Analysis, Event

2012 Keith Davey Forum on Public Affairs

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The 2012 Keith Davey Forum on Public Affairs, moderated by Steve Paikin and featuring Lee Rainie and myself, was held on October 17th 2012 at the Isabel Bader Theatre at Victory University at the University of Toronto.

We addressed the question, Is Social Media Good for Democracy? Neither of us answered a complete yes or no, but instead offered nuanced answers that encourage both cautious optimism and chilling alarm.

The discussion overall was far reaching, and fascinating. In particular it was a treat to spend time with Lee Rainie who is the Director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, a non-profit, non–partisan “fact tank” that studies the social impact of the internet. Lee is also a co-author – with a close friend of mine and University of Toronto sociologist Barry Wellman – of Networked: The new social operating system, which was released in 2012.

The event was recorded by TVO’s Big Ideas, and the audio is now available. I’ll update this page if and when the video surfaces.

Analysis

The Seductive Power of Surveillance

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Surveillance technology may be the most corrupting and also the most intoxicating media proliferating in these rapidly changing times. Its use is a slippery slope sliding further into the surveillance society.

For example, a school district in Philadelphia has recently been caught spying on its students via cameras installed on laptops. The school board was able to do this through several thousand Apple Mac Books with spyware installed that they distributed to students. School administrators could access and activate the laptop camera whenever they wished.

The justification for including this spyware was that it would be used only if the laptops were stolen. The users of the device would not be monitored, but if they were to report it stolen, authorities would have access to this capability to find out where the device was and who had possession of it.

However, all of this came to the public’s attention because, in a totally separate incident, school authorities provided as evidence a photograph they took of a student via a laptop, demonstrating that they had used this capability to spy on the boy. As they started to defend themselves, they also revealed that they had done this on other occasions, to investigate particular students.

This is a great example of the seductive power of surveillance, and the way technology can corrupt authorities. They are approved to use it in one way, but end up using it in others that weren’t approved.

This has caused huge outrage across the US (and across the world) and initially the school district tried to defend itself, but once they were served with a lawsuit they finally stopped the spyware program and ceased the surveillance. They continue to insist that they would only use the technology for the location of stolen property, however the lawsuit claims otherwise, as the student insists he was under investigation for his behaviour, and not stolen property.

The real concern this incident raises is whether other school boards are engaged in this kind of illegal surveillance. The power of surveillance is such that if the capability exists people will use it.

Employees for example should be extra careful when using computer equipment or technology owned by their employers who generally have the legal right to monitor their workers. Given the opportunity, employers can find all sorts of reasons to monitor what their employees do so as to improve organizational and individual efficiency.

Yet while we’ve seemingly accepted the right of our bosses to monitor us when we’re working, there has always been resistance to being monitored by the Government. This surveillance relationship that exists between citizens and the state, often manifests through an average person’s interaction with law enforcement.

Here in Canada the RCMP (Mounties) have announced that they are testing uniform mounted cameras in a few select communities, with an eye on deploying them nationwide.

Uniform mounted cameras are essentially an extension of the ones mounted in the police cruiser, only instead of recording what the car sees, this device records what the officer sees. This would expand the evidence that is collected in every interaction they have, while also acting as a deterrent against acting inappropriately (both for the officer and the citizen).

The issue then is one of control of the camera. By controlling the camera the authority of the law enforcement officer is reinforced within the context of a surveillance society. However if the citizen also has their own camera, is able to record their own point of view, then it is possible (perhaps) to counter the power of the officer’s camera with the power of the citizen’s.

For example a related trend emerging in the UK, where they have comprehensive state based surveillance via a massive system of CCTV cameras, is a project called Internet Eyes, which will give the public access to these cameras via the web. The idea is to allow British citizens to act as voluntary constabulary to give the police extra eyes when it comes to fighting crime.

This makes me wonder if the cameras installed on RCMP and police cruisers in general would ever be publicly accessible. I mean they are public servants, what if we could go online, see where the cops are, and then login to their uniform or cruiser mounted cameras and see what they see? Might make law enforcement both more accountable and also more efficient?

I ask these questions because as a society we need to understand the seductive power of surveillance, the intoxication people feel from being the watcher.

The same way we’re at a tipping point when it comes to protecting privacy, we’re also on a slippery slope when it comes to surveillance.

We need to think a little more about regulating surveillance technology, and recognizing that the surveillance society comes more from little brothers and little sisters than it does from a centralized authority.

I often point to University of Toronto Professor Steve Mann, the world’s first cyborg, who invented EyeTap as an example of how bottom up surveillance will overwhelm the system as everyone starts recording their every moment for everyone else to see and do what they wish….

