Liminal states

From the CFP2008 web page:

This election year will be the first to address US technology policy in the information age as part of our national debate. Candidates have put forth positions about technology policy and have recognized that it has its own set of economic, political, and social concerns. In the areas of privacy, intellectual property, cybersecurity, telecommunications, and freedom of speech, an increasing number of issues once confined to experts now penetrate public conversation. Our decisions about technology policy are being made at a time when the architectures of our information and communication technologies are still being built. Debate about these issues needs to be better-informed in order for us to make policy choices in the public interest.

This year, the 18th annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference will focus on what constitutes technology policy. CFP: Technology Policy ’08 is an opportunity to help shape public debate on those issues being made into laws and regulations and those technological infrastructures being developed. The direction of our technology policy impacts the choices we make about our national defense, our civil liberties during wartime, the future of American education, our national healthcare systems, and many other realms of policy discussed more prominently on the election trail. Policies ranging from data mining and wiretapping, to file-sharing and open access, and e-voting to electronic medical records will be addressed by expert panels of technologists, policymakers, business leaders, and advocates.

Updates:

• if you’re on Facebook, please join the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Cause and/or group. Presence on other social network sites coming soon!
• For journalists writing about information technology and policy: some funding (covering registration, hotel, and travel) is available.

CFP2008 is being held in New Haven, Connecticut, on May 20-23. Back in 2000 Elizabeth Weise called it “the most important computer conference you’ve never heard of”; I think of CFP as the most important conference — and network of people and organizations — focused on civil rights (and increasingly, human rights in general) in an electronic society. Lorrie Faith Cranor’s Ten Years of Computers, Freedom and Privacy gives the early history, where hackers, lawyers, law enforcement, and goverment representatives fought out “crypto wars” and internet censorship battles (ending with a defiant “we’ll be back” from the Clinton adminstration as the Clipper Chip went to its well-deserved fate).

The technology policy focus is extremely timely. The upcoming election will feature significant differences between the parties and candidates on issues like net neutrality, warrantless surveillance, immunity for corporations who may have collaborated with illegal government wiretapping programs, Real ID, the McCain bill to censor social networks, and privacy — now on the national agenda thanks to MoveOn’s stance against Facebook’s Beacon.

Over the last several years, CFP has steadily broadened its horizons to take a more global view and pay increasing attention to perspectives that are getting overlooked: digital divide issues, normalization of surveillance and censorship by governments and corporations, hactivism, the special challenges of communities like the Mohawk Nation (spread over multiple jurisdictions), high school students in a panel organized by danah boyd in Seattle in 2005. After a few (in my humble opinion) rather bland and corporate years, things have taken a more activist turn: a 2003 New York walking tour by the Surveillance Camera Players, a 2005 demo by the ACLU that led to the US State Department changing policy on encryption and passports (props to State Department official Frank Moss for being there and taking the message back), Patrick Ball accepting his EFF Pioneer Award by satellite from Sri Lanka, where he was working with the truth and reconciliation commission. Last year in Quebec, during the height of Stop Real ID Now! grassroots activist campaign, a half-dozen coalition members ranging from libertarians to labor activists were there (as well as some people from DHS and elsewhere who strongly disagreed with us but were still willing to have very honest discussions), and Bruce Schneier’s keynote on the Psychology of Security for people on both sides of the debate.

The call for presentations, tutorials, and workshops asks for proposals on panels, tutorials, speaker suggestions, and birds of a feather sessions through the CFP: Technology Policy ’08 submission page. The deadline for panels tutorials, and speakers is March 17, 2008, and the birds-of-a-feather deadline is April 21.The list of suggested topics is really broad (I’ll include it in a comment) and so as always there are likely to be a lot more high-quality submissions than can easily fit; the program committee often merges and suggests changes to sessions to help squeeze more in. The submission process can seem a bit intimidating (this is an ACM conference and so it has some academic overtones) but the guidelines are helpful and have links to some examples.

So if there’s a topic you’d like to see covered, one or more speakers you think would be good, a presentation you’d like to give, a panel you’d like to organize, or a tutorial you’d like to attend (or provide), please think about submitting it. If you’re not sure whether it makes sense, feel free to give it a trial run in a comment here or just send me some mail.

If it seems like CFP means a lot to me, it does: I’ve been going there for over 10 years; my SO Deborah Pierce has been going even longer and chaired it in 2005. I’ve volunteered, asked questions, been on a panel, run a couple of BoFs, and taken photos of Deborah during the various sessions she’s appeared in or moderated, and this year I’m excited to be on the Program Committee. There are lots of friends and long-term acquaintances we only get to see in person at CFP — and every year we met a lot of new people. This year, with the two of us working together on Tales from the Net, and Computers, Freedom and Privacy 2008’s ambitious goal of “shaping public debate” on technology policy in an election year, I’m particularly looking forward to it!

jon

The two-part series I posted on Tales from the Net and Wired’s How-to Wiki is starting to get some coverage.

