CFP 2009 Blog

This morning I watched Susan Crawford, a new Obama Administration appointee who is the Special Assistant to the President for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy, speak to the CFP conference.  Many folks in the audience know  and speak well of Susan.  However, despite this friendly relationship with her audience, Ms. Crawford declined to take any questions and engage in a true dialogue with participants about the issues being considered.

This choice to speak on behalf of the Administration without then taking the time to hear, consider and attempt to answer questions from the audience is representative of a nagging problem with the new Administration.  Despite the Administration’s positive focus on transparency and creating a way to collect citizen input, when it comes to engaging in dialogue with policy makers and thinkers whom they may not know intimately or as 100 percent supporters, the Administration has been slower to incorporate such input and dialogue into its style of governance.

And whille the Administration is so young (133 days old as of this morning?) it is important that it correct this bad habit and take some risks by putting officials out there to really interact and listen.  Senator Daschle was excellent at this and did it often as an Obama surrogate during the campaign, and there were many other campaign workers who went out and simply met with, listened, and responded to constituents.  This important practice needs to be a central part of the Obama Administration’s style of governance, as it was during the campaign and during Senator Obama’s earlier career as a community organizer.  Such a risk is worth taking and will only result in stronger support and true respect from citizens who care enough to show up and listen.

The famous quote by John Gilmore, “The Internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it,” and whether or not it still applies was the focus of one of the breakout sessions this afternoon at CFP.  The speakers included Ian Brown from the Oxford Internet Institute, who discussed different deep-packet filtering tools used in the UK; TJ McIntyre from Digital Rights Ireland, who looked at the Internet Watch Foundation, the British organization that determines what pages are blocked by some of these tools, and their accountability; Catherine Crump from the ACLU, who discussed recent cases to challenge web filtering in libraries and schools in the US; Derek Bambauer from the Brooklyn Law School, discussing the recent fervor in Australia about a legally mandated national web filtering scheme; and Nicole Wong from Google who discussed censorship faced by Google services in various countries.

The key question- can the internet still route around censorship- was not settled at the panel (but then, a topic that large cannot expect to be settled in an hour and 15 minutes.)  Instead, the focus was on the chilling effects of new legal filtering requirements in what are generally considered “free” countries.  China, Iran, and other repressive countries have attempted to filter the Internet practically since the day they connected their first pipe, and there has been comparatively ineffective attempts to limit particular types of content through mandated filtering in the US and other nations that generally have more respect for free speech (see the Child Online Protection Act). But most individuals sufficiently technically suave can easily get around whatever filters are put in place.  Ian Brown’s examination of the different technologies being used to filter in Britain brought up the specter of censorship technology that will be more difficult to “route around” in the future, but it remains unclear how much more difficult that will be.

However, it seems like the technology of filtering is less significant than the legal, cultural, and psychological effects of mandated filtering.  As Derek Bambauer pointed out, while most of the people who attend conferences called “Computers, Freedom and Privacy” can get around filters, the average user would not be able to.  One of the audience members who worked with internet users in China pointed out that unless one has a compelling reason to seek out particular information, one isn’t likely to just stumble across filtered websites.  A case can be made that this is a good thing in the event that filtered information is child porn– that is exactly the case that the UK and Australia are making when promoting filtering.  However, as Nichole Wong pointed out, once countries like Australia start filtering the internet, it takes away the question of if filtering and censorship are acceptable in general, and allows countries like China to claim that it is merely a value judgment as to what is “dangerous” information.

-Eliza Bonner, guest blogger

Wendy M. Grossman attended the CFP tutorial Twittering in the Trenches yesterday wrote a great recap of the day at net.wars.

Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2009 – Day One

“Did you check that with your ethics committee?”

The speaker, who was feeling the strain of being a newcomer to privacy issues among a very tough, highly activist crowd, turned a little shakier than she already was.

“I didn’t need to,” she said, or something very like it. “It’s not interacting with humans, just computers.”

We spend a lot of time talking about where the line might be between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, but the important question may not be the usual one, Not “What does it mean to be human?” but “How far down the layer of abstractions does human interaction persist?” If I send you email intended to deceive, clearly I’m interacting with a human. If I set up a Facebook account and use it to get you to friend me by first friending one of your less careful friends and never communicate directly with you, the line gets a little more attenuated. Someone who had thought more about computers than about people might get confused.

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Guest writer Mark Belinsky has an overview of the first day here at CFP09 at his 4hours blog. His day covers a few sessions, mainly:

1. Twittering in the Trenches: Activism Using Social Networks
2. Data Mining: Privacy, Transparency, Democracy
3. The Web is a Dangerous Place

Below is a mock-up for a friends don’t let friends use privacy-violating apps campaign seal, similar in theory to the logos that Creative Commons uses.

Half Private

Private

[Mostly] Secure

CFP2009 Co-Chair Jay Stanley is a guest blogger on the Google Public Policy Blog.

Creating the future

Monday, June 1, 2009 at 10:05 AM

(Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Jay Stanley, public education director for the ACLU Technology and Liberty Program and co-chair of the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2009 conference, which is taking place June 1-4 in Washington, DC.)Eighteen years is an eternity when you’re talking about technology. Back in 1991, the World Wide Web was just being introduced to the public, 3.5” floppy disks were state-of-the-art, and a couple guys named Larry and Sergey were mere teenagers. That was also the year of the very first Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (CFP) conference, which took place in Burlingame, California. Over time, it has become an evolving collection of activists, hackers, technologists, academics, government officials, and journalists, who gather every year in a different city to talk about technology and its often bewildering implications for our lives.

 

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