her proposals could perhaps be more significant: a set of measures intended to extricate the internet in Brazil from under the influence of the US and its tech giants.

Some are claiming the country is embarking on a course that will cut itself off from the internet. To international policy experts however, Rousseff's proposals offer a more open and comprehensive discussion of issues that have been quietly brewing in the internet community.

"The hope that Brazil has is that the measures would curb the control the US has in terms of infrastructure and that maybe it will be a pressure for the United States to change its practices that came to knowledge after the Snowden leak," said Marilia Maciel, a researcher who works on Internet security policy at Brazil's Fundacao Getulio Vargas.

To do this, Rousseff proposed a set of ambitious, and controversial, measures that include: constructing submarine cables that do not route through the US, building internet exchange points in Brazil, creating an encrypted email service through the state postal service and having Facebook, Google and other companies store data by Brazilians on servers in Brazil.

"I think that there is a feeling that the US has always had a prominent role in internet governance and they want to change that," Maciel said. "The conversation is under way, and it became prominent last year at Dubai."

It's the conversation at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) Dubai that has internet executives offering alarmist warnings about a balkanized internet that suppresses online freedom. There, Russia and China explicitly stated their hopes to take control of the internet away from the US.

At a discussion in New York last week, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said he was more concerned about a balkanized internet thanNSA surveillance and government spying.

The real danger [from] the publicity about all of this is that other countries will begin to put very serious encryption – we use the term 'balkanization' in general – to essentially split the internet and that the internet's going to be much more country specific," Schmidt said. "That would be a very bad thing, it would really break the way the internet works, and I think that's what I worry about."

Merlyna Lim, a visiting research scholar at Princeton University's Center for Information and Technology Policy, said that balkanization is unlikely because of the significant technological, social, political and economic factors that would need to fall into place for it to become a reality.

"I don't think there are many countries that want to isolate themselves, from the US especially, at least for economic reasons," said Lim.

Lim said that the internet is also more localized than often portrayed because as the amount of people who use the internet increases, they turn to sites in their own language and within their own communities.

"Internet is neither truly global nor truly nation-state, it is just in-between, it has always been like that and it was an illusion that the internet was totally global," said Lim. "Having global communities? It never happened – in so many ways, internet has become more local."

Rousseff, however, is expected to bring the conversation about the role of the US government and US-based corporate multinationals to a global stage at the UN General Assembly at the end of this month.

And by discussing these measures now, Rousseff is taking the unusual step of having a diplomatic conversation about cyber espionage, said Camille François, a researcher at Harvard University's Berkman Center who has worked for Google and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).

"This is a conversation, in the open, about expectations: what countries expect from each other in that realm and how what they can leverage – domestic law, international law, technologies, etc – to enable this state of peace," said François.

She said that the internet isn't inherently US-centric, even though "a significant part of Brazilians' experience of the Internet is shaped by US companies, and they obey American law."

At a practical level, it would be "very, very difficult" for Brazil to cut its internet off from the rest of the world, said Andrew Blum, author of Tubes. This is in part because in the last five years, the power of the internet has increasingly been put in the hands of companies like Google that have created super-networks that operate autonomously.

Blum said the power a tech giant like Google has is comparable to a person who owns an airplane, as opposed to a person with a ticket to ride – owning a network means less inspection into who visits their properties and what the company is doing with its network.

"This Brazil proposal is a moment of correction against the incredible growth and power of the supernetworks," said Blum.

By offering these proposals, the Brazil government has led some to draw an equivalence with site-blocking in countries such as China, Iran and Bahrain. "With Brazil it's a bit trickier, because I think they've got the right intent," said Jillian York, director for international freedom at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "But I do think it sets a really dangerous precedent, so in that sense it's a bad idea – in the sense that if Brazil does it, you're going to see all sorts of other countries going to do it."

She said other countries may use Brazil's actions as a bargaining tool within their own countries, as China has done with the NSA surveillance revelations.

York said she thinks the chances of Brazil achieving internet sovereignty from the US are "probably very slim," primarily because companies like Google and Facebook need to comply with requests to move their data servers in the country.

"I think that it is a threat in and of itself to corral data off into any given country, because the Brazil government now is pretty progressive, but what if the next one's not," York said. "If all your data is in your country, you're sort of risking what's happening in Iran right now, with Iran trying to cut off the Internet."

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http://www.rioetc.com.br/lencos/espirito-livre/

Loving Rio, getting some love back. #weirdlink

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[News] Columbia University Wins First Place at National Cyber Security Policy Competition

Today, my teammate Shawn Lonergan and I won the Atlantic Council Cyber 9/12 Student Challenge, thanks to two briefs we had prepared to balance National Security Interests and Constitutional Rights in the face of the existing legal framework. 

It was a truly interesting competition - coverage from the Atlantic Council below:

Inaugural Student Competition Features Day-after Responses to Major Cyber Attack

On June 15, the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative, with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), held the first student competition devoted to high-level policy recommendations for day-after responses to a major cyber attack.

Held at American University’s School of International Service, the competition brought together more than sixty-five students—from undergraduates to PhD candidates—organized into nineteen teams and representing seventeen universities. In addition, twenty-one experts drawn from the top ranks of the US Department of Defense, US Department of State, White House, and leading cyber security firms participated as judges.

Cyber 9/12 Student Challenge highlight video

“The most impressive part of the Atlantic Council-SAIC simulation was the level of expertise of participating teams,” said student participant Nino Ghvinadze of the University of Kentucky. “It was a very good mix of tech and policy students. I believe I learned as much, if not more, from interacting with the other participants as I did preparing for the competition.” 

