Wired State

Richard O'Dwyer Must Be Extradited and Prosecuted

If a house robber came into a cafe waving a slip of paper, shouting that he had the addresses of people who were away on vacation or weren't home during the weekends, urging his friends to take advantage of this windfall, would the police and the court find that he had engaged in protected free speech? If a car robber came in waving the addresses of chop shops, would he be able to hide behind the First Amendment?

What if he offered the slips of paper to all comers for 10 cents? Or took an advertisement from the local pizza place and ran off xerox copies to distribute to everybody in the cafe all day?

Would he be considered a "publisher" and now immune to prosecution? If he contributed to other people stealing from the houses or buying the hot car parts, and made money from the ad and selling the slip of paper, that would be providing material support to a crime. It's easy to see in this case -- morally and legally -- that a robber can't shield himself behind the "free speech" defense when his intentions and results are obviously criminal.

Even if he jots down among the addresses of the people to be robbed the address of a public library where he hopes to take out a detective novel.

It's so easy to see the absurdity of the copyleftist argumentation when you transpose it back to real life, but they believe that on the Internet, with its pixie-dust sprinkled pixels, that all normal organic law is suspended and anything goes, especially if it it's in Google's business interests.

So it's no surprise that Jimmy Wales, head of Wikipedia, is calling for a stop to the extradition of Richard O'Dwyer, a 24-year-old British student who set up a web site called TVShack that linked to unlawful TV streams that people could pirate instead of paying for the service.

Wikipedia is Google's handmaiden -- if it weren't for Wikipedia results showing up in search first on most searches, we might find it harder to believe in the fiction of Google search as a free utility, and understand it better as Big Ad. In the beginning, Google said it would not allow paid results to show up first in the queue, as that would be the sort of "evil" which they say they would not do (as we know from Doug Edwards memoirs). Is that really still true?

Today, when I type in "tablets," to be sure, I still get the result for Apple first, but a news story on Google's new Nexus 7 tablet is number four, and over on the right, the top return in the ads column is for Nexus 7, and Kindle Fire from Amazon is number 3.

Really, guys? Is it any accident that result number four is "Nexus 7 Aims it Sites at Kindle Fire" -- a CNET story so typical of the captured tech press? Why does anyone think these people can be trusted anymore? If you're advertising Samsung Galaxy, should you even bother to buy an ad?

Wales doesn't just call for securing Google's business model with copyleftism out of co-dependency on Google for his business (which is contributions made by individuals and companies). He truly believes in copyleftism for its own sake, and realizes he would have to do a lot more vetting than he currently does of his own links if there were a law criminalizing the mass linkage to pirate sites for profit.

By always and everywhere cunningly and deliberately merging trivial individual linkage to such sites -- say, a mention on an individual blogger's site or a teenager's Facebook page -- with the mass linkage for profit, Wales and others who fought against SOPA ensured that the anti-piracy legislation would be sunk before it ever came to a vote.

If we had a law, however, it would define the crime better (and it did define better)  --  persistent, mass linkage to pirate sites for profit is -- and could even specify maximum penalties.

Instead, because we don't have a law, we get cases like O'Dwyer's which seem to be "excessively punitive".

O'Dwyer faces extradition to the US and up to 10 years of prison precisely because US trade officials and copyright holders are goddamn sick of all the kids in the council flats  being subsidized by the British government to drain the US economy. So they are message-sending -- and rightfully message-sending.

If you don't want cruel message-sending like this, Jimmy, then you should be for the rule of law -- which would in fact mean having to pass something like SOPA, which you don't like. Copyleftists never met a law prosecuting piracy that they did like.

Not surprisingly, Google engineer-evangelist Brian Fitzpatrick is also stumping to sign this petition on his public G+ feed. Brian has threatened to block me if I ever post any criticism of his advocacy of such destructive policies on his public feed. I've pointed out that if he needs to talk to his little friends at work, he should just post to his circles of co-workers or fellow geeks and not to the public. Brian is like a lot of Google engineers, however, which is that he wants G+ to be part of an overall social engineering project where public critics will be hectored and we will all learn to mind our "thought leaders" and refrain from criticism that is "negative".

Wales claims on his petition that he is for protecting copyright. Where? How? Wales has opposed every law attempting to claim it. He (like certain copyright lawyers) is content to let it be resolved one case at a time, draining copyright holders of time and money to waste on lawsuits.

Arguments saying that Richard O'Dwyers links "were in Google or Bing, so those CEOs should be brought to trial" are silly, because what O'Dwyer did was put these links all in a concentrated place so that the piracy could be accelerated and amplified. Why does he get to do that?!

This notion that links should be protected speech, ironically has been indirectly challenged by none other than Timothy Wu, who would probably make an exception for links to piracy sites since I think he would hew to the copyleftist/Google line (he's the architect of the notion of "net neutrality").

But in his op-ed piece for the Times in fact Wu questions whether search results of any kind are protected "free speech":

The line can be easily drawn: as a general rule, nonhuman or automated choices should not be granted the full protection of the First Amendment, and often should not be considered “speech” at all. (Where a human does make a specific choice about specific content, the question is different.)

Defenders of Google’s position have argued that since humans programmed the computers that are “speaking,” the computers have speech rights as if by digital inheritance. But the fact that a programmer has the First Amendment right to program pretty much anything he likes doesn’t mean his creation is thereby endowed with his constitutional rights. Doctor Frankenstein’s monster could walk and talk, but that didn’t qualify him to vote in the doctor’s place.

In that regard, it would be interesting to see if Richard O'Dwyer hand-placed all his links, or whether he had crawlers searching or RSS feeds or some other automatic process that roamed the web finding the pirate TV sites. The system seems to work as follows: individuals submit links where they know there is free (i.e. pirated) TV, he checks them and posts them. Surely the checking process is automated?

Regardless, O'Dwyer should be prosecuted because he has materially aided crime. Indeed, the courts need to send a loud and clear message that this tap-dancing around the truth of the situation that copyleftists do is completely illegitimate. Linking to piracy sites is done to help people get to them and download the illegal material, not to merely "reflect on" or "comment on" the sites. The intention of having the publisher's haven is to ensure that there is robust and free speech in a democracy, particularly political speech, particularly speech critical of public officials (Times v. Sullivan). The intent is not to aid crime.

Ads sold against the large traffic and views that such offerings inevitably attract are therefore ill-gotten gains. Just as with this very similar case, which copyleftists hyped as a human rights crime, too.

The idea that Richard O'Dwyer shouldn't be extradited because pirate linkage isn't a crime in the UK strikes me as specious -- there are laws officials are trying to pass now that *would* make it a crime, and it *is* a crime. The US has *got* to stop this British  socialist defiance of our content industry, as this English-language ally is obviously a big audience for piracy in a climate of technocommunism where the government subsidizes hackers on welfare and has only recently, under pressure of major events in the US, begun arresting some of them.

I say "socialist," because the Cameron Liberal Democrats/Conservative government which defeated British Labour in the elections in fact has signed the extradition order. Good!

