Dilbert, Skynet and the latest from the transparency front

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) and I have both agreed and disagreed about transparency, for years. In his posting, Crime and Privacy, he has opined, for example, that “Ironically, the more the government clamps down on individual privacy, the more freedom the residents will have. When the government can detect every sort of crime, it will be forced by public opinion and by resource constraints to legalize anything it can detect but can’t stop.” 

Hm, well, that’s right in the general gist, though wrong in the specifics. What Scott is fumbling around — and that I made explicit in The Transparent Society (1997) — is that universal and pervasive surveillance can take us in either of two directions.  One is toward Big Brother, if elites monopolize the omniscience and can surveil in secret, without accountability or supervision.  In that case, you get what Vernor Vinge called “ubiquitous law enforcement.” And if the cops can’t arrest everyone?  Then they’ll cherry-pick and arrest those whom they don’t like.  In the specifics, Adams is dead wrong.

But Adams is floundering in the right direction when he holds “that a lack of privacy would lead to fewer activities being against the law. The only reason law enforcement can afford to act against drug users, or prostitution, or gambling, for example, is because only 1% of those crimes are detectable. If police could magically know every time someone violated a drug or prostitution law, the volume would be so high they would end up ignoring the entire class of crimes for purely practical reasons. And that’s where we’re heading.”

Still wrong! But almost there. What is missing from his vision is… citizenship. Let us assume that we remain sovereign voters and citizens, not just legally but empowered by omniscience of our own. By “sousveillance” — the ability and fierce determination to look BACK at the mighty – of government, oligarchy, corporatcy, criminality – in effect, watching the watchmen. (I portray this in my novels, EARTH and  EXISTENCE and it is very likely. ) Suppose we get used to applying reciprocal accountability and even inserting cameras of our own – or at least trusted witnesses – even in the authorities’ surveillance chambers and control rooms. In that case:

1) Cherry-picking and other abuses will be caught and deterred.

2) We will argue, debate, deliberate and change some of the laws ourselves.  Some will be abandoned, as Scott Adams describes, only by our choice, not because of some cop-laziness.

For example, if you are caught every single time you break the speed limit, and if the fine every time is $400, then you will join millions of your neighbors demanding that the system of fines be changed!  You currently pay $400 because the law assumes it is missing 99% of the speeders.  If it catches 100% of them, then rational people will negotiate a shift to a tariff system, where you pay by the mile… and by the mph… each time you hurry above the limit, but are not putting folks at risk. Deterrence that’s reasonable and flexible. Um…. duh?

Here is what I find depressing. People just don’t get this! Not even smart, out-of-the-box thinkers like Scott Adams. They seldom look at the society of citizens around them and see it! We never notice that 99% of the stuff… even the rules… around us is working! (Just stand at a 4-way stop sign intersection and watch a miracle at work.) Sure, complain about the wretched 1% that isn’t!  I got a list of complaints that rolls out the door. But this tendency to only notice what’s wrong seriously undermines our belief that we can fix things.

No wonder negotiation has broken down, in this era of dismal culture war.  We all assume the worst. We never ponder… is there a solution that we could negotiate, among ourselves, so that these trends won’t rob our freedom, but enhance it?

== The matter at mean ==

The best and smartest of the topical web comics is Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC), by Zach Weiner. A recent strip illustrates the psychological state that drives elites — even well-meaning ones — to proclaim a need for asymmetric information flows… to know everything about us while letting us know very little about what they are doing.  In fairness, such asymmetries can be necessary at a tactical level. But you can count on the rationalizations always getting pushed beyond sense, extending secrecy as a convenience, as job security, and an expression of self-importance — a tendency that winds up endangering citizenship and freedom.

(Another dollop of transparency wisdom from SMBC.)

We shouldn’t get angry about this fundamental trait of human nature — it is likely what you or I would do, to some degree, if we found ourselves in a position of power. But human nature is a challenge, a foundation we had no part in shaping, a hand we are dealt that can and must be improved. When it comes to surveillance by those with power we simply have to keep up a steady counter pressure, to find innovative methods for applying transparency upward (sousveillance). Watching the watchers, in ways that do not prevent them from doing their legitimate jobs.  It turns out there are such methods, just waiting for a concerted effort on our parts. Here is one example: Free the Inspectors General.

Oh, lest this focus solely on government, note that the same psychological drive affects elites of all kinds, from finance to business to social or international or criminal. Only (a slim majority of) scientists regularly practice transparency as a schooled habit. We are all human. But we must stop this old habit from destroying us. We can’t afford to indulge it anymore.

== Skynet now has lasers ==

Our friends the HST (High Speed Trading) or HFT (High Frequency Trading) algorithms are at it again. A single hacked/prank tweet on the Associated Press (AP) account, declaring that the White House had been bombed and Obama injured, sent the market into an instant freefall for three minutes, far too quickly for human traders to have been involved. “That goes to show you how algorithms read headlines and create these automatic orders – you don’t even have time to react as a human being.” See also: Skynet and the Flash Computer Trading Monster.

As if we didn’t already have enough reasons to dread this particular path to artificial intelligence (AI) now they are planning to equip Skynet… I mean Goldman Sachs HST systems… with lasers! Laser beam technology originally developed for the military is being rolled out to shave time off trades. It will compete with new microwave networks that are increasingly being used by traders. Ah, humans.  Marx was right about capitalists, they will sell the new overlords the rope used to hang us all.

== Transparency-related Miscellany ==

I consulted with Qualcomm about this, amid my decades long campaign to change the design of our cell phone system, so that it will continue to be useful when we’ll need it most, when some disaster (local or national or global) brings down the cell towers!  Implementing one of these resilience concepts, Qualcomm hopes to boost mobile coverage with a cell phone service that uses small cellular base stations installed in homes to serve passing smartphone users.

And along similar lines, adding to our potential resilience… Ushahidi aims to build the world’s most simple, reliable, and rugged Internet connection device, but with sophisticated cloud-based features. Its BRCK hub is rugged and can connect 20 devices  with any network in the world, providing eight hours of wireless connectivity battery life

- Smart dust computers, no bigger than a snowflake, will scavenge power from their surroundings, and monitor your world. Clearly a huge predictive hit for my friend Vernor Vinge in his novel — A Deepness in the Sky — which explores the possibilities.  Big potential upsides await… or else downsides far worse than Orwell. Raging against such things won’t stop them from being abused.  Embracing them just might.

- Hitachi Develops World’s Smallest RFID Chip.  Nicknamed “Powder” or “Dust”, the surface area of the new chip is a quarter of the original 0.3 x 0.3 mm, 60µm-thick chip developed by Hitachi in 2003. And this RFID chip is only one-eighth the width of the previous model.  Already the hand-wringing has begun… while clueless over  how to deal with such a world.  Clue: moaning about this won’t stop it.  Elites will have it. We have one option.  Give it to us all and ensure the elites are watched with this stuff.

- How easy is it to scam the Internet with a fake persona? “Santiago Swallow” skyrocketed from a nonexistent made-up name to a Kred social influence score of 754 out of 1000, within days of being “born” online… midwifed by British technology expert Kevin Ashton (who coined the term “Internet of Things.”)  For example: It didn’t take long for Mr Ashton to purchase Swallow some 90,000 followers, all for the price of $50. An automated tweeting service was used to broadcast his thoughts to the world. Image manipulation software created Swallow’s look and Mr Ashton finished his experiment by writing a fake Wikipedia entry and setting up Swallow’s own website through WordPress.

In fact, there are business opportunities for a pseudonymity-reputation conveyance service that would be an instant hit, allowing tools to overcome scams like this. Alas, the general response is hand-wringing and “what’cha gonna do?”

== Past, present and future shock ==

In his book “Present Shock: When Everything Happens NOW,” Douglass Rushkoff contends we must get used to the the world arising out of Alvin Toffler’s prophetically accurate “Future Shock“… a coming era when everything is happening all at once and the present becomes a cacophony of unbearable complexity. One in which the nostalgic reactions of left and right differ — the Occupy Movement seeks an endless present of confrontation while the right wallows in apocalyptic dreams of an ending that would relieve one of having to think about complexity. And yet, both of these bickering twins express a common, underlying personality trait: anomie toward the future.

Borrowing from some of the best web-philosophers, Rushkoff calls digiphrenia – digitally provoked mental chaos.  One of many overlaps in his book with near-future problems that I portray in Existence. Such as how corporate investing in new goods or services has been replaced by relentless — and ultimately futile — efforts to game the markets in real time, betraying the confident foresight that is supposed to lie at the root of capitalism. The motivator (in that case) appears to be less greed than a pervasive unwillingness to grapple with the gyrations of a rapidly shifting target called the near future.

Rushkoff is a savvy writer and perceptive in his attempt at a big picture.  Alas, temporal chauvinism happens to the best of us and the tendency in “Present Shock” is to fall for the very thing he describes happening to others.  Assuming that the present is the only topic here – the only subject worthy of myopic focus.  In fact, history teaches a sobering lesson – that every major new communication medium triggered disruption alienation and pain, before eventually becoming a net force for good.