Analysis

Is Privacy Dead?

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Privacy is dead, and social media holds the smoking gun, at least that was the sentiment expressed on CNN.com by one of silicon valley’s hottest pundits, Pete Cashmore. It’s a sensationalist statement, but one that speaks to many people’s feelings, both positive and negative, about how personal information gets caught up in the world wide web.

Is privacy really dead? No, not yet. However, there’s a growing chorus of people empowered by social media who are eager to declare that it is. This is partly because of the power of networks, and their ability to leverage your private information for personal gain and/or amusement.

Social media is also regarded as a popularity tool that allows people to emulate the celebrity culture we are immersed in. We can all become micro-celebrities who capture attention and influence, albeit on a much smaller scale.

The fear is that as this starts to become more and more prevalent, discarding privacy will become compulsory, expected behaviour necessary for graduating from school, getting that job, buying the home, and succeeding in life.

Already, some people make the argument that if you don’t have an online presence, well-crafted data trail and social network profile, then you won’t be trusted by the influencers and decision-makers who control the spoils and (possibly) obtained their positions due to their own public expressions.

What about those who don’t buy into this vision, who value their privacy and abstain from these networks?

Obviously, there will always be a way to get by without sacrificing your privacy. However, the reality of living in a surveillance society is upon us, even though it bears no resemblance to the centralized Big Brother apparatus Orwell envisioned. Rather, it’s a spontaneous and autonomous movement of little brothers and little sisters who take it upon themselves to be build and participate in the surveillance structure.

There is a certain intoxication that comes with being able to watch people, and here in North America this type of surveillance takes place covertly. Most of us have camera phones, or similar cheap technology, which allow us to capture anything we see around us and share it instantly. Youtube is the biggest example of this: you can watch everything from after-school fights to people driving badly.

In the UK they’ve even started a project called Internet Eyes in which British citizens help monitor the many CCTV cameras the government has setup and notify authorities when they see a crime being committed. Citizens who are particularly helpful in reporting crimes are rewarded or given recognition, and become a type of voluntary constabulary that keeps an eye on all the public squares and alleys.

It is these rewards and incentives that feed social media adoption rates and the spread of the surveillance society. Similarly it is a lack of literacy that allows these services and scenarios to arise without proper debate or deliberation.

This illustrates the direct connection between literacy and privacy. Those who are able to both understand these new tools, as well as read and understand the privacy policies associated with them, are better able to use, or not use them, without compromising their privacy.

The problem tends to be the large majority of users who never read the privacy policy, who don’t fully understand the tools or the scope of their reach, and thus make the type of gaffes or mistakes that get them in trouble and only after they’ve lost their privacy do they realize what’s transpired in the transaction.

Or conversely you have another class of users, increasing in size every day, who understand full well what they are losing and instead value what they are getting in return and feel the transaction is fair.

Ideally if we all focused more on both general literacy, but also internet literacy, we’d be in a better position to make informed decisions vis a vis how these services and applications can be used responsibly.

Is there any way of escaping all this surveillance? Is there any hope for privacy?

Yes and no. The answer unfortunately comes back to class and privilege and the notion of a “digital divide”. It used to be that the digital divide related to access, and being able to get online. Now however it also relates to being able to get off line, off the grid, and escape the world of surveillance.

Privacy has become a commodity, so that if you have the means, you can buy the property and the technology to keep unwanted eyes away. However the more that privacy becomes a scarcity, the more valuable it becomes, and the harder it will be to obtain it.

This relates not only to literacy, in understanding how to get off the grid or avoid systemic surveillance, but also being able to afford it. Perhaps we’ll need subsidies to ensure that privacy is accessible to all instead of just being within the grasp of a small few.

Right now for example Facebook is free to use, although we pay for it by contributing our personal information. However as the site expands in reach and scope they will be forced to allow people to limit how their personal information is used, yet what if they started charging them for that privilege, or for additional/premium privacy controls above and beyond what is available for free.

While Facebook may not be an essential service, like electricity, or water, what if they too took a similar approach to charging us for the right to protect our personal information. Articulated giving away that information as a subsidy on our overall service, and that if we didn’t want to share all of our electricity usage, then we’d have to pay a premium to compensate the utility for that lost data.

Analysis

Resisting Internet Orthodoxy

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I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes the work I do and the ideas I have different from my contemporaries. Rather facetiously, I talk about the internet as a new religion embraced by the masses in search of salvation. By resisting internet orthodoxy, I deliberately try to see our society and its relationship with technology in a unique manner.

