Uncharted: The World of Internet Policy

First of all, I like this week’s reading The Global War for Internet Governance by Laura DeNardis. She made very understandable and straightforward explanation of arcane terminologies like critical internet resources, defined what is Internet governance explicitly (which is not all about government or policy), and most importantly, answered the central question of who governs the Internet. I also appreciate she lay the point at the beginning of the book that the theory was for both democratic and authoritarian regimes under different political architecture, social norms, and cultural background no matter how conflicting values only widen the gap between nations in reality.     

After fast-forwarding this book, I feel no other governments did better than P.R.C. in leveraging the information technologies to serve its propaganda purpose. It managed to maintain and even reinforce its control over information flows when most traditionally dominant institutions have gradually lost some of their historical governance of the Internet due to the increasing degrees of globalization in economic, media, and technology. The various approaches it uses range from conducting direct censorship to regulating online content and activities through intermediaries where dominant Internet service providers and transaction platforms are state-owned enterprises. It is also seeking a segmentation of the Internet into sovereign domains and enabling itself to exercise more control over content and infrastructure via the unique identifiers. The potential of these Internet Critical Resources, a term used by DeNardis, should not be neglected. 

One resource, the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, can be utilized to design surveillance systems, conduct strict censorship, and block specific end-users, which grant owners of the address book a fundamental capability of inspecting every netizen. Currently, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) functions as the gatekeeper that coordinates the namespace of the Internet worldwide. By the time The Global War was published, ICANN was still under the oversight of the U.S. government. As China and Russia put pressure on ICANN-related tensions and the U.N. called for a multi-stakeholder model, Department of Commerce had planned to phase out the funding and supervision since Bush administration, and this was made official in October 2016. Now being controlled by U.N. International Telecommunication Unit (ITU), ICANN causes concerns both inside and outside the U.S., for instance, whose voices should represent the global community, what mechanism should be devised to ensure the transparency of ICANN and the accountability of each stakeholder, how to guarantee the freedom of expression considering divergent interpretations of “freedom,” and whether a multilateral model would actually benefit particular country from expanding its role in the Internet governance.

Another asset is the domain name system (DNS), and its maintenance is the major responsibility of ICANN. Besides the administrative problems similar to Internet protocol system, I think the DNS raise other problems as there is an evolving secondary market for domain names without governmental intervention. When I searched for DNS, millions of results about how to sell domain names for profit popped out. On GoDaddy, you can buy a .com domain name for the first year of use at only 99 cents. Trades of domain names are likely to reap more monetary gains in the election year. A woman bought PresidentTrump.com for $9 and hopes to sell it for $100,000. A D.C. artist purchased ClintonKaine.com for $8 and now expects a return of $90,000. In short, anyone can invest in a couple of domain names with randomly embedded names and make a fortune once someone come across need a particular one. Without solid math proof, my instinct told me that the odds of getting a million in this way should be greater than winning a lottery of the same amount of money. But does such behavior misappropriate one’s name for merchandise use thus violate the right of publicity? I feel the gray areas in the law have still to be clarified.            

I wish I had gotten a little more time with The Global War for Internet Governance, because I was really enjoying it and I wish I didn’t have to do as much skimming as I am having to do. Internet governance seems to come up every week in class in one form or another, so it is nice to finally dive in and thoroughly explore the topic. The internet is borderless by nature, at least in the traditional sense, and the closest thing we have to a universal governing body over the internet is the domain name registry, so it is almost impossible to not talk about who, if anyone, should be in charge and how.

Private organizations and companies obviously have the most direct control over the internet because so much of the web is private and companies control their own websites. However, we have seen many instances recently, especially with Yahoo handing over all of their information to the NSA, that show that the government has the power to control the companies. That raises the question of how much of a distinction is there between private and public internet governance in a society where the public can in many cases control the private.

Websites that exist outside of American borders should at least be free of American government internet governance, but even that has proven to not always be the case. Kickass Torrents was recently shut down, and the owner of the site was arrested for violating American copyright law despite never having set foot on American soil. That definitely paints a picture of a government that has global internet governance to some extent.

