RConversation

Beyond Broadcast Conference Begins

I'm at the Beyond Broadcast conference here at Harvard where James Boyle of Duke Law school just gave a brilliant opening keynote. See Ethan's thorough summary of the talk here. (You can follow the conference on the live webcast here.)

Boyle pointed out that the Internet - and its freeness - actually happened by accident.  "Its not that history is sweeping us to greater openness inexorably," he points out. It's that a bunch of geeks were accidentally allowed to make this happen.

If a bunch of government officials, lawyers and companies had been able to sit down and design the internet, rather than the network where control is at the ends and anybody can create virtually anything, it would have been constructed in a much more top-down, centrally controlled way. Corporate and government forces worldwide are trying very hard now to take it in that direction. We cannot assume that freedom will win because the net is intrinsically free. It's not. And it will cease to be free unless people fight to keep it that way.

Boyle points out that we as  humans have a horrible track record at predicting the future. With this in mind we need to operate under the following assumptions if we want to create system that maximize social benefit and individual freedom:

1. Make sure you leave as open as possible for as long as possible the construction and design of the system you're making;

2. Make sure you're open to as many kinds of feedback as possible for as long as possible in order to collect and incorporate ideas, and adjust to problems that never would have occurred to you independently;

3. Push against your own instincts about what kinds of control are needed.

Sounds like good advice for any media organization.

beyondbroadcast

Don't trust your phone company

When speaking about how U.S. and other multinational technology companies collaborate with political censorship and surveillance in China, I often conclude with this simple slide on the right. It is meant to illustrate the quandary faced by many internet and telecoms companies.  I ask: "What do you do when the user’s rights & interests and the host government’s interests are clearly in conflict?" The problem is by no means unique to China, it's global.

No country claiming to be democratically governed is immune, as we are reminded by today's revelations in USA Today that the NSA has collected a massive database of the phone calls made by tens of millions of Americans, using data handed over (without court order or FISA approval) by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.  Qwest (yay!) questioned the legality of the request and refused to comply. Civil rights and free speech groups are outraged. See reaction from the Center for Democracy and Technology here. If you visit the front page of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, you'll be reminded that they've been fighting AT&T's collaboration with the government's domestic spying program for a while, with a class action lawsuit filed in January. Their work, along with the CDT's, and that of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and many other free-speech fighters is extremely important.

Generally, I don't write much about U.S. telecoms and free speech battles on this blog because there are many bloggers out there who have much greater expertise on U.S. telecoms and U.S. law than I do, and I don't think I have much of substance to contribute - I would only be adding my personal rant to the pile of many other similar rants.

But it's time to make absolutely clear: As an American who has always been proud of the freedoms and opportunities I've grown up taking for granted, I'm gravely concerned and deeply ashamed about what is happening.

Now, the U.S. is far, far from being anything like China, where my friend Hao Wu has been under detention for almost 80 days with no charges, no formal arrest, no access to a lawyer, and his family has no idea where he is. I am quite confident the same thing will not happen to me no matter what I may say about my government on this blog, and am very confident that my blog host, Typepad, is under no pressure to censor me. But unfortunately, as a result of the Bush Administration's behavior, it becomes increasingly difficult for an American person to advocate for freedom of speech in China and be taken seriously.

That said, I'm not going to stop.  I will also continue to emphasize that ALL users of internet and telecommunications services must be protected from excesses of ALL governments, EVERYWHERE. 

This is why I have been critical of the Global Online Freedom Act, legislation introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives by Congressman Chris Smith, because its language and approach imply that U.S. corporate collaboration with governments against the rights and interests of users is only a problem in authoritarian countries - as defined by the U.S. government. That is obviously wrong. It is obviously a universal problem and to claim otherwise is dangerous.

But coming back to the first slide, and the fundamental, global problem we face today: Many - if not most - major multinational technology and telecoms companies seem inclined these days to prioritize their perceived obligations to governments over their obligations to individual users when the interests of government and user are not aligned.

We must make it clear as users, customers, investors, and as voters that this inclination is unacceptable. Click here for some guidelines on what to say if you have a chance to speak with your elected representative.

