Wired State

Will Anybody Stop or Even Criticize Beth Noveck's "Wiki Government" Collectivism?

Today I'm going to run between two interesting conferences on my two favourite topics, Central Asia and Internet freedom, one at Carnegie and the other organized by tech@state called "Wiki Government" as part of the "Wikimania" conference (oh dear) -- a movement by some US government cadres to overthrow the institutions of government that they find don't suit their "progressive" agenda -- which I've been quite critical of.

Imagine, a two-day conference on "Wiki Government" (shudder) which is likely to get absolutely no critical coverage whatsoever, because likely only the craven tech press and evangelists like @digiphile will show up to cover it in great adulation.

"Wiki government' is not something anyone got to discuss democratically with some impartial facts in Congressional hearings or briefings from what I can tell (usually someone finds something that counters this sort of claim of mine of non-democracy around the wikitarians, so bring it, but I don't see it -- trying to criticize the wikinistas is like talking to a hair-dryer, as Scoble once said of me lol -- here are my 21 Theses Against Wikipedia).

No, it's just something that the enthusiasts hope to "ram through" with the network of officials in office, NGO groupies, lobbyists and think-tanks funded by Silicon Valley corporations (or Soros and other "progressives).

Even the New Republic, which has always been my preferred liberal publication, doesn't ever seem to have given all this wiki gov 2.0 nonsense a thrash-through. It still awaits its New Yorker treatment (finally the TED cult has gotten a New Yorker critique that helps explain the greatest thing wrong with it, almost in spite of the author's intent as he seems bowled over by the cult: that it is emotional, not scientific, and plays on emotions, and is not science-based).

So the gov 2.0 debates still play out in more arcane or sequestered places, or blogs like Tom Slee's -- he is a critic, or even mine although I don't spend too much time on it because it takes away from more urgent struggles and I think it will completely collapse of its own weight if Romney comes in, and even if we get Obama II, it will become a more visible target of failure and retired. It's expensive, all those consultants.

Crooked Timber, always interesting to read but tilting to the left with the "progressives, has had a series of posts: here, here, here, here including by Beth Noveck and John Wunderlich about whether or not in fact big data is a good thing and helping bring accountability to government or just a distraction from the need for "structural reforms". As I explain my post there, basically, open data is a Silicon Valley hustle and does have more than its share of collectivism injected into it, but it's of the "capitalism for me, communism for thee" school of Internet platforming.  Meanwhile, what Beth Noveck and Aaron Swartz want is far more radical -- Beth wants to "blow up Congress," for example and replace it with "collaborative democracy".

Anyone who has spent any time in Soviet studies or studying or working in Russia gets where all this comes from, and within seconds of posting a tweet about the awfulness of "collaborative democracy," Clay Amerikanets, an American living in Russia who used to slam my critiques of Russia when A Good Treaty egged him on two years ago, but maybe has seen the light about Putin, in fact immediately recognized this "collaborative" stuff as merely "democratic centralism" of the sort Gorbachev said he would "invigorate" -- but which, of course, was designed by Lenin and perfected by Stalin.

Remember "the cadres decide everything?"

Well, they still do, when Beth Noveck's in charge as she was at the Office of Science and Technology in the White House for two years, before her academic leave kicked in and caused her to return to university or face loss of tenure.

I first encountered Beth Noveck where I encountered all Internet prototype things -- in the virtual world of Second Life in 2005. I was horrified at her writings. I hadn't read anything so profoundly scary and disruptive of liberal democracy ever and began blogging in horror about these bad ideas that were merely Soviet collectivism dressed up with cyber-clothing and pretending they had no provenance in Bolshevism.

In 2009, when she came to power as part of the Obama transition team, I expressed more horror.

Of course, there are those who dislike my critique of technocommunism and use of this term and find me a crank. I don't care. I'll do anything to jump up and down and get attention to the loss of liberal democracy and freedom in my country -- and this is it.  At its most benign, it's stealth socialism like other Obama-isms --  which isn't so benign -- but at its worst, it's a communist-style cadre revolution that hopes to take power by overthrowing the executive branch of government in a technocratic coup, and achieving this through "rules in agencies" or whatever stealth technique they can use to take over. It should be stopped. It's not even being debated, however.

I was first tipped off to the horror of the collectivism with this concept for a virtual world's avatar -- and if you think it's exotic, think again, as you are now an avatar on Facebook and an avatar on Twitter, even if you aren't in Second Life, because you moved yourself online, didn't you?

Avatars are “public” characters, personalities designed to function in a public and social capacity. Avatars think and act as members of a community, rather than as private individuals. Having to construct an avatar in a virtual world not only allows me to see myself but it demands that I design a personage for interaction with others

Of course, avatars in fact are profoundly individual and free and possess all the rights they have offline in the online world, and although highly flawed with development-speak that threatens government intervention, the new Internet freedom resolution at the UN Human Rights Council at least stresses that much.

Not for Beth Noveck, Clay Shirky and others with this online collectivist ideology -- the group is more important and more special and more modern and cool now. "Demanding that I design a personage for interaction with others" when constrained by ethics-free and undemocratic code on commercial platforms is in fact a horror, not progress.

Beth Noveck (Lawlita Fassbinder in Second Life) opened up a simulator (an island) called Democracy Island in Second Life. There you can see her notion of invading the rules-making bodies and overthrowing those agencies to put in collectivism since it's much harder to do with Congress the democratic way (and she wants to blow up Congress).

The first thing that happened with Democracy Island is that it had a closed group -- you couldn't join it as you could many other groups in SL like "Thinkers," a huge discussion group active for a number of years. The next thing that happened is that Democracy Island became physically closed, subject to the whims of the devs and the managers -- basically Beth got tired of its inability to attract the "masses" and lots of old-media style press coverage and went on to other things, leaving it to students. It ended, as one of the students I befriended told me, with dragon furries (i.e. the alternative movement of humans who like to role-play as animals online) fornicating in the empty meadows of the unused Democracy pavillion... The Creative Commons licensing kiosk also gathered cobwebs (thank God!) after only about 30 uses...

People don't really like being collectivized online, although there are "thought leaders" ready to use the age-old techniques to manipulate the masses who turn them into flash-mobs. But that's not democracy, it's something more akin to anarchy or even Bolshevism, as usually only a few cadres who are "advanced" decide everything. (One thing that Parmy Olsen's book on Anonymous is good for is exposing this myth that Anonymous is some kind of lovely loose-knit democracy, when in fact it is a rigid, cult-like hierarchy, as I've always said.)

Clay Shirky is fascinated with "Here Comes Everybody" and groups and collectives -- until they don't work out, then he wants to engineer them. Beth is no different. In her stay at the White House, she tried to get various group collaborationist efforts going, sanitizing and controlling the debate by shutting off comments quickly on the moderated website -- finally completely shutting them down. But, as she wrote:

It is no longer an issue of whether we ought to give power to groups; they are taking it.

By that she means groups she likes, whether as extreme as Anonymous or Occupy Wall Street, whatever, they can be "managed".

If we take seriously the power of groups and the impact of technology on collective action, we ought to think about what it means to give them body as well as soul — to “incorporate” them.

And by that, she means simply organizing the filtrated-out cadres of "the likeminded" -- and the rest is history that we should be careful not to repeat in this country.

The first tip-off to how destructive this gang is of real democracy is that they remove the vote. There can't be any vote. Or there can't be any "no vote". There has to be "liquid democracy" type of coded software that frog-marches people into "constructive" or "collaborative" discussions. So watch when the up and down secret ballot on a vote disappears, and the coders insist that it has to be removed because it's "negative" or not "constructive".

And the first sign of victory on this here is in the appearance of a company called Zoomph which is going to launch today at tech@state. They're even giving a happy hour. Now what could be wrong with something that manages Twitter with a cool name like that, and is having a happy hour for geeks?!

Well, it's because they've solved the problem (that of course Metanomics and scripters in Second Life long ago solved) of how to appear cool and have real-time tweets with conference hashtags and running live-blogging and commenting on a conference, but get rid of the people you don't like. Get rid of those negative types! Get rid of the critiques!

So all that happy flow of people eating noodle salads in 140 character bites, but no "negative criticism".

Zoomph of course is mainly for business -- "find out what people are saying about your brand" they say.

But they're all about MANAGED DEMOCRACY in this:

Real-Time Twitter Conversation Moderator:
Approve or reject content you want displayed on your Tweet stream.

So they actually have not only a software suite like a Tweetdeck, but live people who will come and run your conference and filtrate out the people like me : )

It will be fascinating to see this in action -- comparing the hashtag at the conference on Twitter itself, and then see what they filtrate out on the big screen in the room.

Obviously, conference-controllers got really, really tired of being overthrown from the floor of their conferences by tweeters.

Open data doesn't really interest Beth Noveck, as she has bigger fish to fry and more radical fish:

But until we stop talking about data and start talking about complex and collaborative governance, we will fail to appreciate how open data can both protect consumers, lessen the burdens on entrepreneurs and catalyze more effective institutions.

From her collectivist perspective, she's right that data by itself isn't much unless you overthrow government itself and install communism. Liberating data, for someone like that, is only a half-way house and seems too bourgeois and social democratic when the real problem is how to have the avant-garde of the workers take over.

As always, it will be interesting to see a person whose views I find antithetical to real freedom and democracy in person. Of course, I saw her years ago at State of Play and in avatar form in Second Life and have seen the youtubes and the TEDs. But in real, is she effective? Do people debate her? Do they realize the problem with what she's pushing here?

Given how filtrated the Twitter feed is, I imagine the Q&A will be missing or very limited and only the fanboyz will get picked, and unfortunately I'll have to run back to the other conference and will be unlikely to be able to ask a question.

"Participatory budgeting" and "collaborative democracy" are collectivist clap-trap. Those of us in Soviet studies learned this 50 years ago if not 25 years ago and keep learning it. A new generation of people born long after the Cold War and even the collapse of the USSR don't get it, and will have to be shown the basics so that history doesn't repeat again. And I don't think that if it repeats in cyberspace instead of real life it is then necessarily farce and not tragedy.

The reason WikiLeaks occurred is not only because of the destructive power of Julian Assange and other anarchists and their foot-soldiers in Anonymous, but because our government and military institutions were already beginning to be weakened by unexamined wikitarianism.  There's a big difference between using modern new media and social media tools for useful collaboration and the cultist movement of "collaborative democracy" that is essentially the communist "democratic centralism".  Hopefully, some people will start understanding this better soon.

Here's what a colleague in Second Life had to say about this movement two years ago -- a thoughtful and smart person whom I have long debated who is mainly a social democrat herself, from Portugal:

The Wikipedia pages on "collaborative democracy" and "collaborative governance" are... strange. Some are just stubs pointing to Metagovernment, an ideological organisation that is set to destroy reprsentative democracy and replace it by collaborative governance. Others fail to show pro/con arguments and just discuss how absolutely wonderful collaborative governance is supposed to be, once it becomes widely implemented.

Since Prok [that's my avatar in SL] wrote this article [ on the Coming Collectivization] Beth Noveck was appointed as an official of the Obama administration, as advisor to the President.

And this is also coming to Second Life. Although I know that Prokofy will always label the Confederation of Democratic Simulators "Bolshevik collectivism" :) now we have a new threat to fight: the collaborative democrats have "invaded" in force, and, armed with the banners of Noveck, they're slowly getting rid of representative democracy (a model they claim to be "obsolete" and "outdated") and setting their own version of collaborative democracy instead. Of course it's at a tiny scale. But it shows the kind of strategies these people employ to subvert representative democracy by slowly employing "wikigovernment" instead, which has a huge acceptance among techies, lawyers, and political scientists...

Noveck and friends have few detractors. Prok's article is pretty much one of the few I ever read. Either the detractors are, indeed, few (I hardly imagine nobody has seen the consequences of this model!); or, thanks to wiktatorship, they have been silently removed. So I felt like publishing an article of my own:

http://cdsobserver.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/the-pitfalls-of-collaborative-democracy/

PS the "Confederation of Democratic Simulators" ended badly and is no more, from what I gather. They got invaded by those "collaborationists" and like Europeans in real life, also caught the bug of infatuation with Islamism and allowed the Caliphate sim to join them and they eventually forced out dissidents and took over, then collapsed.

