If you want to join the chat: irc.freenode.net #etech [Technorati tag: etech]

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A whole bunch of people I like and admire are at sxsw. I went to that conference the previous two years, but this year it overlaps with O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference. I’m currently in a Days Inn in San Diego, ready to go to etech tomorrow. I’ve been going to etech for the past couple of years because it’s over my head, so I learn a lot.

After talking with some women, I considered skipping etech this year because it’s too much of a boy’s club: Only 9% of the speakers are women, by my count. That sucks.

So, I checked with O’Reilly. They say that 5% of the submitted paper topics came from women. That sucks even more because it’s harder to fix. And it’s hard to determine why: Fewer women techies? Fewer women who feel welcome at etech? As far as I can tell, though, O’Reilly is behaving honorably, and the O’Reilly organization itself seems to be a good place for women to work.

So, I’m here.

(BTW, O’Reilly rejected my own proposal for a talk on the social effects of taxonomies.) [Technorati tags: oreilly etech]

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After the public session, we went over to the press building and held a press conference.

Ethan Zuckerman begins. He says it’s very challenging to think of the impacts of the Net on terrorism and terrorism on the Net. Ethan says our group focused on the ways in which the Internet and its openness is a great way for democracies to combat terrorism. We had intense technical discussions, especially around anonymity. We feel that it’s impossible to eliminate anonymity and attempts to do so would eliminate the positive benefits of anonymity on the Net, e.g., allowing dissidents to speak. Our hope is that democracies can learn from the openness of the Net that has made the Net so resilient and so conducive of conversations in different cultures.

El Mundo asks how to define the role of bloggers as an alternative to the mainstream news.

Ethan: Readers are discovering that they need to become participants. There’s a synergy between bloggers and professional journalists.

Q: Shouldn’t we regulate Al Qaeda off the net?

John Perry Barlow: Who would regulate it and how? Al Qaeda spreading its views is part of the marketplace of ideas.

Joi Ito: This conference is about democracy. People sometimes forget that the press used to be a check on power, but now the press is owned by large media companies and is selling content. The press should look at blogs and the Internet to fill some of the gap. If you really believe in democracy and the freedom of expression. We need to be able to beat Al Qaeda in debate and expression. He tells of a friend who works with Hezbollah TV; Joi doesn’t want to receive email from her because that may put him on the terrorist watch list. That’s a chilling effect.

Barlow: Terrorism is motivated in part by a sense that no one is listening, that you’re out of the human conversation. And we have a tendency to objectify terrorists. When you can read what they’re saying and thinking, you have an opportunity to re-humanize them.

Q: We can all be journalists but we can also all be policemen. What is the role of individuals in the fight? Can they attack terrorist sites?

Rebecca MacKinnon: The war on terrorism is really a fight for hearts and minds. What’s most important is to fight bad speech with more speech.

Q: Professional journalists like us have problems with the lack of quality and rigor in citizen journalism.[At least that’s what I think he said. My Spanish isn’t that good.]

Barlow: If you say something that isn’t true on the Net, there are many people who can correct it. It’s a conversation, not a broadcast medium

Dan Gillmor: People who are the readers have come to expect that professional journalism makes an effort to try to get it right and offer some balance. It does worry people that there is this explosion of unverified voices. But, there is a self-correcting part of it. Over time, people will find new sources they trust and new kinds of journalism. In the new world, the reader will have to do a little more work, at least for a while, while we recalibrate what we can trust. I think that’s a healthy process.

Rebecca: MSM in the US is undergoing a crisis of trust. But weblogs won’t replace professional journalists.

Dan: I learned a long time ago that my readers know more than I do. As a journalist, that’s an opportunity. The news must stop being just a lecture. It has to become more like a seminar or a conversation, or people will find other ways to get informatoin.

El Mundo: Is Jeff Gannon the dark side of the blog? At Talon news, after Gannon was exposed, Gannon’s stories were expunged.

Dan: Bloggers have become press critics.

Me: Are all bloggers journalists?

Dan: No. Most of them write simply about what matters to the individual blogger.

Barlow: But you can never tell when a blogger will discover something that becomes a large news story. [Technorati tag: SafeDemocracy]

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After a very compressed bout of social editing, here is the brief document the working group is presenting to an open session at the Madrid conference on democracy, security and terrorism.