China's State Kidnappers

I've got an editorial running in today's Washington Post, titled Shattering the China Dream. I talk about the way in which Chinese state agents are in the habit of what amounts to kidnapping: abducting people for long periods of time without any kind of charges, formal arrest, or any kind of legal process whatsoever. Blogger and filmmaker Hao Wu has now been held for 58 days in this way. As far as many Americans are concerned, such unlawful detentions cast a very long shadow over Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to the U.S. this week.  My piece concludes:

With Chinese President Hu Jintao in the United States this week, Americans have an opportunity to assess his regime. What is this country to think? On the one hand his government has raised the living standards of millions of its citizens with economic reform and international trade. On the other hand his underlings trample shamelessly on his people's basic human rights.

The careers of some politicians in both countries -- not to mention military budgets -- would no doubt benefit if our two nations became enemies. As an American who lived and worked in China for more than a decade, however, I continue to believe that peaceful engagement between the United States and China is in the best interest of both nations' people.

But we have a serious problem that won't go away: How can Americans respect or trust a regime that kidnaps our friends?

Hao's birthday was on Tuesday. His sister Nina says you can give him a birthday present by doing something to lobby for his realease. Click here to participate in our letter writing campaign and click here to sign an online petition demanding Hao's release.

Free Expression in Asian Cyberspace

I'm at the first day of a conference here in Manila called "Freedom of Expression in Asian Cyberspace" organized by the South East Asian Press Alliance.  Chi Dang from Vietnam just told us that two members of her delegation were arrested at the airport on their way to this conference.

My colleague Ethan, as usual is doing an amazing job of live-blogging the speakers - people from around Asia who are at the forefront of pushing for free speech online.  The speakers are also being videoblogged  here. And Portnoy from Taiwan is blogging the conference in Chinese here. Also see blog coverage on the blog of PCIJ, one of the conference's Filippino sponsors.  More TBA.

Public Media, Citizens' Media & the Internet

Last week I attended a very stimulating conference on the future of public media put on by the Center for Social Media. At the end of it, David Liroff, VP & Chief Technology Officer of WGBH, gave a public talk:  "In a global village, where is the 'public square'?"

Public broadcasters in the United States are struggling to remain relevant at a time when public discourse is increasingly taking place in the blogosphere: online grassroots citizens media that has little to do with the NPR/PBS model. “In recent months weve hit tipping point at which rate of change in media environment is accelerating exponentially.” Liroff said that the key problem for public media, to quote the Harvard Biz School guru Clayton Christiensen, “what's the job they're hiring us to do?”  And who is the “they” that public media is trying to serve?

Liroff talked about generational differences in media consumption and the challenge this poses. Many young people are engaging in some sort of “public discourse” online all the time. So, “if young people are connected 24/7 to global consciousness what is the role for public media?”  He also pointed out that as the influence of the internet grows, if the public discourse is to be truly representative of the public at large, there is also the problem of access: the gulf in this country between those with high-speed internet access and those without.

I spent all of Thursday and half of Friday in a room with about 20 people – some public broadcasting people, some people doing online citizens media (I was there because of Global Voices, which as a nonprofit project meant to help improve the global public discourse, is a kind of public media), media scholars, and some people from foundations that fund public media. How can public media remain relevant in the age of Web2.0?

The conversation was grounded in a belief that media – in all forms – has a critical role to play in enabling the informed public dicourse necessary for a healthy democratic society. But left to its own devices, there will be certain audiences commercial media may not be particularly bothered with because they are unlikely to translate into advertising revenue, as well as certain types of journalism or conversations that are difficult and unprofitable to pursue. Grassroots media is no panacea either. When left to take its natural course it looks likely to be dominated by the early adopters, the loudest voices, and the ones who can afford access to the technology that is increasingly necessary in order to speak and be heard on the internet.