Movable type, glass lenses, radio, loudspeakers, mass media. Each time this happened, some — like the Luddites of 18th Century Britain — would cry fore-tellings of gloom: that commonfolk would be overloaded, their ability to process overwhelmed, or that people would drift aimlessly without the anchor of tradition. Meanwhile others — from Giordano Bruno to Benjamin Franklin to Teilhard de Chardin — proclaimed ecstatic joy over the prospect of expanding human powers, predicting that the process might culminate in almost godlike omniscience. Every time, the grouches proved right in the short term and wrong over the long run.

Today’s Internet and media-blasted world shows every sign of passing through a similar era of confusion. A confusion well-documented in Present Shock – though alas, without as big or deep or wide or as calming a perspective as Douglas Rushkoff claims that he is offering. That is no indictment. It is all right to be a meta-example of the very thing that you are describing. And he describes it all very well.

== More Transparency Miscellany ==

- A cool and informative Scientific American article about Google Glass… and my sci fi augmented reality “specs” in Existence… and other takes on how we’ll move through a world of many layers and textures.

- An almost completely plastic pistol, made in a 3D printer. It’s heeeeere.  What a world.

- Fortunately, personal firearms will be nowhere near as important in the future as universal access to vision and knowledge. Citizen victories in the Age of Cameras can be among the most important in our time. Recent court decisions in the U.S. have supported a citizen’s right to film and record police activity in public places and the Obama Administration has declared this right to be “settled law.”  No matter could be more important than preserving the one recourse any person must retain, when dealing with authority… our ability to appeal to the truth.

- Now see how the same fight is being waged in Britain by a brave young woman — Gemma Atkinson — whose animated story is brilliant and informative.  Again, most of the time, most police are our good and faithful servants.  But the only conceivable way to keep them that way, is by getting them used to being supervised by their employers.  By us.

- Supreme Court says states may bar Freedom of Information requests from non-residents. Resist.

- An interesting rumination on Yelp! and other crowd-sourced “critic and review” systems… the advantages… and many many disadvantages that must be overcome, before this promising method can truly displace the appraisal of professionals and experts.

== Saving provocative politics for last ==

So you think I am always coming down on conservatism?  (That is, the current-loony Fox-led version; I admired  the intellectual honesty of Barry Goldwater and I tell everyone – left or right – to read Adam Smith;  but neither Goldwater nor Smith nor William F. Buckley would recognize today’s mutant right.)

Well surprise-surprise… I am fully aware of sins of the left, as well!   And I will now  swivel to aim in that direction.

First, bear in mind that moderate liberals are a much larger population than actual leftists, and that liberals do not partake in many of the traits of their more dogmatic allies, nor do they believe almost anything that Sean Hannity claims that they do.  Nevertheless, there truly is a fringe and there are ways in which the far left wing behaves much like fanatics of the far right.

For example, both extremes demand tests of purity and the recitation of rigid, in-group defining doctrines. Neither wing is even remotely interested in applying the genius of pragmatic compromise. At times, the left’s political correctness can seem as brutally intolerant as the know-nothing religiosity we see gushing from the opposite extreme.

One very smart social psychologist who lays out the case in ways that should make left-of-center intellectuals squirm is Jonathan Haidt. If you are one of those intellectuals, and are honest, you’ll give him a look and listen: The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology. (Or see his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are divided by Politics and Religion). And perhaps even adapt. Please. We can only afford one half of the American polity going psycho at a time.

And continuing my swivel to cast a wary eye in all directions: a war on whistle blowers? It is much more complicated than this, and there have been other measures that enhanced whistle blowing incentives, of late. Still we need to keep paying attention.

And… the U.S. gives big push to internet surveillance: Senior Obama administration officials have secretly authorized the interception of communications carried on networks operated by AT&T and other Internet service providers, a practice that might otherwise be illegal under federal wiretapping laws.  I see such things as inevitable.  What I demand (and you should) is that we get something in return.  Ever increasing powers of supervision.

There. See?  I am wary in every direction. Remain suspicious! Especially if you have a “side” that you feel is better than its opposition.  It may only be better in 90% of the ways…

…and that 10% could become lethal. Unless we make sure that even our “friendly” elites know.  That we are watching them.

For more on Transparency and our future…

Hidden Offshore Money Hoards Revealed…and Other Transparency News

You may have heard that a consortium of journalists, working on a cache of 2.5 million recently spilled files, has cracked open the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con men and mega-rich the world over. If preliminary reports prove to be true, it would be a revelation ten times larger than last year’s WikiLeaks Affair and vastly more important. Indeed, it could portend the start of a worldwide radical movement for transparency that I forecast (including – for dramatic effect – a world war on Switzerland) in my 1989 novel Earth.    

For starters, see a chart detailing ongoing investigations worldwide. Scan a wide range of reactions, from Russian officials, Europeans and others: 

–Tax Haven Data Leak Reverberates around the Globe

–Tax Havens Cause Poverty

–Release of Off-Shore Records draws Worldwide Response

 This event appears to prove the contention I made back in 1989, in Earth – that even world elites will have to adapt to a world much more filled with light. Specifically, these revelations may have short, intermediate and long term consequences.  In the near term, some cheaters and kleptocrats will be caught and some laws tightened, some cheat-havens hemmed in, public awareness and anger incrementally raised.  

 The intermediate effect will be to cause the kleptos and New Oligarchs to pay more for increasingly clever methods of concealment, evasion and manipulation. Remain cynical, it will take a lot more than this. A whole lot more.

 But over the longer term, a whole lot more is simply inevitable. We will see cascades of sudden revelation as these skulking methods prove inherently unreliable. They will be undermined by defections-of-conscience and by self-serving whistle blowers. By the fallibility of software and by the venality of henchmen. They will crack and leak, in any world that is short of Orwellian. At which point the world will choose. Shall we endure a return to the long, 6000 year era of law-protected oligarchy? Or will this signal the return to vigor of a civilization that is kept healthy by openness and accountability and light?

 Yes, I am putting it in dramatic – even manichean – terms.  And I have probably understated the importance of the coming series of confrontations. In fact, let’s make the prediction even more explicit than I made in Earth. 

FORECAST: This movement may be propelled – soon – by one or more radicalized nations in the developing world. Not radicalized by socialism or religion or dogmatic frenzy, but by the appearance of a new class of honest, grownup leaders at their helms. Imagine the fury that those leaders and their people will feel, when they suddenly realize just how much of their national wealth wealth was siphoned away by their own former kleptocrat lords. 

Vast amounts that those thieves took with them into exile.  Example: The Philippine Presidential Commission on Good Government probe into the disclosure that Maria Imelda Marcos Manotoc, the eldest daughter of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, was a beneficiary of a secret offshore trust of prodigious proportions, in the British Virgin Islands… 

Now extrapolate this and you start to understand why the Swiss and other haven bankers have recently seemed willing – even eager – to strike semi-transparency deals with tax authorities in Europe and North America.  (1) Because those big countries have dangerous klout that must be placated by tossing overboard some merely-rich, sub-billionaire clients. But far more likely – (2) because the real business of lucrative banking secrecy lies in that mountain of klepto-hoards looted from much poorer nations. By striking deals with the IRS and EU tax boards, they hope to prevent alliances between developed and developing nations, in a grand consortium for transparency. 

Only it won’t work. Eventually, some nation like the Phillipines, or Indonesia or the former Zaire will be led by people graced with honesty, imagination and courage. Leaders who figured out, in advance, the pitfall traps such as blackmail. 

There are things that such nations and peoples can do — exceptional, dramatic and boldly effective things — that could transform the world. There are ways. And when it happens, remember where you first heard this.*

==  Pay attention… this is important == 

You Americans out there who actually want a return to a vigorous, problem solving nation, where politics is about negotiation and the Peoples’ will and not regression into feudalism, you must pay attention to this. There is really nothing more urgent you will watch, probably ever! Because the ability of the American Experiment to remain healthy and solve every problem hangs in the balance.

I mean it.  Watch:  Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim.   

But this next matter is paramount, as well. One issue where I am a flaming, no-compromise radical, is a citizen’s right to record encounters with authority, especially the police. Now the Obama Justice Department has made things starkly and abundantly clear.  It is now “settled law” that anyone is allowed to record or photograph police officers in public.  

A statement of interest – a legal term for when an agency or organization has a stake in the outcome of a trial, but not direct involvement – filed in the case of Mannie Garcia v. Montgomery County, Md., upholds the right of individuals to photograph police under the First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. This is more important than it may seem. Most cops are hardworking and well-intentioned men and women. Their instincts – inherited from ancient eras – are understandable… and must not be allowed to prevail in this matter. 

But even as “settled law” it will be very very hard.  Note these cases:  

The NYPD and Mayor Bloomberg oppose surveillance of police.  See? Even “openness” democrats can’t be trusted in this issue. 

San Diego police attack, arrest man video recording them, claiming his phone could be weapon.  

Dinosaurs. In fact, this new era of omni-veillance will be essential and will help make policing easier! Especially if citizens feel they are partners and not victims. Take this example. NYPD fails to catch mugger for three weeks, but internet commenters catch him in one hour.  My “smart mobs” from Existence, taking form already. 