I believe the US should pursue the extradition and the UK should cooperate if it doesn't want relations with the US to deteriorate. O'Dywer should be prosecuted in the US for this crime, and the sentence should reflect the extent of the damages and his status as a first-time offender -- that means it would unlikely to be 10 years. Perhaps Richard O'Dwyer should be sentenced to a year in jail or six months of community service teaching underprivileged inner-city kids to program computers, rather than to play online games and fill out surveys for their counselsors to make money -- which is what occurs in the at-risk teen programs now in New York City. It's a win-win for everybody if he is punished in this fashion -- and kept under supervision, of course. If he gets a heavier sentence, I won't cry: I want online crime to be prosecuted not because I represent record companies (I don't) but because I want to see the rule of law established over cyberspace, like any other human artifact. It's not special.

If Jimmy Wales, Brian Fitzpatrick and all the other "thought leaders" don't want cases with extradition and heavy sentences, then they need to drop their resistance to anti-piracy legislation. Once the right laws are passed, the law will be more of a deterrent than individual cases designed to send messages. And the first to be deterred will be Google, which already automatically removes infringing content from Youtube, its property.

Google has the technology and the ability to block pirate site links in search so that aggregate sites like this wouldn't even show up in search. It can do so without "breaking the Internet" as some geeks wildly claim. It already does so for malware sites. If nothing else, it can send pop-up notices that such sites are unlawful as it now does for unsecure sites. It needs merely political will and the acceptance that it has to be a little less greedy in grabbing ad revenue from pirate operations to achieve this.

 

 

Irish Times Skewed News Story on Dublin Internet Freedom Conference

Adam Maquire of the Irish Times has a very skewed news story up about the panel at the Dublin Internet Freedom conference where WikiLeaks supporter Birgitta spoke, presenting herself as a victim of the US Department of Justice and making a dubious claim that the media is somehow "weakened" these days:

Speaking at the Internet Freedom conference, hosted in Dublin this week by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Jónsdóttir said legislators had a role in supporting the press, which has been weakened by commercial and legal pressures.

Er, maybe what she means to say is that old media has been injured by new media's open source "free" cult and the "wikification of everything" has harmed the ability of states to legitimately keep diplomatic cables secret.

In any event, Maquire failed to report that Jónsdóttir got some push back at this conference -- from me. I spoke from the floor during the Q&A, challenging her narrative and demanding some accountability for the harm done by WikiLeaks.

It would have great if the US delegation to the meeting had spoken up, but for whatever reason, they opted to say nothing -- perhaps not to add to Jónsdóttir hugely fabricated sense of victimhood.

It's difficult to know exactly what the State Department officials and OSCE mission people really think about WikiLeaks. Formally, US government officials are forbidden to read the cables if they did not have the level of secrecy classification to have read them in the first place, and possibly even if they did -- I don't know the specifics. This creates an absurd situation where the entire world is reading US State Department cables, but the staff themselves in these government agencies can't read the cables or the discussions about them.

I have no idea if the people at State really realize the tremendous damage of WikiLeaks -- surely they do, but they aren't talking -- so as not to do more harm especially those people who were outed by the anarchists as sources to the US.

But I suspect that there is division at State and other quarters as to what should be done to this profound challenge to liberal democracy. Some may feel that WikiLeaks *is* a victim and should simply be celebrated as a publisher and 21st Century Diplomacy crowbar forcing everybody to wickify. They may not get it about just how sinister and nasty the radical anarcho-communist types of doctrines are behind this operation because they may never have studied the writings of Assange and his pals. I have. This is not brave whistle-blowing stuff. This is not Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, although Ellsberg himself can't make the distinction. This is an active measure to bring the US to its knees, with the doctrine that if it is forced open in this wild fashion, it will be forced to go against its liberal democratic nature and close, and become unlike itself and thereby defeated and discredited. It is intended as deliberate harm. The fact that Assange has wound up as a host of a show purchased by the Kremlin's TV station RT ought to be a good tip-off of this awful sectarian operation.

Here's my answer to Maquire, in case the lovely comments policy of the Irish Times deletes it -- we all know how those lefty newspapers are happy to declare any challenge to their line as "hate speech".

And I've also put in paragraph spacing that the IT doesn't let you put in, hoping to make you look like a ranter if you go beyond a paragraph:

Adam Maguire has given a very biased account of this meeting as if Jónsdóttir wasn't challenged on her tendentiously-presented claims -- indeed she was by me, from the floor at the Internet Freedom conference during the Q&A. She didn't provide the context for why her Twitter records were requested by the Dept. of Justice as if people are somehow persecuted merely for their views by the DOJ. In fact, the DOJ legitimately requested her records because of her avid support of the anarchist collective WikiLeaks which had incited hacking of the State Department's cables. She had the best civil rights lawyers from the ACLU who defended her through several court sessions, but she lost her case -- not because of "oppression" or because she was "not an American" as she kept implying, but because she *didn't have a good case*. There isn't some absolute right to steal cables because you feel like sticking it to a democracy you don't like for political reasons, and the DOJ legitimately investigates those who provide material support for such a hacking operation. You can't hide forever behind the shield of publisher status when in fact you're the source and the inciter for criminality.

I confronted Jónsdóttir as to how she could justify WikiLeaks when in fact no crimes against humanity or whistle-blower type of documents of wrong-doing was discovered in these cables, and many sources were exposed and actually harmed, some forced to flee their homelands or suffer reprisals. She responded by switching the topic away from the cables to "Collateral Murder". Had Maquire accurately reported this interchange, he would have pointed out that the moderator, a former Index on Censorship leader and now Google advisor, interrupted Jónsdóttir's self-serving dodge and insisted that she answer my question about exposure of the sources. She responded outrageously by implying that harassment of sources in WikiLeaks was the price we had to pay for the exposure of the "Collateral Murder" video.

I've opposed the war in Iraq and of course I would condemn any actual war crimes proven to be committed by the US military. But this video doesn't show a war crime. It has been tendentiously contrived and presented by the anarchist Assange to appear to be some sort of deliberate assault. Yet the journalists were with armed men, and WikiLeaks never explain why they think that's fine, and that in a war zone, they can't be expected to be shot at. They also claim falsely that US soldiers deliberately killed or wounded civilians including children in a van. But there was no way the soldiers in the helicopter could see who was inside the van, which hurriedly drove up to the scene of the shoot-out and picked up the wounded, which made it seem as if they were on the side of combatants.

Long before WikiLeaks opportunistically picked up this video to flog in their anti-American cause, reputable groups like Committee to Protect Journalists and of course Reuters itself demanded an investigation, demanded the video footage and so on. But they haven't claimed that a war crime has committed. Reuters has not pursued this as a demand for a war crime investigation. It's also important to look at the full version of this video and the context to see how WikiLeaks has cunningly manipulated this story: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=c1b_1270800204 Over and over again, each time radical activists come up with complaints about how the US military handled this incident, we have to counter with the fundamental question: why were journalists traveling with armed men? Why do they expect if they travel with combatants that they will be exempt from possible harm?

