Archive | Internet

Students Receive Support Grants for Summer Internships

By on May 16, 2014 in Internet, Journalism, Privacy

The UNC Center for Media Law and Policy has awarded $1,000 summer grants to two students in the center’s dual-degree program.

The grants went to Natasha Duarte and Kevin Delaney to support their summer internships. Kevin will be at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Arlington, Va.  Natasha will be at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, D.C., working in the Internet Public Interest Opportunities Program.

The media law center grant program, which is in its second year, supports journalism and law students doing unpaid and low-paying summer internships in the field of media law and policy.  In conjunction with a similar program at the law school, the center ensures that each student has at least $5,000 in summer pay.

Students in the dual-degree program earn both a J.D. and a master’s in journalism.

Congratulations to Natasha and Kevin!

0

The Democratic Surround: New Media Technologies as Tools of Personal and Social Liberation

By on March 21, 2014 in First Amendment, Internet

glimpses-1On March 27th, Fred Turner, associate professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, will visit the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy to talk about his new book, The Democratic Surround.

At the broadest level, in The Democratic Surround and the previously published From Counterculture to Cyberculture Fred Turner’s project is to explain how we have come to see new media technologies as tools of personal and social liberation – not tools of social control.  Indeed, the World War II generation feared that one-way media was creating authoritarian personalities and giving rise to brainwashed fascists. Meanwhile, members of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the 1960s adorned themselves with computer punch cards and signs that read “I am a UC student. Please do not fold, bend, mutilate, or spindle me” to protest technocratic society.

The process of culturally revaluing media technologies spanned the 1930s through the 1990s, the period that marked the development of our current technological imaginary (see, for instance, Robin Mansell’s Imagining the Internet.) The Democratic Surround offers a prequel of sorts to From Counterculture to Cyberculture, showing that our own multimedia stylings have a deeper history than the counterculturalists of the 1960s. Turner shows that the countercultural vision of media as, in McLuhan’s terms, “extensions of man,” and tools that can be enlisted in democratic projects of new world making has startling roots in the 1930s and 1940s.  It was a time when the public, leaders, and many scholars feared that mass media propaganda produced mass men, totalitarian societies, and rendered the psyche impervious to reason.  In this world, an enterprising set of artists, intellectuals, and social and political elites turned to media as a potential tool – not of social control, but of democratic liberation.  Together they created multi-media environments suffused with image, music, and architecture. Turner calls these environments “democratic surrounds.”  These individuals believed that surrounds had the power to create democratic personalities – rational and autonomous individuals with firm commitments to racial and religious diversity and democratic solidarity. This new democratic personalities would do battle with authoritarian personalities; to fight fascism required creating new democratic citizens through media.  If propaganda created one-way communication channels that left no room for free thought and fashioned free individuals into automatons, the democratic surround’s immersive media environments fostered democratic citizens who were free to navigate their own way through media.

It was this idea of the surround that Turner tells us migrated from the Second World War to the art worlds of the Cold War.  Intellectuals, artists, and policy makers continued to see the democratic personality as something that needed to be created and nurtured through media, now in the struggle against communism.  At sites such as North Carolina’s Black Mountain College – where John Cage performed the first happening – and the Museum of Modern Art, artists worked out the cultural genres of multi-media surrounds.  By the 1950s, these multi-mediated projects of democratic personality building would make their way to the staging of the 1958 World’s Fair and 1959 American National Exhibition – where Khrushchev and Nixon had their famous “kitchen debate.”

As Turner argues, while the democratic surround was initially aimed at fighting totalitarianism, by the 1950s it quickly bled into a modeling of equally political and consumer choices. It was a particularly influential branch of the counterculture that drew on the media forms and ideas of surrounds during the 1960s. Turner tells this history in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, which traces the emergence of many of the cultural styles, modes of thought, political stances, and collaborative cultures that surround us today from the 1960s on through to the new economy of the 1990s. The “New Communalists” left politics in the streets in the late 1960s and early 1970s and went back to the land carrying commercial technologies and cold war tools to create decidedly new world communes, geodesic domes dotting the landscape.  The Whole Earth Catalog connected these back-to-the-landers, and later it was the early computer network system Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL) that by the 1980s early adopters in Silicon Valley believed was creating new forms of community, connection, and, shared consciousness.