Hearing Global Voices

Kevin Rothrock has fired off a response to my critical blog about his post on the troubling new Internet law.

He publishes a picture of the infamous "troll face" meme which should really apply to him, and of course then tries to discredit me as being a "troll" and even calls me "an hero of our tiem," referencing an even creepier Anonymous/4chan meme of "an hero" related to harassing parents of a teenager who committed suicide. Ugh. The creep factor is always high with this one.

His response rings the predictable chimes and uses the typical Bolshevik methods of arguing (some of which have come to be called "Saul Alinsky" methods).

o find a person or idea the target of the attack is affiliated with or likes, and show that they have in fact an idea or position antithetical to the target (hence, Ludmila Alexeyeva, one of my heroines in life, who signed a statement of concern about the proposed law which mentions the "dangers of SOPA" -- even though, of course, her main and longtime concern is the context of lack of the Russian judicial independence, not some failed anti-piracy legislation in the US).

o find some bad act or association that the target has praised or justified, and try to turn it against them (hence, the reference to Ilya Ponomaryev, who I said behaved honourably in the last year, defending Udaltsov, a communist and even Stalinist -- although of course he deserved to be defended, and by me included, on grounds of human rights principles).

o claim the person is uninformed or misread the text or is ignorant, rather than simply disagreeing (hence, a nerdy quibble about the timing of Ponomaryev's statement and what that signified, as he went from endorsing the handling of the issue by a non-governmental group to endorsing it being handled by a government agency).

o completely remain silent on the central point of my critique, the appalling callous and craven representation of the Bastrykin affair as something that wasn't the awful direct threat that it was, but something where by Bastrykin was "set up" by his enemies (!) or really the fault of the media or Novaya Gazeta's ostensibly timidity in accepting the patch-up. Disgraceful!

I replied, and kept a copy because it's the kind of thing he deletes.

Let's go over some more what Ponomaryev says, although this is really for my other blog, Minding Russia.

Я убеждён, что сегодня мы нашли очень хороший компромисс между государственным вмешательством и саморегулированием. Государственное вмешательство подразумевало бы, что будет создано некое специальное ведомство или существующее ведомство было бы наделено какими-то особыми полномочиями, для того чтобы вмешиваться в то, что происходит в компьютерной сети.

I'm convinced that today we have found a good compromise between state intervention and self-regulation. State intervention would mean that some special agency will be created or some existing agency will be endowed with some special powers in order to intervene with what is happening on the computer network.

So that tells us how Ponomaryev sees this -- as a compromise, but (for him) an acceptable one. Originally he endorsed having the non-governmental group handle it as somehow more acceptable to the "community"; he came around to a compromise of having a government agency do this, but if you read his speech, you see that he is trying to put this government agency's new tasks in the best possible light.

The problem with having more self-regulation that is still accountable under law, and not merely left totally to self-regulation, is that instantly the copyleftists and lawless anarchists say that this is creating "collective guilt" or "undue burden" on Internet service providers. Oh, nonsense. In the US, they already have this responsibility to comply with their own TOS which already outlaws piracy and child pornography. They just don't comply with their own TOS which is why certain forces them begin to lobby for a national law. The idea that providers can't be tasked with removals or they lose their safe harbour and common carrier status is also hugely hilarious now that Google is in the censorship and GlavLit business, receiving requests to take down items under the law or the TOS *and doing so*.

Ponomaryev then says something I would say any day of the week:

В Интернете нельзя делать ровно того же, что нельзя делать и в обычной жизни: в Интернете нельзя красть, в Интернете нельзя оскорблять друг друга, в Интернете нельзя распространять порнографию.

On the Internet, you can't do exactly the same things you can't do in ordinary life: you can't steal on the Internet; you can't insult another person on the Internet; you can't distribute pornography on the Internet.

Well, he says "insult," which is precisely one of those overbroad terms of the Russian Criminal Code that in the American context with have a far more narrow jurisprudence around it with the prosecution of libel. But no matter: the spirit of what he is saying is correct: the Internet is not special, and it falls under the law.

Then another context that's important to see -- Ponomaryev then addresses ISPs as colleagues in this venture, as collaborators or people he sees as peers which he has been trying to placate in this process:

«Если вы видите, что на вашей сети размещена та или иная информация, сами примите меры для того, чтобы этой информации не было. Если вы будете принимать эти меры, то тогда мы обязуемся как государство не применять никакие меры государственного регулирования, на вас не наезжать, вас не закрывать, вас не штрафовать» и так далее. Таким образом, мы вводим принцип саморегулирования отрасли.

If you see that on your n twork there is this or that information placed, then take measures so that that information disappears. If you take those measures, then we as the government pledge not to take any measures of state regulation, not to raid you, not to shut you down, not to fine you" and so on. Thus we introduce the principle of self-regulation of the industry.

He means "unlawful information". Well, if you only have 24 hours to respond to a notice, that's hardly fair and hardly self-regulation as it would be properly understood. Indeed, there will be problems with this law, in its milder or harsher form, *in the Russian judicial context* which isn't fair or just.

As for claiming I "didn't assail him for burying the story" of how the "hero-IT" folk of Russia protested this "for weeks," I did in fact denounce GV on Twitter for not covering this, several days ago, and waited to do a longer blog -- it's been on my to-do list for ages to call out this awful choice of the GV leadership to put a pro-Kremlin blogger in this position, but I just had other things to do.

I also want to note while I'm at it that the notion that the Internet will be "slowed down" by blocking DNS, etc. -- I just don't buy it. I've discussed these issues surrounding copyright, digital rights management, etc. etc. with engineers quite a bit over the years.

The fact is, all kinds of malware and other types of sites get blocked and get notices piled up on them not to enter them and get warnings on various internal geek organizations and so on. Blocking a site may slow down the viewing of that viewer, but the notion that somehow "the Internet" as a whole "slows down" because certain sites aren't put in search just doesn't wash. I find no credible defense of this mystical notion, and it comes only from those vehemently opposed to SOPA, not credible third parties.

It's important to read the non-hysterical commentary from real engineers on the DNS issue, such as from Richard Bennett. He was one of the few lone voices talking about how SOPA's mandate to block sites wouldn't "break the Internet". As he points out, it's not as if browsers are going to be "casting around" after they fail to resolve one blocked URL. And there are solutions for this as a reader puts in the comments that make it even more efficient.

Also note the point that one of the letter-signers is an inventor of the blocking-technology and really should know better.

 

Global Voices' "Nuanced" Coverage of the Troubling New Russian Internet Law

Otto von Bismarck, source of inspiration for Kevin Rothrock's A Good Treaty.

I was wondering when Global Voices, Rebecca MacKinnon, Kevin Rothrock, the Russian editor for Global Voices, Evgeny Morozov  and  their like-minded friends would get around to criticizing the latest threat to the Russian Internet, which they -- unlike even Russians themselves -- love to call "RuNet" as a separate Internet entity. Calling it that, whatever the technicalities, only helps to reify the notion of a Russian sovereign web walled off from the rest of the world. Russians don't speak of "RuNet" for the most part, they simply use the terms "Internet" taken from English or "set'" which means literally "net" in the Russian language. I'm not sure where this fetishization of the term "RuNet" comes from, but it is likely merely to show insiders' knowledge and be knowier-than-thou.

Anyway, finally MacKinnon has linked to a LiveJournal criticism on Twitter, and now today Rothrock has published an essay on Global Voices expressing criticism -- but of course not without accomplishing two other things that always and everywhere accompany his pro-Kremlin agenda: a) bashing Putin critics b) making a moral equivalency between Russia's wrongs and America's wrongs (or what are perceived as attempts at wrongs). It's really distasteful.

I was absolutely appalled when Kevin Rothrock was appointed to this position at GV -- a position ironically several colleagues told me I should apply for but which I utterly rejected, as I would never, ever work for Global Voices in its current form and with its current leadership and with its current Soros funding.

And that's because there is an awful lot to criticize in this operation which has more often been about promoting the American leftist "progressive" line and positions and artificially amplifying them in others abroad than it has really been about serving as an actual representation of diverse "voices" around the world.

Whose Voices?

There is such a halo around Global Voices, like there is around other liberal human rights groups like Human Rights Groups, and the funders are so all-powerful (Soros) that people are hesitant every to speak criticism out loud, especially those abroad who depend on the re-granting, connections to other foundations, invitations to conferences abroad that can give them per diem and consulting fees, and so on. Those that develop any criticism deal with it internally or keep it to themselves. If they do articulate it, they find they have Global Voices cadres chasing them for life and haranguing them speciously for "ideological incorrectness" -- such as David Keyes, head of a competing platform, cyberdissidents.org, has experienced now in debating Jillian York, previously at Berkman and a supporter of GV and now at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

And of course as I have found debating first Ethan Zuckerman, then Jillian York, then Rebecca MacKinnon and their friends at Global Voices, whatever good work they may do in actually campaigning for Internet freedom is overshadowed by what appears to be their main objective, which is to bringing to power over the Internet the "progressive" agenda in their narrow interpretation of it -- itself, troubling antithetical to diversity and pluralism and therefore freedom.

Global Voices was founded by MacKinnon, Zuckerman and friends as definitively a left-of-center platform to push for Internet freedom abroad -- and increasingly at home on the lines of the "progressive" agenda, although they are very different things. It had funding from even the US State Department, something that the founders try to downplay today. It was founded and resourced by the Berkman Center at Harvard, although that's another institutional relationship that the founders today claim they are now independent from. And of course it has Open Society Foundation (Soros) funding and funding from simular liberal establishment foundations.

Keyes soon ran into problems with Ethan and Jillian when he said that his organization would focus on the closed Middle Eastern societies and the worst problems in the Arab Internet and not address Israel and the Israel-Palestinian conflict, as so many already obsess about it, and the freedom of expression concerns there are simply not on the same scale as in MENA.

That's completely sound reasoning and in fact an application of universality -- if you apply universal standards, you find that some countries have governments that are so far more oppressive than others and with so little remedy that you chose to work on media issues in those countries if your resources are certainly more meager than the "progressive" funded outfits that can do all the Israel-bashing needed for everybody, surely.

It most certainly isn't a lack of even-handedness or a decision that somehow Israel or the US should be "exempt" from criticism -- they're obviously never exempt from criticism, serving in fact as the main targets of the "Internet freedom fighters" of the left. And they are free to make that focus should they chose.

Rather, it's that others are free to worry more about murder and jailing and disappearance and outright blockage of the Internet than the problem of teenagers not being able to download their illegal movie files faster.

And so they do, and then they are opened up to harassment from the "progressives" who feel, like new religious cult recruits, that unless they can bring around everyone to their thinking, their own thinking can't stand.

Then if you criticize them doing *that*, they claim you want to "censor" or "stifle" them. Sigh. It's really such an unconscionable racket, and that's why I keep calling it out, always and everywhere.

Cartoons Vs. Reality

Imagine, using your keynote speech, as Rebecca MacKinnon did, at the Dublin OSCE Conference on Internet Freedom, to complain about the "censorship" of "Ulysses" -- a comic book adaptation of Ulysses that Apple excluded because it had drawings of nude men -- an app that in fact was restored after consumer complaints in the normal process of such things -- while the OSCE space is a place where a government like Azerbaijan's regime can take pictures of a real woman, not a cartoon character, while she is having sex with a partner in a friend's apartment, and put them up on the web in order to intimidate her and incite hatred of her from the conservative society, especially religious believers, because she investigates corruption of this government and publishes it in her articles.

And I don't care, if on their well-funded circuit of conferences mainly among themselves without much debate, the Global Voices contingent can find colleagues in countries like Azerbaijan that they can set up to denounce SOPA as much as they denounce the vicious acts of their own government in a country where five journalists have been murdered in recent years. That's done all the time to make "common cause"  -- putting things on an emotional and moral par that they don't belong on -- especially by liberals in authoritarian countries that are eager to show they are part of the liberal world community and not merely one-sided in critiques of their own governments -- even though they are entitled to, just like Americans are.

A Good Blogger?

