Tech Policy In Times Of Trouble

from the pep-talk dept

A colleague was lamenting recently that working on tech policy these days feels a lot like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. What does something as arcane as copyright law have to do with anything when governments are giving way to fascists, people are being killed because of their race or ethnicity, and children are being wrested from their parents and kept in cages?

Well, a lot. It has to do with why we got involved in these policy debates in the first place. If we want these bad things to stop we can't afford for there to be obstacles preventing us from exchanging the ideas and innovating the solutions needed to make them stop. The more trouble we find ourselves mired in the more we need to be able to think our way out.

Tech policy directly bears on that ability, which is why we work on it, even on aspects as seemingly irrelevant to the state of humanity as copyright. Because they aren't irrelevant. Copyright, for instance, has become a barrier to innovation as well as a vehicle for outright censorship. These are exactly the sorts of chilling effects we need to guard against if we are going to be able to overcome these challenges to our democracy. The worse things are, the more important it is to have the unfettered freedom to do something about it.

It is also why we spend so much energy arguing with others similarly trying to defend democracy when they attempt to do so by blaming technology for society's ills and call for it to be less freely available. While it is of course true that not all technology use yields positive results, there are incalculable benefits that it does bring – benefits that are all too easy to take for granted but would be dearly missed if they were gone. Technology helps give us the power to push back against the forces that would hurt us, enabling us to speak out and organize against them. Think, for instance, about all the marches that have been marched around the world, newly-elected officials who've used new media to reach out to their constituencies, and volunteer efforts organized online to push back against some of the worst the world faces. If we too readily dull these critical weapons against tyranny we will soon find ourselves defenseless against it.

Of course, none of this is to say that we should fiddle while Rome burns. When important pillars of our society are under attack we can't pretend everything is business as usual. We have to step up to face these challenges however is needed. But the challenges of today don't require us to abandon the areas where we've previously spent so much time working. First, dire though things may look right now, we have not yet forsaken our constitutional order and descended into the primordial ooze of lawlessness. True, the press is under constant attack, disenfranchisement is rife, and law enforcement is strained by unprecedented tensions, but civil institutions like courts and legislatures and the media continue to function, albeit sometimes imperfectly and under severe pressure. But we strengthen these institutions when we hew to the norms that have enabled them to support our society thus far. That some in power may have chosen to abandon and subordinate these norms is no reason that the rest of us should do the same. Rather, it's a reason why we should continue to hold fast to them, to insulate them and buttress them against further attack.

Second, we are all capable of playing multiple roles. And the role we've played as tech policy advocates is no less important now than it was before. Our expertise on these issues is still valuable and needed – perhaps now more than ever. In times of trouble, when fear and confusion reign, the causes we care about are particularly vulnerable to damage, even by the well-meaning. The principles we have fought to protect in better days are the same principles we need to light the way through the dark ones. It is no time to give up that fight.

Filed Under: copyright, innovation, tech policy, technology

We Interrupt All The Hating On Technology To Remind Everyone We Just Landed On Mars

from the inspiring dept

It was hardly more than 100 years ago that human beings figured out powered flight. Barely 80 since flight became jet-powered, 70 since it broke the sound barrier, and 60 since we mastered jet flight sufficiently for ordinary commercial use. It was also not even 60 years ago that we figured out how to send human beings into space, and not even 50 since we put them on the moon. These time periods hardly span geological epochs; they can be measured by a lifetime.

For those whose consciousness developed after these tectonic shifts in the development of human civilization, it can be easy to forget that mankind spent vastly more of its existence not being remotely able to succeed at any of these things than being able to do them all. It can be easy to lose sight of what a triumph each leap is when today they all seem so ordinary. We take it for granted that we can board a metal tube and just a few hours later end up a continent away. We become glib about putting people in space when we have them sitting up there 24/7. And the moon, that celestial body that from the dawn of man has been the object of every dream, has long faded into the rearview mirror. Been there, done that, we think, as the knowledge that it is within our grasp slowly extinguishes the wonder that used to fuel our drive to seek the impossible.

Fortunately space is full of other frontiers to tantalize us. And Mars is one of them. Orbiting our solar system between 35 and 250 million miles away from Earth (depending on our respective orbital positions), barely visible to the naked eye, and full of even more mystery than our much more proximate moon (which is less than 240,000 miles away), it passes through the heavens flashing its enticing red glow like a bullfighter to his charges. And so, like moth to flame, we go.