By the end of our conference I came away convinced that the best role for public media is to find ways to fill the gaps left empty by commercial and grassroots media. What kinds of journalism simply isn’t profitable for the likes of CNN and even the New York Times to pursue well?  What kinds of investigations are not possible for bloggers with other day jobs to pursue effectively? Whose voices aren’t being heard in the media (public, private, or grassroots) right now and why? How can we find them and help them be heard? Who isn’t talking online, why not, and how can we help them do so when it makes sense? And when it doesn’t make sense or isn’t feasible, how do you bridge offline conversations with online conversations?

To be relevant in this new media age, public media need to think beyond the immediate management priorities of their stations to the larger purpose of civic discourse. How do we best serve that discourse?  How do we help public media organizations around the country engage with the rich and multifaceted public discourse happening across the internet, rather than try to compete with it for eyeballs, ears, clicks and downloads? How can public media better interact with commercial media when doing so will further the interest of the public discourse?

It also became clear to me that in order to serve the public discourse properly, American public media must engage directly with both public education and the national communictions infrastructure. By education I don’t mean journalism schools. I mean integrating media literacy and low-cost media production skills into the public school curriculum – perhaps even as early as grade school but certainly junior high and high school – not to mention college and adult education programs. We have entered the new age of We Media: we are all potentially media now. All citizens must learn how to think more critically about the various kinds of media we are interacting with, and be able to distinguish between various types of media and the different motivating forces behind them. All citizens need to better understand how and why these various forms of media are created, and be better empowered to create their own. Media participation comes naturally to some but not to many others who have spent a lifetime passively absorbing it.

By engaging in the “communications infrastructure” I mean advancing the freedom to connect for all Americans. As my colleague David Isenberg points out: “It is written that Freedom of the Press is only for those with presses. But Freedom to Connect is potentially available to everybody.” Potentially, that is, if we commit to making connectivity truly affordable and accessible to all Americans. How can one claim to represent “public media” in this day and age without becoming actively involved in policy debates over public internet access?  Public media organizations must help to shape a legal and regulatory environment that enables all citizens to innovate, create and speak freely – and stand a chance of reaching larger audeinces if their work merits, whether or not their work has commercial backing or value. Otherwise, how can we have a truly democratic public discourse?

Les Blogs: technology and democracy

Here is my favorite image of the Les Blogs conference: this cartoon drawn on the back of my namecard by Hugh McLeod.  I have enjoyed his blog tremendously since I discovered it a year and a half ago or so. He nails it on the head when it comes to the future of marketing, micro-branding and personal branding. During his panel Tuesday he talked about how blogs enable us to free our personal image or "personal brand" from the identities of the companies and organizations we work for. As he put it: "We have these identities that transcend our jobs, which is very good because most jobs suck." 

David Sifry of Technorati said: "The internet is starting to be used in a new way and we need a new metaphor to better describe the way we use the web."

He described the web as no longer a succession of pages but a "conversation stream" or "event stream," enabling individuals and companies to enter into a more direct conversation. "In next 10 years the whole idea of the consumer economy will shift and we'll be calling it a participant economy." He also believes a new model of civics will emerge as a result of this transformation. Citizens' media, says Salim Ismail of PubSub, sitting on his right, makes it "impossible for corporations to manage their message." 

They're right. Companies - and increasingly I believe governments - can no longer control their messages. Their employees' reputations and identities (and thus market value) are less dependent on employers. Citizens' identities may also become more independent of their governments' national "branding."

Ben Hammersley gave a very provocative talk about the future. (Provocative not only because he was wearing a kilt!) He believes "We are on the tipping point of the next step in the evolution of human society." Ethan blogged an excellent summary of it here.

I must admit, I don't believe that technology - or anything else for that matter - is going to enable human beings to transcend our fundamentally flawed human nature. I tend to feel that we're better off if we plan for the future based on the assumption that human capacity for evil and stupidity will remain pretty much constant, and then make sure to build in the requisite institutions and systems to protect ourselves from the dark side of our own nature.