When Kevin Rothrock was put in charge of the Russia desk for Global Voices, I was absolutely appalled, as were other critics of the Kremlin. One privately answered my expression with outrage by agreeing it was appalling, but noting that it "matters not one wit". Why? Well, because Global Voices doesn't get that much attention. On Alexa, the useful Internet ratings site that geeks love to hate, it's rated at 18,512 internationally, and at about 40,000 in the US. That's not so high although in this niche field, respectable enough and higher than Reporters without Borders and other older groups with similar missions who maybe turned out not to be as web-connected and web savvy as this gang.

But why were we appalled? Well, because Kevin Rothrock has been running a pro-Kremlin website, first under a hidden pseudonym, then with revelation of his own name, for years. It's called A Good Treaty, and itused to  contain a mash-up picture of Putin in a helmet to illustrate the importance of Bismarck's quote, "The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia".

Anybody who has been in a treaty with Russia, however, has often found it broken or ignored, especially if related to human rights, and the objective of a "tolerable treaty with bad Russia" would probably be the more pragmatic goal. And even Rothrock has removed his old symbol of Putin adulation now that he's in this job.

But we all know that for ages, he not only ran gushingly pro-Putin material, he busily bashed the opposition who criticized Putin. I remember going many, many rounds with him in defense of Oleg Kashin, on grounds of principle (I don't know Kashin, I've only read his blogs). Kevin would lean of course more toward Navalny, of course, as a neo-opposition single-issue guy, but once he became more broadly oppositional directly to Putin, Rothrock was more inclined to dis him.

Rothrock then wasn't only content to push Putin and dump on dissidents, he would savagely harass anyone who criticizes Russia legitimately for anything. I had never heard of him until I found him as a regular ankle-biter on Twitter for every single critique of Russia that I would mount, especially related to the Jackson-Vanik and Magnitsky Act issues on my blog Minding Russia, a minor niche blog hardly in competition to his. It turns out that he launched and got readership for his blog while at the American Enterprise Institute, using a pseudonym. He worked with Leon Aron, and that made it doubly shocking that he was such a Kremlin-symp giving that AEI and Aron in particular were always critical of the Russian government.

In time, Kevin was not only out of AEI for reasons that are unclear (he wasn't fired or anything but he left), was on paternity leave and moved to another state I believe, but then revealed his real name. I wrote that I was shocked that he was at AEI with the kind of RealPolitik views about Russia he had, as that was not usually characteristic of AEI, but as I noted, pro-Kremlin thinking and sympathy for Putin and reluctance to ever criticize Russia's many human rights problem is increasingly found among commentators on the right and the conservative think-tanks and even some libertarians. I've tallied a lot of them in writing about the curious inability to endorse the Magnitsky List among so many Kremlinologists like Mark Adomanis of Forbes, a Twitter buddy of the creep Joshua Foust and in line with A Good Treaty. Rothrock only argued with me that it simply wasn't true that conservatives were every uncritical of Putin and on his blog, always threatens to block you if you don't agree with him on fake "civility" grounds.

Then, Rothrock seemed to reduce his awful hostility on Twitter for awhile -- I've seldom had someone harass me as nastily on Twitter to the point where I had to wonder who they worked for -- and then seemed to begin something of an about-face on his blog as the massive demonstrations  in Russia began to occur.

Nex, Rothrock focused more on providing deeply fact-heavy (or seemingly fact-heavy) pieces with lots of fine print about the various opposition leaders so that he could acquire a reputation as the "go-to-guy" on the Russian blogosphere, but then he was always at least subtly pro-Putin in the end. It was creepy.

Meanwhile, all during the period of these massive demonstrations and arrests and first media freedom surges and then backlashes, Global Voices was not reprinting any Russian bloggers or covering anything particularly critical, but letting a recent college grad who worked there simply publish round-ups that you could get from the New York Times or Radio Liberty anyway. I was once again appalled that here the biggest blogging explosion in Russia's recent history was underway, and the "premiere blogging platform" for those "global voices" was simply having an American round them up and not displaying any of them as is. What happened to those "voices," eh?

Then a few months ago, along comes Kevin Rothrock, having first whited out his Putin graphic on his blog, second, laid low during the election and demonstrations without blogging much at all, or only blogging long factological pieces, and is appointed to this job.

And the very first thing he did in this job is run one of his cunning pieces in which he purported to be reporting on a negative phenomenon that involved vetting NGOs more for their foreign contacts,  and the Ministry of Justice's publication of groups that had ostensibly passed their test on their website, but then deliberately exposed a civic group promoting Andrei Sakharov and another group as not on the MoJ list because they had not submitted reports -- as if that meant anything (it doesn't). I saw what you did there, Kevin.

I haven't followed what Rothrock has been up to since, simply because it just doesn't seem that compelling and important even in the Twitter-verse.

But I had to wonder when Global Voices was going to speak up about the increasing threat to the Russian Internet, and I posted a note saying that a few days ago on Twitter.

Threat to Russian Internet Only a Hypothetical

Sure enough, we now have Kevin Rothrock's coverage of the latest threat to the Russian Internet, but not without the known pro-Kremlin barbs that always accompany these efforts, so that the external wrapping remains for the GV gang to claim they are doing the right thing, but the real agenda is accomplished anyway.

First, there's the question mark of the headline. We all know that if this were about America, there wouldnt' be any question. Make denunciations first, then ask questions later.

It seems fairly obvious that this law *is* a threat, as the respected journalist Andrei Babitsky noted because a) the wording is overbroad and b) this is Russia where there is no rule of law or independent judiciary -- see the cases of Magnitsky and Khodorkovsky and hundreds more.

As I've always pointed out, just as "the Internet" should not be separated from the rest of human enterprise in a country with its organic institutions -- it is not special or that different -- so "Internet law" can't be torn from its judicial context in the real world.

These kind of laws represent a real threat in Russia or China or Iran because they are in the hands of bad-faith governments without free media or independent courts. That's why there isn't any fair moral equivalency of laws against piracy or child pornography in the US, where there *is* a free press and adversarial defense and an independent judiciary and remedies that are very weak or don't exist in other countries.

Moral Equivalency

Most Internet Freedom fighters never seem to meet a law against piracy or child pornography that they like and think doesn't chill freedom of speech, and as I keep repeating, the world actually awaits some real jurisprudence from some real national court, particularly US court, or international body, that would really prove that laws against piracy really do harm freedom of expression. So far I simply do not see that they do in the US or the EU, except as a matter of hysterical edge-casing and hypothesis. The edge-cases chosen are all bad cases (dajaz1, for example, or Richard O'Dwyer) that don't prove their point whatsoever.

So predictably, Rothrock focuses on the alleged "similarities" between SOPA and this Russian law, even though there aren't any -- SOPA doesn't make any "collective guilt" of web site owners or Internet service providers, that's ridiculous. It has definitions and procedures and remedies that in fact prevent any such thing and which are evidently not present in the Russian law. Web site owners aren't "presumed guilty" and "face having their entire website closed down" over some infringing content as the SOPA critics claim.

In fact, SOPA never passed, but such actions are only rarely taken under existing law but in fact follow numerous notices of infringement over time, adequate warnings and remedies, and in fact are handled by court orders and lawsuits as MegaUpload is being handled.

By sharp context, the Russian law provides only 24 hours for a response, has no judicial procedure for the shut-down, and takes place in a context where anything in the criminal code, including concepts antithetical to human rights such as the current anti-extremism law, could be grounds for a shutdown and in fact have been in the past for pages, groups, blogs, etc.

So it's hardly any moral equivalency or comparison with the US at all -- that's ridiculous.

A Good Liberal

Then Rothrock bashes Ilya Ponomarev, who is a member of A Just Russia, a party hardly any more guilty than A Just Treaty of wishing to cooperate with the Russian government for pragmatic reasons, and in fact a loyalist party that has become more oppositional from the experience of having their heads cracked by the police in rallies. Ponomarev chairs the Duma committee on the Internet and is involved in Skolkovo, the ill-conceived "Silicon Valley" of Russia, which of course  has earned him bashing as insincere from veteran independent journalists like Masha Gessen.

Even so, Ponomarev in fact has comported himself entirely honourably in the last year as he has been at the forefront of protesting election fraud and the crackdown on demonstrations, and has personally gone to the jailhouses to see if arrestees like Udaltsov are going to be let out and has travelled to other cities where anti-Putin demonstrations and crackdowns have taken place.

To be sure, Ilya is more practical than the more utopian opposition leaders -- and it does take all kinds to make a movement inside and outside of institutions. While others having been endlessly blogging and chanting slogans in the streets, Ponomarev has been busy trying to get the Duma, the non-democratic Russian parliament, to perform an official investigation of election fraud. That's ok to do, even with the constraints, because in the end, it will be more compelling. You have to try, and create the record.

Perhaps much of what Ponomarev does is futile in the Duma, with all its ghastly nationalist and xenophobic and oppressive tendencies, but it's important some people attempt to work constructively, even if the notion of "constructive criticism" is not one I personally endorse, nor do I feel that any social movement or individual has to limit themselves, ever, in any situation, to being "constructive" -- it's wrong.

As Rothrock acknowledges in his blog, Ponomarev tried to get the function of "blacklisting" the groups at least in the hands of an independent NGO that might have more credibility than Roskomnadzor, which is partly the heir of the Soviet-era GlavLit state censorship agency.

Well, with a name like "The League for Internet Safety," I don't know how much good-faith this group would have had in handling this, but at least it might be more open to reason from other civil society groupes.

But Ponomarev said he believed the law was "a very good compromise between government intervention and self-regulation" -- and maybe it was in the Russian context. But of course, what Rothrock wants to snicker at here is the idea that any liberal Russian opposition leader do anything that seems to counter the Western "progressive" agenda because if he does, he's a hypocrite -- hence the prefacing of this paragraph by Rothrock with the snide "Readers might experience a minor shock..." to hear Ponomarev is doing this.

Oh, knock it off, Rothrock, the real "minor shock" is that you scrubbed out your Putin graphic, but we can still see it in the wayback...

Law Likely to Curb the Russian Internet

Well, as with other things in Russia, like the "war on terrorism" and the law on anti-extremism, we'll get to see in practice if things that Western liberal democracies either don't put on the books or don't enforce the way they do put on the books and do enforce in Russia in fact lead to human rights abuses.

And history suggests that they will, as liberal dissidents and human rights activists covering things like violence in the North Caucasus or attacks on the media or corruption and fraud will be likely to face more harassment with these Internet laws than the purported targets of pirates and pedophiles, but who knows, even Russia, notorious for giving safe haven to pirates and pedophiles and serving as a source of a lot of the child pornography, piracy, and cyber-attacks in the world, might do a little better in combating these ills.

Meanwhile, Mission Accomplished at Global Voices. The real problem -- the Kremlin -- merely gets a question mark. It is not exposed as the real engine of the problem. Instead, the "real problem" is in fact a liberal MP in Russia who cares about the Internet and human rights and innovation who was trying to make the best of a bad bargain. The "real problem" is that the US has a law, SOPA, it didn't pass. The "real problem" isn't Putin and his administration, from whence this all ensues, but another A Just Russia deputy who says "nobody but pedophiles and drug lords has anything to fear from this law.”

Rothrock even completes this misleading propaganda by making it seem as if there is "really" a fight between the presidential staff and the prime minister's government, you know, Putin=hardliner, Medvedev=liberal, you know? That old chestnut.

"Medvedev's Minister of Communications and Mass Media, Nikolai Nikiforov, tweeted [ru] this morning that the law in its current form is problematic," Rothrock tells us earnestly -- as if that's going to matter one whit.

A Real Chilling Threat on a Journalist

Rothrock's column is filled with cunning and manipulative stuff like this -- and I just don't have the time to expose it all. But take a look at his odious coverage of the Bastrykin affair -- and the "questions" he feel must be raised (!) about a naked terrorizing of a journalist, whatever the patching up after public outrage and international concern -- a threat that doesn't go away:

Was this controversy engineered or fabricated by Bastrykin's enemies within the establishment to weaken the Investigative Committee and empower some other branch of the security services — perhaps its historical rival, the General Prosecutor? Does Novaya Gazeta's eagerness to settle the dispute with Bastrykin indicate that Muratov panicked and betrayed Russia's ‘independent' press? Was Khinshtein a schemer or just another pawn in all this? The answers to such questions either depend on one's political beliefs, or simply do not exist today in any persuasive form. A more poignant question is perhaps: will anyone remember this story in a year? What about in five-and-a-half, when Putin's current presidential term is nearing its end?

