Posts about publicness

For the diseased

I cannot possibly do better than Zeynep Tufekci in taking two journalists — New York Times columnist and former executive editor Bill Keller and his wife, Guardian writer Emma Keller — to school in a brilliant post that explains how each exploited and offended, misinterpreted and mistreated a mother who they think is doing too much and saying too much about her cancer. Please, please go read that now.

I will address only one matter myself: blogging and tweeting — or as we used to say, talking about — disease.

I will readily tell you about my prostate cancer and consequently malfunctioning penis, about my thyroid cancer, about the atrial fibrillation that came after I sucked in the dust of destruction at the World Trade Center, and while I’m at it, I might as well add a note about my bursitis.

I don’t do this because I am a hypochondriac or want an ounce of sympathy — I deserve none as I have had cancer lite, with no chemo, no radiation, only momentary pain or inconvenience, and most importantly, no mortal threat. I don’t do this to take part in what my elderly parents living in a community of elderly friends call “the organ recital.”

I do this because I gain support and information and because I can give others support and information. I do this because I believe we must talk about about sickness, openly and honestly, to rob it of its stigma, to pool what we know about it, to teach people about it, to influence policy about it.

And why shouldn’t we? It’s just disease. It happens to all of us, except those who come to violent ends. Imagine a world in which there is no stigma about illness, in which ailments are not a matter of privacy or lost insurance or jobs, in which we collectively share and learn as much as we can about what afflicts us so it can afflict fewer. It’s just data.

So I am astounded that two journalists who should support transparency as a virtue come to question the ethics of Lisa Adams for talking about her disease. It is her disease. It is her motives that matter, generously trying to educate people about her treatment. How dare a journalist of all people try to tell someone what she cannot say? How could a journalist seek less information in the world?

When I blogged about my prostate cancer, one and only one guy — who didn’t like me anyway — similarly complained that I was saying too much. He accused me of oversharing. I said the problem is not that. It’s that he was overlistening.

If Emma Keller doesn’t want to read about Lisa Adams’ cancer, then she shouldn’t read it. If Bill Keller thinks Adams should not treat her cancer and her pain, well, he should mind his own business.

But if they do want to act as journalists in this new age, then they must follow Tufekci’s advice and learn that when they read someone’s words, they are not interacting with media, they are interacting with a person. It so happens the person they were writing about is brave and generous. They were not.

And we all should be welcoming the opportunity to hear more voices, learn more perspectives, gain more information. And we should all be wishing Lisa Adams our best for what she is going through and what she is offering us.

The technologists’ Hippocratic oath

The Guardian asked me for commentary on the letter to the White House and Congress from eight tech giants about NSA spying:

Whose side are you on?

That is the question MP Keith Vaz asked Alan Rusbridger last week when he challenged the Guardian editor’s patriotism over publishing Edward Snowden’s NSA and GCHQ leaks.

And that is the question answered today by eight tech giants in their letter to the White House and Congress, seeking reform of government surveillance practices worldwide. The companies came down at last on the side of citizens over spies.

Of course, they are also acting in their own economic (albeit enlightened) self-interest, for mass spying via the internet is degrading the publics’, clients’, and other nations’ trust in the cloud and its frequently American proprietors. Spying is bad for the internet; what’s bad for the internet is bad for Silicon Valley; and — to reverse the old General Motors saw — what’s bad for Silicon Valley is bad for America.

But in their letter, the companies stand first and firmly on principle. They propose that government limit its own authority, ending bulk collection of our communication. They urge transparency and oversight of surveillance, which has obviously failed thus far. And they argue against the balkanization of the net and the notion that countries may insist that data respect national borders.

Bravo to all that. I have been waiting for Silicon Valley to establish whether it collectively is a victim or a collaborator in the NSA’s web. I have wondered whether government had commandeered these companies to its ends. I have hoped they would use their power to lobby for our rights. And now I hope government — from Silicon Valley’s senator, NSA fan Dianne Feinstein, to President Obama — will listen.