Student teams were provided a simulated intelligence report detailing an ongoing cyber attack on the American energy sector, on which they based a series of policy recommendations for the National Security Council. Prior to the competition, teams submitted written policy briefs based on this initial intelligence report. The simulated report was then changed to include an escalation, giving the teams only a few hours to assess the new situation and prepare another oral brief evaluating the possible policy options.

“It was SAIC’s honor to sponsor the first Cyber 9/12 Student challenge focused on global cyber policy response to a serious cyber security breach,” said Julie Taylor, SAIC senior vice president for cybersecurity operations. “Students presented creative and well thought-out strategies that pulled multiple levers to address the complexity of the exercise. This exercise fully appreciated the complex nature of maneuvering in the cyber domain, which requires technical expertise as well, knowledge of the possible global economic, diplomatic, environmental and social effects.” 

Michael Hayden, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and former director of the National Security Agency, delivered the competition keynote and participated in a dialogue with Jason Healey, director of the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative, and the student competitors.

Awards were presented by Rosemary Wenchel, deputy assistant secretary for cyber security coordination at the US Department of Homeland Security; Jeff Moss, vice president and chief security officer at ICANN;  Julie Taylor, SAIC; and Hannah Pitts, executive director, Cyber Conflict Studies Association (CCSA).

Awards:

First Place: Camille François and Shawn Lonergan – Columbia University

Second Place: Kathryn Hostetler, Jonathan C. Murad, Billy E. Pope Jr., and Joseph Roman – Harvard Kennedy School

Third Place: Colin Carroll, Rocky Cole, Axelle Klincke, Jeff Rogg - Georgetown University

Best Written Brief: Evann Smith, Josephine Wolff, and William Young - Mixed team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard

Best Oral Brief: William Fisher - Johns Hopkins University

Best Teamwork: Eli Ginsberg, Latisha Russell, Marie Scholz, and Laura Wacker - Mixed team from American University and MIT

Most Creative Policy Alternative: Lauren Pearce, W. Owen Redwood, Clark Wood, and Douglas Wussler - Florida State University

Link: http://www.acus.org/event/cyber-912-student-challenge

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[Gizmodo - Interview] Privacy is not an "Internet Issue", it's a Society Issue.

Today, I met Adam Clark Estes to talk about the PRISM program. He kindly quoted me in his Gizmodo article "How to pick your battles in the war against transparency", reproduced here: 

How to Pick Your Battles in the War Against Transparency

Are you worried about Barack Obama reading all your emails and listening to all your phone calls? Beefing up your privacy settings is one thing, but fighting in the greater war to protect your Constitutional rights is another. You should do the latter, y'know, to be a good American. Here's how to get started. While you were eating lunch at your desk on Wednesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) scored a serious victory in its decades-long battle for government transparency. Perhaps as a result of therecent revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) spying on you, a federal judge decided that at least some of the decisions from FISA court should be made public. FISA, of course, is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 30-year-old law that enables the government to spy on American citizens, among other things. Just over six months ago, Obama renewed the FISA Amendments Act, a post-9/11 era update to the original law that makes that sort of domestic snooping even easier for the Feds, but now it looks like the judicial system will be putting the smack down on the government's limitless access to your deepest darkest secrets.

At least that's what the EFF would like to see happen. The San Francisco-based nonprofit is enjoying a moment in the limelight, so to speak, with news of the NSA's incessant spying and the executive branch's unapologetic stance on potentially deceiving the American people. Like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) before it, the EFF isn't fighting these battles for the attention or the glory. It's fighting them based on the simple principle that the digital frontier should open up opportunities for greater freedom, not shut them down.

The EFF isn't confused about who's at fault, either. It's the Obama administration. "The fact we have a secret law governing surveillance activity is the fault of the executive branch," David Sobel, the EFF's lead counsel on the FISA case, told Gizmodo. "The FISA court casts a shroud over everything it does. This week the court said that's not okay."

So hooray! The NSA shouldn't be reading your emails because the courts, the guardians of our Constitution, say this scale of secrecy isn't cool. Right?

Not so fast. The fact of the matter is that all branches of the government are still fighting the War on Terror—whatever that means—and the sort of snooping that the NSA's been caught doing is entirely legal thanks, in part, to the suite of counterterrorism laws passed by the Bush administration and renewed by Obama. And it's the War on Terror that makes so many Americans complicit in things like heavy-handed, domestic surveillance, because who wants more terrorist attacks? Who cares if one or two or ten civil rights get stomped on in order to prevent another 9/11 from happening?

The EFF certainly cares, and so do dozens of other companies that are leading a movement imperatively named "Stop Watching Us." The movement, launched just a couple of days after the news of the Verizon wiretapping and NSA PRISM program broke, aims to coerce this country's leaders into taking a long hard look at itself and its surveillance programs. Led by Mozilla, the EFF and dozens of others, the supporters of Stop Watching Us looks not unlike the cast of characters from the anti-SOPA battle a couple of years ago. In a form letter to Members of Congress, the organization says it's "calling on Congress to take immediate action to halt this surveillance and provide a full public accounting of the NSA's and the FBI's data collection programs." Sobel from the EFF said that "public accounting" process should look something like the 9/11 Commission or the 1975 Church Commission that ultimately inspired the need for FISA. "It's probably not a bad idea to have a similar body, almost 40 years later, look back and see how it's all worked out," he said.

This is not a new request coming from the EFF. The organization's been screaming for increased transparency from the government for years, especially in the digital arena, but only now can the organization enjoy the luxury of widespread public support and, more importantly, comprehension of the issues at stake. Folks like Camille François, an independent cyber security research who's worked for everybody from Google to DARPA, certainly feel like now is moment to have a real public debate about civil rights and transparency in the digital age.