Imagine thinking that when the head of the Federal Investigative Committee himself, personally, takes a journalist out to the woods and threatens him, and is publicized accurately as having done so, that this is merely a "plot by his enemies". Insane!

The "forest meme" is one deeply embedded into the East European consciousness. Many is the time that this method has been used on journalists and other activists and dissidents, over and over. (Of course it goes way back to the days of partisans and wars).

I can remember personally working on such cases in Belarus and Russia, and in at least one case, the journalist was found dead (Oleg Bebenin, who had this method used on him years ago before he was then found hanged in 2010). Novaya Gazeta, of course, has had its journalists killed, so it's not just panic.

Khinshtein, a journalist who has been criticized of his handling of this affair,  has only been interested in what advances his own career; I recall him from the 1990s -- I had one particularly unsettling personal experience with him. That's Russian journalism for you, it's not for the faint-hearted. Rothrock is hardly any different.

There isn't anything that "depends on political beliefs" about a state-delivered threat like this whatsoever. It's appalling in every way, shape, or form and if it occurred in a Western country would be grounds for dismissal and a permanent scandal for the press. Imagine, if Eric Holder were to take Glenn Greenwald out into the forest and threaten him with assassination. It's inconcievable! Eric Holder has saturation critical coverage in the media and faces even attempts to remove him from office over allegations of misconduct. Hey, Russia doesn't work like that, kids.

That this incident led to some papering over in Russia where murderous threats are all too common and all too real isn't surprising, but sad. (I wonder if the presence of an American delegation headed by DAS Tom Melia for human rights talks with the Russian-American commission also had some affect on the outcome of this awful affair.)

Yet making it seem somehow a dubious matter or not what it is all about -- a naked power strike on the media by Putin's people -- is outrageous. An organization claiming to defend bloggers and free speech and Internet freedom shouldn't be hawking such horrid pro-Kremlin outrages, but then, maybe it's better if they are open about what they are so we can avoid them.

 

Global Voices' "Nuanced" Coverage of the Troubling New Russian Internet Law

Otto von Bismarck, source of inspiration for Kevin Rothrock's A Good Treaty.

I was wondering when Global Voices, Rebecca MacKinnon, Kevin Rothrock, the Russian editor for Global Voices, Evgeny Morozov  and  their like-minded friends would get around to criticizing the latest threat to the Russian Internet, which they -- unlike even Russians themselves -- love to call "RuNet" as a separate Internet entity. Calling it that, whatever the technicalities, only helps to reify the notion of a Russian sovereign web walled off from the rest of the world. Russians don't speak of "RuNet" for the most part, they simply use the terms "Internet" taken from English or "set'" which means literally "net" in the Russian language. I'm not sure why there is this fetishization of the term "RuNet" but it is likely merely to show insiders' knowledge and be knowier-than-thou.

Anyway, finally MacKinnon has linked to a LiveJournal criticism on Twitter, and now today Rothrock has published an essay on Global Voices expressing criticism -- but of course not without accomplishing two other things that always and everywhere accompany his pro-Kremlin agenda: a) bashing Putin critics b) making a moral equivalency between Russia's wrongs and America's wrongs (or what are perceived as attempts at wrongs). It's really distasteful.

I was absolutely appalled when Kevin Rothrock was appointed to this position at GV -- a position ironically several colleagues told me I should apply for but which I utterly rejected, as I would never, ever work for Global Voices in its current form and with its current leadership and with its current Soros funding.

And that's because there is an awful lot to criticize in this operation which has more often been about promoting the American leftist "progressive" line and positions and artificially amplifying them in others abroad than it has really been about serving as an actual representation of diverse "voices" around the world.

Whose Voices?

There is such a halo around Global Voices, like there is around other liberal human rights groups like Human Rights Groups, and the funders are so all-powerful (Soros) that people are hesitant every to speak criticism out loud, especially those abroad who depend on the re-granting, connections to other foundations, invitations to conferences abroad that can give them per diem and consulting fees, and so on. Those that develop any criticism deal with it internally or keep it to themselves. If they do articulate it, they find they have Global Voices cadres chasing them for life and haranguing them speciously for "ideological incorrectness" -- such as David Keyes, head of a competing platform, cyberdissidents.org, has experienced now in debating Jillian York, previously at Berkman and a supporter of GV and now at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

And of course as I have found debating first Ethan Zuckerman, then Jillian York, then Rebecca MacKinnon and their friends at Global Voices, whatever good work they may do in actually campaigning for Internet freedom is overshadowed by what appears to be their main objective, which is to bringing to power over the Internet the "progressive" agenda in their narrow interpretation of it -- itself, troubling antithetical to diversity and pluralism and therefore freedom.

Global Voices was founded by MacKinnon, Zuckerman and friends as definitively a left-of-center platform to push for Internet freedom abroad -- and increasingly at home on the lines of the "progressive" agenda, although they are very different things. It had funding from even the US State Department, something that the founders try to downplay today. It was founded and resourced by the Berkman Center at Harvard, although that's another institutional relationship that the founders today claim they are now independent from. And of course it has Open Society Foundation (Soros) funding and funding from simular liberal establishment foundations.

Keyes soon ran into problems with Ethan and Jillian when he said that his organization would focus on the closed Middle Eastern societies and the worst problems in the Arab Internet and not address Israel and the Israel-Palestinian conflict, as so many already obsess about it, and the freedom of expression concerns there are simply not on the same scale as in MENA.

That's completely sound reasoning and in fact an application of universality -- if you apply universal standards, you find that some countries have governments that are so far more oppressive than others and with so little remedy that you chose to work on media issues in those countries if your resources are certainly more meager than the "progressive" funded outfits that can do all the Israel-bashing needed for everybody, surely.

It most certainly isn't a lack of even-handedness or a decision that somehow Israel or the US should be "exempt" from criticism -- they're obviously never exempt from criticism, serving in fact as the main targets of the "Internet freedom fighters" of the left. And they are free to make that focus should they chose.

Rather, it's that others are free to worry more about murder and jailing and disappearance and outright blockage of the Internet than the problem of teenagers not being able to download their illegal movie files faster.

And so they do, and then they are opened up to harassment from the "progressives" who feel, like new religious cult recruits, that unless they can bring around everyone to their thinking, their own thinking can't stand.

Then if you criticize them doing *that*, they claim you want to "censor" or "stifle" them. Sigh. It's really such an unconscionable racket, and that's why I keep calling it out, always and everywhere.

Cartoons Vs. Reality

Imagine, using your keynote speech, as Rebecca MacKinnon did, at the Dublin OSCE Conference on Internet Freedom, to complain about the "censorship" of "Ulysses" -- a comic book adaptation of Ulysses that Apple excluded because it had drawings of nude men -- an app that in fact was restored after consumer complaints in the normal process of such things -- while the OSCE space is a place where a government like Azerbaijan's regime can take pictures of a real woman, not a cartoon character, while she is having sex with a partner in a friend's apartment, and put them up on the web in order to intimidate her and incite hatred of her from the conservative society, especially religious believers, because she investigates corruption of this government and publishes it in her articles.

And I don't care, if on their well-funded circuit of conferences mainly among themselves without much debate, the Global Voices contingent can find colleagues in countries like Azerbaijan that they can set up to denounce SOPA as much as they denounce the vicious acts of their own government in a country where five journalists have been murdered in recent years. That's done all the time to make "common cause"  -- putting things on an emotional and moral par that they don't belong on -- especially by liberals in authoritarian countries that are eager to show they are part of the liberal world community and not merely one-sided in critiques of their own governments -- even though they are entitled to, just like Americans are.

A Good Blogger?

When Kevin Rothrock was put in charge of the Russia desk for Global Voices, I was absolutely appalled, as were other critics of the Kremlin. One privately answered my expression with outrage by agreeing it was appalling, but noting that it "matters not one wit". Why? Well, because Global Voices doesn't get that much attention. On Alexa, the useful Internet ratings site that geeks love to hate, it's rated at 18,512 internationally, and at about 40,000 in the US. That's not so high although in this niche field, respectable enough and higher than Reporters without Borders and other older groups with similar missions who maybe turned out not to be as web-connected and web savvy as this gang.

But why were we appalled? Well, because Kevin Rothrock has been running a pro-Kremlin website, first under a hidden pseudonym, then with revelation of his own name, for years. It's called A Good Treaty, and itused to  contain a mash-up picture of Putin in a helmet to illustrate the importance of Bismarck's quote, "The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia".

Anybody who has been in a treaty with Russia, however, has often found it broken or ignored, especially if related to human rights, and the objective of a "tolerable treaty with bad Russia" would probably be the more pragmatic goal. And even Rothrock has removed his old symbol of Putin adulation now that he's in this job.

But we all know that for ages, he not only ran gushingly pro-Putin material, he busily bashed the opposition who criticized Putin. I remember going many, many rounds with him in defense of Oleg Kashin, on grounds of principle (I don't know Kashin, I've only read his blogs). Kevin would lean of course more toward Navalny, of course, as a neo-opposition single-issue guy, but once he became more broadly oppositional directly to Putin, Rothrock was more inclined to dis him.

Rothrock then wasn't only content to push Putin and dump on dissidents, he would savagely harass anyone who criticizes Russia legitimately for anything. I had never heard of him until I found him as a regular ankle-biter on Twitter for every single critique of Russia that I would mount, especially related to the Jackson-Vanik and Magnitsky Act issues on my blog Minding Russia, a minor niche blog hardly in competition to his. It turns out that he launched and got readership for his blog while at the American Enterprise Institute, using a pseudonym. He worked with Leon Aron, and that made it doubly shocking that he was such a Kremlin-symp giving that AEI and Aron in particular were always critical of the Russian government.

In time, Kevin was not only out of AEI for reasons that are unclear (he wasn't fired or anything but he left), was on paternity leave and moved to another state I believe, but then revealed his real name. I wrote that I was shocked that he was at AEI with the kind of RealPolitik views about Russia he had, as that was not usually characteristic of AEI, but as I noted, pro-Kremlin thinking and sympathy for Putin and reluctance to ever criticize Russia's many human rights problem is increasingly found among commentators on the right and the conservative think-tanks and even some libertarians. I've tallied a lot of them in writing about the curious inability to endorse the Magnitsky List among so many Kremlinologists like Mark Adomanis of Forbes, a Twitter buddy of the creep Joshua Foust and in line with A Good Treaty. Rothrock only argued with me that it simply wasn't true that conservatives were every uncritical of Putin and on his blog, always threatens to block you if you don't agree with him on fake "civility" grounds.

Then, Rothrock seemed to reduce his awful hostility on Twitter for awhile -- I've seldom had someone harass me as nastily on Twitter to the point where I had to wonder who they worked for -- and then seemed to begin something of an about-face on his blog as the massive demonstrations  in Russia began to occur.

Nex, Rothrock focused more on providing deeply fact-heavy (or seemingly fact-heavy) pieces with lots of fine print about the various opposition leaders so that he could acquire a reputation as the "go-to-guy" on the Russian blogosphere, but then he was always at least subtly pro-Putin in the end. It was creepy.

Meanwhile, all during the period of these massive demonstrations and arrests and first media freedom surges and then backlashes, Global Voices was not reprinting any Russian bloggers or covering anything particularly critical, but letting a recent college grad who worked there simply publish round-ups that you could get from the New York Times or Radio Liberty anyway. I was once again appalled that here the biggest blogging explosion in Russia's recent history was underway, and the "premiere blogging platform" for those "global voices" was simply having an American round them up and not displaying any of them as is. What happened to those "voices," eh?

Then a few months ago, along comes Kevin Rothrock, having first whited out his Putin graphic on his blog, second, laid low during the election and demonstrations without blogging much at all, or only blogging long factological pieces, and is appointed to this job.

And the very first thing he did in this job is run one of his cunning pieces in which he purported to be reporting on a negative phenomenon that involved vetting NGOs more for their foreign contacts,  and the Ministry of Justice's publication of groups that had ostensibly passed their test on their website, but then exposing deliberately a civic group promoting Andrei Sakharov and another group as not on the MoJ list -- as if that meant anything (it doesn't). I saw what you did there, Kevin.

