Category: Digital Culture

Democracy Disrupted

A couple of posts ago, I reported that the organization Fight for the Future had facilitated enough comments sent to the Copyright Office regarding Section 512 of the DMCA that they “crashed” the servers.  In a follow-up email brimming with pride, the organization said this to those who contributed:

“Wow! In a matter of days you and nearly 100,000 other people told the U.S. Copyright Office about the urgent need for better Fair Use and free speech protections in the DMCA.”

I didn’t receive one of these emails, but my friend David Lowery did. And not because he said anything to the Copyright Office about the “urgent need for better Fair Use and free speech protections,” but because he and his colleagues tested the FFTF web form email blaster and published their findings on The Trichordist blog.  They found that the automated system did not verify email addresses or confirm that IP addresses were within the US; it also allowed multiple comments from the same source and as stated in the post, “we managed to post rapid-fire comments (less than three seconds between comments).”

As indicated in my other post, I really do believe you’d have to search long and hard to find 100,000 citizens who could properly explain the DMCA, let alone fair use doctrine; but to compound this nonsense, some astroturf organization floods a government server with automated messages that may represent anything from bots to foreign citizens to minors to the typically pavlovian American, who just clicks stuff that sounds really serious but that he doesn’t understand.  Democracy in action indeed.

I’ve made this point many times, but it’s one worth making often.  This type of automated “political action,” which in this case is funded by a very large industry, should be among the real digital-age phenomena that scares the hell out of people, regardless of the stated issue du jour.  Forget the DMCA for a moment and imagine it’s the pharmaceutical industry or petroleum or Koch Industries using the same exact tools to rally virtual citizens, sock puppets, non citizens, and literally anyone capable of believing a lie and clicking a mouse to flood the EPA or HHS on some matter that disfavors the public interest in the service of one industry’s bottom line. That’s not even coming close to the reason the first amendment affirms the rights of speech and the petition of government. And, yes, there is a history of obfuscation by big business since long before the internet, but automation seems uniquely suited to fostering the illusion that the people are the ones doing the speaking.

In The Trichordist post, Lowery indicates that if FFTF used the type of automation described above to flood government servers, it might have been illegal but was at least a well-funded monopolization of a system meant to allow all parties to comment on an issue. Hence the “crashing” that this organization is so proud of is tantamount to—you got it—chilling free speech.  One could of course say this about any online petition in theory, but isn’t it interesting that the last time we heard about crashing systems like this was over SOPA?  So, does this really happen because there are so many well-informed citizens who care more about “digital rights” than any number of more pressing issues? Or might it have something to do with the fact that the corporate interests in these cases also happen to be the world’s experts in automation and aggregation?  Maybe not.  Maybe there really are more Americans worried about whether or not some YouTube video is a “fair use” than are concerned with the economy, violent crime, security, real civil rights violations, etc.  And if that’s the case, then  there’s truly nothing left of the Republic worth fighting for, is there?

On the positive side, I suspect a lot of this digital reactivism is wasted and that the internet industry may eventually discover that not everything is a numbers game.  For all the megabytes of outrage, what exactly does anyone think the Copyright Office is supposed to do with most of it? Responsibly vetted petitions have an important role to play in public policy.  But in a moment like this, it is the Register of Copyright’s job to consider the views of various stakeholders; and the comments that should be most influential will come from representatives of all sides who submit fairly long and well-reasoned statements based on actual knowledge of the law.

Ultimately, the Copyright Office recommendations to Congress on Section 512 may be 100 pages worth of analysis based on legal precedent going back to the beginning of the country. So, any petition to this particular office only carries so much weight in the first place; but how much attention does Fight for the Future imagine copyright experts will give to some boilerplate whinging about a doctrine they have grossly misrepresented to the signers of said petition?  And even 100,000 verified signatures would be small potatoes in a age when people will click on just about anything.  It probably wouldn’t be that hard to automate 100,000 “signatures” to lobby the White House to appoint Sponge Bob Square Pants as Ambassador to Fiji, but so what?  (Come to think of it, that petition would probably do quite well.)

There are an estimated 5.5 million jobs in the U.S. that directly depend upon the protection of copyrights. Meanwhile, every independent rights holder I have thus far encountered has effectively given up on the DMCA as a tool for protecting creative works online.  That’s a tangible problem, and one that does affect everyone because 5.5 million jobs supports a hell of lot more jobs than that in the overall market.  We could take this reality seriously, or we could keep finding ways to imagine that free speech is under siege and continue to allow the largest companies in the world to manipulate the political process with a little code and a lot of noise.