This begins with refusing to use the same jargon and phrases as others, and playing with words to find more accessible and meaningful ways of explaining trends and phenomena. The internet is full of technical concepts that have exclusive and rigid meanings.

Yet the power and resilience of the internet is derived from its open nature, so it only makes sense that we embrace freedom when we talk and think about related ideas and concepts. I do this by generally distrusting technical authorities, including early adopters, technology executives, and I.T. admins. I respect their knowledge, but always question whether their perspective has the potential to be transfered to people who aren’t in a position of technical authority (the vast majority of us).

When it comes to the world of social media, which is both technical and non-technical, elitist and also accessible, I find myself consistently frustrated by the level of “group think.” In contrast to other technical areas, social media accommodates anyone and everyone, so jargon isn’t an acceptable vocabulary to control the discussion and analysis.

What you commonly find is a spoken and unspoken orthodoxy, rules that dictates how tools should be used and people should act. The problem is that this stifles innovation and doesn’t allow for the kind of true experimentation we should be seeing in this sector.

Public relations, marketing and advertising people lament the rash of social media experts who project their own industry orthodoxy onto an emergent discipline. Few understand the dynamic involved when in a long chain of diverse individuals and organizations who have a range of expertise culturally acclimatize their own networks and friends.

The seeds of this kind of internet orthodoxy were sown in Ursula Franklin’s definition of technology as being “how we do things around here”. The variable comes in how we define where we are, with the internet collapsing space into time and everyone being “here” at some point in time.

William Gibson notes this changing relationship between space and time by declaring that “the future has already arrived, it’s just not evenly distributed yet”. The problem is that the pioneers who are eager to get wherever first are eager to assert their control over new space, and in this case it’s quite simply a definition of how things should be done (i.e. carried out over time).

Ironically, another source of internet orthodoxy is the rigid culture of mainstream media, and the efforts to frame our world for easy consumption in between increasingly boring and irrelevant commercials. Television, radio and publishing, while becoming less dominant everyday, still set the tone for how we should be sharing stories and analyzing the world. The orthodoxy that governs the operation of these industries not only stifles society, but also threatens their survival.

For example, this past week CBC News has gone through a rebranding, redesign and renewal process, that has been a total travesty as far as critical Canadians are concerned. It’s not that something new wasn’t called for, but rather that what they’ve done is stay entirely within the orthodoxy of sensationalist cable news, a position which is neither appropriate for a public broadcaster nor desired by their audience.

What they should have done is try something new. Something that reflected both the opportunities the internet has to offer, and its potential to bring real substance and investigative journalism back to televised news. A number of newspapers, like the Toronto Star, have returned to a heavy diet of investigative reports as a means of differentiating themselves from aggregation services. This kind of unorthodox approach in an age of journalist cutbacks is exactly the type of contrast that courageous old-school organizations need to embrace in order to renew their relevance.

The business world plays a role in perpetuating a hypocritical approach to orthodoxy. They demand that everyone conform, except for a successful few who have the privilege to rebel. This ignores the fact that rebelliousness is the source of much of their success.

Had the CBC done anything other than pimp their personalities and superficial redesign, the corporate world would have been in an uproar: How dare the CBC do anything different? You can bet that my ideas about what they could have done would be condemned as anarchistic and “just not how things are done around here.”

That’s something you hear a lot in politics, where orthodoxy is perhaps the strongest force against reform and genuine change. The big news out of Ottawa this week has been the change in office of the leader of the opposition. Peter Donolo was brought in to save the floundering leadership of Michael Ignatieff.

From day one Iggy has been a joke, and rather than admit they made a mistake, the Liberal Party turned to orthodoxy as their means of salvation. Unfortunately, short of dumping their leader, they may be right that politics respects tradition, especially when it comes to back-room power deals.

I think one of the reasons my clients and audiences enjoy the work I do and the perspective I bring is that I help them see problems and our society in a way that opens doors and opportunities rather than locking them.

As space continues to collapse, and time continues to accelerate, people will increasingly wonder why the promises of the internet are not being delivered. The reason is simple: internet orthodoxy prevents us from realizing the true potential of open and distributed networks. Now is the time for us to build our own vision of what the internet should be, and to do so we must reject just about everything that anyone is saying about it.

Analysis

An Epic Thread Yields Rapid Internet Justice

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Yesterday I was sent a link to an incredible and epic thread, which a meta-mob of auto enthusiasts formed to mete out rapid Internet justice on a car parts thief who had been preying upon them.