This is a critical step in sparking real debate over surveillance and civil rights. It was nice that technology companies banded together once before to battle against the overreaching copyright regime known as SOPA and for our ability to watch Batman online. Now they must fight for our fundamental — in America, our Constitutional — rights of speech and assembly and against unreasonable search and seizure. ’Tis a pity it takes eight companies with silly names to do that.

Please note who is missing off this list of signators: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Microsoft, Aol, Apple, LinkedIn. I see no telecom company there — Verizon, AT&T, Level 3, the companies allegedly in a position to hand over our communications data and enable governments to tap straight into internet traffic. Where is Amazon, another leader in the cloud whose founder, Jeff Bezos, now owns the Washington Post? Where are Cisco and other companies whose equipment is used to connect the net and by some governments to disconnect it? Where are the finance companies — eBay, Visa, American Express — that also know much about what we do?

Where is the letter to David Cameron, who has threatened prior restraint of the Guardian’s revelations, and to the members of the Parliament committee who last week grilled Rusbridger, some of them painting acts of journalism — informing citizens of their governments’ acts against them — as criminal or disloyal? Since they urge worldwide reform, I wish the tech companies would address the world’s governments, starting with GCHQ’s overseers in London.

And where are technologists as a tribe? I long for them to begin serious discussion about the principles they stand for and the limits of their considerable power. Upon learning that government had tapped into communications lines between their own servers, two Google engineers responded with a hearty “fuck these guys.” But anger is insufficient. It is not a pillar to build on.

Computer and data scientists are the nuclear scientists of our age, proprietors of technology that can be used for good or ill. They must write their own set of principles, governing not the actions of government’s spies but their own use of power when they are asked by those spies and governments — as well as their own employers — to violate our privacy or use our own information against our best interests or hamper and chill our speech. They must decide what goes too far. They must answer that question above — whose side are you on? I suggest a technologists’ Hippocratic oath: First, harm no users.

First, the good news

First, listen to this superb and profoundly disturbing segment by On the Media producer Sarah Abdurrahman about how she and her husband and other guests at a Canadian wedding were detained and mistreated at the U.S. border crossings in spite of their citizenship — American — and because of their religion — Islam.

Welcome back. I told you it well done, didn’t I? I’d be screaming bloody murder at such treatment but Abdurrahman kept her journalistic cool and curiosity, trying to get the facts and understand our rights, asking questions, in spite of never getting answers. People have been saying lately that Verizon picked on the wrong person in me. Well, U.S. Customs and Border Protection could not have picked a worse person to detain: a smart, accomplished journalist with an audience.

I would hope that CBP is humiliated by this and will change, but our government isn’t humiliated by spying on the entire damned world and won’t change that, so I’ll give up my hope. Nonetheless, this story is the perfect bookend to the Guardian’s reporting on the NSA, showing a government that is out of control — because its citizens can no longer control it. Well done, OtM. Thank you, Sarah.

Now the bad news. Next came a story that did have me shouting at the radio as geographer Jim Thatcher condemned major tech companies with broad brush — without specifics, without evidence or proof, only with innuendo — for the possibility they could be redlining the world and diverting users away from certain areas. “It’s hidden what they’re doing,” he said. If it’s hidden, then how does he know they’re doing it? Not said. Microsoft had a patent that could do things like this but Thatcher acknowledged that “Microsoft may or may not” every use it. They could.

Brooke Gladstone laments Google’s purchase of Waze for $1.3 million because “we are being sold for our data, it’s an old story.” No, I was using Waze at the very moment I heard that because (1) I get data of great value back, helping me avoid not opium dens but traffic jams and (2) I generously want to share my data with others who have generously shared theirs with me. This is an example of a platform that does precisely what news organizations should do: help the public share its information with each other, without gatekeepers.

Next, Thatcher says with emphasis that “theoretically” Google could charge coffee shops for directing us to one over another. Then Thatcher acknowledges that it’s not happening. It could. And he dollops on a cherry of fear about technology and “for-profit” corporations.

Don’t you smell the irony in the oven, OtM? You properly and brilliantly condemn the CBP for detaining Americans because they are Muslims and because Muslims could do terrorism even when they don’t. Then, in the very next segment, you turn around and needlessly condemn technology companies because they could do things some guy imagines even though he admits they don’t.