The WELL did so in a rapidly changing world, one that was marked by the precariousness of labor in the high tech industry of the Valley.  Turner argues that the New Communalist imagination of the computer, and networked media more broadly, as tools of personal and social liberation helped information workers see their labor as liberating and in terms of building new societies. And yet, this cultural scaffolding helped these workers elide all the ways that mediated sociality supported freelance networking for piecework in the Valley. By the early 1990s, a host of media objects such as Wired magazine and the sweeping manifesto A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace distilled the New Communalist vision and extended it into the emerging new economy, creating a cultural framework for the new right’s libertarianism to be wedded to computer cultures. In the 1990s it was the riot of color and font that was Wired, in our own moment it is the colorful countercultural stylings of Google. The feeling of radically new peer-to-peer collaboration present on the WELL is not far from social movements such as Occupy Wall Street that are animated by connective action, consensus-seeking, and non-hierarchical forms. Techno-libertarianism animated back-to-the-landers and underpins many remix, peer, and DIY cultures, as well as social media startups, today.

Through it all, the democratic surround persists as a powerful vision and media form, one that animated many projects to reinvent social and political forms. As Turner tells us, the surround is both a new media genre and a model of organizing societies and working out the relationship of individuals to collectives.  Turner’s book offers a rich vision of our past that sheds new light on our own contemporary media projects, from the forms of organizing and connective action that have powered numerous contemporary projects of collective liberation, to the ways that networked media are entwined with the intractability of institutions and bureaucracies. Turner’s account of the surround in the 1950s is also markedly resonant with our own time – not just for the ways that the counterculture took up the themes of personality, psychological liberation, and new community building that infused early internet imaginaries and continues to do so today, but also how commercialism sits uneasily beside these liberating ideals.

1

Obama’s New Plan for the Future of Open Government

By on February 14, 2014 in First Amendment, Internet, Journalism, Transparency

foxfolderlargeOn this week’s episode of WNYC’s “RadioLab” podcast, the hosts interviewed Jeff Larson, data editor at ProPublica. He described his experience in June 2013 filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the United States National Security Agency (NSA) to find out if the agency had collected any metadata about his cell phone usage. He received a letter stating,

We cannot acknowledge the existence or non-existence of such metadata or call detail records pertaining to the telephone numbers you provided. . . .  Were we to provide positive or negative responses to requests such as yours, our adversaries’ compilation of the information provided would reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.

The rest of the podcast episode focused on the history of the government’s common “neither confirm nor deny” response to FOIA requests, and provided some background on the ongoing battle between open government and national security concerns. The podcast hosts also interviewed Jameel Jaffer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) National Security Project, who outlined problems with bringing lawsuits against the government when it fails to respond to FOIA requests. One big concern is how long it takes to litigate a case. “[T]he government may ultimately lose [the lawsuit],” Jaffer said, “but it will lose at a time when the public debate has moved on to something else.” Under the Obama administration there has been a significant increase in the number of FOIA lawsuits filed against the government. Yet, it was President Obama who began his presidency with promises of transparency.

Early in his first term, President Obama promised an “unprecedented level of openness” and said he would “establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration in Government.” Indeed, Obama and his tech-centric staff took steps to that end, including tapping transparency and technology advocate Beth Simone Noveck to head the administration’s newly established Open Government Initiative. According to the initiative’s website, its initial goals, as laid out in the Open Government Directive, were to create a presumption of openness in government data, to improve the quality of government information, to create and institutionalize a culture of open government, and to create an policy framework for open government. Four years later, in a 2012 TED talk, Noveck described her first day at the White House:

[B]omb-blast curtains covered my windows; we were running Windows 2000; social media were blocked at the firewall; we didn’t have a blog, let alone a dozen Twitter accounts like we have today.