Shai Sachs has an excellent piece on MyDD:

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about Facebook “censorship” of free speech. The Blackadder One case I wrote about a couple weeks ago was just an early warning sign of more trouble to come. Recently Jon Pincus has been posting a series of diaries at Tales from the Net and Liminal States about his encounter with problems very similar to those Derek Blackadder ran into when he tried to organize workers on Facebook. Pincus’s posts include a very good trail of documentation of the problems he’s encountering, which make this series one of the more interesting resources on Facebook censorship I’ve seen.

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This morning when I went to log in to a discussion forum on Yuku (“your interests, your communities” — the next-generation, friend-enabled version of ezboard), I was greeted with:

Our terms of service has changed. Please read the new terms of service. By clicking “I agree,” you agree to Yuku’s Terms of Use.

Oh, they has* changed, has they? What changes might those be?

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The discussion board on the Barack Obama discussion page is now *gone* — not just unlinked, vanished. If you follow a link to it, it takes you to your home page instead. Sigh. Looks like they’re choosing fear over hope. Any bookmarks or links won’t work. I’m sure it’s around on backup somewhere, so hopefully things aren’t permanently lost and we can get Facebook to restore it.

It’s not clear whether this was done by Chris Hughes, who’s believed to be the admin of the Barack Obama page (as well as a Facebook founder who according to Wikipedia now “primarily acts as coordinator of online organizing within the Barack Obama presidential campaign on My.BarackObama.com“), or by Facebook. Other Barack Obama discussion boards remain up, although some are undergoing troll attacks.

Facebook: censoring political speech has the backstory.

Update on February 22: How to respond when Facebook censors your political speech is up on Tales from the Net and Wired’s How-to Wiki and links back to comments in this thread. Alas, the Facebook Barack Obama discussion board was deleted on February 20, so many of the links here go off to oblivion.

If you are doing political activism on Facebook and you’re getting warned as a spammer — or if your account has been disabled for engaging in political speech — please leave a comment here or on the Wired Wiki page. Thanks!

February 19: another account was deactivated with less than one hour notice. I’m getting flagged by Facebook’s automated filters for posting info about how to find polling locations. (Okay, I posted it twice, an hour apart. Still.) It’s not pretty. More soon.

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The Yes We Can/Sí Se Puede video’s already got at least a million hits on YouTube — 566,000 for the one I linked to here, a couple more instances with 285,000 and 140,000, and then a long tail curve …

How many people will watch it if we get it all over Facebook? I dunno, but it seems worth trying to find out. So after some consultation with a friend, late last night I put a message on the Obama discussion board with these suggestions:

Here’s how you can help:

1) post it (using the “posted items” link in your applications list on the left hand side). This way, it’ll be on your profile and in your feed.

2) tell your friends about it, and ask them to do the same

3) if you’re in any Obama groups on Facebook, please post these instructions in their discussion boards and wall.

4) if you’ve got a blog, blog about it

Thanks!

I also send a handful of PMs, including one to a 20-person “friend list”, and put it in the One Million Strong for Obama group. [In the process, I ran into a couple of people with complementary ideas — I’ll add those to the comments here.]

Within fifteen minutes, two people replied in the thread saying “done”. By the time I woke up this morning, there were ten replies in the two threads … as they say in election season, “early returns are promising”.

So please: take a moment to get involved and help!

Todd Bishop’s Microsoft goes after biggest buy ever to catch up with Google in the Seattle PI has the most common framing:

Could a PC software giant and an Internet icon join forces to take on the Web search king?

That was the big question Friday as Microsoft Corp. stunned the online world with a bid to buy Yahoo! Inc. for nearly $45 billion in cash and stock — a blockbuster proposal that could reshape the industry by combining two tech veterans in a battle against search leader Google.

Steve Lohr covers similar ground in Yahoo Offer Is Strategy Shift for Microsoft (no, ya think?) in the New York Times.

Analyst Henry Blodgett’s take: “This is a brilliant move by Microsoft–a big premium dangled in front of battered Yahoo shareholders, but a price that would have seemed absurdly low as recently as six months ago.” who da’ punk is more skeptical, but keeping his mind open:

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I thought the Clinton Attacks Obama wiki was a great idea the first time I heard about it, and it’s steadily grown since then.  Here’s the welcome message:

This is an experiment in community information gathering. My name is Baratunde Thurston. I’m a comedian, writer and social media junkie. As a contributor for Jack & Jill Politics, I’ve seen the strong black community reaction to what looks like a pattern of race-themed attacks against Obama by Bill, Hillary and other members of her campaign. As folks have questioned the number and validity of these incidents, I thought I’d put together a place to keep track of them.