Jónsdóttir also tendentiously invoked the privacy of her constituents making private communications with her that were ostensibly exposed in the DOJ probe. Really, Birgitta? Your constituents write direct messages to you on *Twitter* because not only do they follow you but you follow all of them back to enable DMs? Truly? And they don't put their confidential concerns in email, and not 140 characters? This is just a really lame attempt to force moral equivalence between the WikiLeaks sources harmed and Icelandic citizens who happen to write to Birgitta. All in all, a lame performance.

Jónsdóttir whined "we are all Americans now, but not in a good way" because of data stored on US territory in American social media companies. But hey, if you don't want to "become an American," don't support a hacking organization doing damage to American diplomats, you know? You don't have to use these services, you can use others. Furthermore, the real issue is that in fact "we are all Icelanders now" -- a group of radical anarchists in Iceland can promote the hacking and slashing of the archives of democratically-elected states, overriding their democratically-elected Congress, and just do what they want. Then wave a magic wand over this criminality and call it "press freedom". No thank you.

UPDATE How Google's Transparency Report Team Censors Criticism of Its Report #dcif

 

I posted a comment (see above screenshot) to the stream of Brian Fitzpatrick, an engineer on Google's Transparency Team in Chicago. (He's no relation, but scroll down further in his thread to find the epic Tesla thread in which I try to stave off an army of Google engineers determined to prevent criticism of themselves and Tesla).

Brian routinely deletes any comment I file on his wall on any thread except the "lions eat baby gazelles thread" referenced above.

So I took a screenshot to document it.

Sure enough, within 3 minutes, Brian had deleted my comment -- the tools on G+ enable any user to remove any comment they don't like put on their posts, or to mute any person who responds to their posts for that thread or permanently.

I'm all for having such tools so that the individual user can control his experience and not have to avoid public statements or avoid collecting followers because people post nasty hate comments on their page. They should be able to keep their account visible to the public, attract followers AND remove people they find disruptive.

But that's the individual, who has a higher standard of privacy than the public figure.

And my comment isn't nasty or hateful in any TOS sense -- it's just critical, and legitimately so, as you can see from my arguments.

I think public figures like Brian Fitzpatrick  should enjoy less protection against criticism using such tools, just as in real life they enjoy less protection from libel suits. Fitzpatrick is serving as a public spokesman of Google when he posts a flury of propagandistic notes on his G+ page.

Now my comment on this, um, "Transparency" Report about its lack of transparency is just gone. Wiped out completely.

Notice how things get done in the Googleverse. An insider friend of this Google engineer asks whether he can expect a little more information about the process and the tech at a forthcoming industry conference. Fitzpatrick says no, but he'll talk in the hallway. Lots of useful information does get exchanged in the hallways of these tech conferences. I know, because I go to some of them, and that's how I found out Google's VP killed work on Uber Conference, which is why those engineers fled Google to do their own start-up.

You know, the Internet routes around censorship, perceiving it as a bug in the software.

Google's gambit in releasing their soi-disant "Transparency" report is to embarrass governments into doing less censorship. In fact, they are only enabling government censorship by giving them an appetite for more and more of it, with automated processes. Once the word gets out that you can use Google as an arm of repressive state apparatus, there will be millions more requests. Thanks, Google!

Meanwhile, if you criticize them, expect them to unilaterally and arbitrarily and non-transparently remove your comment from their threads. Because they can.

UPDATE:

Not only is my post removed, when I posted my own screenshots showing how this was done, and a link to my critical blog, I got a nasty retort from Fitzpatrick -- he warned me that if I posted on his public thread again on his "work posts," he would block me -- and this was my "last warning". Sheesh, authoritarianism that would make Azerbaijan blush.

Google's Game with the Transparency Report: GlavLit in the Cloud

Google used the opportunity of the Dublin OSCE conference on Internet Freedom to release their Transparency Report containing the totals of requests for takedown of content on Google's servers from governments (this ranges from search links to Youtubes).

The entire exercise was designed to say, "Look at us, we take down content and turn over user data at the behest of governments and thereby impede Internet freedom, but we tell you about it, so you can look at the source of the problem."

Therefore, Google looks good even when it is now performing a global GlavLit function -- another feature of Google tinged with Soviet culture. GlavLit used to filter through every printed thing in the Soviet Union -- even the text on a matchbox -- and make sure it followed approved Communist Party guidelines.

If you take a look at the Transparency Report, your eye will instantly fall on the countries with the hugest amount of take-down notices -- Brazil or the US.

That's one of those very typical artifacts of geeky literalism and obsession with "data" -- i.e. what they believe is pure science and pure numbers, but which is terribly misleading without context.

Already BetaBeat has done exactly what Google wanted to do with this and screamed in a headline, Guess Which Government Sent Google the Most Removal Requests? USA! USA! USA!

It will be only a matter of days -- minutes? -- before Rebecca MacKinnon tweets or blogs that the US is the worst censor in the world -- Google says so, and they should know!

The Irish Times quoted Tom Melia, head of the US Delegation as follows:

Melia, who works in the US Bureau of Democracy, told conference-goers, “too many governments were filtering, censoring content, taking down sites, and perpetuating Internet shutdowns.

So naturally BetaBeat had a lot of fun with that, noting that "Ars Technica points out, that censure looks a tad hypocritical in the context of Google’s latest transparency report."

Well, no, because Google is more than a tad mischievious in how they are manipulating this data. As the search and ad giant tells us in the report, "We hope this tool will be helpful in discussions about the appropriate scope and authority of government requests.."

So obviously, what Google hopes is that after "transparency" will come "alchemy," and citizens will become so outraged at all the takedowns in their country that they will flashmob their governments and force them to stop making them.

I'm wondering about how Google managed to hang on to its common carrier and "safe harbour" status with this entire GlavLit gambit, but they have good lawyers and probably tap-danced around it. They probably put it in TOS terms that they aren't pre-screening the content themselves and not accepting liability for it, but if they receive a "lawful request" they will take it down under established procedures in the industry.

The US has among the most free Internet in the world with the most tolerance for speech of every kind.  Perhaps the WikiLeaks supporting Icelandic contingent feels their country is more free, but the US does not hold any bloggers in jail nor has it closed down any Internet site that anyone can really prove wasn't containing infringing or genuinely unlawful material, i.e. sales of illegal drugs or child pornography.

The problem with the very sparsely-texted Transparency Report is that it doesn't distinguish between the artifacts of its "data" and the capacities of different countries. The reason the US has so many filings is because it has loads of capacity. It has highly developed law-enforcement and cyber-security agencies -- many countries don't have anything, not even a focal point in a foreign ministry or communication or internal affairs ministry. Quite a few countries don't want to add to their burden of existence filing English-language complaints about stuff on the Internet that only one percent or ten percent or thirty percent of their population accesses.

So it's the old story of "more traffic, more traffic accidents" -- the US instantly looks bad merely for being a highly-functioning country with capacity with a long history of policing severe Internet crimes precisely because the Internet was largely invented on its territory.

The US government filed the most requests to remove content and Google only removed 40% of them even with court orders (117 requests) and 44% of executive or police request (70).

For one, it's disturbing that Google can't honour court orders; we don't know what that's all about because they don't tell us. In order to judge whether Google operates in good faith, we'd have to hear more about their criteria.