I haven't followed what Rothrock has been up to since, simply because it just doesn't seem that compelling and important even in the Twitter-verse.

But I had to wonder when Global Voices was going to speak up about the increasing threat to the Russian Internet, and I posted a note saying that a few days ago on Twitter.

Threat to Russian Internet Only a Hypothetical

Sure enough, we now have Kevin Rothrock's coverage of the latest threat to the Russian Internet, but not without the known pro-Kremlin barbs that always accompany these efforts, so that the external wrapping remains for the GV gang to claim they are doing the right thing, but the real agenda is accomplished anyway.

First, there's the question mark of the headline. We all know that if this were about America, there wouldnt' be any question. Make denunciations first, then ask questions later.

It seems fairly obvious that this law *is* a threat, as the respected journalist Andrei Babitsky noted because a) the wording is overbroad and b) this is Russia where there is no rule of law or independent judiciary -- see the cases of Magnitsky and Khodorkovsky and hundreds more.

As I've always pointed out, just as "the Internet" should not be separated from the rest of human enterprise in a country with its organic institutions -- it is not special or that different -- so "Internet law" can't be torn from its judicial context in the real world.

These kind of laws represent a real threat in Russia or China or Iran because they are in the hands of bad-faith governments without free media or independent courts. That's why there isn't any fair moral equivalency of laws against piracy or child pornography in the US, where there *is* a free press and adversarial defense and an independent judiciary and remedies that are very weak or don't exist in other countries.

Moral Equivalency

Most Internet Freedom fighters never seem to meet a law against piracy or child pornography that they like and think doesn't chill freedom of speech, and as I keep repeating, the world actually awaits some real jurisprudence from some real national court, particularly US court, or international body, that would really prove that laws against piracy really do harm freedom of expression. So far I simply do not see that they do in the US or the EU, except as a matter of hysterical edge-casing and hypothesis. The edge-cases chosen are all bad cases (dajaz1, for example, or Richard O'Dwyer) that don't prove their point whatsoever.

So predictably, Rothrock focuses on the alleged "similarities" between SOPA and this Russian law, even though there aren't any -- SOPA doesn't make any "collective guilt" of web site owners or Internet service providers, that's ridiculous. It has definitions and procedures and remedies that in fact prevent any such thing and which are evidently not present in the Russian law. Web site owners aren't "presumed guilty" and "face having their entire website closed down" over some infringing content as the SOPA critics claim.

In fact, SOPA never passed, but such actions are only rarely taken under existing law but in fact follow numerous notices of infringement over time, adequate warnings and remedies, and in fact are handled by court orders and lawsuits as MegaUpload is being handled.

By sharp context, the Russian law provides only 24 hours for a response, has no judicial procedure for the shut-down, and takes place in a context where anything in the criminal code, including concepts antithetical to human rights such as the current anti-extremism law, could be grounds for a shutdown and in fact have been in the past for pages, groups, blogs, etc.

So it's hardly any moral equivalency or comparison with the US at all -- that's ridiculous.

A Good Liberal

Then Rothrock bashes Ilya Ponomaryov, who is a member of A Just Russia, a party hardly any more guilty than A Just Treaty of wishing to cooperate with the Russian government for pragmatic reasons, and in fact a loyalist party that has become more oppositional from the experience of having their heads cracked by the police in rallies. Ponomaryov chairs the Duma committee on the Internet and is involved in Skolkovo, the ill-conceived "Silicon Valley" of Russia, which of course  has earned him bashing as insincere from veteran independent journalists like Masha Gessen.

Even so, Ponomaryov in fact has comported himself entirely honourably in the last year as he has been at the forefront of protesting election fraud and the crackdown on demonstrations, and has personally gone to the jailhouses to see if arrestees like Udaltsov are going to be let out and has travelled to other cities where anti-Putin demonstrations and crackdowns have taken place.

To be sure, Ilya is more practical than the more utopian opposition leaders -- and it does take all kinds to make a movement inside and outside of institutions. While others having been endlessly blogging and chanting slogans in the streets, Ponomaryov has been busy trying to get the Duma, the non-democratic Russian parliament, to perform an official investigation of election fraud. That's ok to do, even with the constraints, because in the end, it will be more compelling. You have to try, and create the record.

Perhaps much of what Ponomaryov does is futile in the Duma, with all its ghastly nationalist and xenophobic and oppressive tendencies, but it's important some people attempt to work constructively, even if the notion of "constructive criticism" is not one I personally endorse, nor do I feel that any social movement or individual has to limit themselves, ever, in any situation, to being "constructive" -- it's wrong.

As Rothrock acknowledges in his blog, Ponomaryov tried to get the function of "blacklisting" the groups at least in the hands of an independent NGO that might have more credibility than Roskomnadzor, which is partly the heir of the Soviet-era GlavLit state censorship agency.

Well, with a name like "The League for Internet Safety," I don't know how much good-faith this group would have had in handling this, but at least it might be more open to reason from other civil society groupes.

But Ponomaryov said he believed the law was "a very good compromise between government intervention and self-regulation" -- and maybe it was in the Russian context. But of course, what Rothrock wants to snicker at here is the idea that any liberal Russian opposition leader do anything that seems to counter the Western "progressive" agenda because if he does, he's a hypocrite -- hence the prefacing of this paragraph by Rothrock with the snide "Readers might experience a minor shock..." to hear Ponomaryov is doing this.

Oh, knock it off, Rothrock, the real "minor shock" is that you scrubbed out your Putin graphic, but we can still see it in the wayback...

Law Likely to Curb the Russian Internet

Well, as with other things in Russia, like the "war on terrorism" and the law on anti-extremism, we'll get to see in practice if things that Western liberal democracies either don't put on the books or don't enforce the way they do put on the books and do enforce in Russia in fact lead to human rights abuses.

And history suggests that they will, as liberal dissidents and human rights activists covering things like violence in the North Caucasus or attacks on the media or corruption and fraud will be likely to face more harassment with these Internet laws than the purported targets of pirates and pedophiles, but who knows, even Russia, notorious for giving safe haven to pirates and pedophiles and serving as a source of a lot of the child pornography, piracy, and cyber-attacks in the world, might do a little better in combating these ills.

Meanwhile, Mission Accomplished at Global Voices. The real problem -- the Kremlin -- merely gets a question mark. It is not exposed as the real engine of the problem. Instead, the "real problem" is in fact a liberal MP in Russia who cares about the Internet and human rights and innovation who was trying to make the best of a bad bargain. The "real problem" is that the US has a law, SOPA, it didn't pass. The "real problem" isn't Putin and his administration, from whence this all ensues, but another A Just Russia deputy who says "nobody but pedophiles and drug lords has anything to fear from this law.”

Rothrock even completes this misleading propaganda by making it seem as if there is "really" a fight between the presidential staff and the prime minister's government, you know, Putin=hardliner, Medvedev=liberal, you know? That old chestnut.

"Medvedev's Minister of Communications and Mass Media, Nikolai Nikiforov, tweeted [ru] this morning that the law in its current form is problematic," Rothrock tells us earnestly -- as if that's going to matter one whit.

A Real Chilling Threat on a Journalist

Rothrock's column is filled with cunning and manipulative stuff like this -- and I just don't have the time to expose it all. But take a look at his odious coverage of the Bastrykin affair -- and the "questions" he feel must be raised (!) about a naked terrorizing of a journalist, whatever the patching up after public outrage and international concern -- a threat that doesn't go away:

Was this controversy engineered or fabricated by Bastrykin's enemies within the establishment to weaken the Investigative Committee and empower some other branch of the security services — perhaps its historical rival, the General Prosecutor? Does Novaya Gazeta's eagerness to settle the dispute with Bastrykin indicate that Muratov panicked and betrayed Russia's ‘independent' press? Was Khinshtein a schemer or just another pawn in all this? The answers to such questions either depend on one's political beliefs, or simply do not exist today in any persuasive form. A more poignant question is perhaps: will anyone remember this story in a year? What about in five-and-a-half, when Putin's current presidential term is nearing its end?

Imagine thinking that when the head of the Federal Investigative Committee himself, personally, takes a journalist out to the woods and threatens him, and is publicized accurately as having done so, that this is merely a "plot by his enemies". Insane!

The "forest meme" is one deeply embedded into the East European consciousness. Many is the time that this method has been used on journalists and other activists and dissidents, over and over. (Of course it goes way back to the days of partisans and wars).

I can remember personally working on such cases in Belarus and Russia, and in at least one case, the journalist was found dead (Oleg Bebenin, who had this method used on him years ago before he was then found hanged in 2010). Novaya Gazeta, of course, has had its journalists killed, so it's not just panic.

Khinshtein, a journalist who has been criticized of his handling of this affair,  has only been interested in what advances his own career; I recall him from the 1990s -- I had one particularly unsettling personal experience with him. That's Russian journalism for you, it's not for the faint-hearted. Rothrock is hardly any different.

There isn't anything that "depends on political beliefs" about a state-delivered threat like this whatsoever. It's appalling in every way, shape, or form and if it occurred in a Western country would be grounds for dismissal and a permanent scandal for the press. Imagine, if Eric Holder were to take Glenn Greenwald out into the forest and threaten him with assassination. It's inconcievable! Eric Holder has saturation critical coverage in the media and faces even attempts to remove him from office over allegations of misconduct. Hey, Russia doesn't work like that, kids.

That this incident led to some papering over in Russia where murderous threats are all too common and all too real isn't surprising, but sad. (I wonder if the presence of an American delegation headed by DAS Tom Melia for human rights talks with the Russian-American commission also had some affect on the outcome of this awful affair.)

Yet making it seem somehow a dubious matter or not what it is all about -- a naked power strike on the media by Putin's people -- is outrageous. An organization claiming to defend bloggers and free speech and Internet freedom shouldn't be hawking such horrid pro-Kremlin outrages, but then, maybe it's better if they are open about what they are so we can avoid them.

 

Maureen Dowd is a Bigot and Ominously Fails to Accept Religious Freedom

I marvel at at all the ruckus around a group of liberal and "progressive" nuns who are now being reprimanded by the Pope, and the furor and outrage kicked up by the liberal media and lefty blogosphere.

Look, religious organizations get to decide what their rules, beliefs, theologies, and rituals are. That's what religious *freedom* is all about.

Freedom of religion or belief is freedom to believe or *not* to believe. We have that freedom very richly and robustly protected in the US, and it's now being violated in fact by President Obama with this gambit to force Catholic institutions to buy health insurance to cover birth control and abortion inducers -- when in fact the individuals who require these relatively inexpensive goods have other ways to get them (Planned Parenthood, a federally-funded agency all its own).

There's really a creepy media crusade going on lately against the Catholic Church that is really unwarranted.

If these nuns do not like the teachings of the church, or the way they are promulgated by the current Pope, they can exit the church and be welcomed by the Episcopalians, which has many of the same elements of the Catholic liturgy but more liberal beliefs on everything from birth control to LGBT rights and even gay clergy. Or some other church that more suits their beliefs. They are not required to be Catholics.

The Catholic Church has a core set of beliefs and tenets. They're not to everybody's liking in the modern world. They don't have to be. They do not violate any law and are the principles this church wishes to live by and which many of the faithful live by or aspire to live by. They get to do that in a free country that values freedom of religion. The Catholic Church is not a state religion or a theocracy and is not in a position to prevent any gay person from living their lives or getting married, or preventing anyone from using birth control or having an abortion or engaging in premarital sex or masturbation. The Church doesn't even have control over its own flock, let alone the public at large. Why all the outrage? The Church takes moral positions. You are free to ignore them or follow them.

Could your fury have to do with some deep inner sense of guilt, or perhaps you suspect there is some truth in the moral absolutes prescribed by the holy?

If not, why are you ranting all the time on G+?