"Should there be a balance between privacy and security? Sure," François said in an interview earlier this week. She went on to explain how issues like privacy are often chalked up to be internet issues when they're actually not exclusive to the internet at all. Similarly, things like cyber security are often associated with the War on Terror, when really we should be thinking about them in the framework of the Constitution. "As long as this is about terrorists," she said, "this is going to be a fake debate."

So let's get real. If you're upset about the NSA's snooping habits there are three things you can do about it.

Number one, you can stop acting so surprised.

The laws that let the government spy on you have been around for a long time—you probably just didn't know about them. It's not even entirely correct to call it "spying" since these surveillance tools are simply built into our telecommunications system.

Two, you can join a movement like Stop Watching Us. No big commitment needed. Just send some letters to your lawmakers which is an exercise in democracy that you should be doing every week not once a decade.

Three, you can charge up to the front lines. Depending on your background, nonprofits like the EFF and the ACLU always need bright young (and old) minds to fight the good fight. Like François suggested, the issues at stake aren't just internet issues or civil rights issues or anything so specific. They're human issues that affect not only Americans but world citizens as well. So if that law degree is sitting in your home office gathering dust, now is a good time to clean it off and put on your Johnny Do-good hat.

It won't happen next week or even next year, but at some point in the not-too-distant future, these transparency and privacy issues will bubble up to the Supreme Court, where a precedent must be set. If you care at all about the first ten amendments to the Constitution, you will have picked a side by then. It's not going to be a pretty fight. But it'll be a fight worth winning.

Article link here. 

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[Public Speaking] Personal Democracy Forum 2013, NYC

On June 6th 2013, at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York I joined Alex Fowler, Sasha Romanosky and Sharon Bradford Franklin for a panel on "Battling Big Brother", moderated by Andrew Rasiej. Full program of the conference, and speakers, available here. 

I took this opportunity to note that the ubiquitous notion of cybersecurity didn't mean much, and that we needed to shape what cyberpeace looked like. I will be working on this notion more in the months to come, and will of course share the work as it takes form. Rod Beckstrom (former President & CEO of ICANN, and founding Director of the U.S. National Cybersecurity Center) was kind enough to quote me about cyberpeace in his afternoon talk about cybersecurity (full talk video here), and I have received many emails with ideas and suggestions for shaping cyberpeace: I am glad that this concept triggers people's curiosity.

Alex Fowler

- 

 Andrew Rasiej & Sharon Bradford Franklin

Sasha Romanosky & Andrew Rasiej 

- Panel photos from Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/personaldemocracy/

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[News] Working on a multi-stakeholders conference about drones

I'm helping to put together DARC, a multi-stakeholders conference about drones that will take place in New York in October 2013. Visit the link for more info, we will update program and speakers there as our work progresses. 

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Let's talk about packet switching, and explore what Leonard Kleinrock, Donald Davies and Paul Baran had in mind when they came up with it

"The further backward you look, the further forward you can see" - Winston Churchill.

I have spent this last month studying the history of the Internet, for my courses at Columbia, for my online ISOC seminar, and for my own pleasure. I decided to share this article I wrote on packet-switching: what it is, what are the stories behind why it was discovered and by whom, and what these stories tell us about the Internet we know today.

Packet switching is a ‘Monsieur Jourdain technology’. In Molière’s classical French comedy, a bourgeois realizes that he has been speaking “prose” all his life without knowing it: if you don’t know about packet switching, when you will learn about it you will probably realize you have been using it everyday: packet switching is the fundamental technology that makes the Internet work.

All information that circulates on Internet is broken into packets. The emails you send are packets. The videos you download are packets. The pictures you upload are packets. As a matter of fact, Internet is a “packet switched network” that can only transmit information once it has been broken down into little pieces: the packets. 

Packet switching is thus a fundamental technology to understand. As it is the technical basis of the Internet, it dictates a certain type of design whose underlying implications are essential in any Internet policy decision and in all cybersecurity matters. The very history of how packet switching was conceived, by whom, and why reveals important characteristics of the network.

  What is packet switching: the New York tourists’ metaphor.

  The New York tourists’ metaphor can be used to introduce the general idea behind packet switching. Let’s imagine a group of 5,000 tourists travelling through the streets of NYC in a single gigantic tour bus, on a Friday afternoon, at rush hour. Their problem is simple: they are all the way up in Harlem and wish to visit the Statue of the Liberty before it closes. It is unlikely that they will arrive there on time if they remain in their gigantic bus in the middle of the congested streets. They rather decided to get off the bus and spread out with maps, and each tourist decides to take their own route to Liberty Island. Some will cab there, some will take the subway, and some will even kayak down the Hudson River. How they get there does not matter, as long as they get there on time and all meet there. 

The technical and mathematical way to achieve this, dividing information into multiple pieces and organize a way to have them travel through a network making sure that they will arrive at the same point and are reassembled in the same order for the information to be reconstituted, is called packet switching.

  How packet switching differs from line switching: Leonard Kleinrock’s frustrations with AT&T.

  At least three people can claim they discovered packet switching[1], grossly at the same time in the early 1960’s, in different places, and for different reasons. Among them is American engineer and computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock who laid out the foundations of packet switching in his 1962 doctoral thesis. Kleinrock’s main aim for designing such a technology was only to “find an effective and efficient way for computers to communicate” when “unfortunately, the only way these computers could communicate at that time was by using the telephone network”[2]. How did the telephone network worked, and what was wrong with it when one connected two computers over it is what we need to figure out if we want to understand Kleinrock’s frustration.

The telephone network at that time was dependent on an other way to send information from an end to an other end over a network: line switching, also called circuit switching. The information remains undivided and will travel from its origin to its destination by using a dedicated route.