In the Dublin presentation, there was mention that a variety of sources are used to make these determinations, from US Supreme Court decisions and European Court of Human Rights decision. We can see the report sources information about the closure or blockage of its services from various news media.

Bu what's more interesting about the "USA! USA!" page for user information requests, however, is that 93 percent were honoured by Google. That means when confronted, Google partially or fully supplied information 93 percent of the time on individual accounts because they involved crimes. Because the US did the right thing and lawfully asked for information on individuals involved in a wide range of offenses, whether pedophilia or terrorism planning, and Google conceded that.

They were the result of court cases, law-enforcement investigations or common sense.

The copyleftists and anarchists get their knickers in a twist that the ebil imperialist Amerika is "censoring" the Internet, but what they are asking to remove is not something that any other country is allowing to appear, even if liberal -- if it has the capacity to remove it or request that it be removed.

Google stood up to most of the requests that came even with court orders (!) when it came to content, i.e. posts, pictures, videos, etc.

BetaBeat simply fails to mention that Google, which it sees as the good guy and "not doing evil" is in fact complying with the US requests on user data largely because it finds them reasonable. It focuses on the content requests which only have 40% compliance from Google -- and here stuff like data defaming a policeman (likely related to an Occupy protest) is not something Google will remove.

Now, here's where is simply no transparency on this entire gambit hiding behind the word "Transparency".

We don't know the criteria for how Google makes decisions as to whether a takedown is "good" or "bad," i.e. oppressive of civil rights and/or frivilous. Obviously authoritarian governments misuse a system like this to harass their opponents.

As I noted in a comment from the floor during the last session of the Dublin conference, if an individual country might prosecute a handful of cases related to Internet and free speech, and the European Court might process, or at least accept for review, ten thousand here or ten thousand there from, say, the ex-Soviet countries, Google is now handling MILLIONS of cases. MILLIONs. And handling them very swiftly and peremptorily -- the Google gal told me that they have a million requests flowing through a week, and that they handle some with automated processes because they have a "trusted party" system. For example, RIAA is conceded as a "trusted party," despite the vehement hate for it by Cory Doctorow and other copyleftists, Google is a mature business operating by a basic sense of contract law and reputation, and for them, RIAA is a respectable and predictable filer -- it's putting in legitimate requests.

The Google rep said that Google respects copyright. I asked about the figure of 5 million pieces of content removed last year at the behest of copyright holders through DMCA takedown notices, and the report that Google satisfied 75%. "It's actually more like 97%," she said, and I'm not sure how the change happened. Five million! Thats a lot of ads sold against hijacked content! The rep said they remove items within 7 hours. Really, guys? But of course, from the moment the content is uploaded to the preparation and filing of the DMCA which can be time-consuming, Google gets the ad money.

Like Electronic Frontier Fondation with its "chilling effects" pages, Google likely hopes to pressure those asking for removal of content to give it up as pointless.

If anything, however, the more the requests are publicized, the more there will be. Now that states have this handy "GlavLit in the cloud" service from Google, they don't have to use up resources doing their own monitoring and staffing, they can just send a request to remove some content that may fail but which seems to be accepted.

But the most ominous aspect of this seemingly benign "Transparency" Report is that Google is letting us know that it makes a judgement about government requests and only removes them some of the time.

ON WHAT BASIS it makes that judgement is most certainly NOT transparent -- and scary.

Google hasn't signed any international rights covenants or the Helsinki accords; Google only plays at corporate accountability in its controlled Global Network Initiative with a nod to some principles.

It has no due process on its servers, as I pointed out in Dublin -- no written notification of who filed the charges against you (as far as we can see -- we don't know what notices are going out to people); no law of discovery, no right to face your accusers, no right to call witnesses, no remedies, no right to appeal, no adversarial defense and so on.

So we don't know how this giant court -- a troika in the sky -- is adjudicating cases or how it reaches decisions that this or that request is illegitimate. Google is positing itself as a trans-national, supra-multilaterial court in this regard -- and that's evil, because it's a court not functioning under basic notions of the rule of law.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alec Ross' Disturbing New Proposal for Intellectual Property Protection #dcif

Asalto al coche (Robbery of the coach), by Francisco de Goya

Alec Ross, the US State Department innovation representative, had a disturbing new proposal to make at the Google Big Tent meeting last night at the Dublin OSCE meeting on Internet Freedom.

He said any and all attempts to legislate anti-piracy efforts should end -- as an ardent opponent of SOPA, he finds them all overbroad and flawed.

Instead, we should look for technological solutions to engineer copyright protection.

I couldn't have face-palmed harder if I tried.

The fact is, those of us who have been debating this hard for a decade know perfectly well that Silicon Valley will not engineer copyright protection. Oh, sure, there might be a Facebook block on a Pinterest copy-paste (which is hardly an engineered obstacle to copy because you can still use "print screen" of course, or control-C and paste into another application before hijacking the photo to Pinterest). Or there might even a DRM left on something like i-tunes. But there will not be any serious technological and engineered solution. No way.

Ross was indignant when I suggested he was being snowed by the geeks. They have absolutely no intention of disrupting the California business  which works so well for ad revenue.

He says I'm wrong and that we'll have this in less than 10 years, even much sooner. I will be reminding him of this claim for the rest of his life, of course.

Of course, Cory Doctorow and the other copyleftists wouldn't concede this at all, but they're happy to say nothing while Alec goes on believing this and the engineers he talks to continue to string him along on this, because they in fact not only don't want any engineered solution, they know it is hard.

In fact, precisely because it's hard, you need policies and of course laws -- the rule of organic law, not code-as-law. But Doctorow of course doesn't cede this.

Doctorow quoted my nemesis John Perry Barlow, who said trying to remove copying from the Internet is like removing red dye from a pool -- it can't be done.

Of course, as Marshall McLuhan once put it in another context about the media and the global village, the problem is to "stay the dyer's hand".  Indeed, on this context as well.

Naturally, you can get the red out by putting in a white cloth that absorbs the dye, or a filter that takes it out. And that's what states are doing and that's the debate. Of course you can have filters and the claims that they don't work 100 percent of the time needn't defeat the objective. But it's not filters that are really needed; the rule of law is needed.

"If you can see it, you can copy it," and of course we know about the analogue hole.

Even so, even as we speak, hundreds of thousands of DMCA takedown notices are streaming into Google and they are taking the content down -- within seven hours, even! And automated processes are functioning on Youtube. If I post a Second Life machinima that happens to pick up a song off an Internet radio station on in the background on the server, that soundtrack snippet will be captured by the automatic filtering system and I will soon get a notice telling me that I have posted infringing content -- and in Germany, people won't view my content. It may hang there for some days -- it will then be removed. Good!

 Truly, it is not an issue of investing further in that elusive engineered solution. We've been through this in thousands of man-hours on the JIRA and the Linden office hours for a decade. Remember when the watermark was promised? Remember when the registration was promised? And you wouldn't want registration because it undermines the Bern Convention inherency of content.  Obviously watermarks can be spoofed like any other seen thing.

The problem with conceding the engineered solution instead of the organic rule of law is that it accepts the proposition that everything in cyberspace -- which increasingly makes up a lot of our lives and someday will control much of them -- has a coded solution that coders can devise in an emulation and simulation of real life -- however flawed that simulation might be, and however binary its execution.