But it hasn't been easy. We didn't get close to Mars until the 1960s, or get any sort of good look until the 1970s. And it wasn't until the 1990s that we finally got to touch it with tools we created as stand-ins for ourselves. But even as some Mars exploration missions succeeded, most have ended prematurely, or failed altogether. Even though in the intervening twenty years since our first lander we've managed to send several more robotic extensions of ourselves, which in turn have sent us back enormous amounts of data teaching us about this place so difficult to know, every time we come up with some new apparatus to help move our still-limited knowledge of Mars forward, we still face the same nearly insurmountable problem: how do we manage to get this highly sophisticated piece of equipment to this incredibly far off place?

Yesterday, we got it right. Yesterday, we threaded this near-impossible needle and successfully landed the InSight Lander exactly where we wanted it. But this perfect arrival obscures what a tremendous accomplishment it represents. As The Oatmeal illustrated earlier this month, there were a zillion possible points of failure that we had to get perfectly right. We had to pick a spot to land. We had to pick a day to launch to hit that spot. We had to pick a place to launch from. We had to calculate where Mars would be by the time it got there. We had to fly it across 300,000,000 miles of space to get there. We had to get it to arrive at the correct 12 degree angle. We had to get it to survive the heat of atmospheric entry. We had to get it to successfully deploy a special "super-sonic parachute" at exactly the right time. We then had to get it to successfully detach from the heat shield, deploy some landing legs, and fall from its protective shell. And then, with the same impeccable timing, we had to get it to fire some retro-rockets to control its continued descent. And we had to perfectly anticipate every instruction for every task in programming baked into our robotic scout months and months before that program would ever be run. Programming error, mechanical error, or any other human error all could have doomed the mission. And yet none did. It has some more to do to prepare for all of its experiments (deploy instruments, etc.) but InSight now stands ready, on Mars, to continue teaching us about our mysterious planetary neighbor.

It is a moment worth celebrating. We spend so much time lamenting technology, often regarding human innovation as some sort of disease to be cured of, that we lose our ability to marvel over just what we've accomplished as a species. To see those first pictures beamed back to our home planet today from another elsewhere in the solar system because we figured out how to is like looking at something of unspeakable beauty. Not just in the view itself but in the momentous human achievement we are privileged to see unfold before our eyes.

Filed Under: advancement, innovation, insight, mars, nasa, technology

Robert Jackson Bennett Uses Magic To Make Sense Of How Technology Shapes Our Lives

from the an-interview-with-the-author-of-Foundryside dept

In Robert Jackson Bennett's critically-acclaimed new novel, Foundryside, a scrappy thief-cum-spy explores a world where items can be "scrived" to think for themselves and bend natural laws. The role scriving plays in this alternate reality is powerfully analogous to how software defines so many aspects of our own lives, and the four merchant houses that dominate Bennett's fictional society map closely to the tech monopolies that are accruing more and more power every day in the real world. In the following interview, we discuss the political consequences of technology and the power of imagination.

How does scriving extrapolate the social implications of the internet?

The superficial comparisons to software and technology are fairly obvious in the story: magic functions as instructions, which must be carefully written by some very educated people in order to achieve amazing results — only instead of using pattern recognition to identify hidden, unrealized value in large datasets, the programmers in this world smash things together and blow stuff up. So, a bit more dramatic.

Things are a bit more interesting when you start to consider how using this technology allows people to reshape reality, both directly and indirectly. This method grants certain kinds of people a great deal of power, which allows them to dictate how the world works — much like how the political and economic schemes of our world are increasingly viewed through the lens of the internet, in the world of Foundryside, everything is shaped by scriving. They cannot imagine living without it, and they can't imagine not using it to get what they want. It's just too easy to colonize and conquer.

What can we learn about ourselves from the systemic problems illustrated in the book? How do we build a future that leverages the power of scriving without winding up in a merchant house oligarchy?

I think technology and technologists trend toward moral agnosticism. There is a belief that the purpose or value of a technology will reveal itself after being exposed to the market - you make it available for sale, and people, being pretty smart, will use markets to figure out how to use it to produce the most value. In other words, the morality of a technology is often someone else's problem. It's not an engineering problem, in other words.

But I think we're seeing now that markets make good servants but poor masters, and right now, technologists seem to believe markets are masters more than servants. Amazon wants to sell facial recognition software to ICE, Google wants to sell a censored search engine to China — these are all decisions that pencil out to make a great deal of money, but are morally bankrupt. If technology continues to develop in this sort of environment, then the world of yawning inequality and tyrannical merchant houses is inevitable.