Comparing Noveck’s first-day experience to the administration’s current online presence, it is clear that since Obama’s election, the federal government has increased its use of technology to disseminate messages and to allow the public to access data from its various agencies. However, the degree to which the administration has truly increased transparency is much less clear.

In the four years since the Open Government Initiative began, the federal government has created a variety of tools to increase the public’s access to government information. For example, the launch of data.gov, the self-proclaimed “home of the U.S. government’s open data,” in mid-2009, required each federal agency to begin by posting “at least three high-level data-sets” to data.gov and to establish a webpage to “serve as a gateway for agency activities.” The administration also launched We the People, a web page on which users can launch petitions and, if they gather 100,000 signatures in 30 days, receive a response from the administration.  The number of required signatures increased from 5,000 in September 2011; to 25,000 in October 2011; and again to 100,000 in January 2013. “We the People” has been utilized to create petitions on a wide range of topics, including one to make unlocking cell phones legal and another to revoke pop-star Justin Bieber’s green card and deport him to his home country of Canada. The initiative also helped create the “peer-to-patent” program, a project that leveraged public expertise about technology to streamline the application process at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Many critics argue, however, that the administration’s open government efforts, while having some potential civic value, only marginally increase the government’s level of public accountability. Harlan Yu, of Princeton University’s Center for Information and Technology Policy, and David Robinson, of Yale University’s Information Society Project, argue that the term “open government” originally was associated with politically sensitive disclosures obtained via FOIA, but now the term has merged with “open technology” so it is associated with the sharing of data over the Internet. This definitional blurring, they argue, has made “open government” less about public accountability and more about “politically neutral public sector disclosures.” At closer examination, almost all of the commitments in the initial Open Government Directive dealt with making non-sensitive data publicly available. At the time of the directive’s release, Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU National Security Project offered this criticism:

While the Obama administration should be commended for the issuance of this directive, we remain concerned that executive agencies are invoking national security concerns as a pretext to suppress records that relate to government misconduct. . . .While we appreciate the steps that the Obama administration has taken to increase government transparency, the administration’s stated commitment to transparency has not yet translated into real change on information relating to national security policy.

Obama is by no means the first president to struggle with secrecy in the executive branch. Balancing secrecy and transparency has been a long-time struggle for U.S. presidents. In 1967, when the initial iteration of the Freedom of Information Act was reluctantly signed by then-President Lyndon Johnson, he noted in his signing statement:

A democracy works best when the people have all the information that the security of the nation permits. No one should be able to pull curtains of secrecy around decisions which can be revealed without injury to the public interest. At the same time, the welfare of the Nation or the rights of individuals may require that some documents not be made available.

In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court found against the Nixon administration in the landmark case, New York Times v. United States and allowed the publication of The Pentagon Papers, a 47-volume U.S. government report about the Vietnam War. In that case, President Nixon’s solicitor general, Erwin Griswold, argued that despite the Constitution’s protection of freedom of speech and of the press, there was a need to “protect the nation against publication of information whose disclosure would endanger the national security. . . .” The analyst who leaked The Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, defended his actions, saying, “I think we cannot let the officials of the executive branch determine for us what it is that the public needs to know.” In 1974, Congress had to override President Gerald Ford’s veto to pass the Privacy Act Amendment of 1974, which strengthened FOIA in the aftermath of the Watergate and other scandals involving the Nixon administration.