Then it all moves to a new front. “The Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act,” prohibits filming or taking pictures on livestock farms to “defame the facility or its owner.” Violators would be placed on a “terrorist registry.”  Terrorism?  This was prompted by animal rights groups video-recording scenes of horrific sadism and cruelty on farms and in slaughterhouses… going far beyond the normal bloody business necessitated by the carnivorality industry. This was exactly the sort of transparency that the industry ought to want, in order to rid themselves of vicious monsters, the way pedophiles are kept out of schools. When they get used to this and embrace it, the owners will have a cleaner and more efficient – and less Karma-burdened – business. 

And related news —  A judge has blocked Iowa State University from releasing documents about food safety research conducted for the beef-processing company that makes the product dubbed “pink slime” by critics. At the level of details, there are actually reasons for compromise in this case.  At the level of principle, none at all.  

This is not as crucial a situation as the taping of citizen contacts with police.  But it matters and light must be allowed to shine. 

Oh, but sinking lower than slaughterhouses… on a secretly-recorded tape, GOP Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and his advisors are heard laughing and joking about opposition research they had on actress Ashley Judd, who had been considering running against McConnell next year. Many Democratic groups blasted McConnell for the remarks, disgusted by the fact McConnell would potentially use Judd’s suicidal thoughts as a child against her. In reactionn came a firestorm or protest against eavesdropping by “leftist agitators.”  Um, get used to it. Stop being led by crude people. Go back to choosing grownups. It really is that simple. 

Interesting times indeed.

==  Augmented reality… and catching liars == 

Compare these two images of Rome during the election of the last pope in 2005 and more recently in 2013.  Then contrast the images to my descriptions of “tru-vu goggles” in EARTH (1989) and the gel-lens stalks people wear in 2048, portrayed in EXISTENCE. How quickly are we moving toward the world of Augmented Reality (AR)?

Get used to expanded power of video to appraise tiny changes, measure your pulse at a distance and enhance our already tremendous ability to pick patterns out of backgrounds.  These methods developed at MIT will help us all thrive in Augmented Reality… or else prove powerful tools for tyranny.  We’ll get best outcomes from them if we all embrace them.  Openly. 

Indeed, after reading that article, ponder my 1980 novel Sundiver in which vision-based lie-detectors (inescapable, wherever there is light) utterly transform politics. 

I predict that by 2016 there will be lurid claims from “experts” on all sides, claiming to catch fibs by opponents talking in public or on TV… experts who are then “shown” to be lyingI It will be chaos, at first.  Then this stuff will become an App. And by 2020 or 2024? A useful tool> Possibly a sieve for psychopaths and monsters? Can you see yet why – for so many reasons – the clade of already-powerful psychopaths is growing desperate?

== And more transparency crux-points ==

Perching: Video, released by the Air Vehicle Directorate, shows a pigeon-like drone that can draw power from an electrical wire while its camera watches a target. These and other new-style drones are part of a fascinating and problematic future. Stay alert. 

In a fascinating article, Technology Review explains how a huge black market has developed for “zero-day” systemic flaws in programs and operating systems, especially in mobile devices.  These can be exploited by governments or corporations of criminal gangs, especially in mobiles, that get infrequent security updates.  A cottage industry of hackers now swops in to find flaws and back doors and chinks in security and then sells them at high prices.  The article raises this as a scary scenario… but in fact I am not so sure.  Isn’t this how an immune system functions? T Cells that discover an invader and ways to neutralize it are rewarded within your own body; they are given resources to reproduce.  Is that any different from a government agency saying: “Come to us with your clever discovery of a flaw.  We’ll pay better than the criminals do… and you won’t risk jail.”  See: the Malware industrial complex and the trade in zero-day vulnerabilities.

A multinational security firm has secretly developed software called RIOT capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behavior by mining data from social networking websites. Riot can display on a spider diagram the associations and relationships between individuals online by looking at who they have communicated with over Twitter. It can also mine data from Facebook and sift GPS location information from Foursquare, a mobile phone app used by more than 25 million people to alert friends of their whereabouts. The Foursquare data can be used to display, in graph form, the top 10 places visited by tracked individuals and the times at which they visited them.  

Curious whether a prescription or medical device your doctor is recommending comes from a manufacturer who has been paying your doctor? Good news, then: The federal government has finally developed a plan for how the Physician Payments Sunshine Act will work. The Sunshine Act, made federal law as part of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, was designed to allow anyone — patients, doctors, journal editors — to look up which doctors are getting how much from which companies.   

== And yet MORE transparency news… == 

See the stunningly huge number of new top level domains that are under consideration by ICANN.  

These guys consulted me. Koozoo envisions a world where a network of smartphone cameras will anticipate your needs and offer streaming video that fills them. But that’s future talk. For now, it will just put up cameras anywhere it can. 

In the wake of the famous WikiLeaks events, a large number of emulation sites popped up around the world, aiming to blow the whistle on corruption from Bulgaria to India to Nicaragua. Most of these clones never got very far and appear to have all but shut down. Balkanleaks seems to be just one of a handful still actively receiving and publishing new documents. (Note, I long supported Witness since 1990 or so, a more robust model that does not rely on inherently fragile encryption methods.) As I described in The Transparent Society, maintaining methods of aggressive accountability, threatening the dark secrets of powerful men, is a dangerous game and secret codes are only the tip of what’s required. 

States are pondering or passing laws to restrict the use of drones for camera use in the skies over public realms like highways. This is not where we should be concentrating our freedom and privacy protecting efforts.  All such laws will do is hamper the good aspects of drone use while compelling elites of government and wealth to make their surreptitious drones smaller.  More like birds and insects and harder to detect. The failure of imagination of these people….  

The thing we need is not to try to blind elites… that has never ever worked. (Show me one historical example. One.)  What we must pursue is sousveillance, our ability to look back at power. to see with our own drones etc.  And, above all, to make fresh, agile deals every time an issue like this comes up.  

“You say that you, our protectors, need more vision to better protect the public?  Fine.  But in return you must undergo more supervision.  Citizens in the control rooms.  Citizens on the panels that issue licenses. Webcams in boardrooms.  You may see better, in order to serve us better.  But you are a watchdog, not a wolf! And here is your choke chain. Accept it – and your role as a public servant – or else we will hire others.”

== And more! ==

Brad Foster puts into perspective the ever-rising tsunami of information and how crushing is the hypersonic waves of… bullshit. Just a few small examples:  Netflix consumes a THIRD of all internet traffic. Four billion shares on Facebook every day.  Eric Schmidt of Google says 5 exabytes of information were created by humanity till 1980.  We now create that much every two days.  Frost goes a bit over the top in his denunciations and diagnoses, but he concludes there has never been a better time for people to find ways around the BS and slim down, in order to be creative, or useful, or focus on what you can do that does (or is) some good.  

Political note: The FCC and Obama Department of Justice appear to be leaning toward favoring smaller mobile phone companies in releasing more cell tower spectrum, in order to encourage more competition with Verizon and AT&T. This may be a crucial sign of sentiment as the FCC also decides whether to release spectrum for major citizen-access use of WiFi type systems anywhere in the continent. 

== Brin on Beck? Via Penn Jillette? The strange world of Transparency ==

 

I was mentioned on Glenn Beck! In a “surprisingly cordial discussion” between Glenn Beck and Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller). Penn mentioned me twice, citing The Transparent Society (about 34 and 41 minutes in). I consider Penn to be a true paladin of freedom, worthy of my greatest compliment… that he and I would both have been quickly burned at the stake under any tyranny. (You, too, should strive to be burnable!) But in this wondrous civilization he and I are instead well paid to provoke and stir the pile, joyously yelling at each other and in all directions. Progress indeed.  

Beck? Well, he was courteous and calm on this occasion.  Go watch a discussion between a sane-openminded (though rambunctiously provocative) true-libertarian and a tendentiously delusional faux-libertarian shill for the new lords… but still a good mind-stretch for those of you who need to wallow now and then, in smart perspectives that challenge you. 

== Coda == 

A final set of sad notes. I have spoken elsewhere of the terrible news that both Jay Lake and Iain Banks are in desperate fights against cancer. I will speak more of that later. (They are great writers and let’s all send our best vibes.) Now comes news that the son of eminent science fiction author Dave Wolverton – AKA David Farland – suffered a terrible accident recently. Past fans of Dave’s work – or folks interested in trying something new – might have a look at his novel Nightingale… or else, if you are a would be writer, consider Million Dollar Outlines, in which Dave offers would-be best-sellers advice how to analyze an audience and outline a novel so that it can appeal to a wide readership. 

————

* Oh, but by then I may have been bribed into denying it all! No serious offers so far.  You – the smart public – should feel insulted by that! Think about it.

Questions I am frequently asked about… (Part V) Transparency, Privacy and the Information Age

I’ll now complete my compilation of questions that I’m frequently asked by interviewers. They can all be found online on my web site and press kit. This final section is about… 

== PRIVACY AND TRANSPARENCY==  

Note that my tenure as an expert in these matters arose from the 1997 publication of The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?  which won the American Library Association’s Freedom of Speech Award and the McGannon Public Policy Prize.  It revealed many surprising aspects to a vexing and complex set of problems that we must negotiate and navigate in the coming decades, with nothing at stake… other than liberty, survival, and all the things that make life worth living.

For more detail, see a compilation of some articles and interviews  about transparency, freedom and technology .