Yat Siu of Outblaze made some really good points about how a lot of these conferences make assumptions about the future of technology based on the assumption that it will emerge from a Western cultural context - which is a wrong assumption, given that soon the largest group of internet users in the world will be Chinese, and given that Northeast Asian companies and consumers will increasingly be driving information technologies of the future.
In our Monday afternoon media & blogging panel, both Ethan and I raised the point that you can't assume that a more democratic society will result just because blogs have emerged. Censorship technologies can be baked into the software and hardware, and people in some online communities exercise a great deal of self-censorship. You also see waves of nationalism and polarization emerging in some blogospheres, which can lead to tyrannies of the majority and herd mentalities -  which are not particularly conducive to democratic discourse.

Yes, I agree that information technology and citizens' media are powerful tools - that's why I quit my job in TV to build an international blogging community. World-changing things can be done with these tools. But I believe that truly world-changing solutions can only be the result of concerted human efforts to be less selfish and evil. We cannot sit back and expect technology to do our work for us. If we want the world to be better, we must reach out to other human beings outside our immediate comfortable circle. And human effort - assisted by technology - is ultimately what Global Voices is all about.

(final photo by "altaide")

China: Fear of Smartmobs

China's latest efforts to control online news are being sold to the Chinese public by the Chinese media as an effort to protect innocent citizens from swindlers, pornographers, and rumor-mongerers. But everybody in China I've been communicating with over the past 12 hours thinks the real reason has to do with fear of the kind of thing depicted in the picture on the above right: smartmobs. This picture was taken by a blogger during the anti-Japanese protests (which occasionally turned into riots) last spring. The protests sprang up in true smartmob-fashion, mobilized by people on internet bulletin boards, mobile phone text messaging (SMS) and e-mail.  (Thanks to Chris Myrick of Asiapundit for permission to use the picture.)

In case this interpretation is in any doubt, the expat blogger Danwei points out an interesting factoid:

"Today, The Beijing News dutifully reports on new regulations to control the internet, saying that the incitement of demonstrations on websites will now be banned. Juxtaposed with the story, however, is an admiring photograph depicting the thousands of anti-war protestors gathered in Washington on Sunday. We like to think that the irony was conscious."

Admiring? Or terrified? Clearly the authorities are connecting the need to prevent political protests and spontaneous activism with the need to tighten controls over online information.  The headline reads: "The Internet is forbidden from inciting illegal protests."

Chinese news reports make it clear that the regulations include internet bulletin boards (BBS, as they're known in China) and SMS mobile text messaging. Should the regime be nervous about these technologies? You bet. After all, just a short flight away from Beijing in Seoul, South Korea sits a President who was elected thanks to a grassroots youth political movement galvanized by the online citizens' media news site OhMyNews, but which couldn't have been successful without the mobilizing power or chatrooms and SMS text messaging.

If you go through the original Chinese text of the regulations released this weekend, you'll find them to be an update of regulations released in 2000 (Thanks to Roland Soong for that archive link!)

As Sophie of China Digital Times points out, the number of forbidden content-categories has been expanded from 9 to 11, and all of those new categories relate to people's ability to organize online. Reporters without Borders and Roland of the EastSouthWestNorth blog have English translations of those points.

(UPDATE: China Digital Times now has an English translation here.)

Roland of ESWN has pointed out that in China, the internet bulletin boards and chatrooms are more powerful than blogs. Why? One big reason, he says, is because professional journalists use internet bulletin boards as a place to anonymously post stories their editors won't publish because they were too politically sensitive. Putting them on a blog leaves the individual too exposed and too potentially traceable. So Chinese who want to find alternative news know that the BBS are where they're most likely to find it.  It's not clear whether the new regulations cover blogs or not, but if they cover BBS there's no reason they wouldn't cover blogs. (UPDATE: it appears they definitely do.) But blogs don't actually appear to be a major concern right now. All the blog hosting services like Bokee, Blogcn, and Blogbus are required to censor and police the blogs on their services anyway. And all the independent bloggers were required to register their identities earlier this year. So from the government's perspective the blogs have been sufficiently neutered.  The BBS and SMS are what they fear.

An example of this fear is how the government recently banned all further internet forum discussion about rural democracy and unrest in a village called Taishi. More on the Taishi story from the tireless ESWN here, here and here.