And that's an outcome that has to be fiercely rejected. It's not the case, as Doctorow kept hectoring, that governments always try to control every new media and then give up. The Internet isn't just media; it's the means of conveyance, it's a transportation system.

When the stagecoach routes and the railrways were invented, highway robbers plagued the passengers and the conductors.

Nobody said, "oh, highway robbery is new technology". Nobody said "don't get in the way of highway robbery innovation, you are a Luddite". Nobody said, if you didn't concede highway robbery, "you need a new business model".

Rather, they conceded that new technology was plagued by old problems of theft and violence and that they had to be arrested. The rail must go through. And it did, and highway robberies became scarce if not non-existent on trains. That's how we have to think of the Internet.

Google is Deciding What Speech to Remove, Not States

I'm at the Dublin OSCE conference on Internet Freedom and it's as bad or worse as I suspected, with the overwhelming focus of European diplomats and NGOs on the contrived conversion of piracy, "net neutrality"  and related issues drowning out the voices of human rights activists from Tajikistan or Azerbaijan trying to get more concerted Western action on the very basic liberties they lack in their countries.

It's clear Article 19, Index on Censorship and others have picked up the anti-piracy legislation cause because they fear if they don't, they will be accused of not applying human rights standards in their own countries or appear imbalanced in focusing on just journalists' killings in Russia and Central Asia and so on.

Yet there are in fact no freedom of expression standards to invoke to solve the pretend issue of "anti-piracy as a freedom of expression notion". Michael O' Flaherty of the UN Human Rights Committee and the Northern Ireland human rights commissioner put it very compellingly, that he fears the claims he kept hearing from speakers such as Cory Doctorow that the Internet is special and requires new norms to be negotiated because it could jeopardize everything that was achieved in the freedom of expression field in the last 30 years. Precisely. O' Flaherty adds in conciliation, however, that he is confident that all these new media technology concerns like the alleged chilling effect of anti-piracy legislation can be dealt with by existing norms.

They can't really, because there isn't any real international legal analysis of any sort to support the idea that you can convert the prosecution of the crime of piracy -- a legitimate state activity -- into a FOEX concern. That could only be done if you insist that actual practice -- not wild hypotheticals -- involved wild misuse of the notions of anti-piracy to suppress speech. But you can't.

It doesn't really matter what this or that government or NGO does or thinks about suppression of speech, however, because it is Google that is already deciding this for all of us with little democratic discussion or the rule of law in the process.

To be sure, Google unveiled its long-awaited "Transparency Report" last night in the Big Tent in Dublin and around the world documenting just how many times they take down content at the behest of a government. And this impressive and massive exposure of raw data is supposed to snow us enough to miss the larger lack of transparency in the process of definition and adjudication.

Google now shows table after table of thousands and thousands of requests to remove  speech for political reasons, in countries like Brazil or India mainly, but also in the US or the UK. We don't know the kind of cases these are, however, except for a few anecdotal reports of what Google wouldn't remove, i.e. insult to a policeman.

The real issue, however, is that we don't know how Google is deciding that constitutes hate speech, whether they use accepted UN jurisprudence or EU or even US notions. It's all on the fly. A lot of it is automated. And is not an independent judiciary with due process, adversarial defense, discovery, witnesses and so on.

I confirmed with the Google rep that the copyright takedowns are worse also than indicated last year by CEO Eric Schmidt in Congress. Google received 5 million -- 5 million! And Google removes a whopping *97 percent* of them as justified! They have a system of trusted parties as they explained, such as the RIAA. Why? Because they do, unlike Doctorow, recognize copyright.

Of course, activists hope that the sheer numbers and the transparency gambit will force states and parties like the RIAA to cease and desist. The real disturbing part is that an undemocratic and mysterious notion of what constitutes hate speech is gaining traction, and a new world power -- Google -- is enforcing it without all of us.

No New Norms for Internet Freedom -- at the UN or OSCE

Protest in Moscow, May 2012. Photo by Lev Melnikov. The poster is a quote from Shakespeare about power and conscience.

We most certainly do not need any new norms to be negotiated and passed to promote Internet freedom at the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) or indeed any multilateral body.

There is an OSCE meeting on Internet Freedom in Dublin next week, as Dublin is currently the chair-in-office at OSCE. And at the UN Human Rights Council next week, Internet Freedom will be on the agenda as well with discussion of a report by Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression Frank LaRue and related issues.

There's a concerted effort to try to get these bodies to try to take up additional issues beyond the basic core set of principles for freedom of expression and to bless these issues as being about freedom of expression when they are not. And there's a concerted effort to amplify and aggrandize perceived or real problems with US government control of the Internet as somehow morally equivalent with the great enemies of the Internet in places like China, Russia or Iran.

We already have the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights and the guarantees for free speech in this treaty, and Art. 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These norms aren't as robust and free as the American First Amendment, but they work pretty well. The task is to bring the poor levels of press freedom found under authoritarian regimes at least up to the level of Art. 19, not to undermine the achievements already arduously made by negotiating with illiberal regimes who are in bad faith, and only too happy to have everyone distracted from the basics.

Indeed, we shouldn't distract from the fundamental freedoms already enshrined in international law by tacking on various other issues that distract from them -- like "net neutrality," opposition to anti-piracy legislation, or efforts by the US to counter cyber-attacks -- which emanate from the governments and associated hacker networks of China, Iran, Russia and other authoritarian regimes.

As I've been writing for some time now, there is a crew of "Internet fighters" who continually appear to be fighting for media freedom and freedom of expression, but they use this as a wrap under which they place other issues closer to their hearts from their "progressive" political agenda. Rebecca MacKinnon -- who is speaking both in Dublin at the OSCE meeting and at the US Mission to the UN in Geneva next week -- says the US is the "worst country" for blocking Internet freedom -- merely for contemplated -- not implemented -- legislation -- and bills that in fact address real criminal actualities such as piracy, child pornography and cyber-attacks.

Cory Doctorow's worst Internet enemy isn't Belarus or China or Iran or Syria, it's Western governments supporting an international effort against copyright called ACTA or the US Congress in attempting to pass SOPA or any local or international legislation against piracy. Like MacKinnon, he draws a moral equivalence between the victims of oppressive authoritarian states, and people like Jacob Appelbaum, an ethics-free hacker who calls on coders to build in "bug doors" to demolish their software if used by people or governments they don't like, and who has been under investigation by the Department of Justice for helping WikiLeaks. Many liberals look solely at the notion of the right of the press to publish whistleblower's reports without considering the ethical and criminal matters involved in deliberately inciting and benefiting from the theft of classified documents. WikiLeaks' publication of stolen cables harm people whose names are mentioned in the cables and has caused real damage to them. And have you ever noticed that WikiLeaks just never got around to leaking anything much from the Russian government as it claimed it would do? Instead, WikiLeaks' leader Julian Assange is now on a Kremlin-sponsored talk show on RT.