–Do you worry about the loss of privacy as both the government and amateurs have more and more access to surveillance?

I got some of my nicest letters based on Chapter 9 of The Transparent Society, where I disassemble my own theory, appraise and talk about all sorts of ways that a transparent society could go wrong! For example, you could have a really nasty version of majority-rule, such as Ray Bradbury shows in Fahrenheit 451. Even if transparency prevents Big Brother, will that mean we’ve traded top-down tyranny for the lateral kind? Oppression by hundreds of millions of judgmental Little Brothers? 

Serious concerns, Still, real life offers reason to hope. If you look at the last 50 years, whenever the public learns more about some eccentric group, it judges that group on one criterion: Is this group mean? 

Are they harmful and oppressive to others? When the answer is yes, the more we learn about the group, the less they’re tolerated. If the answer is no, the more we learn about the group, the more they’re tolerated. Look back. More exposure and information about others reduced racism, sexism, homophobia… but increased our aversion to groups like the KKK or Stalinists.  No other criterion explains this. 

If that’s true and if it holds in the future—if people continue to defend others’ eccentricities because a) they think it’s cool to live in a world of harmless eccentrics and b) for the sake of their own protection—then you would likely see a 51 percent or 60 percent or 70 percent dictatorship by a majority that insists on crushing just one thing… intolerance. Okay, that’s still group-think majority-imposed will. But the least harmful one you can imagine. 

As far as privacy itself is concerned, I have a simple answer to that. (It makes up chapter 4 of The Transparent Society.) Human beings want it. We naturally are built to want some privacy. Moreover, if we remain a free and knowing people, then sovereign citizens will demand a little privacy, though we’ll find that we must redefine the term for changing times. 

The question really boils down to: Will tomorrow’s citizens be free and knowing? Will new technologies empower us to exert reciprocal accountability, even upon the mighty? It may seem ironic, but for privacy and freedom to survive, we’ll need a civilization that is mostly open and transparent, so that each of us may catch the would-be voyeurs and Big Brothers.  So that most of us know most of what’s going on, most of the time. 

It can happen!  The proof is us.  Because it is already the method that we’ve used for 200 years. And to see this all laid out, have a look at one of the only public policy books from the 20^th Century that’s still in print and selling more each year.

–What do you foresee as tiny cameras proliferate? 

Essentially, this is the greatest of all human experiments.  In theory… sousveillance (looking at the mighty from below) should cancel our worst fears about the surveillance state, if we get into the habit of stripping the mighty naked. 

If that happens, we should eventually equilibrate into a situation where people – for their own sakes and because they believe in the Golden Rule, and because they will be caught if they violate it – eagerly and fiercely zoom in upon areas where others might be conniving or scheming or cheating or pursuing grossly-harmful deluded paths… 

… while looking away when none of these dangers apply. A socially sanctioned discretion based on “none of my business” and leaving each other alone… because you’ll want that other person to be your ally next time, when you are the one saying “make that guy leave me alone!” 

That is where it should wind up.  If we’re capable of calm, or rationality and acting in our own self-interest.  It is stylishly cynical for most people to guffaw, at this point, and assume this is a fairy tale. I can just hear some readers muttering “Humans aren’t like that!” 

Well, maybe not. But I have seen plenty of evidence that we are now more like that than our ancestors ever imagined they could be.  The goal may not be attainable.  But we’ve already taken strides in that direction.

-What do you see as the major problem in achieving a more transparent society?

When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.

-How will greater openness affect our society?

We already live in the openness experiment, and have for two hundred years. It is called the Enlightenment — with “light” both a core word and a key concept in our turn away from 6,000 years of feudalism. All of the great enlightenment arenas — markets, science and democracy — flourish in direct proportion to how much their players (consumers, scientists and voters) know, in order to make good decisions. To whatever extent these arenas get clogged by secrecy, they fail.

But the next step in people empowerment is even more impressive — those burgeoning “smart mobs” Howard Rheingold and Clay Shirky and Vernor Vinge talk about. (Also shown in my latest novel, Existence.) It’s agile. It’s wired. Every generation innovates, or the Enlightenment dies.

- In EARTH (1989) you forecast that a huge world issue in the 2010s and 2020s would be international banking secrecy. Now, daily revelations seem to be bearing that out.  Do you still foresee something like a “Helvetian War”?

An actual, physical war, waged by nations of the developing world against the great banking havens?  Well, not really.  That was an exaggerated metaphor for a novel that achieved dramatic effects. But I do still expect increasing radicalization and pressure from many newly rising nations, when they realize that their former, kleptocratic lords stole literally trillions that might save and give hope to millions of children back home, if the money were recovered.

This issue won’t go away. Just recently (April 2013) a cache of 2.5 million files has cracked open, spilling the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con men and the mega-rich the world over. In my novel, Earth, I predicted this would be the core issue of our times.  I still think things will play out that way.

See: more articles about Transparency and Openness

Or:

Return to Part 1: Questions on Writing and Science Fiction

Part 2: Questions on Science Fiction and Fantasy

Part 3: Questions on Brin books and The Postman

Part 4: Questions about Prediction and the Future

 

Transparency in 2013: A Followup

I had considerably more transparency-related news than could fit in one posting. So now let’s get into a series of micro-snapshots of this most-important front in the fight for tomorrow.

First: we failed to generate the needed 25,000 signatures for a petition at Whitehouse.gov requesting the Obama Administration to look into my “no-losers” proposal for how to simplify the tax code without much political pain. (Thus making it somewhat possible, at all.) Thanks Thomas Benson, for trying.

== Has Obama betrayed the promise of openness? ==

Professor Jack Goldsmith is a smart fellow, expert in the field of rights, freedom and privacy. His new book Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency After 9/11, suggests that those liberals who are angry at President Obama for retaining some Bush Era powers have not looked closely enough.  Obama has cooperated with the establishment a significant limits and oversights to those powers that had been lacking before.  “Conventional wisdom holds that 9/11 sounded the death knell for presidential accountability. In fact, the opposite is true. The novel powers that our post-9/11 commanders in chief assumed—endless detentions, military commissions, state secrets, broad surveillance, and more—are the culmination of a two-century expansion of presidential authority. But these new powers have been met with thousands of barely visible legal and political constraints—enforced by congressional committees, government lawyers, courts, and the media—that have transformed our unprecedentedly powerful presidency into one that is also unprecedentedly accountable.”

That is not to say that I am without disappointments.  In fact, several Obama Administration lapses and measures have me seething!  I will be so-pleased when conservatism wakes from its fever dream and can serve as a proper foil, to keep democrats accountable and honest.  Alas, till then, we are stuck with a choice between flawed and corrupt-crazy.  I’ll choose flawed.

== Transparency Miscellany ==

We the people… A step toward more open government: See how GitHub uses open source to allow citizens to access, interact with, hack and edit government documents, data and software.

You really need to watch this, showing the amazing psychic at work… and his secret… (the multiple tents should be a clue.) 

A growth in anonymity…The online anonymity network Tor claims that 36 million people have used the system since it was first deployed about a decade ago. The system conceals its users’ identities by encrypting communications and routing them at random through a set of servers. This ensures that the sender and recipient cannot be identified by an eavesdropper along the way. What’s more, the last node in the route always appears as the originator of the message, at least as far as the recipient is concerned. That protects the location and identify of both the sender and receiver. Now Cal Berkeley researchers claim to have fixed a problem in this method by utilizing social networks to avoid malicious nodes. Me? I don’t trust such systems an iota and only a fool would. We have one route to freedom.  Strip the mighty naked. 

Ah, progress… A drone of your very own..if you have 990 euros.  Definitely a unique way to remotely keep an eye on the kids, a dad in the Northeast modified a quadcopter to watch from afar.

Mohammed Ibrahim is a strange sort of philanthropist, in that he doesn’t do handouts. The problem in Sudan and the rest of Africa, Mr. Ibrahim says, isn’t lack of money. It’s “governance—the way Africans govern themselves.” So Mr. Ibraham has a different idea: He gives directly to individuals—specifically to political leaders—who have to earn the money. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation, begun in 2006, tracks the quality of governance across Africa and awards cash prizes to leaders who leave office with relatively uncorrupt records.

The Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership offers a tidy $5 million over 10 years and then $200,000 annually for life. You might call it offering payoffs to leaders who don’t take payoffs.

Westerners no longer ignore what African governments do for—and to—their citizens. This shift “really helped democratize Africa a lot,” Mr. Ibrahim says. The leaders there are hardly perfect, he adds, “but they’re moving in the right direction.” He is only too happy to dangle a gold-plated carrot to keep them moving that way.

Federal officials can apparently use a “stingray” to locate a mobile phone even when it’s not being used to make a call. The Federal Bureau of Investigation considers the devices to be so critical that it has a policy of deleting the data gathered in their use, mainly to keep suspects in the dark about their capabilities.  Read the WSJ article… but bear in mind the implicit myopia.  That whatever federal agents can do, criminals and corporations will have access to, in a few years… and then your nosy neighbors.  Again, ironically, the solution is not to pass laws against such things; the laws won’t work. It is to make it all above-board.