The list of content that online news sites are not allowed to report includes "state secrets." Roland provides an example (scroll down to the bottom) of how arbitrary the definition of "state secrets" can be, and how people often find themselves in possession of documents (handed to them by officials) which are not marked anywhere as classified - but then they are busted for possession of them later. Charges of reporting state secrets could also be levied in this manner - as an excuse to nail somebody. This tactic has been used against plenty of Chinese conventional newspaper journalists in the past. We are simply reminded that online news organizations cannot escape. It could be extremely easy for a journalist to be nailed for posting "state secrets" on a BBS without knowing he or she had done so.

So the Chinese government is trying to extend the same kinds of regulations it uses on mainstream media to the internet - to professional and grassroots media alike. It will be interesting to see just how far they're able to go. With the quiet compliance of the commercial sector I think China's leadership will buy themselves more time in power.

Now, before you argue that flashmobs aided by BBS and SMS may still ultimately prevail and bring democracy to China in the longer term, think again. It's going to take a lot more than that. The Chinese Communist Party has learned to control the internet not perfectly, but well enough:  Nascent opposition groups have been successfully prevented from using the internet to grow into any kind of national movement. Outside the Communist Party, there's currently no viable alternative group of people capable of governing China.  If an altermative is going to emerge from anywhere it will likely be from within the party itself. 

The Chinese government has very good reason to be scared of flashmobs and I very much doubt they'll succeed in preventing them in the future. Flashmobs could indeed bring the government down if they get big enough and out of control. But flashmobs can't incubate a generation of leaders capable of democratic governance. On the other hand, mobs are very good at crowning new demagogues to replace the old ones. After all.. that's how Mao came to power...

False claims of Chinese censorship?

My friend Kaiser Kuo, former Tang Dynasty rockstar and currently Red Herring's correspondent in Beijing, has just written an article: China Net Star Cries Censorship. The story describes the rise and likely fall of China's recent blogging sensation Sister Hibiscus (sometimes also known as "Sister Lotus" in the western media though her Chinese nom-de-blog "Furong Jiejie" actually translates to "hibiscus," not "lotus"). Now the important thing to understand about Sister H., who is plain and not very talented, is that her stardom was basically the result of bloggers and chatroom denizens making fun of her - a situation which in her egotism and lack of sophistication she herself failed to understand.  The plot only thickens from there.

Like most people who follow such things (including many snickering bloggers around the world) I had been under the impression - thanks to this Reuters article widely reprinted, re-posted, and broadcast in video and audo versions around the world - that the Chinese authorities had cracked down on her, and that her blog host bokee.com had complied with their request to, er, de-emphasize her on their site. While Reuters quoted Sister Hibiscus herself as claiming to have been cracked-down upon, Kaiser could find no further evidence that this was the case. The people at Bokee.com strongly denied having been asked by the authorities to stop featuring her blog on their front page, and pointed out that Sister Hibiscus' blog remains one of the most well-trafficked in the Bokee blog constellation.  But the "in thing" had moved on (to "Super Girls", a phenom I'll discuss in a later post). 

So anyway, Kaiser called the Reuters correspondent to see where he got his information. Apparently, the reporter had nothing more than Sister Hibiscus' claims, plus the quote from a Daily Telegraph article about her in which she told the Telegraph reporter  "They blocked me. The Propaganda Department told the television stations and big newspapers to stop covering me."  Usually, when somebody claims to have been cracked down upon, a responsible journalist will make the effort to get at least off-the-record confirmation from official Chinese contacts (even if indirectly via friends of Chinese officials or people who work in Chinese media organizations who tend to know about crackdowns) that such a crackdown has in fact occurred. When I worked as a journalist in China, I myself ran across situations in which artists and writers claimed to have been censored when the reality was they just weren't very talented - but were trying to salvage their careers by claiming political victimhood and getting buzz with Western journalists. The tactic works surprisingly often, I'm afraid. 