NOTE: This is available on the Global Voices wiki.

The Infrastructure of Democracy
Strengthening the Open Internet for a Safer World

March 11, 2005

I. The Internet is a foundation of democratic society in the 21st century, because the core values of the Internet and democracy are so closely aligned.

1. The Internet is fundamentally about openness, participation, and freedom of expression for all — increasing the diversity and reach of information and ideas.
2. The Internet allows people to communicate and collaborate across borders and belief systems.
3. The Internet unites families and cultures in diaspora; it connects people, helping them to form civil societies.
4. The Internet can foster economic development by connecting people to information and markets.
5. The Internet introduces new ideas and views to those who may be isolated and prone to political violence.
6. The Internet is neither above nor below the law. The same legal principles that apply in the physical world also apply to human activities conducted over the Internet.

II. Decentralized systems — the power of many — can combat decentralized foes.

1. Terrorist networks are highly decentralized and distributed. A centralized effort by itself cannot effectively fight terrorism.
2. Terrorism is everyone’s issue. The internet connects everyone. A connected citizenry is the best defense against terrorist propaganda.
3. As we saw in the aftermath of the March 11 bombing, response was spontaneous and rapid because the citizens were able to use the Internet to organize themselves.
4. As we are seeing in the distributed world of weblogs and other kinds of citizen media, truth emerges best in open conversation among people with divergent views.

III. The best response to abuses of openness is more openness.

1. Open, transparent environments are more secure and more stable than closed, opaque ones.
2. While Internet services can be interrupted, the Internet as a global system is ultimately resilient to attacks, even sophisticated and widely distributed ones.
3. The connectedness of the Internet – people talking with people – counters the divisiveness terrorists are trying to create.
4. The openness of the Internet may be exploited by terrorists, but as with democratic governments, openness minimizes the likelihood of terrorist acts and enables effective responses to terrorism. fertile ground…

IV. Well-meaning regulation of the Internet in established democracies could threaten the development vof emerging democracies.

1. Terrorism cannot destroy the internet, but over-zealous legislation in response to terrorism could. Governments should consider mandating changes to core Internet functionality only with extraordinary caution.
2. Some government initiatives that look reasonable in fact violate the basic principles that have made the Internet a success.
3. For example, several interests have called for an end to anonymity. This would be highly unlikely to stop determined terrorists, but it would have a chilling effect on political activity and thereby reduce freedom and transparency. Limiting anonymity would have a cascading series of unintended results that would hurt freedom of expression, especially in countries seeking transition to democratic rule.

V. In conclusion we urge those gathered here in Madrid to:

1. Embrace the open Internet as a foundation of 21st Century democracy, and a critical tool in the fight against terrorism.
2. Recognizing the Internet’s value as a critical communications infrastructure, invest to strengthen it against attacks and recover quickly from damage.
3. Work to spread access more evenly, aggressively addressing the Digital Divide, and to provide Internet access for all.
4. To protect free speech and association, endorse the availability of anonymous communications for all.
5. Resist attempts at international governance of the Internet: It can introduce processes that have unintended effects and violate the bottom-up democratic nature of the

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I’ve posted a transcript of the morning’s IRC session.

And here’s the afternoon session.

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I’ve posted on Flickr a few photos from the Madrid conference. Search for SafeDemocracy.

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Now we are talking about the positive values of the Internet as a way of spreading and preserving democracy.

Marc Rotenberg says that this conference seems quite aligned with the values of the open internet. He suggests four ways of talking about the Net that work with the conference’s values.

Pekka Himanen worries that we are answering terrorism with “fearism.”

Desiree suggests that we build more “trusted spaces” where people with divergent views can talk. (E.g., ThreeFatesForum.) Should government finance these? She also worries about the “war on terror” inculcating fear.