Blog posts are not good places to keep a running list, and I’m too busy to do it all by myself, so like a multinational corporation, I’m outsourcing this bad boy.

Not only does opening it up to the community means that sources any one person would miss keep flowing in, it’s an excellent use of the automatic list generation features available on most wikis, too.  Seeing the list of race-themed attacks that are being flung around really highlights how extensive the pattern is.  Baratunde’s also the Jack of Jack and Jill Politics (blogging as Jack Turner), and his The Clintons, Black folks, and America — a Reckoning gives some great perspectives that don’t usually make it into mainstream coverage.

The wiki’s starting to get some press attention and this’ll probably steadily increase, no matter whether or not the attacks stop.   And deservedly so: the general technique is something that supporters of candidates from any party can use to surface repeated uses of code words or images as part of smear campaigns.   Swiftboating will be a lot harder this year …

I summarized the Economist’s debate on social networks in education on the Tales from the Net blog, but I wanted to focus more on the race and gender aspects here on Liminal States. To start with, check out the participants and their roles. Superficially (and to the extent we can tell from the pictures and pronouns people use), it seems gender balanced: three male, four female. Look a little more closely though:

1. the “speakers”, presenting the arguments for and against, are both male.
2. the “moderator” (who frames the issue, provides commentary on both speakers’ arguments, and “will peruse all correspondence from the floor and raise points that are of particular interest or merit with the two speakers”) is also male.
3. the women are all “guest participants”

Marginalized much?

Things are even more extreme in the “age” dimension — in a comment in the debate, I asked whether there were plans to involve any current or recent students as guest participants. And although it’s much harder to infer reliably from photos and language, there appears to be even more extreme marginalization in the race dimension … it’s a mighty white-looking bunch of folks they’ve got.

One of the thing that makes this lack of diversity more acute is the Economist’s “Oxford 2.0” debate rules:

In our reconception, the proposition and the opposition are each represented by individual speakers—experts in their fields chosen by The Economist‘s staff to match the proposition at hand.

Because, after all, we wouldn’t want those (nudge-nudge) other perspectives to get equal standings with the guys hand-picked by The Economist’s staff.

Howard Rheingold (author of The Virtual Community) has a new vlog up.  The first video does a great job in setting today’s high-bandwidth, visually immersive world in the context of online community, social networking, and activism over the late 20 years. From his intro post on Smartmobs:

It all started when I started thinking about updating A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community, which I wrote twenty years ago. It didn’t take long to realize that a description of how I spend my time online these days would be conveyed more effectively via video/screencast than plain text. Once I got rolling, I realized that it would take more than one episode to show how and why I spend time reading RSS, scanning blogs, blogging, gardening wikis, posting in virtual communities, Twittering, teaching, etc. So the first month or so will feature episodes of A (re)Slice of Life Online. However, once I started including my indoor and outdoor offices in the videos, it occurred to me that I ought to explain something about the parts of my life that haven’t been so visible to my readers — the painting, gardening, sculpting that are as important to me as the publishing activities that are most visible to others.

This mixing of different aspects of life is very characteristic of how I think of social networks as well — and something I’m trying to do in this blog, as I mix in psytrance, gender, and political activism  along with software engineering, security, and strategy.  Rheingold does it better, of course; ah well,  maybe in another 20 years I’ll be up to his level.

Worth checking out. 

Wikia‘s an open-source search engine that uses community feedback to improve search results, an approach referred to as ‘social search’, and they released their alpha version today. I briefly discuss the social networking aspects of this and my initial experiences on the Tales from the Net blog and linked out to some initial reviews and discussion. In South Korea, Naver dominates the market via a social search approach; when I was at Microsoft, I strongly lobbied for the company investing in this to complement its algorithmic approaches and try to leapfrog Google rather than catching up, so I’m a big believer in the possibilities if it’s done right.

There’s an interesting debate about Wikia’s intent to be transparent about its search algorithms and implementation: will this give the advantage to people trying to hack the system to put their site on top? Or — because the community as a whole and responsibly-behaving web site owners all have an interest in getting the users high-quality search results — will it instead create a system where search engine optimizers and marketers (SEOs/SEMs) are above-ground participants, and overall results are better? Hard to know … if Wikia starts to get some traction, with luck, we’ll find out.

Tales from the Net.

Stay tuned!