Then there's Jillian York, a freedom-fighter from the Electronic Frontier Foundation who is more worried about the US trying a bit of counter-propaganda against Al Qaeda by placing an ad against suicide bombing on the terrorist organization's site than she is about Al Qaeda Youtubes and other propaganda inciting deadly murder via the Internet.

There is good reason to oppose any new norms for Internet Freedom in this kind of climate and to stick to the basics.

First, any effort to negotiate new norms at the UN where enemies of the free Internet such as China, Iran, Pakistan and other countries will sabotage the process, or at the OSCE, where Russia and its allies will sabotage the process, will only lead to losing what we have achieved in the past. You simply cannot enter into a process where you risk going below the level of freedom already negotiated in the last 50 years, which has been constantly under threat.

A good example is the "defamation of religion" resolutions that the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation sponsored for years at the UN, which were ostensibly devised to fight Islamophobia but wound up shielding theocratic regimes from any criticism by free speakers. This effort was recently successfully fought off at the UN Human Rights Council, and a different resolution was ultimately passed that only pledges to combat discrimination and condemns "incitement of imminent violence" rather than vague and unclear calls to criminalize criticisms of Islam. It also lists various best practices and adviseable activities that states might engage in to decrease hate crimes, rather than binding them with overbroad language that can -- and is -- misused by authoritarian states.

Russia is a typical example of a country constantly misusing laws against extremism -- a young man who sneezed on a portrait of Putin is charged with extremism and facing serious jail time; feminist punk rockers who disrupted a church service to sing a "punk prayer" in protest against the Russian Orthodox Church's collusion with the Kremlin are facing seven years of imprisonment in pretrial detention, their young children left home without them.

Russia has been actively trying to reverse the progress made in the Helsinki process, as the OSCE meetings have been known, and it has been difficult to promote the basic civil and political rights with this brutal opposition -- indeed, Russia has targeted human rights programs for defunding and Russia's key ally Belarus is busy trying to shorten the days of the annual Human Dimension Implementation Meeting and cripple its agenda. We shouldn't have to prove that Russia is an enemy of Internet freedom when there are ample examples of bloggers beaten or pages blocked or services disrupted -- and this week the deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta suffered a brutal and blatant death threat from a high police official personally.

Yet the agenda promoted by some of the "freedom fighters" would ultimately end up rewarding bad actors like Russia and China and undermine authentic rights and freedoms.

The misguided focusing on campaigning against piracy and demanding sharing of content regardless of whether the user has the rights to it as a "right"; the focus on "net neutrality" which is ultimately a bandwidth consumption and development issue, not a "freedom of expression" issue; and the antagonism to legitimate efforts by democratic states to protect their Internet sites from takedowns by hostile governments and thuggish forces like Anonymous and Lulzsec -- these are all ultimately gifts to the autocratic regimes like Russia or China.

Rebecca MacKinnon and others often cast their moral equivalency with an argumentation that the US shouldn't provide "bad examples" to countries like China with the supposed "censorship" involved in tackling piracy or cyberattacks or devising ways to cope with violent flash mobs. But these regimes don't need examples; they already suppress the Internet and their citizens, and the US legislation isn't even passed. Some legislation should be passed to combat the destructive forces of piracy and child pornography and cyberattacks, and in fact countries fight these ills even without the legislation, on a case by case basis which doesn't make for the best rule of law. There's a disturbing readiness to hysterically cry "foul" about Western governments trying to protect the civil societies and freedoms they have, and a strange reluctance to focus on the non-Western governments that actually brutally suppress bloggers and journalists and block the Internet. Why?

Jillian York's Selective Internet Freedom-Fighting

Still from the film Easy Virtue by Alfred Hitchcock (1928)

Jillian York has a piece up at one of her favourite outlets, Al Jazeera.

In it, she's clutching her pearls at the sort of mild counter-propaganda the US engages in, and the occasional attacks on authoritarian regimes it is credited with, and myopically ignoring the real dangers of cyberspace, which are Russia, China, Iran, etc. -- authoritarian governments that she rarely finds time to criticize, as all her ammunition is used up on the US.

My response:

I don't endorse any kind of hacking, whether the State Department or Anonymous does it. Does Jillian, or is her rage selective only when it comes to the State Department? I've never heard her denounce Anonymous DDOSing and other forms of cyberattacks.

I don't see anything wrong with the State Department placing counter-ads to Al Qaeda or engaging in whatever educational broadcasting and new media work it wishes to engage in to advance the interests of the liberal democratic state America. Jillian finds this a horror -- why? She never expresses such concerns about RT, the Kremlin's propaganda TV station reaching American audiences, although the Kremlin is backing the murderous Syrian regime, and she cares about Syria.

Morozov's mischievous notion that the State Dept. should copy Anonymous isn't meant to condemn anonymous but to make State an object of ridicule and opprobrium.

As for this literalist and specious Fisking over the "material support law," if the purpose for which the US was essentially infiltrating an Al Qaeda-owned site was in fact to try to undermine it, that would mean it wasn't in fact providing material support, despite some modest fee for an ad -- duh. And that's just why there is language about approval by the Secretary of State -- to deal just with those situations that involve things like companies selling equipment that helps dissidents even if it helps authoritarian governments. You can't look so literally at laws that have a spirit that is clear: real Internet freedom, not the sort Jillian York is fighting for, which is merely the political agenda of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

If we're going to clutch our pearls about "use of force" and castigate the State Department, where's the outrage about China, Russia, Iran and many other authoritarian countries doing far worse than the US?

York is worried about fake online personas? She was never worried about them when Anonymous, which wrote the book on such personas, used them for destroying privace and costing millions of dollars of damages just because they don't like entities ranging from NPR to Gawker to the Pentagon.

York is concerned about "US and Israel state violence in the Middle East"? The far more grave problem is the violence of regimes from Iran to Syria to Saudi Arabia. Where's the concern for this more broadly? And of course, the Palestinian movement's own violence, of which there is ample documentation.

It's preposterous to claim that because the US has what she characterizes as "propaganda" operations that somehow Internet freedom is jeopardized. This is indeed concern-trolling. The beneficiaries of the US programs, whether directly through grants or indirectly through a true policy of Internet freedom, aren't complaining. Only York is, because it doesn't suit her own radical agenda.

As for the Palestinian blogger, I don't trust York's judgement here, and I'd like to read up on the individual's posts to see if in fact they did constitute violence. And that's because many a time, I've seen York soft on this point and not willing to condemn violence in principle.

There is war in cyberspace, and the overwhelming majority of cases of spreading viruses, DDOSing, hacking, defacing, etc. are caused by the states of China, Iran, Russia and similar authoritarian states and the hackers who live in them who are often loosely affiliated with the government. York seldom if ever complains about them. And wait, I thought we learned that what the US did wasn't really a hack, but a bit of what is actually social hacking by buying the ad on the site?

Alec Ross himself is a propagandist, and he finds that his propaganda against things like SOPA work all too well.

If the State Department is to be tasked to show where it draws the line on extremism, I'd like York to do this as well. Can we get a full-throated denunciation from York on any and all calls for the intifada and violence from Palestinians and others in the Middle East seeking radical revolutionary solutions to the many problems of the region?