== More Transparency snippets! ==

1. California takes a step toward free digital, open source text books for college students.

2. Undercover cops spying on protesters via cell phones.

3. Using statistics to sniff out science that’s too good to be true.

4. While definitely one-sided and politically driven (it’s hard to imagine anyone standing up for the other side) this essay about the fall of Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973 is primarily about an experiment in internet-like cyber-governance that was attempted during Allende’s brief tenure in office.  Completely aside from the tragic history and our own Nixonian shame is the fascinating tale of a utopian experiment in connectivity, way before its time.

5. In a fairly simpleminded theoretical model, some physicists report that there is a natural inertia and momentum to fanaticism of belief… that moderation of opinion suffers from disadvantages when confronted with powerfully-held memes.  From the descriptions of the model, I am not terribly impressed.  But it does continue to show what I described in my paper to the National Institute on Drugs and Addiction… that we face a difficult task becoming a nation and world of pragmatic negotiators and and practical, calm listeners and innovators in making a better world.

6. Creative Barcode is a nonprofit organization that allows members to share new ideas without the risk of unauthorized copying. It was founded in 2010. Members embed digital codes in creative works to indicate usage permissions. Private disclosure is made to other members who agree not to publicly disclose the idea or use the idea without permission of the original creator.

7. Another audio interview podcast, this one on the subject of “Funding the Dream: The Future of Crowds.”  Interesting sub-topics around the notion that creativity will have all sorts of new avenues available to all of us in the future.

8. Saudi women’s male guardians began receiving text messages on their phones informing them when women under their custody leave the country, even if they are travelling together. Denied the right to travel without consent from their male guardians and banned from driving, women in Saudi Arabia are now monitored by an electronic system that tracks any cross-border movements.

9. Adolf Hitler’s infamous book ‘Mein Kampf’ will be published again for the first time in some 70 years. Bavaria, Germany has held ownership of the book’s copyright since the end of World War II, but those rights are due to expire in 2015. Perhaps the intent is to publish a fully annotated – and critical – version that then floods the market so that the 2015+ editions put out by Nazis and others will not stand alone.

10.  At least a fifth of all embedded computers that are accessible online – including possibly your printer or modem – still have their factory default passwords, meaning just about anyone can waltz in (digitally) and compromise them, and thus enter your main computer. Printers can even be taken over by coding contained in a doc file! Read Charles Choi in Scientific American on secret electronic wars in our embedded computers. There are positive developments too… that are starting to look more and more like the multi-layerings of an immune system learning to combat the ferocity of viruses and other parasites.

11. Text messaging on contact lenses. Vernor and I depicted it in science fiction.  Stuff keeps arriving faster than we anticipated!

12. Meanwhile, dig it: black boxes required in cars by 2014.  Only if they go in squad cars and limousines too!

13. Andy Kessler provides us with a summary-snapshot of the current balance of power between government surveillance and the rise of citizen-level sousveillance. For example: Already a third of large U.S. police forces equip patrol cars with automatic license plate-readers that can check 1,000 plates per hour looking for scofflaws. U.S. Border Patrol already uses iris-recognition technology, with facial-recognition in the works, if not already deployed..

14.  Then there is the matter of IP… Intellectual Property. Having filed suits against Samsung for “slavishly copying” its products and selling them around the world, Apple now has developed a history of winning in places where people invent things (Germany, the U.S.) and losing in places where they steal them (South Korea, Japan).

The real meaning of Apple’s legal, and marketplace, struggles is cast into sharp relief by this schism in how various legal systems treat the question of copying others’ work. For this reason, Apple has done the world a terrific service by bringing a problem front and center which has been known to everyone, but not properly discussed until now. When it turns out that the thieves’ courts say stealing is OK, and the inventors’ courts say it is not, then what?

LATE BREAKING: The Aron Swartz case is sad. Tho somewhat unsurprising — he was a hothouse depressive type — I am also very angry that prosecutors tried to high-ball their preliminary plea charges at 35 year… for what was in effect a civil offense that should have been dealt with in civil court.

Onward.  What interesting times.  Spread light.

Transparency 2013: Good and bad news about banking, guns, freedom and all that

== Bank Secrecy ‘ending’ at last? ==

“Bank secrecy is essentially eroding before our eyes,” says a recent NPR article. ”I think the combination of the fear factor that has kicked in for not only Americans with money offshore, countries that don’t want to be on the wrong side of this issue and the legislative weight of FATCA means that within three to five years it will be exceptionally difficult for any American to hide money in any financial institution.”

In one sense, this would appear to be vindication of my forecast, in EARTH, that banking secrecy would become a major issue by the second decade of the 21st Century and that it would go extinct soon thereafter, propelled via anger by the rising worldwide middle classes plus the basic needs of democracy and true capitalism. Do I feel predictive vindication?  Sure.

But at another level all of this is far less substantial than I depicted. The banking havens are retreating in good order, making deals and protecting what has become their core business – sheltering lucre stolen from developing nations by their kleptocratic leader-castes. Those klepto-depositors aren’t American or European citizens and hence need not be reported. Moreover, the amounts involved — especially if you include so-called “sovereign wealth funds” — vastly outweigh the deposits of a few U.S. and Euro mere-billionaires. Indeed, Western governments have been complicit, so eager to reclaim tax revenues from their own citizens that they have given assurances not to go after more general transparency.

The real scenario from EARTH, has yet to be played out. When citizens in Congo and the Phillipines, in Myanmar and Mexico and Malaysia and so on become radicalized and start demanding true international transparency of ownership…

… that is when we’ll see such a crisis as I portrayed in the “Helvetian War.” This ain’t over by a mile.

== Tentative Good News ==

In September, with most members out on the campaign trail, the House of Representatives approved final passage of the long-awaited Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (S. 743), a set of 10 reforms intended to clarify the difference between policy disputes and whistleblowing. Sponsored by Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, it would expand the types of employee disclosures of violations of laws, rules or regulations that are protected and beef up employee rights. It also would broaden coverage to employees of the major intelligence agencies and the Transportation Security Administration, prohibiting the revocation of a security clearance in retaliation for a protected whistleblower disclosure. And it would expand the rights of the Office of Special Counsel to file friend-of-the-court briefs.

The bipartisan bill would strengthen authority for reviews by the Merit Systems Protection Board and provide whistleblowing employees with more access to their agency’s inspector general. It would establish whistleblower protection ombudsmen to educate agency personnel about whistleblower rights. The bill now returns to the Senate, where it is up for consideration in a November lame-duck session. In the previous Congress, a version of the bill died in a December session.

* Someone out there please report to us all — what’s the status on the legislation? *

This could be almost as important as last year’s victory for transparency and civilization, when Illinois courts struck down a law banning the taping of police. No civil liberties matter was more important to our future. On this – no compromise, ever.

== Transparency in The Central Kingdom ==

As we speak, openness advocates are struggling for basic press freedom at China’s Southern Weekly. This is not something I mention out of hostility but in hope that the rulers of that rapidly developing nation will come to see the benefits of light – the only possible corrective medicine for corruption – and find the courage to return to their earlier plan.

What earlier plan? Why, to let freedom at the local level clean up corruption where it does the most damage, in exchange for a social contract to leave top national power alone (in oligarchic hands) for a generation. It was a highly plausible plan and would have derived the top benefits of freedom — accountability and prevention of abuse, crime and errors — while still managing overall development from above — the neo-Confucian solution. (Note: I disagree with all forms of oligarchy, but that version could have worked.)

Alas, it was a compromise they found inconvenient in countless ways (freedom often is) and so it fell aside. Overcome by the impulse, imbedded in human nature, to try to control everything.  I hope they will prove their vaunted high intelligence and go back to it, because, in reality, it is their only hope.

== Then there’s Big Brother on the Bus ==

According to Wired: “Transit authorities in cities across the country are quietly installing microphone-enabled surveillance systems on public buses that would give them the ability to record and store private conversations, according to documents obtained by a news outlet. The systems are being installed in San Francisco, Baltimore, and other cities with funding from the Department of Homeland Security in some cases, according to the Daily, which obtained copies of contracts, procurement requests, specs and other documents. The use of the equipment raises serious questions about eavesdropping without a warrant, particularly since recordings of passengers could be obtained and used by law enforcement agencies.”

Again, how will you prevent this? By banning them?  So that (as Heinlein said) the bugs simply are made smaller? Better have these things in the open… and insist that WE can zoom into the control room and watch the watchers.

== SMBC Rocks transparency and philosophy! ==

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal captures much of the essence, how look-back “sousveillance” is our only recourse.

Then an oldie…but excellent explanation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

How many of you know someone who has done this? Used this cop-out? I know several.

Impressive theology.

== Update re HFT or High Frequency Trading ==

I’ve spoken of calamities far worse than the multi-billion dollar “oops!” mistakes already made by HFT systems… leading all the way to “terminator” problems with emergent AI… by far the most likely way the Singularity could go very badly wrong.

Now Greg Trocchia: “One of the about high frequency trading concerns I voiced, as a Software Quality Assurance (SQA) professional, is that even a rigorous software development process could not preclude emergent pathological behavior on the part of the algorithm that might occur in unpredictable sets of circumstances.  It now seems that things are even worse than I had realized.  In certain cases, at least, even the most elementary software engineering precautions were absent: Chicago Fed Study Blasts lid off of High Frequency Trading.  I am aghast that software of such critical importance should be treated with such cavalier disregard of the hard-learned lessons of SQA.”

