#information policy

She proceeded to tell me about the Florida law (HB 1467) requiring a certified media specialist to review books before they can enter school libraries and classrooms.

“More jobs for future librarians like you!” she said.

Sad to think this is how a lot of people probably see this law, and that many won’t bother to investigate further into how vague and harmful it really is for students (not to mention the teachers who could face a third-degree felony for violating the law). 

I don’t know if this is an area of librarianship I really want to go into, but literacy has always been at the forefront of my academic/professional interests. That includes cultural literacy, which tends to fall under HB 1467′s broad language (re: theories that could lead to "student indoctrination”). 

I’ve found myself thinking about the ways I could shape my librarian studies/career into something that involves combatting these and similar laws affecting our education system, but I’m still not 100% sure what that would look like--hoping to take Intro to Info Policy in the fall for some insight. 

Having grown up in India, some of the issues being talked about in this week’s readings resonate with me, as they still impact people in my home country. In developing countries, the cost of high speed internet access can be a significant chunk of an average household’s monthly income, thereby rendering it inaccessible. With the internet gradually gaining universal acceptance as a classroom tool, does this mean that children from low to average income households will fall behind with respect to their peers with high speed internet access? Reasons like this make it important that cheap (or free) last-mile internet access become available in developing countries.

The last-mile connectivity problem seems to me to be very different in a developed country as compared to a developing country. For example, here in the US, an ISP like Time Warner Cable may argue that building the infrastructure needed to provide high speed internet access to a remote town of 1000 people would cost more money than they would make from subscribers. Most developing countries, however, have a higher density of population than the developed world. India is a third of the size of the US, while having a population that’s three times as large. If internet access was priced in such a way that basic usable internet access is cheap or free, and high speed connections with high download limits are more expensive (quite similar to how UT does it, but with the amount of money in question being non-trivial), the ISPs could surely recover their money. If not, government subsidies or non-profit organizations could help.

The idea that internet and communication technologies can help meet sustainable development goals by the year 2030 seems like a good goal to have, but I feel that it may be a bit unrealistic. I think so for multiple reasons. First, building the required infrastructure in some of these towns and villages is difficult and expensive. Some remote areas in developed countries (even the US) don’t have proper internet access - providing this in developing countries within the next 15 years seems impossible. Secondly, just the availability of internet and communication technologies will not solve the underlying problems of these areas - poverty, illiteracy and hunger. They will make it easier to fight these problems, yes, but a lot of work will still be required.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it is also an issue of interoperability. As this required infrastructure is built across the world, many different players will be involved, with many different standards of communication and information storage. These different systems need to be able to work with each other seamlessly if global development is to be achieved.

‘The Global War for Internet Governance’ is a fairly recent book by Dr. Laura DeNardis. I felt that the book did a really good job of taking a complicated policy area and breaking it down into parts in such a way that an information policy enthusiast can make sense of the mess. As we’ve discussed in class many times, information policy is a complicated area because of the large number of standards and policies already in place, and the decentralized nature of these. The author says that most of what goes on in the world of internet governance is hidden from the average user, and I agree with this assessment. Typically, we think that the government is responsible for “governing”. We, as citizens, have the right to voice our opinions, but in the end we leave it up to the government. It’s more complicated with the internet, because of a number of reasons (which have been described in detail in the book).

Dr. DeNardis says that the six main policy areas that dictate the state of the internet are - control of critical resources, setting internet standards, cyber security, interconnections within the internet, the role of information intermediaries, and the enforcement of intellectual property rights. The interesting thing here is that there is no single institution of government body that can lay claim to governing or dictating policies for all six of these areas. These are all policy areas that grew as the internet grew, and in which a need for governance arose and was met by different players. These policy areas may seem independent of each other, but they need some form of governance because they all affect civil liberties (freedom of expression and privacy), national security, global innovation, and also democracy. For my main discussion this week, I want to talk about the role of information intermediaries in the context of all four of these areas.

As discussed in Chapter 7, information intermediaries, or search / social media companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter, have a large amount of control over the global flow of information over the internet. The best example of this is Twitter, which has now become the source of breaking news across the world. During drone strikes or in warzones, Twitter is sometimes the only source of unbiased information about what’s happening on the ground. Tweets from celebrities and politicians are now quoted in traditional news.

While platforms like Twitter encourage and allow for freedom of expression, this can sometimes be curtailed, when a company decides to block specific content or people based on orders from the local government or on humanitarian grounds. These private companies also collect a large amount of data about their users, and they may either sell this data to advertisers for profit, or be asked to disclose a person’s information by law enforcement. These platforms (including technical information intermediaries like GitHub and Apache) also control the flow of technical knowledge, thereby impacting global innovation. And finally, as evident from the heavy online campaigning for the upcoming Presidential election, these platforms have the ability to dictate the democratic discourse.