One of the reasons why it made sense for the telephone system to work this way is because telephone calls are analog signals (or at least, at that time they were). Analog signals are degraded when often transported or reproduced. A line switched network allows transporting the information as a whole while minimizing the number of nodes it will go through. Computer-generated data, though, allow for a re-thinking of the network design as they don't dictate the same constraints: they can be transported and replicated without alteration of the signal. They are digital signal, and not analog signal.

  A more efficient use of network resources: Donald Davies and the NPL’s attempt to create a network adapted to ‘computer talk’

  While Leonard Kleinrock was seeking for an alternative to connecting computers over AT&T telephone lines, at the other side of the Atlantic Ocean the British National Physics Laboratory was the Welsh computer scientist Donald Watts Davies who was also considering the same efficiency issues. Donald Davies came up with the packet switching theory in its 1965 paper, and soon convinced the British telecommunications establishment to help him apply this idea to an experimental network at the NPL. Davies thought that line switching was poorly adapted to the irregular, bursty and frequently interrupted nature of the data traffic that computers were generating and wanted to design a network that would carry these data in a more efficient way.

Let’s think about what happens during a phone call. As phone call use dedicated connections with line switching, if I stop speaking, the line is still dedicated to my conversation even though I am not using it to transmit information: it is somewhat wasted. If people send data over line switched networks, as Leonard Kleinrock had to do in the States, then the user blocks an entire line for frequently interrupted traffic. This is both expensive for the user, and inefficient for the other users as they cannot use the line that is being block by the communication.

If the message that I want to send is broken down into many little pieces, these pieces will travel faster through the network because they are smaller than the original message. They can also all take different routes to avoid the busy nodes and go through the fast paths: they will travel in an opportunistic fashion. The itineraries they follow through the network do not matter as long as they arrive at their destination. It does matter either if which order they arrive, as packets are all ‘labeled’ so that they will easily be reassembled to reveal the original message. So in order to achieve that, all packets have to travel through the network carrying information about where they come from, where they are going, how many pieces was the original message broken into, and which piece is this specific packet[3]. 

Packet switching represents a far more efficient use, as the resource sharing works on a demand basis: when I have nothing to send, other people can still use the line to send their own information as packets. With such a network design, all users are thus able to share and enjoy the entire network capacity.

Bob Kahn, the American Internet pioneer who later invented the TCP/IP protocol with Vinton Cerf explains why packet switching is a more optimal use of the resources than line switching in these terms:

“To dial up a circuit from one location to another takes a few seconds. Well, if you’re only trying to send a very small amount of data so much that it could go in a fraction of a second, there’s a lot of overhead to dial up for a few seconds worth to just send a fraction of data and then shut the line down. It’s a very inefficient use of a line as well. It would be the equivalent in order to drive from, let’s say, Washington D.C., to Los Angeles, having to reserve the whole road for you to make the trip and it’s not a very efficient use of the road space. A lot of people could share it by having dedicated lines that were always in place that could be multiplexed, shared that is, by lot’s of users’ traffic.”[4]

In 1970, Donald Davies helped create the Mark I, the first packet switched UK network. And in the meantime American researchers were reaching the same conclusions – yet, from a different perspective.

  A more resilient and survivable system: Paul Baran’s answer to the prospects of a nuclear war.

  The third person that claims having invented packet switching indeed had a very different focus. In 1960, Paul Baran, a Polish American engineer, published a paper[5] for the RAND Corporation on packet switching. Baran’s aim to work towards a more resilient and survivable network than the line switching telephone network is clearly stated in his research introduction:

"The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of earth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many. Better quantitative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a less emotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of the "what the hell -- what's the use era?" era. A new view emerges: the possibility of war exists but there is much that can be done to minimize the consequences. If war doesn't mean the end of the earth in a black and white manner, then it follows that we should do those things that make the shade of grey as light as possible: to plan now to minimize potential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permit the survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstruct the economy swiftly."

Baran’s concern with the survivability of the network post-nuclear attack is also the origin of the mistaken idea that the Internet was created by the Department of Defense out of nuclear concerns.

Baran had his own set of reasons to be frustrated with the existing American line switching network. Because of it was build around central switching points, it was extremely vulnerable: if parts of it were to be destroyed, it wouldn’t allow emergency communications to go through. Baran greatly admired the brain’s neuronal network’s ability to recover from a stroke and observed that when there were damaged cells, new neutral nets would from to bypass them. He developed packet switching an opportunity to create a more resistant and distributed communications network in America that would somewhat resemble the neutral nets in its ability to generate alternate pathways when needed.

  This distributed network configuration, along with the idea that information would be sliced into “blocks” (at that time Baran wasn’t using the term ‘packets’ yet), provided a flexible and robust communications system.

Baran did not get from AT&T the kind of understanding and support in developing packet switching that Davies had from the British telecommunications, probably because AT&T was not sensitive to Baran’s argument on the vulnerability of their network in a nuclear attack scenario. “The idea of slicing data into message blocks and sending each block out to find its own way through a matrix of phone lines struck AT&T staff members as totally preposterous. Their world was a place where sent as a stream of signals down a pipe. Sending data in small parcels seemed just about as logical as sending oil down a pipeline one cupful at a time” describe K. Hafner and Matthew Lyon.

Yet, as everyone else, AT&T had to deal with the underlying consequences of this “preposterous” idea. And they just announced, in November, that AT&T will soon get rid of all remaining circuit-switched networks, see here.

Understanding what design choices were made about the network infrastructure, and why, is critical today to understand what will Internet make possible – and how to deal with it.

                REFERENCES

  Research papers and press articles

  Baran P., 1960, "Reliable Digital Communications Systems Using Unreliable Network Repeater Nodes", RAND Corp., Santa Monica. Online at: bit.ly/U57BXU

  New York Times article ‘A Paternity Dispute Divides Net Pioneers’, Nov. 8th 2001. Online at bit.ly/WR4Lfh

  Books

  Hafner K. and Lyon M., 1996, Where the Wizards Stay Up Late – The Origins of the Internet, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York.