== Transparency and Guns ==

Finally… Jon Stewart’s riff on gun control touched most of the bases. Especially (and incredibly) he paid attention to the deep-underlying  motivation of gun enthusiasts.  One that needs to be addressed, if we are to calm them down enough so that the moderates join us in conversation.  That may demand some mental adjustments on our part.  Watch his episode then see my nuanced and careful logic about this: The Jefferson Rifle: Guns and the Insurrection Myth.

Here’s Stewart’s bit: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-january-8-2013/scapegoat-hunter—gun-control

Alas, the Gun Lobby devotes far too much faith in the protection of the Second Amendment, a slender reed that will bend at some point, when, amid some future crisis, a Court will turn to the “well-regulated militia” part of the 2nd and interpret it in ways the gun fellows will not like.  I say this not out of hostility… indeed, I support core gun rights! Rather, I point it out as a futurist who knows his game.  You guys need another amendment. And my essay offers you one that liberals would help you to pass! It would be a shoo-in, if you’d stop panicking and negotiate. (And that holds for you lefties, too.)

How does transparency relate to gun control?  Simple.  As I point out in The Transparent Society – almost all of the advantages and almost none of the disadvantages of personal firearms are available to us if we all go around armed (as we will!) with cameras.  All of the ability to hold others accountable… plus little of the ability to wreak tragic havoc the instant we fall prey to Homo-erectus rage.  Rage that – with cameras – one might later apologize for.  With a gun, it can bring regret for the rest of your life.

I am not for banning all personal weapons!  Read my proposal, which is logical and preserves a certain level with safety. But try being openminded, and know that the new era will depend less on gunpowder and more on light.

And now pause… I’ll have more transparency-related news, next time.

Let a Million Topics Bloom

Lots of cool items, in this miscellany-post.  But first a brief lament and a couple of media notes:

* Harry Harrison – Grand Master of science fiction – passed away this August in his nineties. He was one of my favorite authors during the 1960s and certainly one of the most rambunctious and unabashed individuals I ever met. We got to know each other well, when I lived in London, during the 1980s.  He was a good friend and generous to a fault. His passion for a better, more peaceful world was expressed in his fiction and the way he lived his memorable life. And he was a perfectly grand storyteller.

* A fascinating 90 minutes: Science and technology are converging to change the global game; and nowhere is that change more clear than in the words of scientist and futurist David Brin and Paul Rosenbloom, a lead researcher on artificial intelligence. From Isaac Asimov to Brin’s new novel, “Existence,” science fiction has often looked at whether AI will outpace the human brain and lead us into a brave new world, or has it already?

So, intrigued yet? Have a look at the  premiere edition of a great podcast/broadcast series produced by KPCC radio (NPR), “NEXT: People | Science | Tomorrow.“ Brin and Rosenbloom join host Mat Kaplan in the Crawford Family Forum to talk about our cyber future. Will humanity survive and even thrive when the Singularity arrives?

* And an example of tech teething pains, striking the Hugo Awards!  How copyright enforcement robots shut down the broadcast of the Hugo Awards ceremony from the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago, despite having permissions from every studio and author and publisher.

== A Veritable Trove of Contrarian Insights! ==

I’ve been using ScoopIt to compile accumulations of my more popular articles, essays (and some outright rants!) under topic headings, where people might skim and pick from whatever interests them.

The latest?  A ScoopIt collection of articles and speculations by David Brin about Taxes, economics and markets… 

Here are some others.

An accumulation of interviews on many topics with David Brin

Articles and speculations by Brin about transparency, freedom and technology    

… About Science: Better than Fiction!

… Forward-looking Technology

… the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)

… Speculations about Science Fiction 

… Pop Culture: Star Wars to Tolkien to The Matrix 

… All about Existence

… Using Science Fiction to teach Science

… Teaching Science Fiction

… Politics for the 21^st century

*  Oh, for you tech geniuses… here’s a small web-brin side perplexity… Not sure why Bing’s biography of David Brin comes up with a description of a band named “!!!”

== Misc cool items ==

*  Dang crazy humans.  Here we dolphins come charging onto a beach in order to roll around in the sand for a bit, and all these tourists come hurrying down and dragging us back out to sea!  Well, in fact it probably is just what it looks like.  Satiated-generous humans becoming great pals of nature and improving our reputation with sea-folk.  Still, it might have another explanation.  Watch it and be (tentatively ) proud of us. We’re getting better.  Truly.

* See the trailer for 2001 a space Odyssey… as it would be done garishly today…

*Naked woman sculpture legacy for coal mining tailings…

* An epic black & white tale about a race that discovers the ability to question old ways and to invent progress.  I would have slightly altered three frames just before the very moving end.  Guess which changes?  How?

* The 2012 Bulwer-Lytton Awards for hilariously bad writing. There are some ‘good’ ones this year …   Examples:

“Bishop threw back the shot of bourbon and reflected on his career as a private dick, a profession he always thought of as perfect for a man named Richard who kept to himself and was often unkind to others.”

“Truly, twas Gimoneus the wise, grand sorcerer of Elantorfan, keeper of the ancient rune of Turgochit, came nearest to slaying the mighty dragon of Ralmorgantorg; for he was old and sinewy, and the wretched beast near choked to death on his femur.”

“Primum non nocere, from the Latin for “first, do no harm,” one of the principal tenets of the Hippocratic oath taken by physicians, was far from David’s mind (as he strode, sling in hand, to face Goliath) in part because Hippocrates was born about 100 years after David, in part because David wasn’t even a physician, but mainly because David wanted to kill the sucker. “

And finally this one by Rebecca Oas which is actually rather good! “Ronald left this world as he entered it: on a frigid winter night, amid frantic screams and blood-soaked linens, while relatives stood nearby and muttered furious promises to find and punish the man responsible.”

* Best Marriage Proposal EVER.

The essence of the X Files:  Monster of the Week comic

Tokyo’s “levitating girl” is just plain cool.

== And finally… sci fi notes == 

* StarShipSofa launched its very own genre fiction audio network called District of Wonders:  www.districtofwonders.com  There are four podcasts that now come under the DoW banner all produced and edited by Tony C Smith. For horror fans there’s Tales to Terrify hosted by Larry Santoro, for your crime fan we have the excellent Crime City Central, hosted by Jack Calverley, and for anyone gripped by excitement and adventure there’s Protecting Project Pulp hosted by Dave Robison, as well as Science Fiction stories on StarShipSofa hosted by Tony C Smith.

* The hub of sci fi these days – io9 – lately speculated on what it would take to revive yet another terrific version of Star Trek for the new, episodic medium that television is rapidly becoming.   I especially like suggestion #6… more scripts by real life sci fi writers.

In fact I have written Trek… a graphic novel! See: Forgiveness (illustrated by the great Scott Hampton).

* Cracked has started getting more interesting than when I was a kid. For example, take this essay suggesting that six classic SciFi notions, from spacesuits to ray guns to airlocks, were first portrayed not in a great classic — like War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells, but in a rather schlocky “sequel” to the Wells masterpiece, a quickie ripoff called Edison’s Conquest of Mars which, despite all that, seems to have been quite the font of SFnal ideas.

And moving on to the sublime… for tech esthetics junkies. Watch Professor Greg Parker perform an amazing calculation with two turns of the fabulous, and beautiful) Curta calculator.

Bulletins from the Transparency Front

1) Toronto researcher Steve Mann, who was one of the earliest pioneers of wearable computing and augmented reality (AR), and who co-coined the term “sousveillance,” was physically assaulted by employees of a Paris McDonald’s restaurant during a recent family vacation, for the crime of wearing AR visual aids akin to Google’s Project Glass.  We are indeed in an era of rough transition.

2) CBS tours the newly opened Nazi archives on the Holocaust which have been (unbelievably) closed until now.  Now, miles and miles of documents constitute a stunning blow to the denialist cult.  Well… one of the denialist cults.  The drought destroying crops all over the world may budge a few climate denialists.  But then, there are still some who deny tobacco is anything but good for you.

3) More on those terahertz laser scanners that do chemical spectroscopy on materials and vapors around you, without exposing you to ionizing X-Rays or (disturbingly) ever letting you know you are being scanned. This is not an imaging device, but a tool for reading absorbance spectra at the high microwave, low infrared range. “This kind of picosecond laser reads the environment in real-time. That gunpowder residue on your hand from hunting the other day, cannabis smoke particles in your hair, or even a bit of (explosive-boosting) nitrate fertilizer stuck to your shoe could trigger this scanner. Will that cause an entirely new set of headaches for airline passengers?”  But get used to the new world.  And push for the ability to look back.  To get this for ourselves.

4)  This month, if everything goes according to schedule, your Internet Service Provider may begin monitoring your account, just to make sure you aren’t doing anything wrong with it — like sharing copyrighted movie or music files. Violations may result in an escalating scale from warnings to termination of service.

5) The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) secretly spied on E-mails of its own scientists – who were filing whistle blower complaints. Disturbing? Yes, but my perspective is unusual.  I see it as a case of everything working as it should.  Looking back at power worked.  This time.