Having that been said, Apple’s battle earlier this year with the FBI does show that government control over private companies has its limits. In addition to that, the book talks about the Global Network Initiative, an organization of companies dedicated to protecting the rights of internet users. The GNI is something that I had not heard of before reading this book, despite this being an area that I follow. I was familiar with the EFF though, which is also a big advocate of online privacy and freedom of information. The EFF frequently lends legal aid to people or organizations that butt heads with government surveillance.

For this week’s Information & Data Security topic I read Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier. Most topics we’ve covered, like complex adaptive systems, the information economy, interop, and big data have major privacy implications. All books we’ve read so far asserted the importance of privacy and the need to protect privacy.  However, I think Data and Goliath made the best argument I’ve read about why privacy is so important.

I’ve always been skeptical of the argument “if you aren’t doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide.” But at the same time, I’ve argued, even last week, that personalized advertisements are not an invasion of privacy. In Data and Goliath Schneier convinced me that both of these are bad arguments. Schneier devoted a whole chapter to explain the importance of privacy and why it’s a fundamental human right. I will not repeat all the convincing arguments he made, but one point stood out for me: There’s a strong physiological basis for privacy. Biologist Peter Watts makes the point that a desire for privacy is innate: mammals in particular don’t respond well to surveillance. We consider it a physical threat, because animals in the natural world are surveilled by predators. Surveillance makes us feel like prey, just as it makes the surveillors act like predators. There are facts about our lives that we choose not to share, not because we’re doing something wrong, but because someone else knowing them makes us feel like prey.

The reason I’ve concluded that personal advertisements are an invasion of privacy is because as Schneier explained “data we’re willing to share can imply conclusions that we don’t want to share.” Further, as he argued, even if it’s just an algorithm that’s doing the conclusion, the fact that a person may become aware of this conclusion is enough to feel like an invasion of privacy.

As a side note, I’d like to point out an irony in regards to privacy. As Schneier demonstrated in many examples, governments shroud their surveillance activities in secrecy. Governments have it backwards: they insist on secrecy (privacy) because they are doing something wrong. People have a fundamental right to privacy, because they are human, but governments don’t. There are probably limited reasons as to why government is entitled to secrecy, and we need policy to delineate these limits and ensure that we don’t suffer from “secrecy creep”.

So, privacy is fundamental right. How do we go about preserving that right? Like Schneier proposed, there are principles we all probably agree to. However, in practice different people’s understanding of these principles and the tradeoffs they are willing to make regarding their privacy are so different that coming up with policy is an almost impossible task.

However, one policy that I think is relatively easy to institute is protections for whistleblowers. In the end, humans are the best judge of when an invasion of privacy occurs. Whether in private or public settings, we need to empower the people are willing to point out these invasions, rather than discourage them.

Bruce Schneier’s book “Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World" emphasized that today, metadata is collected on us from the devices we use, the sites that we visit, and the applications that we employ. Schneier is very concerned that this data is being used to remove people’s privacy, and while I agree that this is true, I am not entirely convinced that we have that much to fear.

While I know that social media companies store metadata about us and even sell our information to other corporations, I did not realize, like Schneier mentions in the book, that most of us are walking around will a tracker in our pockets everyday: our cell phones. Every time we make a call, GPS data is attached to the call, and it can be used to generally pinpoint where we are. Which leads to one of Schneier biggest insights for me: we will probably continue to be spied on, because most us are unwilling to let go of the massive convenience and usefulness of surveillance devices like our cell phones and laptops. And if you are unwilling to chuck your cell phone and laptop, there really are that many practical things you can do to protect yourself.  It doesn’t even matter if  you only put your data out on the internet just once, for a short amount of time, and then took down. Computers have the computational power and memory to doggedly collect all the information you have put on the internet at some point and persist it. So does this mean we will never get back our privacy? Schneier seems to think that we can only protect our privacy by passing laws that will mandate it. My only concern is that collecting meta-data has clearly become profitable for business and given our government policies can be swayed by lobbyists, I wonder how long it will take for internet privacy laws to be enacted.

But unlike Schneier, I’m not as alarmed. True, the government can usually get our metadata from corporations, or simply collect it itself. But I don’t think our government or these corporations have malicious intent. The former wants to uphold national security and the latter really just wants to increase its profits by creating advertisements that are tailor their business to us.