Foundryside is a story of revolution. What are the most misunderstood aspects of real world revolutions? If we want to empower ourselves to make a difference, what should we do and what should we pay attention to?

Revolution is examined much more closely in the sequel, but I would say that it's important to realize that a revolution is not a singular event, but a violent series of tug-of-war that has actions and reactions. One can argue, for example, that the French Revolution lasted nearly a century, if not more, as various kinds of liberals seized power, only for various kinds of conservatives to pop up and take it back, practically right up until the First World War.

I think we should view revolutions in terms of survival. You should ask: Which groups are the most threatened? Which threatened group has the most power to organize and respond? You fight a lot more when your future's on the line, and your fight makes a difference when you have the actual power to see it through. You can think of this in terms of the Clayton Christensen model of disruption, where disruptors are put into positions where they must disrupt in order to survive, or you can look at the Founding Fathers, who were almost exclusively upper class landholders and merchants — a critical reason why the American Revolution succeeded.

If a group's survival is threatened, and if they have enough power to adequately fight back, then a revolution can take place. But if people are distracted or content or fractious, or if they're unable to organize and act, then either nothing will happen, or dissent will get quickly squashed. There are far, far, far more failed revolutions than successful ones.

History is full of dead, failed heroes. We tend to forget that when we climb up on our metaphorical horses.

The universe the story takes place in has the heft and texture of a fully-realized world that extends far beyond the confines of the novel. How did you build this world?

I read a lot of history, and tried to draw from that rather than play to whimsy. I try to build my worlds so that each facet examines a central theme, however elliptically. Good worldbuilding feels organic, and it feels like there's a purpose to it — learning about the sort of ships the world uses tells you something about the world and the people, not just the ships.

Even while it wrestles with big problems, the story is packed with intrigue and misadventures. How can "beach reads" that embrace the joy of pulp shed a unique light on important issues and ideas?

A spoonful of medicine helps the medicine go down. I'm all about recontextualizing things we're dealing with today in terms that make us rethink them. Like, say, slavery — America has a lot of problems with its history with slavery. But if I make up a slave system for my secondary world, it's suddenly a lot easier for Americans to decide how they feel about slavery. I try to use fun and magical worldbuilding to sort of sneak through the backdoor into people's brains and plant ideas. I'd say it's subversion, but it's really not terribly subtle.

What role does speculative fiction play in society? What do journeys of imagination offer us?

Speculative fiction gives us the emotional distance to allow us to more dispassionately judge our ongoing moral conundrums. People paint self-portraits sometimes because they wish to distort their faces to see how much they can change and still remain "themselves." Speculative fiction is a literary version of that.

What other books would fans of Foundryside enjoy? What books have changed the way you see the world and your place in it?

I expressly avoided reading Brandon Sanderson as a writer, because I didn't want to subconsciously steal from him (in fact, I really read almost no fiction these days, for better or worse) but I am told that Foundryside has a lot in common with his works.

Eliot Peper is a critically-acclaimed novelist and the author of Bandwidth, Borderless, Cumulus, Neon Fever Dream, True Blue, and the Uncommon Series. He lives in Oakland and maintains a popular reading recommendation newsletter.

Filed Under: foundryside, robert jackson bennett, science fiction, technology

Can We Make Congress Less Dumb About Technology?

from the one-can-hope! dept

Earlier this week, a bunch of organizations -- including Techdirt's own sister organization, the Copia Institute -- announced the launch of a new project, called Future Congress. It's a coalition of organizations, some of whom rarely agree on anything with some of the other members. It is made up of organizations with a variety of political viewpoints and policy ideas. But, this coalition does agree one one thing: we need to stop Congress from being so damn clueless about technology.

For many years, we've talked about the unfortunate decision by a Newt Gingrich-led Congress back in the mid-90s to dismantle the Office of Technology Assessment (or OTA). This was the organization that was a non-partisan, careful think tank focused on providing useful technology briefings to anyone in Congress who needed it. And yet, just as technology was becoming central to our every day lives, Congress defunded it (technically, the office still exists on the books, but it has no funding and no staff). Over the years there have been many calls to bring OTA back, and every so often someone in Congress floats a bill... which always gets shot down (the latest was just a few months ago).