Those are two sides of the same phenomenon: moral panic, the unsubstantiated suspicion that some apparently alien entity — Muslims or (OMG!) for-profit technology companies — could upset the social order, a fear often fanned by media.

Put down the fan, OtM, and learn the lesson from Abdurrahman’s superb story that your role — you of all media outlets — is to throw cold water on such unwarranted fright-mongering.

Mind you, these two segments were surrounded by two more very good reports: one that gives us a guide for what to ignore in breaking news (so as not to fan flames) and another about how — surprise, surprise, surprise — technology can lead to good ends. I remain a fan and loyal listener of OtM. And that is why I humbly offer you a map to guide you away from a dodgy neighborhood called technopanic.

The war on secrecy

Here is a post I wrote for the Guardian:

It has been said that privacy is dead. Not so. It’s secrecy that is dying. Openness will kill it.

American and British spies undermined the secrecy and security of everyone using the internet with their efforts to foil encryption. Then Edward Snowden foiled them by revealing what is perhaps (though we’ll never know) their greatest secret.

When I worried on Twitter that we could not trust encryption now, technologist Lauren Weinstein responded with assurances that it would be difficult to hide back doors in commonly used PGP encryption — because it is open source.

Openness is the more powerful weapon. Openness is the principle that guides Guardian journalism. Openness is all that can restore trust in government and technology companies. And openness — in standards, governance, and ethics — must be the basis of technologists’ efforts to take back the the net.

Secrecy is under dire threat but don’t confuse that with privacy. “All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret,” Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez tells his biographer. “Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves,” Jill Lepore explains in The New Yorker. “Privacy is consensual where secrecy is not,” write Carol Warren and Barbara Laslett in the Journal of Social Issues. Think of it this way: Privacy is what we keep to ourselves. Secrecy is what is kept from us. Privacy is a right claimed by citizens. Secrecy is a privilege claimed by government.

It’s often said that the internet is a threat to privacy, but on the whole I argue it is not much more of a threat than a gossipy friend or a nosy neighbor, a slip of the tongue or of the email “send” button. Privacy is certainly put at risk when we can no longer trust that our communication, even encrypted, are safe from government’s spying eyes. But privacy has many protectors. And we all have one sure vault for privacy: our own thoughts. Even if the government were capable of mind-reading, ProPublica argues in an essay explaining its reason to join the Snowden story, the fact of it “would have to be known.”

The agglomeration of data that makes us fear for our privacy is also what makes it possible for one doubting soul, one weak link — one Manning or Snowden — to learn secrets. The speed of data that makes us fret over the the devaluation of facts is also what makes it possible for journalists’ facts to spread before government can stop them. The essence of the Snowden story, then, isn’t government’s threat to privacy so much as government’s loss of secrecy.

Oh, it will take a great deal for government to learn that lesson. Its first response is to try to match a loss of secrecy with greater secrecy, with a war on the agents of openness: whistleblowers and journalists and news organizations. President Obama had the opportunity to meet Snowden’s revelations — redacted responsibly by the Guardian — with embarrassment, apology, and a vow to make good on his promise of transparency. He failed.

But the agents of openness will continue to wage their war on secrecy.

In a powerful charge to fellow engineers, security expert Bruce Schneier urged them to fix the net that “some of us have helped to subvert.” Individuals must make a moral choice, whether they will side with secrecy or openness.

So must their companies. Google and Microsoft are suing government to be released from their secret restrictions but there is still more they can say. I would like Google to explain what British agents could mean when they talk of “new access opportunities being developed” at the company. Google’s response — “we have no evidence of any such thing ever occurring” — would be more reassuring if it were more specific.

This latest story demonstrates that the Guardian — now in league with The New York Times and ProPublica as well as publications in Germany and Brazil — will continue to report openly in spite of government acts of intimidation.

I am disappointed that more news organizations, especially in London, are not helping support the work of openness by adding reporting of their own and editorializing against government overreach. I am also saddened that my American colleagues in news industry organizations as well as journalism education groups are not protesting loudly.

But even without them, what this story teaches is that it takes only one technologist, one reporter, one news organization to defeat secrecy. At the length openness will out.