In addition, there have been numerous executive orders over the last several decades changing the classification procedures for documents related to national security. In fact, starting with President Carter, each president has issued his own executive order clarifying procedures for handling classified information. In their signing statements, these presidents all claimed that their orders protected U.S. security, limited over-classification of documents, and simplified procedures for declassification of secret documents. Critics have consistently argued otherwise. In 2012, Margin Faga, the former director of the National Reconnaissance Office, lamented the current system’s complexities and tendency toward over-classification. In a blog post for the Public Interest Declassification Board, a nine-member advisory board mandated by the Public Interest Declassification Act of 2000, Faga wrote:

The system keeps too many secrets, and keeps them too long. Its practices are overly complex, and serve to obstruct desirable information sharing inside of government and with the public. There are many explanations for over-classification: much classification occurs essentially automatically; criteria and agency guidance have not kept pace with the information explosion; and despite numerous Presidential orders to refrain from unwarranted classification, a culture persists that defaults to the avoidance of risk rather than its proper management.

In December 2013, the Obama administration released its second National Action Plan for the Open Government Initiative. As did the first initiative, the new plan proposes several ways to increase public participation in government, including an expansion of the “We the People” website and the establishment of best practices for federal agencies seeking to increase public participation. However, the second National Action Plan also includes new commitments to address transparency and accountability concerns in areas related to national security. These include, but are not limited to: increasing transparency about intelligence-gathering activities conducted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), changing the system under which documents are classified for national security purposes, and consolidating federal systems to streamline and standardize FOIA requests. In each of those areas, the Obama administration has formed, or is in the process of forming, advisory groups to make policy recommendations. Below are brief summaries of these issues as laid out in the National Action Plan and the progress that has been made on the issues since the plan’s release in December of 2013:

Increasing Transparency of Activities Conducted Under FISA

After the publication in June 2013 of information leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden about the NSA’s domestic spying program, the Obama administration instructed the director of national intelligence to declassify and publish online documents about the nature of U.S. intelligence collection programs. Going forward, the National Action Plan calls for continued review and declassification of documents pertaining to intelligence programs as well as numerical data about the use of these programs. Since the plan was published in December 2013, Obama has proposed additional changes to the FISA Court, the judicial body where agencies like the NSA request surveillance warrants. On January 17, as part of his speech on NSA reform, Obama called on Congress to install “public advocates” to represent privacy and other civil liberty concerns at the secret FISA court. Many advocates of NSA reform, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Truman National Security Project, have lauded the proposed public advocates as a step in the right direction on civil liberties, though the proposal also has been criticized by the former head of the FISA Court.

Changing the System Under Which Documents are Classified for National Security Purposes

The second National Action Plan proposes creation of a simplified system of classifying materials for national security purposes to reduce over-classification of materials and simplify the process for declassifying materials that are no longer sensitive. The plan’s recommendations range from implementing technologies to simplify and automate the declassification process to a complete overhaul of the classification process. The plan also calls for creation of a Security Classification Reform Committee to review the recommendations contained in a report, Transforming the Security Classification System, released in November 2012 by the Public Interest Declassification Board. The report recommends reducing the traditional three classification levels (Top Secret, Secret, and Confidential) to two levels and implementing procedures to help align the level of classification with the “level of harm anticipated in the event of an unauthorized release.” Classifiers would base their classification decisions on “clearly identifiable risks” linked to specific classification levels, rather than on vague estimations of “presumed damage.” Additionally, the report recommends providing “safe harbor” protection for classifiers who “adhere to rigorous risk management processes and determine in good faith to classify information at a lower level or not at all.” Some critics of this plan argue that it simply restates the decades-old ideal of protecting U.S. security, reducing over-classification, and simplifying declassification with no clear plan as to how those goals might be achieved. Critics also complain that a two-level tier of classification simply moves the lowest level of classified material to a higher level.

Consolidating Federal Systems to Streamline and Standardize FOIA Requests

The Obama administration claims that it has made FOIA processes easier by speeding up processing time, disclosing information proactively to avoid the need for individual requests, and by reducing FOIA backlogs. The National Action Plan outlines the goal of directing FOIA requests into a single online portal to reduce the confusion information-seekers experience when trying to identify the proper department for their particular need. The plan also outlines increased efficiencies and a continued reduction in FOIA backlogs by increasing staff training and sharing best practices across departments. Last, it commits to establish a FOIA Modernization Advisory Committee to oversee these improvements and foster dialogue between the government and the requester community. As of January, 2014, the National Archives and Records Administration, in cooperation with the General Services Administration, has begun recruiting members for a 20-person committee, with equal representation from both the government and the FOIA requester community.