The goal of the Future Congress coalition is to try to convince Congress to fix this -- for its own good. For many, many, many years now, we've highlighted how every time there's a hearing related to issues regarding technology, nearly all of our elected officials come off looking totally clueless to a degree that is outright embarrassing. They could easily fix this -- in a way that will both stop making them look clueless in front of the world and likely lead to better policy outcomes. Hopefully, they realize this.

I will note that last month there were some baby steps towards this, with Congress putting some language into an appropriations bill that fund a study of reviving the OTA while also moving to let the GAO take on some of the work that OTA used to do. It's unclear if this will actually survive or do very much, and Congress should be willing to step up and do much more. Hopefully, this Future Congress coalition will help make it clear to Congress why it should stop being so ignorant on technology -- especially when it has the means to better educate itself.

Filed Under: congress, future congress, gao, office of technology assessment, ota, tech literacy, technology

Microsoft Wants Confirmation That Helping Politicians Not Get Hacked Isn't An Illegal Campaign Contribution

from the the-times-we-live-in dept

We live in such ridiculous times. The ongoing silly narrative over supposed "political bias" by tech companies is causing all sorts of stupid follow on effects. For instance, Microsoft has now asked the Federal Election Commission for an advisory committee to state that offering its enhanced security features -- known as AccountGuard -- to any political campaign won't be deemed an unfair campaign contribution.

At first blush, this seems crazy that they would even need to do so, but it's really a product of the era that we live in. As you may recall, part of the issue around the whole Stormy Daniels / Donald Trump fight is the question of whether or not Trump lawyer Michael Cohen paying her off to stay quiet was an illegal campaign contribution because it was money paid specifically with the intent to aid a particular candidate (in this case, Trump) in his election campaign. Indeed, John Edwards got caught up in something quite similar in the 2008 campaign in having someone pay off his mistress to keep her quiet. And some have argued that the case against Trump is significantly stronger than the one against Edwards (in which he was indicted, but after an acquittal on one charge and a hung jury on the rest, the DOJ decided to drop the case).

But the key issue under election law is that they apply to payments (or in-kind contributions) "for the purpose of influencing an election." And, in Microsoft's case, it highlights in its letter that it is offering this security service to all candidates regardless of their party positions, and thus is not trying to influence elections one way or the other just to protect politicians from getting hacked.

Microsoft seeks confirmation that it will not be making prohibited in-kind contributions by offering a package of enhanced online account security protections at no additional charge on a nonpartisan basis to its election-sensitive customers, including but not limited to federal candidates and national party committees, as described above.

It seems fairly obvious that this shouldn't even be an issue, but seeing as I'm not an expert in campaign finance, I reached out to former FEC chair Ann Ravel to see if I was missing something. She agreed that it was unlikely that Microsoft doing this would be seen as a violation of the law: "I am fairly confident that the FEC will conclude that Microsoft's proposed free service to "election sensitive" customers is permissible and not a prohibited in-kind contribution. Microsoft has made a good case that the service will not only be non-partisan but is in the company's own business interests, as well as their social obligation."

But another reason why Microsoft may have asked the FEC for an opinion is that lately we've been seeing more and more people claiming -- somewhat ridiculously -- that the silly debate over "political bias" on the platforms also involves illegal campaign contributions. I believe that this is intellectually dishonest partisan gamesmanship, simply trying (weakly) to take the claims about the Daniels' payment and play whataboutism on a grand scale.

Indeed, at least one candidate has even filed an FEC complaint over being banned by Twitter: and that's Paul Nehlen, who self-describes as a "pro-white candidate" and whose bigoted views are extreme enough that even Steve Bannon and others in the Trump camp have washed their hands of Nehlen.

Nehlen's FEC complaint was put together by lawyer Marc Randazza, who many of you are familiar with. Frankly, I believe this is not his best work. It relies heavily on the debunked article by Vice that incorrectly claimed that Twitter was "shadowbanning conservatives" based on their political views. The reality was that Twitter was not shadowbanning (it was merely having some users not show up in autocomplete) and it wasn't based on their political views. But the complaint doesn't acknowledge any of that, and insists that the article is evidence of Twitter trying to silence Nehlen's side of the "debate."

I raised some fairly skeptical questions about the complaint with Randazza over email, who responded that he believes that "Twitter and other platforms are attempting to "meddle in" elections" and stated, "Once they figure out who they can ban and who they can't, just watch for it." No offense to Marc, but that sounds fairly paranoid and devoid of any actual evidence. The discussions I've seen from platforms is that they actually are bending over backwards to appear "balanced" in how they handle political candidates from all across the political spectrum, perhaps to a ridiculous degree, out of fear of backlash from the supporters of those politicians. In Nehlen's case, his tweets were so far over the top and so far beyond what Twitter's terms of service allowed, that they finally got rid of him.