  Segaller S., 1998, Nerds – A brief history of the Internet., TV Books, New York.

  Winston B, 1998, Media Technology and Society – A History from the Telegraph to the Internet. Routledge, London.

          [1] See New York Times article ‘A Paternity Dispute Divides Net Pioneers’, Nov. 8th 2001. Online at bit.ly/WR4Lfh

[2] See Leonard Kleinrock’s video interview on packet switching, bit.ly/3A78Xu

[3] The protocol that serves this function today is the TCP/IP protocol, later developed by Robert E. Kahn and Vinton Cerf (in 1975) to be the concrete application of the packet switching theory. It specifies how data should be formatted, addressed, transmitted, routed and received at their destination.

[4] As quoted in Segaller S., 1998, Nerds – A brief history of the Internet., TV Books, New York.

[5] Baran P., 1960, "Reliable Digital Communications Systems Using Unreliable Network Repeater Nodes", RAND Corp., Santa Monica. Online at: bit.ly/U57BXU

[camillesnotebook-blog]

In a network society, any political question reduces to: who controls the switches?

said Professor Eben Moglen yesterday.

[camillesnotebook-blog]

"In Politics, Perception is Reality" - short wisdoms from Elisabeth A. Lindenmeyer

United Nation's expert Elisabeth A. Lindenmeyer shared her views with a couple SIPA students about the legitimacy of the Security Council, Syrian crisis, and whether or not we should be talking to the bad guys of International Affairs. In very short:

What is the UN, who is the UN? is the question we should be asking ourselves. When we say "the UN failed, the UN succeeded", are we talking about the UN of Member States? The UN of "We, the People?"? The UN of the Agencies? The UN is not monolithic.

Do we have a human threshold in humanitarian crisis? is also a tough question. When the Member States are blocking intervention, is there a point at which we can say: that's just too much. Close to 800 000 people died in Rwanda without the UN getting involved... 

Is the Security Council legitimate? The perception of it not being legitimate is important enough. In Politics, perception is reality. If perception is that the 177 other Member States aren't represented by this Security Council because power has shifted elsewhere, well that's the reality. An effective way to bring a fast solution to this would be to modify the working methods. For instance, it could be suggested that when in a humanitarian crisis, there's no possible use of veto. Changing the working methods is much easier than changing status and compositions, and could be very effective.

Should we talk to the bad guys? The answer's yes. To everyone. Including pirates in Somalia. Politics is human - exclusion is a cause of war.

More about Prof. Lindenmeyer here.

#columbiastream 

[camillesnotebook-blog]

Internet & the Egyptian Revolution? A Conversation with Alaa Abd El Fattah

_ _ _ Things that I have learned from Alaa Abd El Fattah on the Egyptian Revolution

✓ The Internet did not create this Revolution – yet it impacted it a lot. For instance, it encouraged the values of transparency and openness of the revolutionary movement.

✓ The online activity was really focused on organizing the movement inside the country – communicating with the rest of the world to inform and demand support was almost insignificant.

✓ Tools such as Twitter and Facebook were indeed used, but other ad-hoc tools were also built, and the open source and free software community played a central and key role.

✓ Focusing on the educated and connected youth when analysing this revolution prevents a comprehensive understanding of the demands of the movement, and of what will happen next. Beware of the idea of a “Facebook revolution”, farmers and factory workers were on the streets fighting with the police!

✓ The Muslim Brothers also use the Internet – though they use it differently: they’re in different places (rather on forums than on social media) and have different ways to use it (they’re closed and secretive). There’s now a strong debate inside the Muslim Brother’s movement with a small part of the movement demanding more openness and more transparency in the use of these tools.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

I had the chance to meet Alaa Abd El Fattah in NY, at the Personal Democracy Forum on June 8th 2011 were he was invited to talk about the Egyptian revolution. Alaa co-founded the Egyptian blog aggregator Manalaa: he is a democracy activist, a blogger and a software developer. For these reasons, he even spent time in jail in 2006... Here are his answers to some of my questions on the role of the Internet in the Egyptian revolution.

The types of tools that you used, and the types of tools that you avoided? Did you privileged existing tools or build new ones?

“We used everything, we did build websites and specific tools, we did code but we were also confortable using the existing tools. We avoided building new platforms, we would do that only if an ad-hoc tool was needed: for instance to collect signatures for petitions, you have to code a bit because it has to fit specific regulations in order to be legally accepted as a petition. We also created platforms to train activists to use these tools, to bring the old generation on the Internet. But we also used existing tools like blogging platforms, wordpress, twitter, facebook and all the rest...”

Were you bothered by the fact that you were using American-based companies’ tools?

“No. We didn’t care that they were American, their ownership structure wasn’t relevant. We realized that it implied that our pages could be removed at any time: indeed sometimes social networks were hard to use for these reasons. But we used them because people were already there.”

Would you say that the Internet was mainly used to organize and mobilize inside the country or to communicate with the rest of the world to ensure support and coverage?

“Without a doubt, mostly used to organize and mobilize inside the country. Talking to the rest of the world was almost insignificant, it really was a local conversation. For instance, we were writing in Arabic, almost not at all in English. Though I haven’t seen much hyperlocal conversation, for instance at a city or town level. It might have to do with the fact that we were really fighting a national battle, and also with the low Internet penetration rates in small cities.”

Did private companies from outside Egypt reached out to you and tried to help?

“Well Google actually tried to do useful things, but it was mainly coming from their Egyptian employees. Other companies reached out, but it was obviously a marketing approach.”

Was there something that was particularly surprising to you?