6) A report from Wired: Saying it wanted to help to protect dissidents who appear in videos shared on YouTube, Google launched a tool Wednesday that can blur their faces in footage uploaded to its servers. Now mind you, this is a stopgap measure.  As more cameras swarm, the bad news is that this won’t work for long.  The good news?  If we all can use those cams, then lying – even by the mighty – will get a lot harder. And abusing witnesses won’t be a workable option anymore.

=== Politics redux (get used to it) ===

Somewhat turgid, overblown and self-righteous, an article by Sara Robinson on AlterNet nevertheless takes a look at the present Culture War that’s tearing America apart and calls it what it is.  What I have long realized that it is.  Nothing less than Phase Three of the American Civil War.

In fact, I would couch things slightly less radically than  Robinson does in: “Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America: America didn’t used to be run like an old Southern slave plantation, but we’re headed that way now. How did that happen?”

Nevertheless, let’s be plain, her essential point about the divide between two styles of American aristocracy, one represented by Gates and Buffett and the other by those wanting an old fashioned feudalism to return, is the core conflict tearing the United States apart at present.

Moreover, this phase of the Civil War must end the way the others did –

– by the blue Union being awakened, roused perhaps by polemical exaggerations like Robinson’s. Into realizing What Fox has accomplished — what southern yellow papers did at the command of slave-holding elites in 1860 — destroying any hope of negotiation.

All that is left is for Blue America to win.  Simply – and for the sake of freedom and progress and the Great Experiment – win.

=== Some (mostly) science miscellany ===

A fascinating breakthrough in producing graphene transistors. Will this result in computers based on graphene rather than silicon chips?

University of Granada researchers have developed an “artificial cerebellum” that controls a robotic arm with human-like precision.

The University of Nottingham has begun the search for a new class of injectable materials that will stimulate stem cells to regenerate damaged tissue in degenerative and age-related disorders of the bone, muscle and heart.  This is part of a huge new development in rediscovering the regenerative capability most mammals appear to have abandoned millions of years ago.

For more see Juan Enriquez’s TED talk…

The first artificial molecules whose chirality (handedness) can be rapidly switched from a right-handed to a left-handed orientation with a beam of terahertz light has been developed by a multi-institutional team including Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). This development holds potentially important possibilities for uses of terahertz technologies across a wide range of fields, including reduced energy use.

…amazing times…

Accelerating Dangers & Opportunities from Transparency

The future comes rushing upon us so quickly, already I worry that the world portrayed in my freshly minted novel will be old hat long before the time it is set, 30 years from now. (Meaning that we need futuristic and open-minded thought experiments now, more than ever.)

Try these items on for size…

With new laser technology, hidden government scanners will instantly know everything about you from 150 feet (or 50 meters) away, detecting traces of drugs, explosives, bioweapons or gunpowder on your clothes or luggage — even recording your adrenaline levels. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will install these scanners (a million times more sensitive than current systems) at airports and border crossings across the country — as early as 2013. The Russians are developing a comparable system.

Now… if this reduces our exposure to x-rays and allows the TSA to tamp down the aggravation at airports, you can expect the new systems to have their upside. On the other hand, this sort of thing could be Big Brother’s most delicious dream.  (More on that aspect.)

…then there’s this. Cell phone providers received 1.3 million cell phone snooping requests last year from law enforcement agencies seeking information on locational data and calling records. There is little oversight over who can make such requests, or what is done with the information.

Way back in ’97, in The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force us to Choose between Privacy and Freedom, I made it clear that we’ll not stop any of this with whining, moaning or by trying to ban these technologies.  Our only chance? If government – and other mighty elites – are absolutely fated to know everything about us anyway, our sole option is to know everything about them.

This is the important distinction between surveillance and sousveillance — looking down vs. looking back.

And though I’ve covered it at-length from many directions, I expect to be doing so repeatedly, for the rest of my life.

Is it even remotely possible for sousveillance to work?  For citizens to shine enough light upward to remind our civil servants that they are servants?  To keep a choke-chain on our guard dogs, so they never see themselves as wolves?  To remind corporations that they are constructs, and oligarchs that they are not feudal lords, with droit du seigneur?  As it happens, there are dozens of techniques that might help… providing we nurture the calm, rational… but militant… determination to make this practically happen

Let’s start simple. See just one practical approach that – with a very simple slip of legislation that could be written on one piece of paper – and maybe cost 20 million dollars – we might suddenly and smoothly add a layer of safety and accountability to help let us sleep at night. It’s no panacea!  But by simply changing how government inspectors general function, we might follow the sage advice of Sun Yat Sen and stymie the bad in government, while aiding the good.

Let’s hope that this election cycle someone actually listens.

And another Transparency related item.  This one not only forecast in The Transparent Society  but also in EARTH…

…the tendency of humans to filter out news or opinions or views or even sensory input that we don’t like or agree with.  (Yes, one side of the political “spectrum” is currently doing it to psychotic degrees… but the other end does it too!)  We’ve been finding out that our brains naturally pass disagreeable info and opinions and input through emotional centers rather than those devoted to reason.  But as predicted, electronic “filters” are making things even worse for some, even while opening up vast universes of wonder and possibilities for others.  See “Are we stuck in a filter bubble…hearing only what we want to hear?” Then see how this very issue was dealt with, in Earth (1989).

Indeed. And then comes the new world of “augmented reality.”

Patricia F. Anderson wrote: “Graffiti goes virtual with an augmented reality app for your cell phone, called LZRTAG  Shades of @DavidBrin1 ‘s early scenes in Existence.”  Indeed, the layering of virtual surfaces over our world has already begun. Still images, animations and video can be tagged to real world surfaces, so your smartphone can interact with media, billboards, lampposts or landmarks. Vernor Vinge and I do – however – show where it must eventually lead. That is, where it must lead if we are lucky and do smart things!

To see where it will lead if we drop courage and brains?  Try Nineteen Eighty-Four.

=== Fascinating cases of watching the watchers at work ===

Think I am naive? Teams at Harvard and the University of Hong Kong have been using new software that allows them to watch the censoring of posts on Chinese social-media sites more closely than before. Monitoring the Monitors summarizes their report in The Economist:

The team found that, overall, 13% of all social media posts in China were censored. Yet their most surprising result is that posts critical of the government are not consistently censored. On the other hand, posts urging people to assemble in protest, are generally removed from the internet within hours. Harvard professor Gary King writes, “Clearly the goal is actually to repress people gathering.”

Rebecca MacKinnon, author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, comments. “The goal has never been total control. The goal is to keep the Chinese Communist Party in power.”

The researchers analyzed the posts that had been censored to determine exactly what had made them objectionable to the government. What they found was a constantly changing list of keywords and sensitive topics, resulting in “a cat-and-mouse contest between people and censors.”

=== Keep the dream alive ===

On the recent American Independence Day… with a marathon of the eponymous film playing in the background … I was reminded of the ways that our revolution has affected the world.  Sometimes for ill – though less than any other great “pax” power across time. And sometimes for profound good.  That may be viewed as biased (though in fact, I am more of a Californian than a yankee).  So I suggest steeping in points of view that might be considered neutral and yet poetically insightful.  Such as this account, by the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, of how a remote Circassian mountain tribe once sat at his feet, demanding stories about … Abraham Lincoln.

Are we made of lesser stuff than our parents, or the heroes of the first phase of the American Civil War?  We are in phase three now. Wake up and end it.  By winning it.

=== Science Miscellany ===

We need to discuss what to do about nuclear waste.  It never made the slightest sense for us to abandon the Yucca Mountain site on account of some supposed small chance that the depository might leak a little in 10,000 years.  Say what? So these people are now willing to talk about sci fi levels of time, when they won’t even discuss a decade from now, on any other issue?  Dig it. In 10,000 years, the stored radionuclides are far more likely to be more valuable as stored “gold”, than they are to leak into a desert aquifer.  Read up.

Dinosaur sex! Scientific!  With feathers, yet.  And facial expressions.

On the Transparency Front… Secrecy, Drones and War

Since 9/11 the budget for Special Ops has quadrupled. Under President Obama, the forces of the Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), which includes the Green Berets, Navy SEALS and Army Rangers, have been granted more latitude and greater autonomy, engaged in counter-terrorism, surveillance and reconnaissance in as many as 120 countries around the world. According to an appraisal published in Mother Jones, America’s Rising Shadow Wars: “They are displacing conventional forces, becoming the “force of choice” in operations with far less civilian oversight, accountability or control — i.e. no Congressional approval or consultation necessary, no press coverage, their operating budget a black book…”

Hm. Well now… as “Mr. Transparency” I naturally feel my hackles rise over any systematic increase in secrecy.  It’s not that secrecy in military operations and intelligence matters cannot be justified – I am actually quite moderate about that.  It is the fact that such secrecy should always face demands for justification.  It should bear a burden of proof, or else a “ratchet effect” will carry us down an ever deeper pit of unaccountable obscurity.  That’s simply human nature and, across the last 6000 years, we’ve seen where that leads.

But, having said that, there is the other side to all of this.  The clear and blatant fact that there is a profound, staggeringly clear difference between Democratic and Republican styles of waging war.