Why Does Google Love Piracy?

In yesterday’s post, I referred to the Android-based service called Google Now, which is about as close as your mobile device comes (so far) to reading your mind and anticipating your wants and needs.  By gathering data from contacts, emails, destinations visited, searches made, etc. the algorithms applied by the Now service essentially learn a user’s interests and then prompts him with what Google calls Cards, containing information or recommendations that may be either general or timely.  As Andy at TorrentFreak reports, “Google Now and its ‘Card’ notifications often pop up at the most opportune times, offering advice about things that haven’t yet happened in a users [sic] life – but are about to.”

As stated yesterday, I cannot personally imagine the benefits of this type of service outweighing the utterly invasive ickiness of it, and Andy also acknowledges that Google Now may be getting too close for comfort for many users.  But the headline reason TF was citing the service is that one of their regular readers noted that Google Now had recognized his interest in the character Deadpool and so delivered a Card recommending that he can view the recently-released feature film on a major torrent site. Andy writes, “Obviously there isn’t a team at Google hand-crafting Google Cards designed to promote unauthorized torrents. However, this does appear to show that Google’s algorithms are smart enough to put together interesting advice based on multiple and diverse information sources.”

Right.  Google surely is not “hand-crafting” Cards to promote piracy; but as usual, it isn’t making any effort to mitigate it either.  I know. I get it.  If the user shows an interest in Deadpool and also regularly visits torrent sites, Google’s algorithm is going to cross-reference these data and somewhat blindly produce the result described.  But that doesn’t mean the search giant doesn’t have the capability to limit or even stop themselves from pushing infringing sites like mints at the drug store register.  We know they have this capability.  In fact, I bet a user could read dozens of articles about human trafficking all day long without ever once receiving a Google Card suggesting where he can buy a slave.  (Please let me be right about this.)

Google is apparently addicted to pushing mass copyright infringement at every opportunity.  The difference between a search yielding legal and informative results about Deadpool and a search yielding a list of infringing sites offering the film hinges on whether or not you put the word “watch” in front of the title.  And even if nobody cared about the fact that this multi-billion dollar company is effectively pushing content theft, it also happens to be offering really crappy search service. I mean heaven forbid a user who isn’t attuned to the darker aspects of the Web simply wants information about a movie, and Google has decided that if he uses the word “watch” in his query, he gets to be vulnerable to links that are increasingly loaded with malware.  That’s cracker-jack service from the biggest search engine in the world.  But Google Now takes the problem a step further.  Rather than the user explicitly searching for information, and then navigating around useless and predatory results, Google Now can actually push a recommendation that is not only illegal, but potentially hazardous to the user.

More broadly, what does this story say about the larger promise of these platforms to create new opportunities for commerce and entrepreneurism?  Because an interest in a hot new film like Deadpool is an opportunity to drive a consumer to comics, merchandise, fan sites, or (call me crazy) any number of legal platforms to watch the movie! So, any prompt that would send the consumer to a torrent site is pure opportunity cost for the legitimate market.  Considering how leading-edge applications like Google Now really are, it seems like a one hell of a precedent for the company to set given all their pretensions to be great innovators.  Then again, this is SOP for Google, isn’t it?

Apple v FBI Doesn’t Address the Real Challenge

In a story that appeared Monday in The Guardian, writer Danny Yadron projects a hypothetical, but not technically unrealistic, future scenario in which we imagine our driverless car hijacks a run to the grocery store, transporting us instead to a police station because face-recognition software resulted in our being wanted for questioning in an investigation.  The eerie itself, Yadron reports, comes from engineer and former US government privacy policy consultant  Ashkan Soltani, who warns that this kind of circumstance could become reality if Apple loses its fight with the FBI over whether or not it must write code to circumvent the security system of San Bernardino terrorist Sayed Farook’s iPhone.

Of course, it is not farfetched to anticipate new forms of abuse in our increasingly networked lives, and it is prudent to seek remedies in policy and caselaw precedent that may preempt such scenarios; but I’m not sure that a ruling one way or another in the Apple case would be quite so prophetic as some observers suggest.  In fact, assuming we do become increasingly networked and adapt to the holistic Internet of Things as effortlessly and rapidly as the technologists expect us to, the matter of protecting civil liberties in this future society seems increasingly paradoxical. After all, government agencies are supposed to be our hedge against the excesses of private enterprise that might invade our privacy or run afoul of anti-trust restrictions; or government agencies are meant to protect us from criminal abuse of the same systems. But do we simultaneously expect private enterprise or “white hat” hackers to protect us from the overreach of government?