“All of it is a surprise! The Revolution, its speed, its success...”

We all realize that the Revolution was in preparation since a couple of years, and that we can’t consider that Internet created that Revolution – but how would you evaluate the impact that the Internet had on this revolution?

“It contributed to provoking it in a way. It gave it a specific shape. It structured it, it structured its networks. For instance, it impacted its shape in the sense that it is because of the Internet that we ended up doing everything publically. We were not worrying about encryption, or surveillance. Nothing was secretive, everything was accessible and open. That also means that we didn’t have to worry about who could be a spy from the Government for instance: everything was accessible. So the Internet influenced on the shape, the rhythm and the nature of the revolution. It helped us combine all the different grievances together. It helped us unify the different social and political movements together.”

Are there things that people say in the media about the Revolution that sound very untrue to you and that annoy you?

“A lot! For instance I hate reading that what happened in Egypt was a revolution of educated frustrated Internet-connected youth. I mean, of course it was youthful but our demography makes it youthful: 70% of Egyptians are under 45 years old. So it’s important, of course. But I don’t really like this idea of a Twitter-revolution or a Facebook-revolution. It ignores the middle class. It ignores the majority of the movement: it ignores the factory workers, the urban poors, the farmers. They were on the streets, beating the police. And it’s important to take them into account if you want to understand the demands of the revolution: most of the demands were their demands. We don’t have much class conflicts but classes have specific demands. Connected youth were of course an important part of the movement – but I feel they benefited from overexposure, and that doesn’t help understanding our demands. For instance, much of the social justice demands or of the demands concerning police brutality come from these other citizens.”

Does the focus on these actors also prevent a comprehensive understanding of what will happen next?

“Yes, definitely. The different actors of the revolution have different relations to institutions, the well-off citizens trust in institutions such as the army, the justice while most of the poor citizens do not. For instance, some commentators said that the 77% score at the constitutional referendum was a tragedy, a disaster. I believe this comment misses the explanation that people who voted yes were also people who wanted to benefit now from the revolution, people who were afraid that the country would be ruled by the elites.”

Does that mean that you are in favor of conducting elections as soon as possible?

“Yes, definitely. That’s not very common among reformers, but I believe that if we wait the political parties will reconstitute and that they will be a much higher chance that the country will end up being ruled by the elites.”

On a totally different topic: the Muslim Brothers also use the Internet. Do you feel like you’ve been using these tools in a similar way?

“Not really. First the Muslim Brothers use different Internet tools: they’re mainly on forums and websites rather than on social media platforms for instance. They also use the Internet differently: they use it to strengthen their community, and almost only talk to their own people. While we were open and transparent, they were more secret and in closed groups. That actually created an important internal conflict inside the Muslim Brothers: a part of the movement reflected upon the success of our movement and decided to campaign for a change of use in these tools, they want the Muslim Brothers to be more open, and more transparent. They’re for instance the Muslim Brothers Youth. But they’re really a minority inside the Muslim Brothers’ movement. Yet it is true that now that Mubarak is out of the country these habits do not make much sense: they do have traits of a secret underground group, of a sect.”

A last question: did the open source community have a specific role or a specific importance in the conduct of the revolution?

“Yes, actually! I am myself very involved in open software, and this was of great help for building and organizing the online tools. The free software community had a very important role for the conduct of the revolution online: for instance, when the Internet was cut off the free software community worked together to build alternative Internet routes, that was very impressive. They definitely were a very strong player in this revolution.”

[camillesnotebook-blog]

What would F. Scott Fitzgerald tell me if I were his daughter

A little more than two years ago, I told my friends I was heading to Princeton to study in the States. One of them gave me This Side Of Paradise as a going-away present, and I remembered him telling me: "Meet Francis Scott Fitzgerald, he'll be your new mentor out there". I laughed because I was going abroad to meet living mentors, but of course he was right, and the year I spent there taught me (among many other things) how to find wisdom and inspiration in Fitzgerald's books and life. 

As I was wondering what should a young person decide to care about, and not to care about, I found this letter that Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter Scottie in 1933 (she was 11 at that time).

Things to worry about: Worry about courage Worry about cleanliness Worry about efficiency Worry about horsemanship Things not to worry about:  Don’t worry about popular opinion Don’t worry about dolls Don’t worry about the past Don’t worry about the future Don’t worry about growing up Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you Don’t worry about triumph Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault Don’t worry about mosquitoes Don’t worry about flies Don’t worry about insects in general Don’t worry about parents Don’t worry about boys Don’t worry about disappointments Don’t worry about pleasures Don’t worry about satisfactions Things to think about:  What am I really aiming at?  How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to: (a) Scholarship (b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?  (c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?  With dearest love, Daddy

(Source: F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters)

[camillesnotebook-blog]

A Great Honor

In June '11, my friend Andrea Fassina & I got a message from the content producer of a documentary series called "XXVI People to Save The World", made by the famous Argentinian reporter Jorge Lanata:

I'm writing to you because we are dedicating one of the episodes to Jimmy Wales, and the important role wikipedia has worldwide. Into this context, Mr Lanata would like to discuss about the democratization of the information access and the possibility of getting knowledge through Internet. We consider that Freeculture it´s an organization that represents the subject we want to talk about. 

A couple of months later, Andrea & I met with Jorge Lanata in London for a very long interview, and I am very happy to see that the episode dedicated to Jimmy Wales is now online. I'm very grateful that Jorge Lanata gave us the opportunity to express our views on the future of the Internet. I has been an honor to be interviewed by such an amazing, curious, generous Journalist! 

So guys, if you want to see a great documentary, just follow the link.

That's it for today, bonne journée !

- Camille.

Added comment on post: I have received a couple messages from people in US & in Argentina encouraging us to continue what we started with SFC. That's why I love the Internet... Thanks so much for the messages. To join the SFC movement, please give a look at our website.