The theories of celibacy, monogramy, marriage as a sacrament, the dignity of the human being  seem strange in the modern world which basically wants maximum freedom for hedonism. The Catholic tradition stresses the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman as a spiritual concept that grows out of a notion of marriage emulating Jesus. The idea of this sacrament is perhaps not so easy to understand if you have not grown up with it, but there's a concept of intimacy, privacy, dedication, selflessnes -- a kind of refined energy, if you will -- inside a marriage which is believed to be terribly disrupted by everything from unfaithfulness to premarital sex to masturbation. That's the belief. Deal with it. It serves some people and they live by it; you are not required to.

Indeed, the Church would be better off if its leaders and practitioners got more in touch with the sacredness of marriage they believe in and merely lived it and served as examples, proving this truth by example rather than by admonishment.

Nowadays the average totally liberated individual weaned on Masters and Johnson or Our Bodies, Our Selves finds it outrageous that any authority would attempt to ban or demonize masturbation. What sort of cramped and puritanical creature are they? But the Catholic belief, like other religious traditions that discourage masturbation, perceives the sex act as special, sacred, blessed within marriage only between a couple and a damage to that special relationship if it takes place. The argument that Dowd makes that masturbation is actually beneficial to relationships sounds odd to those who see it as a selfish dissipation and failure of commitment and communication with a trusted partner -- it's like Savage's notion that adultery actually saves marriage -- another modern notion that the Catholic tradition would reject outright as in fact disruptive of the special nature of marriage.

Don't like this belief? You are not required to believe it or remain in this church. You can hoot and holler and mock people that you see as creepy old men with sexual hangups, but that's not how the people inside this belief system see these beliefs, and they won't be changing them for your benefit, or for the benefit of feminist nuns who have been caught up in the zeitgeist of the age.

Maybe lots of people will leave the Catholic Church. Or maybe a new Pope will come in and be less harsh and abrasive. But the fact is, these set of beliefs, as offensive as many find them, especially regarding intolerance of gays, are beliefs that the Catholic clergy and some Catholics are not going to cast off merely because you find them inconvenient or repulsive. They may find you the same way. I don't share these strict beliefs myself, but I concede that the Catholic Church gets to have them in a free world.  But it seems no longer, as even Catholic officials in the Obama Administration, all kinds of secular leaders, groups, movements, bloggers and New York Times columnists feel it is their moral duty to change other people's beliefs and get them to be different. Why?!

They are like the classic new recruits to a cult who can't seem to advance in their own belief system without recruiting others immediately -- often as a spiritual task of necessity! -- and who must demonize and disassociate themselves from the non-believers. All too common!

Most Catholics I know are tolerant of birth control and gays and even more nowadays tolerate premarital sex and at times even abortion. They just don't make a big deal out of these issues and focus more on their private spirituality, the social life and social action of their particular church, and leave it at that. They do not feel served by Maureen Down hollering at them to be more cool; she hectors them way more than their parish priest, you know?

There's a certain brand of Catholic public figure these days that seem to believe they have to go overboard fighting aspects of the Catholic Church they don't like, publicly, vigorously, defiantly. Why? Why don't they just leave? Nothing holds them. Truly. When enough leave, either the Church will change or they will make another church -- and that's ok. It's good to have many paths to the truth because no one can access the truth wholly in our imperfect existence. Indeed, that is the catholic approach. The Church, if it is indeed one and true, will survive.

I've found Maureen Dowd particularly loathsome in this role for years. I'll never forget, many years ago, when she called the tradition of the Kiss of Peace (actually a handshake of the people around you in the pews) at Catholic Mass "a hootenanny". That was simply uncalled for.  If she is a "recovering Catholic," as such people sarcastically call themselves, why doesn't she recover, already? Some people find it a joy to shake hands with their neighbours every Sunday. Why is that a "hootenanny"?! What's *wrong* with her?!

Now, she's really gone over the top today. She's taken up the cause of the nuns, and never once entertained the question that I implore people to consider: if these nuns do not like the reprimands they are getting, if they don't like the discipline and the strictness of theory and doctrine that they should be dedicated to as "brides of Christ," then should should break their vows and leave. They will not be the first or the last. Let them charge over to the Episcopalians or start a new non-profit of do-gooding women and look for funders from sympathetic Catholics and non-Catholics who will surely appreciate them. Let them break with Rome. But don't let them and their cheerleaders expect to overthrow Rome. There isn't any need for it.

A world in which the politically-correct flashmob incited by the New York Times can force a religious leader to change his views isn't a world that's free, and not a world I want to live in. If the New York Times readers need liberal and even hedonistic beliefs to feel comfortable with, let them go to whatever place of worship suits them and leave others alone. Truly, there has to be freedom and choice.

MoDo then indulges in another nasty practice that is all too common these days -- she brings up the pedophile priest issue to help accentuate her beef against the Pope's disciplining of the nuns, although it really is an unrelated subject. Does Dowd really think that if the Church changed its belief system tomorrow and accepted marriage for priests, abortion, premarital sex, gays, etc. that somehow, these cases wouldn't occur? Such cases can occur in any setting where grown-ups have power over children without supervision, especially developing teens, and abuses occur if there aren't preventions established -- look at the Sandusky case.

Yet like others angrily blasting the Church over the nun issue and what they see as the appalling refusal to bless masturbation as a boon are always quick to wield the weapon of the pedophile priest stories to clinch their argument with a blast about hypocrisy, instead of focusing on what really has to become the central issue: freedom. Freedom to believe, or not to believe. The Pope is free to discipline the members of his organization who took vows to uphold the religious beliefs and are given livelihoods by the Church and supported, and they are free to leave if they don't like it. They aren't in Iran or Afghanistan. They can do that without being hanged or beheaded, you know?

That's why invocation of terms like "jihad" are especially repulsive coming from Down. She's merely bigoted and hateful and unwilling to let people be free to have the beliefs they wish to have. It really is appalling coercion, using the bully pulpit of the powerful and influential New York Times.

And all you have to do to understand just how awful this is, is to flip the script of her columns and replace "Catholic" with "Jewish" or "Muslim". Can you imagine the uproad of she castigated the Orthodox Jewish or devout Muslim leaders and their beliefs in the same way -- for their beliefs on women or sex or anything?

She wouldn't dare. And therefore the Catholics -- as a mass of people -- have to serve as her modernist punching-bag, to be available -- because they don't fight back with massive boycotts or violent demonstrations or terrorism  -- to take the hits for the sake of modernity.

It is not pleasure that is a sin; it is sex that is outside the sanctity of marriage that is a sin in this belief system. Don't believe that? No one is holding a gun to your head to force you to live this belief out; the Pope is hardly in a position to police your bedroom.

If you don't agree with these doctrines and want to live in a belief system where any kind of pleasure is tolerated and even encouraged, then do so, Maureen Dowd. But it seems you can't without heckling and harassing and bullying your fellow Catholics. Stop it!

Arrogant Google Engineer Dreams up Self-Serving Geek Code of Conduct

Rebecca MacKinnon, who is known for her radical vision of the Internet, has posted a hideous "code of conduct" for coders on liberationtech, the closed list that anyone can join but which is not made public by the list owners and which has a high level of censorship "moderation".

There's a lot of this "bill of rights" and "duties and responsibilities" stuff going around these days, it reminds me of how kids go up in tree houses when they are 9 years old and draw up rules for their club, then change the rules the next day. But whenever you see a Google engineer strike up a pious pose like this one, watch out, your rights will be taken away from you.

Here are the following things wrong with this idea:

1. First, if it is truly to be liberal, democratic and transparent, a code of conduct should be the end of a process, not the beginning. Drafting it and putting it out to a list of your peers and posting it on G+ and calling it "transparent and open" is ridiculous. Of course it's not. It's merely the usual geeky sectarian operation. Perhaps if some existing organization of engineers, the IEEE or something, or Computer Scientists for Social Responsibility, or some organization with a board and membership, or even TechCrunch were to post something they've drafted, it might reach more people and have more seriousness. One wonders why the CSSR code already in existence wasn't good enough for this Google boss -- probably it wasn't collective and coercive enough.

But the best thing would be not to have such a code of conduct for ethics-free hackers, but apply existing national and international law to them and prosecute them when they break existing organic law.

2. The notion hinges on a concept of "the commons" which I really find repulsive. We can see it outlined in MacKinnon's book as well -- a utopian, socialistic space of coders and programmers and their chroniclers like MacKinnon herself, and some other politically-correct folk, who collectively, and collectivized, make up "the Internet" or "the commuuuuunity" as geeks always call it reverently. Their "commons" is like the Second Life sandbox where the furries go to script objects and decide whether to crash the servers or not, and if they crash them, claim this is a good deed that is testing the system and "helping" to make it stronger by bug, er, testing.

The commons is merely a computerized commons -- not people, not real people in their real communities in the real world, but the artificial coded commons with the code-cave culture reigning. That explains what comes next in the code of conduct:

3. It's now fashionable for people who in fact believe that "code is law" and not law is law to speak airly of the rights-based approach. In fact this term has a long and twisted history at the UN and in various NGOs and is being discarded by people who want to ensure that it isn't just a cover for the same old Marxist or authoritarian newspeak being dressed up with a sanctifying "rights" concept. The rights-based approach was originally designed and promulgated particularly by Kofi Annan in fact to take the UN out of its Soviet-style culture where agencies like UNDP would do "development," like put in giant dams because a communist party had ruled it, instead of finding out if that actually served people's livelihoods and wouldn't ruin their communities. Rights-based was an antidote to big ideological straightjackets that made development more accountable to universal civil and political rights and people's needs.

But in the Internet world, geeks are now wielding notions of "rights" as the Marxists at the UN once did, in order to get rid of commerce, profit-making, free enterprise, business, corporate rights as persons, etc. etc. That's all.

3. Max Senges claims code is "a product serving no other purpose than to benefit man in general, not merely some men".

But that's utter bullshit, even by the tekkie's lights. They are the first to claim that technology and code are inanimate, neutral, and "just tools". Of course, I always argue that in fact their culture is baked into it, when I wish it weren't. And here Senges as good as admits it by telling us that code in fact has a purpose welded into it -- or SHOULD have welded into it -- "to benefit man in general, not merely some men."

Why? Who gets to decide? Why this collective deciding this coercive thing? If someone wants to make code to help only some set of users, that's fine. They aren't required, in a business, or a non-profit, to be all things to all men. And why should code "serve humanity"? Most code in fact is entertaining and time-wasting. Is this serving humanity? Maybe not, but it's part of the free market and human freedom to do what they want online, as long as they don't break the law, and they need not be coerced into some agenda to create a "better world" or have to be "benefited". It's pious utopian bullshit and needs to be called out as such instantly.

4. Now listen to this particular arrogant outrage:

"I will seek to  understand the technological, economic, socio-cultural and ethical   dimensions and interdependencies of the online ecosystem, always aiming not   to hamper user-centered development and innovation but to further creative   destruction and open competition.

When I wrote about my theory of socialware (back in 2009 before there was a company by that name and no Google returns on that word) -- I meant that social media software  would in the future (and it can't get here soon enough!) cease to be generated exclusively by coders (and their VC backers) but would actually be rooted in existing communities that needed some web or electronic task done that they would then themselves very much participate in creating. That is, these users wouldn't be tacked on as an afterthought or as some condescending nice thing to do; the project would begin with them, not end with them; it would not happen without them. This was to counter the constant collectivism, engineering hegemony, and just plain bad ideas that harm people or are just stupid that are rampant in Internet "innovation".  Yes, in a world of free commerce, you will go on having all that arrogance and stupidity and can't stop it.

But what you can do is stake out some areas that in fact really, truly are user-centric -- and "user" as in "ordinary people like your Mom" -- not some power user in the devs' insiders' fan clubs and groups. Imagine a world in which regular, ordinary people decide what kind of software they need to live their lives and what its features are and how it should operate -- as philosophical and social and spiritual premises -- rather than coders. A world in which they really decide and really control this process. Such a world would require a revolution in the consciousnesses of coders -- or a dismissal of the existing class of coders and the creation of a completely different one. In conceiving of this dream, I was responding to the insanity of every beta-test that I had participated in, every outrageous open-source project that was anti-human, every geek-centric enterprise that ended in tears not because of PICNIC ("problem in chair, not in computer) but because of PANIC ("problem about nerd, not in computer".