As a specific example of the role of information intermediaries, let’s look at content blocking on Facebook. According to this article (http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2015/03/16/block-in-india_n_6876648.html), India makes the most requests to block Facebook content, with almost 6000 pieces of content being blocked during July-December last year. This is a staggering statistic - many would argue that it’s a curtailment of free speech. Do you think a nation’s government has the right to moderate what its citizens are talking about on social media? And what about the social media company’s role in this? Are they right to acquiesce to all content blocking requests made by a nation’s government? How does this change when an international incident is involved?

Another area that interests me, and that we’ve talked about in class before, is enforcement of intellectual property rights. There are two different discussions here - one is the attempts to stop illegal streaming or downloading of movies, music, and such, and the other is wilful hacking in an attempt to gain access to someone else’s intellectual property, such as code or writing. I feel like the similar treatment of the two under the umbrella of “intellectual property rights” is a mistake, and we should develop policies that address each of these areas separately.

Information and espionage have been an integral part of warfare right from the beginning of time - be it the Trojan Horse the Greeks used in the fall of Troy, or the courageous use of fake documents to rescue American hostages from war torn Tehran (as depicted in the Ben Affleck film Argo). If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles - this is perhaps the most famous quote from Sun Tzu’s ancient treatise on military strategy, ‘The Art of War’. The fact that this was written over 2000 years ago and is still considered essential reading on military strategy gives me one clear message - even though our weapons and the scale at which we conduct war have changed, the basic ideas behind warfare essentially remain the same.

Information is the basis of warfare, and it has been so for millennia. Whichever side is successful in hiding more of its own information while at the same time acquiring accurate information about the enemy’s plans typically wins the war. This is what happened during World War 2 - the Nazis were winning the war until the Enigma cipher was finally broken at Bletchley Park, and the tide finally turned in favor of the allied forces.

I decided to write such a detailed introduction to the importance of knowledge in military strategy because on reading the introduction to “Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It”, I got the sense that the authors wanted to impress upon their readers how much things have changed in terms of how war is waged, even since the days of the cold war. I disagree with this point of view - war is still about the control of information and resources.

While the authors bring out some interesting talking points, and definitely succeed in raising general awareness about the issue, the writing of the book is a bit too dramatic in my opinion. An event such as a cyber-9/11, something that brings death and desolation in its wake, seems a bit far-fetched. Our cyber systems have been in existence for a number of years now, and they’re surely only getting better, as vulnerabilities keep getting discovered, and more secure software written. Is software perfect? Pick up any high profile security breach from the last 2 years, and you’ll have the answer to that question. It’s an emphatic no. But, are we aware of the danger? Yes. And, are we getting better at cyber security? I believe so.

The core idea of the book “Interop: The Promises and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems”, is interoperability. The idea is a simple one, and it has been around, at least in the field of computer science, for a long time. In my mind, this is how I look at it - how can we make different things function together synergistcally? And, can we do so in a cost-effective way that makes it worthwhile?

Interop is an idea that is not limited to the tech domain. The railroad example from the book illustrates this very well. Automobiles are another example - if you know how to drive a car, you can probably drive any car. Most of the essential functions and features of a car are probably built in a standard way, independent of the manufacturer. There are probably regulations that require carmakers to do this. Was it always so, though? After cars were invented and started becoming common, I imagine there was a period where different manufacturers did different things with their cars before things became standardized. I also feel like we will go through another such phase when self-driving cars become an everyday thing.

Talking about software interoperability, the idea remains the same. The core requirement of interop is some form of standardization that allows different people to build different things that will be able to talk to each other and function together with little to no extra effort, by virtue of the standardization. Low-level communication protocols at the network level are already standardized - TCP/IP is the backbone of the internet. Now that our systems are starting to collect and process big data, the ideas of standardization and interoperability are being applied at a higher level of abstraction. SQL queries are a standard way to interact with any relational database, regardless of which specific database is being used in an application. Hibernate is an Object/Relational Mapping framework for Java which allows code to be written in a database agnostic way, and only requires some configuration files to make everything work. These things have existed for a while now.

With the backdrop of things becoming more and more connected, I’d like to talk about three things. First - the open source movement seems to be a step in the right direction for interop, and with the exception of Apple, tech companies which follow an open source development philosophy generally seem to be doing better than companies which do things the proprietary way. Second - at my previous job, I worked on a team that built proprietary frameworks to allow client-server applications to be written in any programming language and work seamlessley together. While these frameworks worked very well, we started having problems because code was not compatible with RESTful web services, which is pretty much the standard way of building client-server applications now. Third - I believe that the cloud computing industry will go through a period of upheavel because, as of now, there’s no standard way of interacting with cloud servers provided by various Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers, with Amazon WebServices being the biggest player. Given that it already has a large market share, there is no motivation for Amazon to standardize it’s APIs, but other, smaller companies are pushing for standardization to allow them to try to capture a larger market share. I’ve heard of companies attempting pseudo-standardization by writing a wrapper that internally maps commands to the specific cloud implementation, not unlike Hibernate for databases.

Talking specifically about data interoperability, with the rise to prominence of schemaless / NoSQL databases like MongoDB and Cassandra, and standard ways to transmit / receive documents like XML and JSON, we’re already well on our way. It may seem counter-intuitive that the key to data interoperability was not more structure, but less structure.