[camillesnotebook-blog]

Is an Iphone the only thing you need to be a good photo reporter today? When you're a photo-reporter, what does it changes to use your phone instead of your camera?

I find it very interesting that a Hipstamatic/Iphone picture made its way to the front page of Le Monde this morning. What's Hipstamatic ? "The Hipstamatic for iPhone is an application that brings back the look, feel, unpredictable beauty, and fun of plastic toy cameras from the past" says their website. When creating this app, I'm not sure they imagined it could be used to report on the events in Yemen to national medias. The app was firstly used by young people to take nice pictures of their friends' party to post them on Facebook.

Yet Karim Ben Khelifa's Iphone picture is on the front page on Le Monde, one of the most read and most serious French newspaper, founded in 1944. Karim Ben Khelifa is a renowned press reporter. You can see more of its Hipsta-Iphone-Yemen pictures on the Web, here for instance. I've also found an interview in which he explains, in French, why he decided to use an Iphone to report on Yemen. He says that people in Yemen are aware that they're living an historical moment and that they use their own phones to take pictures during these events all the time. He talks about a crowd made of raised arms with mobile phone - doing the same thing helps a lot to melt in the crowd, it's very good for discretion and for Karim Ben Khelifa, it's quite interesting to use their method to tell their story. 

[camillesnotebook-blog]

From the Agenda Theory to the Algorithm Theory

Hi everyone, today I'm glad to share with you an article I wrote with my mother about the "filter bubble" theory. It just got published on l'Express' website. Unfortunately, it's in French... 

Original version here: 

http://blogs.lexpress.fr/infolab/2011/04/11/entre-mere-et-fille-de-la-theorie-de-lagenda-a-celle-de-lalgorithme/

De la théorie de l’agenda à celle de l’algorithme, par Natalie Rastoin et sa fille Camille François

LE 11 AVRIL 2011 11H15 | PAR INFOLAB

Chaque mois, « Infolab » traitera d’une grande thématique autour des enjeux de l’information. Nous continuons le projet en nous focalisant ce mois-ci sur les aspects générationnels(l’étude a démontré que la notion de « génération Y » était a minima très contestable) et les nouvelles responsabilités en cours pour les médias vis-à-vis du traitement de l’information.

Première contribution de ce thème, et elle est écrite à 4 mains, entre mère et fille : Natalie Rastoin, figure majeure de la communication et de la publicité, qui est Directeur Général dugroupe Ogilvy, et Président d’OgilvyOne, avec sa fille Camille François, étudiante à Sciences Po et Columbia, présidente de Students for Free Culture France.

En tant que mère et fille, nous partageons de nombreux intérêts : un peu futiles parfois, comme les chaussures ou les macarons – mais aussi plus sérieux, comme la conviction qu’Internet peut faire évoluer la démocratie et le débat public. Nos deux générations ont un rapport très différent à cette révolution, mais nous avons toutes les deux toujours pensé qu’Internet représentait un endroit fabuleux où tout peut se dire et s’échanger sans barrière et où peut se renforcer l’intelligence collective. Aujourd’hui, nous nous demandons si cette conviction n’est pas un peu naïve, à l’heure de Google et de Facebook…

En effet, nous avons été très touchées par la mise en garde récente d’Eli Pariser, activiste démocrate américain et fondateur du site militant MoveOn.org, lors de la convention « Personal Democracy » à laquelle Camille assistait. Depuis le début de l’année, Eli Pariser nous invite à considérer l’importance des algorithmes de personnalisation et leurs effets pervers sur l’information que nous consommons. En effet, les sites comme Google et Facebook prennent une importance de plus en plus importante dans la façon dont les français s’informent au quotidien. Importance encore accrue avec l’usage des smartphones qui nous conduisent à passer encore plus par Facebook. Or l’information que nous fournissent ces sites est toute particulière : elle est personnalisée pour correspondre exactement à ce que nous avons envie de lire en nous levant le matin.

Pourquoi nous ne pouvons pas vraiment personnaliser notre info’

Derrière notre newsfeed Facebook ou derrière les premiers résultats que Google nous présente, il y a une mécanique subtile orchestrée par un algorithme invisible qui prend en compte des critères comme les dernières recherches que nous avons tapées, les sites que nous visitons le plus, notre langage d’utilisation, notre lieu de résidence, etc. Eli Pariser dénombre pas moins de 57 critères utilisés par Google pour classer nos résultats de recherche afin d’arriver à nous présenter en premier les résultats qui correspondent le mieux à ce que nous avons envie de voir !

Depuis Décembre 2009, il n’existe plus de « Google Standard » : la personnalisation des résultats de recherche n’est pas une option, c’est la donne pour tout le monde! Cela se vérifie sur nos deux ordinateurs : bien qu’ayant des intérêts convergents et bien que nous effectuons nos recherches depuis des lieux proches, Google nous présente des résultats différents, correspondant à ce qu’il estime être ce que nous avons envie de voir. Par exemple, des recherches connotées « business » vous renverront ultérieurement à des résultats « business », des recherches connotées « politiques » à des résultats « politiques ». La composante géographique peut changer radicalement les résultats présentés : pensez à ce qu’il se passe lorsqu’une recherche est effectuée de part et d’autre de l’Atlantique sur un sujet polémique… Cela est dangereux, car ces algorithmes nous dictent désormais le menu de l’information que nous consommons mais sans que nous puissions savoir quels critères ils utilisent – critères qui doivent pourtant être bien éloignés de ceux que l’on imagine être ceux de l’Express lors de la conférence de rédaction, quand elle pense à ses lecteurs !