This high-and-mighter coder Max Senges is no different -- he puts himself as a coder at the center of the universe, and then -- striking a noble and pious pose -- pledges to "help" users. No, we don't need your fake sacrifices, asshole. Especially when your goal is the hugely fake "creative destruction," where you are always disrupting and destroying somebody else, but it never touches you, eh? Just once, just once, if a piece of software bit you as hard on the ass as it has some of us, you might be chastened, you might be humbled! "Humility is endless."

Instead, Max sees himself surrounded by adoring fans, dispensing code magnanimously to the grateful masses.

As for competition, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not. Google is terrible at social, but it has to have social to compete with Facebook, when it should apply its talents to other things it does well and not be so greedy.

5. And here we see more collectivization -- such an ominous trend with all these people:

" collaboratively generate knowledge and to contribute to sound decision  making"

Knowledge isn't always generated collaboratively. Sometimes it's generated by a lone individual by himself or two partners in a proprietary company. That's ok. "Sound" decision making? Is that another code word for the sciencism approach, that only *some* decisions made by the collective are "good," and the individual free decisions of participants in the free market are bad? Sounds like it! Be gone!

6. "I will take critics seriously. Governance is about constructive  dialogue rather than representation."

Oh, baloney. You don't take critics seriously or you wouldn't be writing such self-centered poppycock. And who says criticism has to be "constructive"? Who gets to decide? Your gilded guild?! Governance is in fact about representatives -- congress people, parliamentarians. Representative democracy is a good thing; one person, one vote is a good thing. The notion of special collectives online that deliberate "constructively" is a fiction, a communist utopia that disguises the "thought leaders" and the "cadres who decide everything". They should not be deciding. Direct democracy is not democracy. Deliberation is not a vote. Democracy is rowdy, free, negative, with *gasp* even ad hominem attacks and swearing! Good! Let it be free, and keep your clutchy, controlling paws off it.

7. Note the creepy mafia-like omerta approach in no. 3. If there was a real human rights violation, why aren't you publicizing it or calling the police? If one of your little script kiddie friends DDOSes the Pentagon, you should call the FBI, not "solve it internally" or just have a "little talk" with your peers inside the group.

When Catholic arbishops followed this approach with pedophile priests, the world rightly condemned them. Why is this particular geek clergy given a pass in doing the same thing? We need more, not less, calling out of "misdeeds" of the whole ethics-free coding class -- and how!

8. And here we go again with the open-source cult -- no validation of code for commercial purposes, or proprietary code, but just this silly hippie utopianism:

"henever possible I will contribute to the commons and the public  domain. Subsequently I will always practice a strong bias towards open innovation and open standards."

I've got news for these goofs. The commons lives without them and beyond them and around them. The commons is living and diverse and the aggregate of every person or institution or government or group on the Internet of every type, not coders.

The role of the coder is merely to write instructions for machines. It's about at the level of a garage mechanic or a gas station attendant. And that's where we need to have these people realize they are: not running us, not running our "commons," not running our code without our full-fledged equal-rights involvement, regardless of our technical capacity, but serving the public like any other profession, something below doctor or lawyer, in fact.

There's more gobbledegook here -- "striving to understand the contextual agreement" -- Foucault, go home!

But it's clear that this entire construct serves only the ideology of technocommunism, privileging coders as the "avant-garde" of the working class and making a state where "democratic centralism" at best among the Party elite decides everything -- and we're to expect a favour has been done for us and our "commons".

Stop this now in its cradle!

Here's the full text as posted by MacKinnon:

By Max Senges who works for Google in Berlin, with a background in academia
and civil society.
Cheers,
Rebecca

http://maxsenges.com/?p=402
A hippocratic Oath for Techies & Policymakers
Posted on 2012/07/03 <http://maxsenges.com/?p=402> by
maxsenges<http://maxsenges.com/?author=3>
*Acknowledegements & Context*

When Rick Whitt and I were working on a paper on a framework for internet
policy that brings together complexity theory, endogenous economics and
common pool resource governance, I pondered once again about a proposal to
write and promote a hippocratic oath for internet techies and policy makers
in order to have them (including me) pledge to ?do no harm? to the potent
but also fragile internet ecosystem.

Below you find a code of conduct to which I feel I can subscribe. However
it is not and will never be final. Rather I plan to develop, add and
sharpen the code further. Please send comments and suggestions as to what
should be included and/or where it should be more precise.
**
Preamble

I recognize technology as a product of human effort, a product serving no
other purpose than to benefit man in general, not merely some men; man in
the totality of his humanity, encompassing all his manifold interests and
needs, not merely some one particular concem of his. Humanistically viewed,
technology is not an end in itself but a means to an end, the end being
determined by man. I hence promote a humanistic conception of technology in
which the desire to obtain maximum benefits is subordinated to the
obligation not to injure human beings or society at large.

Therefore the following principles shall marshal my mindset, decision
making and practices:
**
Code of Conduct

**
*1) Do no harm:*

  - I hold a humanistic conception of the internet and therefore will not
  simply compare costs and benefits of any particular code or practice, but
  follow a rights based approach as formulated in the 10 Internet Rights &
  Principles <http://irpcharter.org/campaign/>.
  - When assessing code, practices and policy proposals I will seek to
  understand the technological, economic, socio-cultural and ethical
  dimensions and interdependencies of the online ecosystem, always aiming not
  to hamper user-centered development and innovation but to further creative
  destruction and open competition.

*2) Participate in deliberation: *

  - Acknowledging that internet governance must be an open
  multi-stakeholder process, I will participate in both internal
  organisational discourse as well as in public deliberation with the aim to
  collaboratively generate knowledge and to contribute to sound decision
  making.
  - I will take critics seriously. Governance is about constructive
  dialogue rather than representation.

*3) Act responsibly  *

  - I will contribute to the internet governance discourse to the best of
  my knowledge. Should an obligation to an institution contradict my
  perspective I shall refrain from disagreeing publicly but will take the
  responsibility to argue my case internally.
  - Should I witness any error or misdeed (i.e. human rights violation) I
  shall first address and remedy it with the responsible individual or within
  the responsible organisation. However should it prove impossible to resolve
  a serious matter directly, I shall bring the case to prosecution.

*4) Promote openness & contribute to the commons*

  - Whenever possible I will contribute to the commons and the public
  domain. Subsequently I will always practice a strong bias towards open
  innovation and open standards.
  - I will always acknowledge from whom or from what text I have learned
  about a certain idea or concept and if appropriate include direct links (or
  other relevant bibliographic references)
  - I will be transparent about my social networks and motivation to
  choose collaboration partners.

*5) Respect privacy and confidentiality*

  - I will honor the contextual agreement regarding the use and sharing of
  information and data that I have access to. This means that I will use and
  discuss information only within a given institution (confidential) or
  between certain individuals (private). In order to do so I shall always
  strive to understand the contextual agreement and make it explicit when in
  doubt.
  - Given the strong socio-political and economic benefits of information
  and data that is in the commons (or public domain), I will strive to make
  transparent and public as many of the endeavors and practices I am involved
  in as possible.

**
*Acknowledegements*
I had been inspired to work on such a code of conduct some years back when
I read the excellent article ?A Humanistic Technology? (1965) Hyman
Rickover<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover>.
(The Preamble is a mashup from his text.) In the article he proposes that
given the power technocrats and engineers have over mankind they should
swear an hippocratic oath which binds them to an ethical code which is
placed above the interests of their employer or their self-interest.

Back then I chaired the Internet Rights and Principles (IRP) coalition and
the discussions about how to transpose human rights to the net and what
technical principles should be upheld was also aimed at the goal to find an
agreement on which to root internet governance (policies) and hence
practices. The group has since produced an excellent document ?10 Internet
Rights and Principles <http://irpcharter.org/campaign/>? which I naturally
use as fundament of this code of conduct.

During the development of these guiding principles I also consulted several
related texts such as ACM Code of Ethics and Professional
Conduct<http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics>andThe Ten
Commandments of Computer
Ethics<http://cpsr.org/issues/ethics/cei/>from the Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) website.

And of course I also happily followed Jeff Jarvis? proposal to President
Sarkozy (and all policy makers) to swear an hippocratic oath for the
internet back at the eG8 Summit in 2011. In fact it was when I listened to
his pretty good audio book ?Public Parts<http://buzzmachine.com/publicparts/>?
that I decided to take a shot at a prototype for such an oath as feels
right to me as professional policy entrepreneur.

Killing the Internet in Order to Save It: The Awful Free Press "Internet Freedom" Declaration

Save the Internet, a campaign of the so-called "non-partisan" Free Press, is using this stylized icon of an American eagle with a cell phone tower and an Internet network diagram in its claws to signify "freedom," but while a 501-c-3 organization supposedly engaged in education and not lobbying, its selectively focused only on stopping "bad bills like SOPA, PIPA and CISPA"

Save the Internet is an old socialist cause in new cyber clothing.

If you're tired of hearing about "technocommunists" from me, you can read it in an enlightening and accurate essay by Adam Thierer of Tech Liberation Front, who explains that one of the leaders of this campaign is none other than Robert McChesney, an avowed radical and socialist, who has a very definite and detailed vision for government and the economy -- and now the Internet. As Adam explains, with the more durable US Constitution and Bill of Rights, we actually have all we need to enjoy freedom in cyberpsace:

By contrast, if you subscribe to an alternative theory of rights that imagines there exists a litany of goodies to which we all possess an inalienable right, then you will likely be more sympathetic to efforts like the this new “Declaration of Internet Freedom” and “Digital Bill of Rights.” But that’s the problem I have with both documents.  The wonderful thing about the original Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights was that they didn’t create any expensive entitlements that required affirmative state action. Instead, they tightly bound government and curtailed its powers and left the people at liberty. By contrast, these new “Declaration of Internet Freedom” and “Digital Bill of Rights” contain all sorts of aspirational principles that could be construed as “positive rights” that require government to provide some sort of basic underlying service, or to affirmatively and aggressively regulate the information economy to protect some of these amorphous values.

Also involved in this campaign are the same crew from the Mitch Kapor-funded astro-turf outfits about which I've been writing forever -- lately here, in outlining their role in the anti-SOPA campaign.

Free Press prides itself on being "transparent," and you can even find links to its 990s, the forms they must return to the Internal Revenue Service as a non-profit organization. They don't mention WHO their funders are in their "about us" and other web site sections, and forgot (or it wasn't easy to find) the list of contributors of $10,000 or more that must accompany the 990s. But I knew that it's the Soros Foundation -- and this is a matter of public record in any event, just Google it. There's more in that vein that can be found -- "Save the Internet," far from the "bipartisan" campaign it feigns to be is a concoction of the "progressive left" -- the New American Foundation, home of cyber-freedom-fighter Rebecca MacKinnon who has a most decided radical vision of the Internet and the Free Press is basically another Electronic Frontier Foundation front.

By getting everything from Mozille and Cheezburger to Amnesty International to sign on to this seemingly innocuous platform, and spreading it around with the highly-read tech press so that every geek clicks on it twice, Save the Internet can create the impression of a "mass movement" -- something that of course socialists have always dreamed of since they first conceived of making a better world whether people wanted one by their lights or not.

And what it's achieved so far is now spawning a predictable reaction from the conservative libertarian right -- Ron Paul and Rand Paul have now targeted them in ways that also undermine the real Internet freedom cause, because now anyone who tries to criticize the socialists for re-introducing state control will be tarred with the brush of the loony Paul phenomenon (and I'll have more to say about that problem in another post).

Save the Internet pretends that Internet freedom "isn't a left or right issue" -- but of course it is, as it has to do with power, property, governance, and people, and different visions for social systems and how they are to be run.

STI pretends the proof of their "bi-partisan" nature is their "strange political bedfellows" like lefty Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has fought SOPA and fought cybersecurity measures and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) who has done exactly the same from the libertarian perspective -- these two extreme positions meet around the Internet and the utopian notions of "open" because it facilitates their drive for power.

Disingenuously, Save the Internet gets a beleaguered Egyptian blogger to morally equivocate the murder and oppression he faces in his own disrupted country with "troubling trends emerging in your own backyards" like...."network neutrality" and "draconian copyright" (!). And what sort of copyright isn't "draconian" for these guys, except maybe the few books of Cory Doctorow's that might still sell even if he doesn't give them away?