For these entities, the government and corporations, to accomplish their goals, most of the time they look for specific patterns related to groups, not individuals. Why? Because its infeasible to look at each person separately and do an in-depth analysis. They simply do not have the time or budget. Like with any considerable task, an agent has to prioritize, and that means drilling into the individual level as late and as infrequently as possible.

Reading the book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think was as unnerving to me as it was intriguing. As someone who is very cautious with their internet privacy, the information gathering aspect of big data worries me. But as someone with interest in the advancement of technology and science, parts of big data are also really exciting.

I think that this book, along with pretty much all the books we have read for this class so far, overhypes itself. Every topic we have covered so far has been “the next big revolution.” Don’t get me wrong, I see why big data is important, and I believe that it has immense promise, but I still don’t think ‘revolutionary’ is quite appropriate.

Revolutionary or not, the information that can be gleaned from big data in the hands of corporations and local police departments today makes federal espionage of the twentieth century look like child’s play. And we would be kidding ourselves if we think for a second that all of that information is not also in the hands of organizations like the NSA and the FBI. We talked about this briefly in class last week, but Microsoft was brought up as a company that is collecting unprecedented amounts of user data. And it was pointed out that Microsoft takes user data security very seriously, and has several measures in place to prevent hackers from getting their hands on that data. But these federal agencies regularly serve subpoenas to businesses like Microsoft with explicit orders to not disclose that any information was collected.

Many people are comfortable with businesses having their information. After all, if we ever decide we don’t want a business to have our information we can stop using that business and switch to another. But the federal government having that information is beyond our control, and the implications of that are not far off from George Orwell’s depiction of a police state in 1984 (obviously the totalitarian thought policing is nowhere near the level it was in 1984, but there are several very concerning similarities).

Now, to be fair, my aversion to this kind of information state is based in a set of values that I developed in a world where data collection was much less prevalent than it has become. As the book points out, society’s understanding of the concept of justice is going to need to be updated in years to come, and as part of society, it is not fair to exclude myself from that. Maybe privacy is just a right that we are making obsolete, and I will need to get over my antiquated sense of self and start embracing my role as part of a greater whole.

I found Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Live, Think, and Work to be delightfully no longer transformative. I say this because I think the book, while very insightful, presents a story that most people, knowingly or unknowingly, already accept as fact. 

Big data exists. My data and I are already part of that. The “owners” of my data can do things with it that I do not understand. 

I think most people operate with this understanding as they use internet and information services, but they put it out of their minds as they work with a pretty interface and get uses out of the programs that seem innocuous (aka not collecting your data and making predictions about your behavior). It’s when we, as everyday users, start to think about that data collection that we start to get worried, that we feel as if our privacy is invaded, and when we start to cry for legislation and limits on these (to us) invisible powers that seem to know everything about our lives.

That being said, I want to go over some of the fears surrounding big data and maybe get at why they scare us. Furthermore, I want to add to that fear by suggesting another possible anxiety that Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier don’t discuss.

First, I think that causality, or the ignorance of causality by big data collectors, scares a lot of people. By datafying our actions, complex decisions and actions are reduced to simple numbers and statistics. These statistics often ignore the reason why we made such a decision or action that results in our data reading a certain way. Put simply, big data removes our power to explain ourselves. For example, when we are put onto a watchlist because we checked out Mein Kampf, the fact that we were doing a presentation on Nazi propaganda or that we were actually checking out the book to spit on it is not taken into account. This could be a fault of our data collection processes, and a better system may very well account for these nuances when collecting data, but when large swathes of people are placed into categories based on predictive indicators, it will always be reductive and lack some nuance - that is, in part, its goal - and that scares people.

Another fear comes from our own ignorance. Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier talk about the ability for data to predict actions and tell us things separate from what the data was originally collected for. As I understand it, this is what they called “data exhaust,” and while it is important for data collection by systems, I think the logic behind it causes anxiety for users. We are afraid that our data is being used for something other than what we thought it would be used for. Let’s continue with the Mein Kampf example. While I might know that posting a tumblr post including two references to a book by Adolf Hitler would, hypothetically, put me on some kind of list for suspected neo-Nazi’s, I might not know that it would also increase my likelihood of seeing Donald Trump advertisements on my feed. Or I might not be aware that this could reduce my likelihood of getting a small business loan because neo-Nazi’s are notoriously bad at loan repayment (maybe). 