Again, due to my lack of experience with campaign finance laws, I ran the Nehlen complaint by former FEC Chair Ravel, who also felt that it stood little chance before the FEC, and suggested that the complaint misrepresented campaign finance law:

I don't believe that this issue comes within the FEC jurisdiction. The "debates" that the FEC has some responsibility to oversee, (11 CFR 110.13) has to do, clearly, with the "staging of debates." The code refers to whether or not a debate is a contribution or expenditure for a candidate, so related to the use of funds to defray "staging of candidate debates" not being a contribution. The FEC's only responsibility is to ensure that the structure if the debate is not to give priority to one party or individual. Consequently, the only issue that the FEC considers regarding a debate is whether or not pre-established objective criteria, to avoid real or apparent bias that is used to eliminate some candidates from the debate.

And while the Nehlen complaint bends over backwards to argue that "Twitter is the new debate platform," it seems like a huge stretch to argue that just because everyone shows up on Twitter to debate, that this is the same as Twitter "staging" a debate. Ravel also see some other massive hurdles to Nehlen's complaint:

Further, I think that the complaint would run afoul of the regulation that is still very much in existence (11 CFR 100.94) which says that uncompensated internet activity is not a contribution to influence a federal election. This includes the use of equipment or any form of communication on the internet. The only exception is as to those activities that are placed for a fee on a platform. So while this is not meant to apply to the platforms itself and its decisions about removing offending individuals from the platform, it certainly would be an impediment to the kind of relief that they are seeking.

In short, this seems unlikely to get very far. Though, given how long these things take, it may be years before we get official rulings on these issues. But, seeing as people are now trying to use campaign finance law as a weapon against anything related to politics, I guess we shouldn't be all that surprised to see Microsoft feel the need -- and you can almost hear the giant sigh coming from the legal team in Redmond -- to first seek an advisory ruling to make it clear that what they're doing in protecting candidates is okay.

Filed Under: accountguard, campaign contributions, elections, fec, paul nehlen, social media, technology
Companies: microsoft, twitter

Once Again Congress Votes Proactively To Keep Itself Ignorant On Technology

from the a-series-of-tubes dept

Four years ago, we wrote about the House voting to keep itself ignorant on technology, and unfortunately, I can now basically just rerun that post again, with a few small tweaks, so here we go:

The Office of Technology Assessment existed in Congress from 1972 until 1995, when it was defunded by the Newt Gingrich-led "Contract with America" team. The purpose was to actually spend time to analyze technology issues and to provide Congress with objective analysis of the impact of technology and the policies that Congress was proposing. Remember how back when there was the big SOPA debate and folks in Congress kept talking about how they weren't nerds and needed to hear from the nerds? Right: the OTA was supposed to be those nerds, but it hasn't existed in nearly two decades -- even though it still exists in law. It just isn't funded.

Rep. Mark Takano (in 2014 it was Rush Holt) thought that maybe we should finally give at least a little bit of money to test bringing back OTA and to help better advise Congress. While some would complain about Congress spending any money, this money was to better inform Congress so it stopped making bad regulations related to technology, which costs a hell of a lot more than the $2.5 million Takano's amendment proposed. Also, without OTA, Congress is much more reliant on very biased lobbyists, rather than a truly independent government organization.

The fact that we're seeing this kind of nonsense in Congress should show why we need it:

A quartet of tech experts arrived at a little-noticed hearing at the U.S. Capitol in May with a message: Quantum computing is a bleeding-edge technology with the potential to speed up drug research, financial transactions and more.

To Rep. Adam Kinzinger, though, their highly technical testimony might as well have been delivered in a foreign language. “I can understand about 50 percent of the things you say,” the Illinois Republican confessed.

But, alas, like so many things in Congress these days, the issue of merely informing themselves has become -- you guessed it --partisan. The amendment failed 195 to 217 on mostly partisan lines (15 Republicans voted for it vs. 211 against, and only 6 Democrats voted against it, while 180 voted for it). If there's any silver lining, that's slightly better than in 2014 when a similar vote failed 164 to 248. So... progress?

Either way, when Congress is ignorant, we all suffer. That so many in Congress are voting to keep themselves and their colleagues ignorant should be seen as a problem.

Filed Under: congress, mark takano, office of technology assessment, ota, rush holt, technology, understanding