Ultimately, there's nothing essentially wrong with the US program to influence Yemen's users or any other country's users. God knows Russia, China and Iran are busy propagandizing their unfree ideas, and we should counter them.

Rebecca MacKinnon's Radical Agenda for the Internet

Facebook's new net-nanny message interferes with and then even blocks posts.

Rebecca MacKinnon has an article at Foreign Policy called "Ruling Facebookistan" where she criticizes what she sees as various undemocratic features of Facebook.

I began writing about the problem of Facebook authoritarianism years ago in 2008, in noting first and foremost that we are "not 69 million of anything" -- we are not a country because it's not freely elected. I also flagged the troubling meglomania of Mark Zuckerberg, who believes that in connecting everbody on Facebook, his job essentially is to "build tools" on top of this for them to "make the world better" -- and he thinks Facebook ends terrorism by making people more empathetic when they connect (a hugely unproven and even sinister thesis). We're no more free and no more of a country now that there are 950 million of us -- but the answer is merely to have a market in such services so there is pluralism, not to try to smuggle in the "progressive" agenda to overthrow Facebook so as to rule the world better with a social media network.

Two years ago, I wrote about how Facebook has serious governance problems precisely because it is under a TOS that it doesn't enforce, and hides behind the "common carrier" status to avoid taking responsibility for speech and governance in general. But the reality is, there is no court ruling or law that enables anyone to take Facebook as a "country" in any form. The landmark cases in recent years mitigate against it. As I wrote:

Silicon Valley titans have been able to elude such an analogy with "corporate towns" with the 2009 case of Estavillo v. Sony, when a user sued the PS3 gaming network for expelling him on free-speech grounds. The judge said the network “does not serve a substantial portion of a municipality's functions, but rather serves solely as a forum for people to interact subject to specific contractual terms."

The moral of the story is that you will need US government regulation to enforce the First Amendment and also the Supreme Court ruling that bars "incitement to imminent violence." But MacKinnon would hate more government regulation, and government-forced First Amendment rights turn private corporations into arms of the state, paradoxically.

In thinking about this subject for many years, I've concluded that only a free market in varying First-Amendment level (and below) services is what will work, coupled with increased options for user control of the environment for their speech. Don't like somebody's hate speech? Don't make them your friend, you know? Don't like a hate group? If it incites violence or discrimination, abuse report it avidly and try to get it removed.

MacKinnon always and everywhere seeks government and public action in the interests of the "progressive" agenda she represents. But as I indicate in my comments on the article, it's basically once again about packing the agenda first in a wrap of concern about Chinese dissidents and the awfulness of the Chinese regime in censorship them, then smuggling in the sandwich meat of the real radical cause, that celebrates Palestinian activists and insists on pseudonyms and interoperability (collectivism) so that the revolution can have more sway over the masses. No thanks!

My comment:

Re: "It may not be able to tax or jail its inhabitants, but its executives, programmers, and engineers do exercise a form of governance over people's online activities and identities."

The more operative point to make here is that Facebookistan is *not a country*. The 900 million people here have not agreed to join together; they are arbitrarily joined together merely as data in a data base. They are all individuals in the physical world with civil rights, for better or worse, in their own countries. They also have an international legal system to claim rights through the UN. The idea that Facebook is a "country" is romantic, but not actualized because there are no free elections and no independent judiciary let alone representative democratic parliament.

As the executives accurately point out, their abuse-report system is automatic. And when enough abuse-reports come in, even by untrustworthy parties not acting in good faith like the Chinese government, their system reacts, and only manual overrides -- prompted by things like the open letter from the Taiwanese -- can restore justice. It's the lack of due process in the Facebookistan "justice system" that is the worst problem.

But that problem emerges from what MacKinnon herself unquestioningly celebrates in her book, in her validation of the notion of an "Internet commons" which privileges engineers, coders, and platform providers and their ideas of what governance and justice should constitute. She should start first by condemning "code as law" rather than celebrating it as "community" and accept that pluralism and multiple systems and perspectives in the aggregate are what make the commons, not the open source cult and its authoritarian methods.

MacKinnon is worried about activists of her choice having problems on Facebook. But the problems are larger and affect all of us. Just now I tried to respond with a long comment to a long post made by Pavel Durov, head of Russia's vkontakte.ru on his ideas for improving Russian society. Facebook warned me that my comment could be viewed as spam and told me to review it before posting it. Any comment that is long gets that interruption and even blockage. Worse, Facebook pops up arbitrarily, apparently based on key words, and tells me that I might reconsider making a comment, or it won't print a comment, if it thinks it isn't "constructive". How does this *machine* decide what is "constructive" and who elected it to make such decisions anyway?! If my comment contains words that Facebook judges inappropriate, perhaps "breast" even if the discussion is about breast-feeding -- not even pictures, but words -- it will block me.  Facebook should cease all that net-nannying; it already has the ability for people to mute comments or defriend people who are disliked; that's all that is required.

I have serious doubts about a censorship site run by a Palestinian activist. Given everything we've seen on the Internet from the Palestinian cause, that could involve a very biased agenda and I wonder if we can trust it to be run fairly. I wonder if the link to One World Freedom was removed because of incitement of hate and violence? Since MacKinnon also chastises Apple for in fact rightly removing the violent "intifada" app from the app store, I have to ask this question.

As for MacKinnon's oft-made request to impose on Facebook the anonymity that she feels is required for the world's various revolutionary movements, I can only say: those who want to have large groups and huge friendship lists can't expect to avoid accountability forever by using nicknames; whatever the very real concerns they have about government oppression. Those who need to conduct sensitive human rights work don't need 5,000 friends or 100,000 people in a group; they have gmail. Figures like Sakharov and Mandela and Havel never used pseudonyms, they took the risk and rewards of using their own names. There are other services from Twitter to Blogspot where you can use pseudonyms and collect friends, and that can be used.

Accepting pseudonyms on Facebook, far from creating freedom, creates unfreedom by subjecting those people who use their real names to attacks by Anonymous, the e-thugs, and all kinds of sock-puppets, haters, spammers, etc. Identity helps create accountability. While it can't always be used, then the answer is still to require real-name sign-ups and then the use of a pseudonym shell. But that isn't what the revolutionaries will accept. The answer to this problem is not to impose standards of revolutionary zeal on platforms, but in a free market of goods and services, and to create alternatives. Create an anonymous network platform, and see who shows up! Oh, I hear Anonymous is making one. Maybe you'd find that useful.

MacKinnon is right to flag how phony the Facebook "democracy" is and the 30 percent "advisory" rule. It's impossible in a setting where there are 900 million people using the platform mainly for socializing with close family and friends to demand that they "get educated" on a vote, pay attention to a vote, and vote. So again, the answer is to *go make the alternative you seek and see who shows up* instead of banging on this commercial service to do this or that point on your agenda.

Facebook didn't hide the polling station; they're just not a freely and fairly elected parliament. If you want social media to be democratic, you first have to make the institutions that can lead to those results. But there aren't world parliaments for good reason -- authoritarian countries get a vote and then democracy is watered down as it is at the UN. I'm not interested in making a parliament with 900 million people; any such entity would enable the coders to win, not authentic democratic movements.