Now, let’s put aside the fact that large democratic constituencies have always despised war in principle and have given the party a reputation for pacifist leanings.  In fact, that reputation seems rather undeserved, if you scan history.  Indeed, across the last 100 years, democrats were ready and willing to confront militarism in 1917 Germany, and then Hitler and Imperial Japan, then the communists, far more than the isolationist republicans of those eras.

But Democrats, going back to JFK, have always favored special forces.  “Surgical” responses. And, after the fiasco of Vietnam, their record in that department is pretty strong.  Both positive (e.g. from the Balkans and Libya to the killing of Osama bin Laden and today’s search for Joseph Kony) and negative (e.g. Somalia), it is the preferred approach of Democratic presidents.

In rather sharp contrast, Republicans go for heavy firepower, tens of thousands of boots and treads on the ground.  Toe-to toe battle! Armies in motion and flag pins stuck into a map. For example Grenada, Panama, both Iraq Wars and and the endless, interminable quagmire attrition of Afghanistan.

(Note: Afghanistan actually had two phases.  Phase one, right after 9/11, was undertaken swiftly, with minimal presidential meddling, and followed Clintonian military doctrines, even though the President who said “go!” was George W. Bush.  That first part, toppling the Taliban, used mostly special ops and air power and worked with savage effectiveness. But the decision to stay and occupy with a massive army for 12 years? That was phase II and entirely Bush’s decision.

I will write more on this, over the summer.

==More on Transparency==

Speaking of transparency, Wired Magazine has published a map showing 64 locations where the US government maintains drones on American soil.  Creepy signs of Big Brother? Wellllll… I am always more concerned about things we don’t see, or efforts to prevent us from performing sousveillance or looking back.  (Of which the Wired article is an example.)  I’ll be furious if the government winds up with a monopoly on look-down vision.  See Existence for a number of scenes that lay out some interesting possibilities.

And what happens if and when they get drones?

In the last half of 2011, Google received over 1,000 official requests to remove content from its search results or YouTube videos. Google denounced what it calls an alarming trend — but it complied with 65% of court orders and 47% of informal requests to remove content. And yet, Google has not complied with Spanish regulators who asked Google to remove links to blogs and articles criticizing public figures, mayors and public prosecutors. In some countries, Google submits to such requests, because certain types of political speech are unlawful. For example, in Germany, references to Nazis are banned, so Google removes such videos from YouTube. And then there are issues of pornography and copyright…

The following item isn’t as bad as it first appears… but still it is disturbing: “The NYPD has created a “wanted” poster for a Harlem couple who films cops conducting stop-and-frisks (posting the videos on YouTube). The poster brands them “professional agitators” who portray cops in a bad light — and lists their home address.”  Not as bad as it first appears?  Well, this was an internal flyer, posted on a few precinct bulletin boards, not in public or on the web.  And I guess cops have a right to tell each other “watch yourselves around these vexatious citizens.” Still, it’s offensive, probably illegal, and certainly the sort of thing that could easily get out of hand.  But in any event, note this: light did shine on this event. The ones who posted it now probably regret it. The next such flyer will be more cautiously worded, knowing it, too, will leak.

Transparency, Secrecy, and Copyright for the Modern Age

=== A Look at The Transparent Society  15 years later ===

Why freedom of the press concerns us all. Nick Cohen of Standing Point Magazine (UK) does a detailed retrospective and appraisal of my book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? He examines how far we have gone in the directions that I discussed, suggested…. and warned about.  Especially regarding the profession of journalism.

“Brin’s Transparent Society stood out from the mass of now forgotten predictions about the internet because he understood that technology had made old levels of privacy impossible: “The djinn cannot be crammed back into the bottle. No matter how many laws are passed, it will prove quite impossible to legislate away the new tools and techniques.” The best encryption systems in the world are of no use if the state or another public, private or criminal organization can place a miniature camera behind you while you type, or insert a program into your system to monitor your key strokes. Instead of trying to protect the unprotectable, Brin called for political change to match changes in technology. He envisaged possible responses by imagining how two cities might look in 2018.

In his first city, cameras were on every vantage point. Only the authorities could access them. Crime fell, but the city’s inhabitants knew that the police could monitor their behavior and record their arguments against the status quo.

Brin’s second city looked much like the first. It, too, had cameras on every vantage point. All citizens could access them via devices on their wristwatches, however. (He could not predict the sophistication of the modern mobile phone.) A woman walking home could check that no one was lurking behind a corner. A man late for a date could check if his girlfriend was still waiting for him. When the police arrest a suspect they do so with meticulous attention to his rights because they know that unknown eyes might be monitoring them.“

===Swiss Cheese Mountains==

Recall the “Helvetian War” from my novel Earth?  In which the whole world pummels Switzerland and it takes years and nukes, before they finally release the bank records?  Well nobody ever said it would be easy!  John McPhee reports: “Near the German border of Switzerland, every railroad and highway tunnel has been prepared to pinch shut explosively. Nearby mountains have been made so porous that whole divisions can fit inside them. There are weapons and soldiers under barns. There are cannons inside pretty houses. Where Swiss highways happen to run on narrow ground between the edges of lakes and to the bottoms of cliffs, man-made rockslides are ready to slide…”

The whole country, in fact, is mined with self-destructs.  Did they reinforce the efforts, after reading EARTH?

==Technology for better and for worse==

You will want Google Glasses: A glimpse into the advantages of wearable “overlay computing” that is given its early, primitive-initial form in Google’s Project Glass… which was unveiled (intentionally?) during the very same month that saw publication of my novel EXISTENCE, filled with speculations, warnings and things-you-never-thought-of about wearable Augmented Reality (AR).

Farhad Manjoo writes about Google Glass in Technology Review: “This was a revelation. Here was a guy wearing a computer, but because he could use it without becoming lost in it—as we all do when we consult our many devices—he appeared less in thrall to the digital world than you and I are every day.” Such mobile systems may actually help the user pay more attention to the real world as opposed to retreating from it, providing you with the integrated information you need, when and where you need it.

(Well, this shows a remarkable lack of imagination beyond the five year near-future. Still, it is nice to see a positive tilt unfold.)

=== Other AI developments ===

The Pentagon’s intergalactic black-magic plot is getting ready to raise the dead. Dead satellites, that is. Darpa, the military’s research agency, intends to harvest parts from unused communications satellites still orbiting the Earth, and convert them (particularly antennas) into a communications array to reach troops on the ground.  Yes you read that right. Actually cannibalizing physical parts in GEO. Very different from my idea of utilizing the 10% remaining capacity in retired DoD commsats for a backup civilian net.  This new idea offers possibilities for good, including automation and cleanup techniques… and is also meant to make clear US ability to act at will in the valuable realm of GEO.

Are we drifting too far from Asimov’s Three Laws?  More and more machines are being equipped with capabilities to use force – including lethal – against human beings. Despite case-by-case justifications, will this turn out to be a creep we later regret?  Are there methods to embed ultimate human judgment and control into the “DNA” of such machines?

==Copyright for the Modern Era==

Unglue.it – is a new approach to paying authors to make their ebooks freely available: The author sets a price (“I’d like to make another $10,000 from this novel I wrote a while back, and if I could make that much I’d be happy to release it into the world under a Creative Commons license so the ebook would be free to anyone who wants it.”) and Unglue.it has a fundraising campaign to raise the money to pay the author for some of the rights to the book.

I’ve long held that copyright is a practical measure to guarantee creative people enough income for them to be creative publicly.  Along with patents, this bribes them out of the recourse to secrecy that dominated the previous 6000 years.  There is no mystical right to “own” ideas.  But the practical effects of Intellectual Property (IP) have been staggeringly positive.  Today, instead of being squirreled away and lost (e.g. Hero’s steam engines, the Antekithera Device, the Baghdad Battery…) our ideas now mingle and breed in the open, leveraging and accelerating progress.  Find another way to solve the age-old disaster of secrecy, and I will happily watch copyright go into retirement.

== The big security Trojan Horse ===

Buy up old computers.  Seriously.  A fellow I know sent this: “When a recent edition of Windows came out, I looked very closely into the security literature on it. I was appalled to see that the main new security features were security against users trying to establish control over their own computer either at home or at work. Many large institutions discriminated against Mac in favor of Windows, because Windows made it easy to install “hidden” security software (easy enough to find, impossible to suppress) to monitor and control everything you do. I have had a few struggles with Radia at home. But a corollary is that the computer is wide open to things from the outside.

“The new Mac operating system Lion is said to make the institutions much happier, and is fully compatible with external control. Great news for really competent hackers. And regular security updates come to Mac too, more and more.”

==Miscelleneous==

A thought provoking rumination about how many of the world’s extant 6500 spoken languages are dying, while English and Chines and Spanish rise…. And English speakers use less complex or precise speaking patterns.  Worth some contemplation!

Former WIRED editot-in-chief Kevin Kelly has an interesting kickstarted project that I recommend you look at: The Silver Cord. Kelly writes, “The Silver Cord is my first try at fiction. My co-authors and I are giving away the first book, hoping that those who enjoy it will want to fund the concluding half. First part of the story is free; the ending will cost. We’ll see how well that works.” It’s an interesting exercise in speculative theology as Kevin puts it.  A phrase you’ll also find – with some differences – in another book that came out the same day… Existence.  (Kevin’s approach is about how technological advances may instigate a clash between humans, robots and angels!)