Dan Gillmor worries about the mass media dumbing us down and the effect that has on our ability to govern ourselves. Now we have the ability for all people to communicate with one another. It’s “massive and wonderful thing.” We need an ecosystem of media, he says, from citizen journalism to mass media. Finally, Dan asks if this is a binary question: Do we have to choose between privacy and a working Internet. He suspects not. (John Perry Barlow comments that in general, if someone presents you with a binary choice, he’s trying to control you. :)

I say that we should phrase our report by talking about how an open Internet supports democratic values. We should be very careful about our vocabulary and metaphors. (E.g., “anonymity” is probably not taken as a positive value by state leaders.) And we should stress, I believe, that the Net is a force for global democracy not just because it enables people to publish dissents, but because it allows people to connect, and that’s at the heart of democracy.

Rebecca MacKinnon talks about the need to have voices other than the media in conversation. The media tend to magnify extremists, she says. We should bring in the “silent majority,” which of course means addressing the digital divide.

Andrew McLaughlin says that he’s heard these issues raised so far: Terrorists attacking the Network, terrorists attacking the real world by coordinating over the Net, terrorists using the Net to market themselves. And he’s heard, as a theme, that there’s a single response to all of these: Maintain an open Net. He proposes this as a framework for discussion.

There’s good discussion of how to talk about these issues to government leaders who don’t think in these terms. And Andrew McLaughlin pointedly asks how we can maintain the value of anonymity in a city where terrorists were caught because their communications were tracked back to them.

To follow the conversation, go to the IRC: irc.freenode.net #madridopendemo [Technorati tag: SaferDemocracy]

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(Joi has pointed out that media are not allowed into this hall, but bloggers are allowed to blog it. Interesting.)

John Gage, of Sun, gives an introduction to how the Net is viewed by the international leaders to whom we will submit a one-page set of recommendations. Our vocabularies are different, he says, so making a succinct statement is going to be difficult. Our metaphors about “openness” don’t work. And, he says, security agencies had thought they were in the control business, but now they’re being told that they need to share information. They’re confused and we need to understand their needs and way of thinking.

Conference room

Wendy Seltzer of the EFF says governments believe if we could track everyone and every message, we could catch the terrorists. But, she says, we need to preserve privacy. Currently, very little of what you do on line is truly anonymous, unless you take active steps.

Paul Vixie says that the Net was initially left uncontrolled because you had to be an academic with a university affilitation to get onto the network. We have no “admission control” for email or for data packets. When the attack comes from 10,000 servers each sending you a couple of packets a secoind, there is no practical way to track them all back and stop them. “The robustness we feel about the internet is illusory.” Any angry teenager with a couple of hundred dollars of equipment can take down a site. We have to preserve anonymity if only to allow political dissent to continue, but we also need to fix the vulnerability, he says.

Paul: I’m advocating admission control not because I like it but because otherwise it’s too easy to bring down the Internet. To ensure that there are no forged headers, we have to agree to turn a few knobs on the routers. To make this work, we’d have to regulate the ISPs to require them to turn those knobs, and this would have to be done through international treaty so it wouldn’t just move overseas.

I asked Paul about this during the break. He says that admission control would have no effect on the ability of governments to track down dissenters. He is an anonymity advocate and would like to make it easier to be anonymous on the Net. But he’s not sure how to do that while also ending the ability to create denial of service attacks.

[Technorati tag: SafeDemocracy]

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I’m at the Madrid conference on democracy, security and terrorism. Joi has set up an IRC chat and Ethan Zuckerman is doing a good job of posting the main points of the dialogue as they occur. Go to irc.freenode.net and join the #madridopen channel.

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We divided into three groups and talked about what we think the news media will/should look like in five years.

The groups tended to believe that citizen reporters will be integrated into the “ecosystem,” with the media operating as aggregators of information, or as places, perhaps clustered by topic. Open source content. Creative Commons licensing. Training the young. Niche reporting and advertising. On demand. Cross platform, off PCs and onto mobile devices. Slice-and-dice. More globalized. Conversation is the entry point to the culture.

Jeff Jarvis summarizes each of the three groups’ presentation with a word: Trust, transparency and conversation. [Yup. And how does this compare with the news media’s current values of, approximately, trust, authority and accuracy?]

I believe that if questioned, the groups would disagree about the likely specific fates of, say, The New York Times, the BBC, etc. E.g., will citizen journalists be working for the news media or will the news media of the future be loose aggregations of content, some of which is created by professionals but much of which won’t? Will the business model come top down or will there be small changes and experiments so the business model can grow organicallly?

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