It all started in the parking lot of Toronto’s Yorkdale Mall. While the victim was at work, someone stole a specialized front lip from his car, an Acura TSX, in the middle of the day, using his own car to block what he was doing. The victim went to mall security, got video of the crime, but because the thief took the plates off his car, and there are no witnesses, the police said there was nothing they could do.

Frustrated by this lack of action, the victim turned to the TSXClub.com site, a forum for Acura TSX owners. He started the thread in the early hours of May 21st 2009.

As a bit of background, forums online are one of the largest and most vibrant elements of social media, and automotive forums tend to have a character and class all of their own. What is particularly interesting in this case is the not only way the forum responded, but also automotive forums of all kinds right across the web.

Immediately a suspect emerged, as one of the members recognized the car in the security video as being almost identical to photos of a car posted by another user of the site. At first people were hesitant to point fingers, but when the user tried to defend himself with a poorly written reaction, intense scrutiny started to fall on the suspect.

In examining the user’s history, they found a connection between the suspect and the victim, as a couple of weeks before the theft the victim had posted information about a job at his work place, and the suspect asked about the hours the store was open. The implication being he had used the site to identify his prey, their car, and when they would be at work at the mall, and at which point the parts on the vehicle could be stripped.

Once this connection was identified, a frenzy ensued. Many of the users on the site were also users on other forums and recognized a pattern. Within hours, multiple accounts on multiple sites were linked to the same suspect who had been accused of stealing cars and car parts and reselling them via these forums and all these various aliases. Threads on other sites about the same individual sprang back to life as the chase picked up speed.

Ironically, one of the real tell-tale signs of the connection between all these accounts and identities was the language and writing style used by the suspect, which included poor grammar and spelling.

However, the real connection that unravelled it all was the use of a photobucket account, which is a free image-hosting website that a lot of people use when posting images of their cars to these forums. The suspect was using the photobucket account to host images of the stolen parts he was selling on the various sites. By looking at the URL and then details of the photos, people were able to identify his license plate, house number, and even photos of him.

Rather than giving up or confessing, the person then created a new account, and via that new account confessed to the crime, as an attempt to take the heat off the accounts that were under suspicion. However, he used his same computer to create the new account, thereby having the same internet address and browser information, linking this posted confession to all the other accounts. A day later, after realizing how totally stupid that was, he removed those posts. But by then it was too late. The group had their guy.

Canada's Dumbest CriminalsAfter the internet forensics were complete, and it was clear this was the thief, the first thing that emerged were image mashups of the guy, mostly making fun of him. However then users combed over Google Maps using the pics of his car in front of his house and information that it was in Richmond Hill and eventually they were able to identify his address by recognizing it in the satellite view.

Of course it didn’t stop there, the Internet being what it is, they were able to identify his mom and where she lives, his grandmother and where she lives, his sister, her employment, and some of his past crimes, including the fact that he is currently driving even though his license is suspended.

This was then followed by suggestions that all members of all auto clubs in the GTA show up at the guy’s house. Some started talking about the violence they would like to inflict upon the individual. The individual continued to post on the site and reply, escalating the violent rhetoric.

Finally, in the early hours of Wednesday, May 27th 2009, six days after it all started, the thread was closed by site administrators. The suspect’s account was closed and their IP banned from accessing the site.

There’s now a petition asking for the police to get involved. I don’t see why they would not, given that their work has been done for them.

This is a fascinating example of the rapid rise of a “meta mob,” which was the result of not a single community or forum, but rather an aggregation of many sites working together to connect the dots and remove a predator lurking among them.

I’ve talked in the past about the rise of virtual lynch mobs, and the speed by which Internet justice can be handed out. This is something we’re going to have to come to terms with, as it’s certain to re-appear frequently as people realize the power of this kind of mobilization. Why turn to the police when you can raise a mob of Internet people to help bring justice? This is question I expect a lot of people will contemplate.

While the thread has been closed, and one assumes the police will now step in, will local vigilantes show up at this guy’s house and take justice into their own hands? Some suggested going to his neighbourhood and postering the area to alert his neighbours. Is six days enough time for an internet trial? Did the accused have any rights, or chance at a fair process? Or was this process in fact quite fair, and the rights of the accused discarded by his involvement in the process? Other questions you have about this?

Update: So while there has still been no news of an arrest or any legal action against the suspect, the community in general continues to post sightings of him, including pictures, and updated license plate numbers. Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project pointed me to another similar case from last year. Talk about spreading phenomena…

Update Dec 2010: As far as anyone can tell there was never any legal action taken in response to this incident. The accused still floats around the periphery of the community, and many members remain vigilant, calling him out and warning others whenever he re-appears.

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