Yadron’s article addresses several aspects of this challenge, citing competing points of view from the policy, law-enforcement, and technology sectors.  And there are no easy answers.  For one thing, the current Apple case involving the cell phone of a known terrorist and a warrant issued by court order may be too specific to beg the broader question as to who controls the code that runs our day-to-day lives.  As of yesterday morning, the FBI announced that they may be able to crack the iPhone without Apple’s help; but even if the presently-suspended legal case were to proceed, Yadron notes that the court could rule in the FBI’s favor in this one extraordinary instance while remaining silent on the much larger question.

My own assumption is that, with regard to cases involving law enforcement, the public is still served by the courts and due process and that new legislation may not be necessary to adapt to new technology. For instance, as dramatic as the futuristic arrest by driverless car scenario may sound, it would be an illegal detention according to existing statute, at least the way Soltani imagines it.  But if similar automation were one day used to capture a wanted criminal based on evidence and an arrest warrant, due process would not necessarily suffer just because the arrest would be partly effected via code. Particularly as we anticipate an inevitable increase in automated law enforcement practices, if we cannot continue to invest faith and power in judicial oversight, we’re basically hosed.

With regard to living day-to-day in a networked society, though, we probably have to imagine scenarios more subtle than the automated arrest by our own robot vehicles—like undetectable invasions that track habits and behaviors, all organized into data that could be used to manipulate or determine opportunities for jobs, education, healthcare, insurance, credit, and so on.  The opportunities these encroachments provide for mischief by corporate, criminal, or government entities are indeed new territory—much more so it seems than the Apple/FBI case—and could easily demand new legislation.

Yadron quotes science fiction writer Bruce Bethke, who gives examples like your cellphone notifying your health insurance provider when you enter a tobacco shop. Users of Google Now on their Android phones have opted into a “service” that cross-references search, GMail content, location, etc. to anticipate their wants and needs and then provides suggestions via  Cards.  Why anyone finds this more helpful than creepy is a mystery to me. All I imagine is Montag’s doe-eyed wife, subservient to the system in Fahrenheit 451, when I contemplate the capacity for this technology to push behaviors, including political or social beliefs. Even at its most benign, it just sounds annoying, like they should have called it Google Nag instead of Google Now.

Meanwhile, we should expect to see a growing market for anti-surveillance products and services for what can only become an increasingly paranoid world in which we are voluntarily spying on ourselves.  As AlterNet reports, English designer Adam Harvey is making wardrobe that will shield against thermal imaging, and he’s demonstrating makeup techniques that will confound face-recognition software. Such efforts are endorsed by organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight for the Future because the presumed abusers of surveillance technology will be government agencies, but what about the more subtle private-enterprise promises of the networked society?

Will we live in “smart” homes enjoying their many conveniences but always sure to wear our cloaking PJs?   Will we need to buy and vigilantly update an array of countermeasures to protect our privacy inside our own walls because now they really do have ears?  As we interact with our own homes and vehicles and with one another, we will constantly be sending data to somebody’s servers somewhere.  We are already doing this, though not as holistically as the Internet of Things implies.  How do we write legislation that protects against corporate, government, or criminal abuse of these data and systems?  Or more immediately, whom can we expect to represent civil liberties in this context?

Because I think organizations like EFF and Fight for the Future are often haggling over small potatoes while getting nowhere near the larger question.  These digital rights activists—who are dependent upon Silicon Valley support by the way—make a lot of noise about our “right” to jailbreak these disposable, hand-held devices—something very few of us will ever bother to do—without coming close to having the real discussion about whether or not public agency oversight will be able to protect consumers in a fully-networked future.  When too much of the emphasis on anti-surveillance assumes “government” will be the only abuser, we forget that there is a profit motive in all this monitoring by private enterprise.  Meanwhile, as Google’s presence in Washington increases considerably, are legislators and executive branch officials getting advice from Google on how to protect us from Google?  Because one way or another, we seem to be voluntarily becoming a surveillance society, and I wonder if there will ultimately be an opt out button.