Yochai Benkler argues in his book The Wealth of Networks that the internet has had a democratizing effect on our public sphere, replacing and improving upon the old mass media model of press, radio and TV. Benkler argues that while the internet does not reach the utopian ideals placed on it in the 1990s, the internet has revolutionized the public sphere, allowing individuals to move beyond just being consumers and observers, and now entering the role as participants in the conversation.

Benkler does an excellent job of addressing the many critiques of the theory of internet being a democratizing medium. Benkler argues that the criticism that the internet will create information overload and centralization of information will limit the speech of individuals, implies that prior to the internet we had a system where everyone’s voice was heard. Rather, instead of judging the internet as a public sphere to an unachievable baseline, we should compare it to the medium before, mass media. In his point, the internet has revolutionized the public sphere because it has broken down the one-way structure of commercial mass media and created a two way avenue for public discourse.

But I think Benkler leaves out a large criticism of the new public sphere and that is the the power of it to destroy civil debate. Benkler celebrates the ability for individuals to participate in the conversation, but we have seen this feature lead to pretty dark and dangerous dialogue. As anyone can put information on the web, there is no watchdogs or gatekeepers to ensure civil dialogue. More and more media sites are getting rid of comment sections because the virtual that is being spewed on the boards. A recent example of Fox News removing the comment section of an article on Malia Obama accepted admission to Harvard University shows the level of hate that the internet can provoke. And maybe that is not the role of the public sphere to police how people interact, but I think it is important to recognize that while the internet provides a liberating ability for all members of society to engage in the public sphere, that the openness this create can also bread discourse that we do not see as beneficial to society.

I am curious to think about whether Benkler’s views on the democratization of information through the internet changes with the emergence of social media. If the internet was an evolution of the public sphere from mass media, I think we have transformed to a new era with the emergence of social media. I say this because I think social media has changed how we consume information in a way that is different from how Benkler describes. Benkler describes an internet that users decide which websites to go to and can engage in discussion on those sites. Voices can be heard as anyone can write on the web. But Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms have created a system in which information is pushed out to the user just as much as they seek it. If Benkler thought that the internet was “just right” in terms of its level of chaos and concentration, I wonder if the social media fire hose of information would change his opinion. The amount of information that we consume from quickly scanning down a Twitter feed is vastly different than how we originally consumed media on the web. The reach of one’s voice is also much larger and the speed in which huge swaths of people can learn of information has evolved tremendously from when Benkler wrote his book.  

I don’t think that the emergence of social media would change Benkler’s argument. In fact, there is also a very democratizing power of social media. Twitter has been a vehicle for marginalized people to shed light on atrocities and for citizens under authoritarian regimes to to have a voice that reaches beyond their borders. This voice could never have been imagined in the confines of commercial mass media and shows the power of internet and social media.

“On the Blockchain, no one knows you’re a fridge" - Richard Brown

While I’ve read about bitcoin in news articles previously, this week’s readings were my first encounter with blockchain, bitcoin’s underlying architecture. It certainly seems to have the potential to make widespread changes in many aspects of people’s lives, particularly for those in developing countries.  Leveraging the blockchain to reduce the cost of remittances and to provide a publicly available and secure database of land titles sounds interesting and potentially revolutionary for those currently faced with uncertainty about ownership or high fees.  However, some of blockchain’s purported strengths do raise questions, which could prevent the “revolution” proponents say it will bring:

Security— One of blockchain’s key selling points, according to the Blockchain Revolution website, is that it uses advanced cryptography as well as a public, yet anonymous ledger of transactions.  The infrastructure of the system releases people from having to trust the other entity that they are transacting with.  Additionally, everyone keeps a copy of the blockchain ledger, which allows for group accountability.  However, this promise of “the highest level of cryptography” (according to Don Tapscott) seems misleading.

While the cryptography underpinning blockchain may be secure, the framework built on top of it might not necessarily be. In recent news, someone (or a group of people) exploited a vulnerability in the DAO (a venture capital group) code and was able to send themselves approximately $50 million from the organization’s funds which were based on the Ethereum blockchain platform. As a result, while the blockchain code is purported to be secure, that doesn’t mean that the code built on top of it is.  Additionally, decentralized groups have to get majority consensus on how to address the aftermath of these disruptions, whereas a centrally governed organization could potentially be more decisive.