Apparently, no effort to confirm Sister H's claims was made by the Reuters journalist. Kaiser's efforts along those lines have turned up total blanks. It appears, indeed, that China's bloggers and chatroom denizens - as fickle as bloggers and chat-roomers anywhere -  have lost interest. Welcome to 15 mintes of fame. It ends. The cyber-herd moves on.  Sister Hibiscus appears to be trying to revive her edge by turning herself into a censorship victim, whether it's true or not. (That said, if anybody out there has evidence that authorities have indeed made deliberate efforts to diminish her fame, please hit the comments section and let everybody know.)

As Kaiser points out in his article, Western reporters can get away with this kind of sloppy reporting because there is so much real censorship happening every day in China. So reports of censorship are always believable - to foreigners as well as to many Chinese. This situation is reinforced by the fact that the Chinese government routinely lies and obfuscates about what it censors, why and how. So denials - even when true - are not believed. Similarly, companies involved with censorship and filtering are generally evasive and un-transparent about what they're up to and what the Chinese government has asked them to do. Bokee, like all Chinese blog-hosting companies, filters and censors the blogs they host. Users know this through their posting experiences, not because Bokee has been publicly upfront with them about what they're doing. So I wonder, when Sister H. cries censorship, and the Reuters article gets cut and pasted around the Chinese blogosphere and chatrooms, do Bokee's users believe their denials or not? 

It's an interesting question. I'd love to know what Chinese bloggers out there think.

IT Industry, "Policenets" and "Warnets" Worldwide

My latest Cisco post has generated a lot of debate and a fair amount of criticism.

Several people have pointed out that the issue goes far beyond the question of how U.S. tech companies may be assisting Chinese police thuggery and state censorship. As many, including Dan Gillmor point out, there is a much bigger question about the relationship between the tech industry and curtailment by governments of freedom of speech and human rights worldwide. Dan writes:

...Moreover, the issues get even more fuzzy when you consider our own government's race toward creating a surveillance state, or worse. As Congress moves to reauthorize the grotesquely named "Patriot Act," who are we to blame domestic companies for cooperating with repression overseas when we're creating our own version at home?
...

On a discussion list, Sasha Costanza-Chock writes of the need for more "ICT for Development" to balance out the extensive resources put by governments into "ICT for War" :

...Now, my point is not to argue about the equivalence or relative levels of state repression of internal dissent in China vs. the USA. And if it comes to that, then we could just shift the conversation to Cisco's role in the US' current multiple wars of aggression and occupation.

But the point is really not about relative levels of state violence, it's about the need to recognize the deep structural links between, not just Cisco, but the IT industry in general and the military-police apparatus everywhere. The IT industry can't be decoupled from state repression and violence by picking a few instances for delinking.

Yet Cisco-DOD contracts are of course funded by the public. So maybe the conversation and strategies are really about how to ensure that public money put into ICT isn't used to enhance state surveillance and violence but instead is used for 'development.' One (small) step for researchers is to be able to demonstrate the comparative spending levels for networked warfare vs. networked development. I'm shocked that, in all the WSIS process, I've barely heard mention of the military (though we did get a clause about information warfare into the CS Declaration at Geneva) and haven't seen 'civil society,' let alone government delegates, make frank comparisons of the budgets for ICT4War vs. ICT4Dev.
...

Food for thought.

Final Madrid roundup, off to Austin

Ethan Zuckerman has a great post about the criticism received by our Thursday Madrid panel when we presented a set of recommendations about how not to destroy free speech on the internet while fighting terrorism. He also has an excellent summary of the discussions and debates that our group had all day Wednesday as we put those recommendations together. David Weinberger summarizes the press conference our group gave – mainly to Spanish press – later on Thursday.

After a weekend traveling and then recovering from travel, I’m off again to Austin, TX for the end of the South-by-Southwest conference, where I’ll be on two Tuesday panels: Blogging vs. Journalism (the title is a non-starter but I didn’t name the panel), and How to Think About Democracy & Technology. Then I’ll participate in an all-day workshop on Wednesday focusing on activist technology.  I’m looking forward to learning a lot… despite my conference fatigue.