Despite the commitments in the National Action Plan, many remain skeptical of the Obama administration’s commitment to increased transparency. The administration’s aggressive use of the Espionage Act to target whistleblowers and leakers does not inspire confidence in the administration’s ability to “to create and institutionalize a culture of open government” as promised in Obama’s first Open Government Directive. It seems more likely that political pressures created by the Snowden leaks and the public outrage over domestic spying programs motivates Obama’s recent commitments to transparency. This seems particularly likely in the case of FISA in that Obama, along with Congress, successfully renewed the Act, including the Bush-era amendments, in December of 2012. The several new review groups and committees called for in the National Action Plan to help craft and implement policy are also cause for concern. In his recent speech on NSA reforms, Obama refused some of the more sweeping recommendations made by the recent NSA review panel. It’s altogether possible that he might do the same with recommendations for FOIA and classification system reforms.

Even giving the administration the benefit of the doubt, it is unclear that the proposed changes would be effective. As the recently Radiolab episode pointed out, the most successful FOIA requesters have to find specific mentions by public officials of individual documents or files in order to be precise in their requests. And there’s the rub: FOIA was enacted as a means to increase transparency, but its effectiveness is reduced when requesters do not know exactly what they are seeking. Because there’s no index, this need for specificity combined with rampant over-classification is a major problem with the current system. The classification system for national security documents is likely the biggest roadblock to increased transparency—web portals and technological automation can provide only partial reform for issues related to access and declassification. True reform requires a cultural change in the intelligence community in favor of increased openness. Until that exists, it’s hard to imagine a government employee marking even a low-risk document as “unclassified.”

Given the Obama administration’s inconsistent record on transparency and the long history of secrecy in areas related to national security, skepticism about the second National Action Plan’s potential to enact meaningful change is understandable. That being said, the plan is a welcome admission by the executive branch of the need to reform secrecy laws. Moreover, it identifies and offers incremental solutions for specific problems in the classification and declassification processes that contribute to the tendency toward secrecy. While some of the proposed solutions may need to be reconsidered or retooled, the administration has opened a new door to dialogue and cooperation with open government advocates. Whether that door was initially opened for public relations purposes is unimportant. It would be a mistake to let pessimism and skepticism stand in the way of reform.

0

What’s the deal with fast-track authority?

By on February 7, 2014 in Copyright, Internet, Transparency

Text Definition of Fast Track Authority

Back in November, The New York Times editorial board endorsed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement involving 12 countries in the Americas and the Pacific Rim that is being negotiated by the Obama Administration. The agreement contains sections covering a broad number of policy topics, including a chapter on intellectual property. At that time, I put together a brief post about the agreement and potential bipartisan opposition to it in Congress. Since then, Senators Max Baucus (D-MT) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT), along with Rep. Dave Camp (D-MI), have proposed the Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities Act of 2014 to grant the Obama Administration “fast-track” trade authority. This legislation would allow the administration to negotiate the TPP and other agreements (although negotiations are already in progress) and place them before Congress for blanket approval or disapproval without amendments or filibusters. This has ignited a debate about the roles played by Congress and the White House in negotiating trade agreements. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) publicly announced his opposition to fast-track, putting him at odds with President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. But what exactly is fast-track trade authority?

The Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution gives Congress the exclusive power to “regulate commerce with foreign nations.” Under fast-track trade authority, also known as trade promotion authority, Congress maintains its constitutional oversight of foreign trade, but cedes the nuts and bolts of crafting trade agreements to the executive branch. The Nixon administration was the first to pursue fast-track, though it was not enacted until Congress passed the Trade Act of 1974 under President Ford. Originally, fast-track was only approved through 1980, but it was repeatedly extended until the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. Congress denied President Clinton fast-track Authority in 1998, but granted it to President George W. Bush from 2002 to 2007. Despite the expiration of fast-track trade authority just prior to Obama’s first term, he was also able to utilize it in trade agreements with Colombia, South Korea, and Panama because those deals had been penned by the previous administration prior to the authority’s expiration.

Currently, fast-track is regularly mentioned alongside the TPP, as if the Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities Act of 2014 would apply only to that particular treaty. In fact, the Act authorizes fast-track for four years with a potential three-year extension for the next presidential administration. According to the official website for the United State Trade Representative, the TPP is not the only trade agreement in the works. U.S. representatives are working on a similar agreement with Europe, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). If granted, fast-track would be applicable to this and other forthcoming trade agreements.

0

A UNC Student’s Summer Experience at the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, a Project of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society

By on January 14, 2014 in Copyright, First Amendment, Internet

Berkman Center LogoLet me start by saying that I really like information. Numbers, lists, facts, data, trivia. I like them all. I’m an information junkie. I also happen to love the First Amendment. Given this, it’s not surprising that I was so excited to spend this past summer interning with the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Chilling Effects collects threats to free expression online, mostly in the form of DMCA take-down notices and similar intellectual property infringement claims, although Chilling Effects receives notices of other threats to free speech as well. All of that information is compiled into a searchable database. Being able to work with Chilling Effects, to explore this database, and to see “under the hood” was a great way to combine my interest in data with my passion for the First Amendment.

The summer was jumpstarted with a joint project involving myself and the two other Chilling Effects interns. Our task was to track down questionable trademark infringement claims in the database. We sorted through hundreds of these claims, looking to see if the people who filed them had concerns beyond trademark infringement — for example, someone whose real issue might be closer to a defamation claim than a trademark claim, but the latter might more quickly and effectively take down the content in question, since defamation claims can be costly to pursue and difficult to win. In other words, we scoured the database looking at potentially fraudulent trademark infringement claims that were being used to stifle free expression online. Once we wrapped up our search we worked with Jeff Hermes at the Digital Media Law Project to turn our findings into content for a presentation he was giving. One of the best parts of summer at the Berkman Center was a project like this one because I got to work with the other interns, all of whom were passionate, curious, and eager to spend the summer researching and working on a variety of Berkman projects.

On top of working with these great people, interns attended weekly presentations by leaders in the technology and policy fields. One week we got to hear from NYU privacy scholar Helen Nissenbaum, who spoke about transparency and privacy issues in accessing online court records. Earlier in the summer many of us attended a book launch for ReWire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection by Ethan Zuckerman of the MIT Center for Civic Media. But perhaps the most fun “intern hour” was an interactive demonstration of Google Glass. We might have looked ridiculous, but we loved being among the first to check out this new wearable computing technology.

The summer flew by. When news broke about the NSA’s PRISM program, I started reading everything I could about the issue and turned my research into a blog post featuring a timeline of Edward Snowden’s leaks and related news about the program. The best part about the blogging for Chilling Effects was that I got to use the Chilling Effects database to add color, facts, and figures to the stories that were already out there. For example, when Twitter released it’s annual Transparency Report in July, I combined their reported data with information stored in the Chilling Effects database. By layering the Chilling Effects’ data on top of Twitter’s, it was easy to start to see the bigger picture for how Twitter handles attempts by countries to censor tweets or account holders.

My summer internship at the Berkman Center gave me the opportunity to work with an area of the law that I am passionate about and introduced me to dozens of new friends and peers who are equally excited about the future of technology, law, and policy. It was by far the most exciting and memorable summer I’ve had and it was an honor to work with some of the world’s leading tech and policy thinkers. Summer 2014 Berkman Center internship applications just opened up and are being accepted until February 16.  If you’re interested applying you can find more information on the Center’s Internship page here.

1