Interoperability should not be forced. It's just an excuse -- again -- to force the collectivist notion of the Internet and not allow freedom of association for companies which is vital to freedom and which enabled these innovative services in the first place. Walled gardens are a good thing, contrary to the geek sectarian belief about how the Internet should be run. Facebook has 900 million members and is growing constantly mainly because people are happy with it as indeed a walled garden where every passing Scoble can't grab 5,000 "friends" who didn't give permission to him to do so and port all their data to other platforms of his choice. If I need to talk to a friend on Google Plus, I can join Google Plus, interop is not required. Interop is also a fake agenda that hides the ulterior motive of trying to bring all platforms under the power of those with a certain ideology about how the Internet should run. There's no need to enforce this "harmony" as the Internet's strength comes in pluralism.

The Internet as a system may be a utility; the platforms built on top of it are not. There has to be freedom of expression and freedom of association for the companies that invest treasure and talent into building services and communities, and not merely freedom for those who want to take over the Internet with their agenda.

Facebook has to be closed in order to make a profit. Capitalism is okay; if you want socialism, build a socialist platform rather than destroying the capitalist ones. Eventually Google will have to allow advertising on G+ -- go bang on them, as they have a system Ad Sense that in fact we should all be allowed to embed into our G+ pages so that the Internet doesn't just bring wealth to a few tycoons in Silicon Valley.

So once again, under the guise of "Internet Freedom" and beginning with legitimate concern about how the Chinese governments censors, MacKinnon ends by smuggling in the "progressive" agenda -- boosting radical Palestinians and flogging socialist models out of the EU bureaucracy. No thanks!

Further Comments in Opposition to Silicon Valley Principles: Some Case Studies

In a democratic society, matters of how much or little freedom to give in public demonstrations have to be debated and deliberated, not pre-ordained in code. Organic law, by contrast with code-as-law (as Lawrence Lessig has described the operation of code in cyberspace), is based on judicial interpretations and real case studies. Unlike computer code, it is not a series of binary “yes/no” options, and not physically coercive with “pass/no pass” or consecutively processed with “first in/last out”. There are a wide variety of opinions and circumstances on these issues in organic law, and the binary thinking of code and engineering is not the best mode to use on organic politics of real people in the real world.

Example, no. 8 of the Silicon Valley Principles ambitiously postulates that "human rights implications" can be recognized in code and that programmers (not states) should "ensure that technology is used in the exercise of fundamental freedoms and not for the facilitation of human rights abuses".

While the intentions may be noble, this is quite frankly an absurdity, and a dangerous one. No one has empowered technologists and their companies to make adjudications on matters of law -- much less incorporate them into automatic, robotic process that will be "good" or "bad". And as I’ve explained in my paper on “objections” to the principles, their commercial and corporate interests mean they are foxes guarding the henhouse.

Aside from this theological interpretation about code versus law (don’t concede that code *is* law), there are wild disagreements even among technologists themselves about these issues and it's wrong to set them in any kind of code.

Example: when the government of the UK raised the issue of whether Blackberry messengering services should be suspended in some areas where looting and rioting was deliberately planned with their use, Internet freedom advocates such as Rebecca MacKinnon issued cautionary warnings to David Cameron that the UK would become "like" China if it started blocking SMS messages.

Yet such an option, enforced by a liberal democratic state under the rule of law, would not have been “like” China, and certainly would not have deprived the public or individuals of their freedom of expression through many alternative venues besides Blackberry messages in one locality. (They could go on Facebook or TV). And when lives were at stake (people were injured and killed) and property damage and livelihoods at stake, the intervention of authorities due to "imminent violent action" seemed perfectly justified and consistent with Article 19 and British law protecting free speech.

In one sense, although on their own platforms they maintain sometimes draconian speech regulations, everywhere but in Silicon Valley’s cyberspace, restrictions as to “time, place, and manner” are recognized as lawful regarding freedom of speech. People will disagree about what is the best course here -- so how would "coding for human rights" work -- make it impossible for governments ever to shut off cell phones? Maintain an “always on” state defying intervention no matter what?

Or let's take the disagreements about satellite phone encryption and protection given the possibility they were used to assassinate journalists. There are opposing views on this -- some believe that it's not cell phones but computer connections such as Skype which were to blame in the recent deadly attacks on reporters in Syria; others think that in fact journalists should make their communications obviously trackable and mappable as a kind of protection in visibility -- although the good will of the states doing the killing of journalists hardly seems something to rely on.

So again, what is "coding for human rights" -- making no encryption possible, or encryption that might inevitably be hacked? People want their own individual options open, and technologists could foreclose them with rigid notions of what constitutes "rights". (And I might add here that in these principles, as in other manifestos from Silicon Valley, the concept of encryption is used selectively, arbitrarily, and opportunistically. When it came time to attempt encryption of digital content, always and everywhere the geeks told us it “could not be done” due to the ever-present possibility of hacking, even with obfuscation or simply policies that strove for some minimal compliance. When it comes time to securing their own privacy and realms, suddenly encryption is a necessity and a technical feasibility. (Much like the readiness with which geeks concede that malware sites can be blocked that harm their own software and their own domains, but refuse to apply the same logic to blocking obvious piracy sites.)

So while in the Silicon Valley Principle No. 8, the companies were essentially urged not to do evil, in No. 13, the companies would insist on the platforms staying open no matter what, and deprive governments and law-enforcers of taking appropriate action to stop assault and destruction of property, i.e. evil. How could that possibly be justified? The makers of electric lights, cars, phones and faxes have never insisted on such right-of-way and eminent domain for their products, nor such a “flexible” notion of good and evil.

No. 10 completely abdicates responsibility and in fact departs from the sort of basic TOS protections that all ISPs have -- there are court-established limits to how much you can harass, stalk, and bully a person online and expect the ISP to shield you from the police. The recent case in New Jersey that found that a college room mate who used a web cam and Twitter to bully his fellow gay room mate on line, who committed suicide, is an example of the limits communities and courts are putting on social media technology.

No. 11 gives away the utopian notion of "a borderless virtual world" which in fact defies the sovereignty of states. But even the virtual world of Second Life in fact has to abide by the laws of the State of California on computer fraud, as some customers have found, and the platform providers are forced to ban gambling, pyramid schemes, child pornography simulation (because it is actionable in Europe), use of Nazi symbols and other restrictions because in fact they aren't in an autonomous realm and face real-life law-enforcement response if not credit company cancellation of services. The notion of the “borderless virtual world” that now directly assaults Congress and other liberal democratic institutions to get its way must be challenged.

The principles are permeated with a notion that not states or international treaty bodies or courts will decide human rights enforcement, but groups of "stakeholders" -- engineers, users, whoever. They don’t have status or credibility to set and monitor rights because they are selective about which rights they chose; they define them tendentiously to serve their own corporate interests; and they are not conceding whatsoever – they are revolutionaries, not conceding that sovereign states with checks and balances and parliaments and courts decide law – not them.

I call this "the tyranny of who shows up" and the authoritarianism of innovation. These are platforms without the most basic tools of democracy – to cite but one small example with great implications, they are deliberately, ideologically structured to keep out "no" votes -- you can "like" but not "dislike".