L’enjeu est le suivant : ce que j’ai envie d’entendre en tant que consommateur est-il toujours ce qu’il est nécessaire que j’entende en tant que citoyen ? Faut-il toujours flatter cette vieille théorie du « mort-kilomètre », qui dit qu’un mort à un kilomètre de mon domicile en vaut mille à mille kilomètres ? Mark Zuckerberg met bien les pieds dans le plat quand, pour expliquer le fonctionnement dunewsfeed Facebook, il déclare qu’un écureuil mourant sur le palier de votre maison est sûrement plus susceptible de vous intéresser que les enfants qui meurent en Afrique (l’anecdote est rapportée par David Kirkpatrick dans son livre The Facebook Effect)

Des informations organisées selon un agenda qui nous échappe

Certes, personne ne croit qu’il est possible d’évoluer dans l’immensité d’Internet sans ces filtres algorithmiques : il faut bien que les résultats soient organisés quand on tape une recherche ! Là dessus, c’est Eric Schmidt, le CEO de Google, qui a donné le chiffre qui tue en début d’année : d’après lui, nous créons désormais tous les deux jours autant de données qu’on en a créé entre le début de la civilisation et 2003… Il ne s’agit donc pas de se tenir éloigné des moteurs de recherches et des applications qui organisent l’information qui circule sur Internet. Il s’agit plutôt d’en comprendre les rouages, et, quand il le devient nécessaire, d’apprendre à les contourner pour qu’Internet reste un outil propice à créer des citoyens éclairés sans devenir simplement un fournisseur quotidien de lolcats et autres vidéos divertissantes mais franchement stupides partagés par vos petites cousines sur Facebook.

Les citoyens du 20ème siècle ont appris la théorie de l’agenda : ils savent que l’information diffusée par la presse reflète une sélection des enjeux choisis par les rédactions plutôt qu’un reflet de ce qu’il se passe dans le monde (voir les travaux de Maxwell McCombs et Donald Shaw en 1972, bien que le succès de cette théorie se mesure en constatant qu’elle a échappé à ses auteurs pour entrer dans l’intuition collective !).

A nous, citoyens du 21ème siècle, de nous emparer de la théorie de l’algorithme : ce qui se passe dans nos ordinateurs n’est pas non plus un reflet de ce qu’il se passe dans le monde, mais bien une sélection personnalisée faite par des algorithmes et basés sur des critères que nous n’avons pas choisis.

Ainsi, plus les français se nourrissent d’information sur Internet, plus une mission claire et importante s’affirme pour les médias traditionnels : il leur incombe de faire le travail de la visibilité des points de vue, pour que le citoyen soit confronté dans la presse à ce que sonnewsfeed lui cache. A cet égard nous remercions toutes deux Courrier International dont la sélection d’information est toujours dérangeante, comme quelqu’un qui ignore notre confort parfois facile et paresseux.

L’algorithme n’a pas de visage, il n’y a personne à vilipender pour les choix qu’il fait. C’est ce qui est d’autant plus dangereux : ce n’est pas parcequ’il n’est pas humain qu’il est neutre– il reste forgé, conçu par des hommes dont nous devons comprendre les choix et les objectifs afin de les mettre en balance avec les nôtres. Les ingénieurs de Facebook veulent nous divertir et cela est bien normal. Mais notre démocratie nous appelle également à davantage de responsabilité, ce qui implique aujourd’hui de repenser notre rapport à l’information sur Internet, et qui rend un rôle clé au journalisme du XXIe siècle.

[camillesnotebook-blog]

Reflections on our Students for Free Culture Conference in NY, Feb. 19-20 2011

  I arrived superjetlagged but superenthusiastic at SFCNYC, and I had two days to meet the community and to ask all the questions I wanted to. Indeed, before I left we (the French chapter) established a list of questions we wanted to ask the other chapters, and on top of that list was: Is there a simple, clear, operational definition of what free culture is and that we could give to people who keep bothering us with that question?

I was given the chance to attend this conference, and I am now given the opportunity to give you my thoughts about it, so let me tell you briefly what I’ve learned at SFCNYC. When I came back home everyone asked me how it was, and I was so tired that I could barely articulate, so it came down to two words: Amazing Community. Now that I’m more awake I can of course elaborate more on all the rest, but I think it remains the main point. We can work together to elaborate a short definition of what free culture is (and thanks to Aditi for re-sending us the Wheeler declaration, it helps a lot to answer people’s questions about our goals!) but what’s magical about our movement is the community it creates. Maybe it’s OK that there is no concrete and definitive one-line goal written in gold letters on our website, because it might be what makes us more creative everyday.

In reality we share a lot more than a one-line definition: we share common values and a broad vision of the society we want to work towards together. This opens a billion ways to participate in our movement: I was amazed by the diversity of the initiatives that were presented at SFCNYC, diversity of subjects (education, music, fashion, ect.), of people (so many different talents and skills!) and of means (technical, legal, etc.). We still ignore how far our movement can go, both geographically and conceptually, how exciting!

The unconference (as I’m typing this my autocorrect tries to get it back to just “conference” but no – we made the unconference happen!) was exceptional. Seeing everyone brainstorming together to organize small meetings on the topics we wanted to discuss, and then to run around to listen to everyone’s ideas and to collaborate to the various projects was like a one-day illustration of how SFC works!

So when I came back and I was asked: “And what should we do now?”, and I want to answer that by saying: “We should share more!”. Let’s share more ideas about how we apply our freeculturian values to the things that interest us, let’s share our opinions and our passions, let’s share our ideas about “how to make free culture sexy”, about what to do in our colleges/cities/countries, let’s share our articles, our funny videos, our posters and our campaign materials!

Reposted from the SFCNYC blog : http://conf11.freeculture.org/2011/03/05/reflections-from-camille-francois/#more-439