I gathered from the readings and videos about blockchain that it is expected that there would not be one all-encompassing block chain infrastructure. Instead, private organizations would create their own individual blockchains. However, my understanding is that part of the security of Blockchain is the reliance on a large user base to continuously generate transactions to guarantee that double spending doesn’t occur. Perhaps the private user base would be able to trust the people with whom they transact, so this is less of an issue.  

Crowdsourcing – Don Tapscott discusses moving from business models such as Airbnb, Lyft, and TaskRabbit to a true “sharing” economy with the blockchain, which can manage the database, reviews, and payment for these blockchain-based peer-to-peer organizations. These peer-to-peer organizations would be owned by those who offer up their goods or services to the platform rather than be owned by a large corporation. However, we already have the technology to be able to do this without blockchain.  For example, Ride Austin follows this model but doesn’t use blockchain. My guess is that the issue for these non-profit business models is having enough funding to pay for insurance, background checks, taxes, and lawsuits rather than finding the appropriate technology stack. ———————————————————————————————

What are the policy implications of this new technology? It depends on the use of the blockchain. For example, location-based peer-to-peer services discussed in the previous paragraph seem easier than the DAO, a venture capital group not tied to any country, to regulate under preexisting public policy.  

Yuval Harari’s article, “Big Data, Google, and the End of Free Will”, really shows how we as data users and information consumers have allowed our data to know more about us that we realize, or are willing to admit. In order to have our wireless lives work seamlessly together, we’re willing to sign user agreements without reading the fine print. Harari describes a world where our data knows us better than we know ourselves, which isn’t entirely inconceivable today. We rely on Google Maps to let us know how long our work commute will be and when we should leave to make it to work on time. Amazon’s “Alexa” will actually learn when you usually leave for work, where you work, and will alert you if you need to leave earlier depending on that day’s GPS data for traffic flow. “Big data” has become today’s buzzword. Everyone is mining for big data, learning more about everyday citizens. Medical records, GPS information, even your shopping cart tells more about ourselves than we can. This type of data accumulation is still highly unregulated, unstructured, and capable of huge potential. Policy and legislature concerning this data accumulation continually lags behind technology development by decades. Harari’s article really isn’t about the use of this big data by government and corporations, but how we, as society, let the big data govern us. By maintaining authority over our decisions, not letting big data wholly make them for us, we continue to maintain our humanistic qualities.

But today’s society is caught between Harari’s dataist and humanist concepts, we still make emotional decisions, but our decisions are becoming more and more influenced by the data we are exposed to and accumulate. Johnson’s book, “Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software” attempts to create a connection between society’s data accumulation and structure, and the complexity structure as a whole. He describes various examples as complex structures, such as ant colonies, the human body, and New York. But what actually is emergence? Because the Internet is vastly diverse, is it the fact that it is still organized into a structure that allows simple problem-solving capabilities? That each user follows simple rules of behavior, like using ISP address to get to a specific website, the coding behind a webpage, or the search engine using crawlers to index new websites? He states the web, “wouldn’t truly be considered emergent until those local interactions resulted in a higher-level pattern interactions between local agents” (p. 19). Because we are interacting on a higher-level between each other, is the web truly considered emergent?

Johnson states the Web is not considered a “global brain”, which is understandable. Its processes are derived from the billions of people using it, searching and creating information. It may be able to “learn” about us, but it only learns by our own Web-use actions, its not organic. If I no longer use the Web via my phone, computer, iPad, or use my credit card, “going off grid”, my browser and Google no longer learn about me.

I think much of the anxiety experienced by these users stems from the fact that informational technology in the form of social media formulates the identity of heavy users. They are their online presence. When that connection is severed, the mind dissociates and panic ensues. In reference to how the students were found to view their phones, Chen said “The device is seen as the sole key to wider human contact. Vulnerable children and young adults can feel adrift and unable to connect to others without it.” Visit the wikipedia page for nomophobia to learn more about this emerging anxiety. The connection users share through the internet appears to foster deep, identity forming interaction.