Using the stylized art work of the Infographic -- which has increasingly added a shrill note of Bolshevik-style propaganda to the web and dumbed down thought and debate -- Save the Internet has boiled its "theses" down into five principles"

Don't censor the Internet.

That sounds fine -- who can't get behind that? Except for these extremists, "censorship" can mean prosecuting piracy even legitimately. For them, "censorship" is removing links to pirate sites or prosecuting the owners of commercial pirate sites that earn hundreds of thousands of dollars hijacking TV streams unlawfully, such as is alleged in the case of Richard O'Dwyer, who the US wants to extradite from UK to "send a message" -- now that both SOPA and ACTA have failed in the crush of the Internet flashmobs.

We've also learned that "censorship" can mean merely enforcing rules of good taste or decency as a private corporation, as Apple does when it takes out nude pictures, or enforcing its own terms of service against hate speech and incitement of violence, which it does when it removes the "intifada" app.  Non-state actors don't commit censorship under the law; they aren't the actors or the enforcers of the First Amendment, and Supreme Court jurisprudence has ruled a number of times that corporations' own freedom of expression and freedom of association trump the notion that they have to supply freedom of expression to everyone at First-Amendment levels.

They don't. In a free market, there are varieties of levels, and the issue is that the *state* cannot stop a publisher of nude pictures or hate speech, not that the private company that doesn't wish to publish them has to be *forced* by "progressives" to publish them. Jurisprudence at the UN Human Rights Committee supports this interpretation as well.

Next, the freedom-fighters have demanded the socialist access -- "promote universal access to fast and affordable networks".

Who is going to do this and how they are going to pay for it all is left unstated -- typical for socialism. Sadly, this manifesto, that came out literally the same day as the UN resolution on Internet Freedom was being publicized, perfectly echoes the "development speak" of the troublesome paragraphs in that resolution:

3. Calls upon all States to promote and facilitate access to the internet and international cooperation aimed at the development of media and information and communications facilities in all countries;

Ah, Americans live large -- they want fast and affordable access not mere "facilitation" as they're offering at the more timid UN!

That this lefty manifesto conceived by socialists long ago and mooted now in a timed campaign is meant to echo the UN resolution is patently obvious, and the links in the networks with figures like Rebecca MacKinnon to both texts are on the record as well. Even so, we need to learn more about how this decision to include this identical text was developed at the State Department and by whom to understand what we might expect from Obama II in terms of more government interference in the Internet in the name of "freedom".

Next comes the coded and loaded term "openness" -- which is always and everywhere linked with promotion of open-source software with this crew.

Keep the Internet an open network where everyone is free to connect, communicate, write, read, watch, speak, listen, learn, create & innovate.

Say, what's missing? I'll tell you: freedom to come online and sell stuff. Freedom of commerce. Freedom of prosperity. Freedom for the profit motive to make and sell commodities or services. If you think "innovation" covers that, think again -- most of Silicon Valley's "innovations" are free, and paid for by venture capitalists or foundations like the Mozilla Foundation (Mitch Kapor again) or covered by ad clicks -- which aren't even included in the "openness" regime here cooked up by these "bi-partisan" socialists. How does Daryl Issa think the companies in his state of California are going to pay for everybody's Youtube???

Innovation, of course, is a loaded and coded term as well. It means anything that Google and other Silicon Valley companies want to do to advance their business, whether in fact it's a very tired old app based on scraping your data and reselling it to ad agencies to pitch you ads while you upload pictures of your cat, or whether it enables free accounts and uploads for free, hijacks content to sell against against, and makes IP holders chase after platform providers with DMCA takedown notices.

Protect the freedom to innovate and create without permission. Don't block new technologies and don't punish innovations for their users' actions.

"Creating without permission" is only one thing: abolishing copyright. The "permission" you need if you have a new innovative service like Pinterest is merely the right of the content "shared" by the customer. In many cases, the customers don't have rights to the content they upload. While in a small circle of friends it doesn't seem like a big deal, as the numbers grow larger and as the ads inevitably begin to be served, then it becomes a problem of rampant criminality, just as it was for Youtube, owned by Google, and Twitter and other networks.

"punish innovators for their users' actions" is merely a coded phrase for insistence on "safe harbour" status for content and "common carrier" status so that Google or other entities are not held liable for the content infringements or other crimes of their users.

Yet there's something really contradictory about all this. As we know from Google's faux Transparency Report, Google takes down millions of items every year at the behest of governments and corporations. It has terms of service that bar infringement and hate speech and so on. It responds unevenly and in fact non-transparently -- we don't know the criteria used in most cases. If Google really wasn't to blame for its users, it would do nothing and not bother to have a TOS. But it does, and it sporadically enforces it. Now especially that it is in the business of running its own social network, G+, where it has rules like "no pseudonyms", it can't go on arguing forever that it is a neutral entity that has no public responsibility for the online discussion environment created by its often aggressively anarchic and hateful users from among the Google engineer population in particular.

Then there's the finding that the "chilled innovation conjecture" is basically a fallacy.

Finally, having eliminated all private property protection by dismantling copyright, deliberately discouraging or even barring profitable commerce, and draining the state treasury to boot, the socialists at Save the Internet now want to somehow protect privacy -- trusting ethics-free coders and hackers:

Protect privacy and defend everyone's ability to control how their data and devices are used.

This sounds like a nice idea, but again, there is a fundamental contradiction: the very platforms that provide the existing Internet technocommunism -- a regime where everything is free and where we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us -- rely on a social bargain that involves you trading your private data for the freeness of the product. In fact, there's a savvy Internet meme that if you are not paying for something on the Internet, *you* are the product -- your data is being sold by the providers to various ad companies and marketers.

As for everyone controlling how their devices are used, this is an ongoing struggle, too. Geeks "jailbreak" phones that they think lock them into telecom services or other features that they think they shouldn't be locked into, regardless of the commercial agreements involved. Social media was supposed to be used for socializing, not stalking and planning terrorist attacks, yet it is -- we're supposed to endlessly supply to all users of technology the freedom to do whatever the hell they want, without any notion of the rule of law?

Of course, there are plenty of existing laws and Supreme Court rulings that work perfectly fine on what is in fact merely yet another human artifact for communication and transportation, but the Save-the-Internet gang recognizes no law in cyberspace. Courst do; that's how they could nevertheless find some way of punishing the room mate of a gay man who committed suicide after being stalked and outed with a webcam and Twitter.

Each and every one of these "Save the Internet" principles involves coercion and non-freedom that in fact will kill the free Internet as we know it now. A notion of censorship that commands private corporations to perform in politically-correct ways is an abrogation of their own freedoms. "promoting universal access" -- and even *fast* access! -- means government gets in the business of supplying a "utility" rather than getting out of the way and letting the market and free enterprise handle it as they have asically been handling it pretty well for the last 20 years. After all, the Internet isn't neutral utility like electricity that the society might wind up turning over to the Tennessee Valley Authority or other entities to supply; the Internet is a medium in which people live and move and have their being.

Insistence on only open-source software and refusal to concede the need for proprietary code and "walled gardens" (such as Facebook) means that only a certain socialist regime for Internet life is allowed, and others aren't free to *chose*.

Getting rid of copyright protection so that some people can "innovate" at the expense of others is merely the Bolshevik's "expropriate from the expropriators" updated for the cyber age. It's no more legitimate now in 2012 than it was in 1917, nearly a century ago. And these ideas are certainly not innovative, with that past-the-sell-by date.

Does the Internet Really Bring Development? And Whose Development?

I asked these little boys at the Dunkin' not even ready for kindergarten which they liked better, ice cream or i-pads, and they said "I-pad". (c) Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

As I've noted, the US has co-sponsored a resolution at the UN Human Rights Council regarding "Internet Freedom" that it is now trumpeting as an achievement against the forces of censorship and obstruction that come from authoritarian states like China or Russia or Iran or Syria.

Yet, disturbingly, the resolution, although mercifully short, contains not one, not two, but THREE references to "development" -- code word for state economic measures that can involve control of commerce and hence the heart of the Internet's success -- the big companies like Google and Facebook that helped thrived under the American free enterprise system and which foster mass usage of the Internet -- and the many individual and corporate entrepreneurs that make the web a place of vibrant commerce and livelihood for people.

One such reference to "development' in the UN context is a necessity -- ever since the West had to pay for a truce on "civil and political rights" versus "economic and social rights" at the UN international conference on human rights in Vienna in 1995 with conceding a "right to development," we've been stuck with this strange politicized portmanteau concept.

The Soviet Union was the main promoter of exclusive focus on economic and social rights which they didn't even do a good job of supplying to their hapless subjects. After the USSR fell, the Russian delegation at the UN was taken over by human rights leaders including ex-political prisoners Sergei Kovalev and Vyacheslav Bakhmin, and they insisted on promoting the integral nature of both sets of rights because the economic justice the Soviets claimed to provide was hollow without a free media, free trade unions, and many other exercises of freedom of expression and association to curb and prevent the state's abuses. The Vienna concluding document represented a consensus that economic and social as well as civil and political rights were integral to each other and both sets are needed.

Today, the "right to development" is still half-heartedly debated but a concept scolded even by some of its fans as just too amorphous and ineffective. The game at the UN continues -- Cuba and other socialist authoritarian states continue to insist on the primacy of economic rights; the US doesn't even recognize these concepts as "rights" even though it may do a better job than many states that do in supplying social goods like housing, education, and health care.

Yet even given the UN context, this resolution has three references to "development" -- and that's at least two too many. It's not necessary, and I'm not sure how it happened. As I know from following the HRC, US diplomats can be stubbornly protective of their achievements in this hostile atmosphere and always want to be seen as wresting victory from the jaws of compromise and defeat, not giving up principles. Even so, this resolution spells serious trouble that will come back to haunt us, and the US is now going to have to work hard to keep it out of the claws of forces far more radical than even the left-leaning Obama Administration lieutenants.

The resolution is passing at a time when new campaigners for Internet freedom, fresh from their success in defeating the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), incited by seasoned cadres of the anti-copyright movement funded by long-time open source software promoter Mitch Kapor have joined with an old long-time socialist media critic Robert McChesney to create a now Soros-funded Save the Internet Campaign where commerce is not even recognized as an Internet freedom. This "bill of rights" is more radical than the UN resolution, but some of the language dovetails and resonates -- and that's not accidental -- the people involved indeed overlap.

As I've been blogging for some time now, the entire effort to convert the anti-copyright and "pirate party" agenda into a "freedom of expression" banner is a concerted and careful "march through the institutions" that has been under way now for at least seven years. One by one, human rights organizations that should know better have been lobbied, pressured, and thrown on this issue. Electronic Frontier Foundation and other spinoffs have set about sanitizing the criminal aspects of first hacking, then piracy and demonized the legitimate prosecution of copyright infringement or efforts at cybersecurity as a "chill on free expression" -- without a single case and a single establishment of jurisprudence on this notion in any national court or international body.

It's all been premised on edge-cases and hysterical hypotheticals and the sheer overwhelming noise of the Internet flashmob -- with carefully planted Youtube videos that go viral and stunts like Tumbl putting up a fake ICE notice as if their entire site could be taken down by US marshals under SOPA. The anti-copyright campaign culminated with Wikipedia deciding to upset the millions of school-children who rely on it to do their homework nowadays by going dark in protest against a SOPA they claim outrageously could have shut them down. It was all calculated and cunning panic-mongering, as the bill was limited in scope and contained many obvious definitions and remedies that made the intent was to stop a few dozen large commercial pirate sites draining revenue from US content businesses -- not crush a teenager's Tumblr blog over a Youtube link.

Now that we see the bad-faith context in which "Internet development" can take place, what's the worst that can happen?

First of all, any liberal democratic government will rightfully have a "development" component outside of a socialist system that will involve simply funding public education and the common weal. I get all that, even if in fact many leftists don't. Despite the editorializing of the Nation, the liberal democratic state of America, even if under Bush, still funds health care, education, training and anti-poverty programs. The capitalist, non-socialist state of America funds many social goods that so-called socialist or communist regimes have never managed to provide, which is why immigrants continue to flock to this country and not Russia or China.

So any US administration, whether Republican or Democrat, can and should have some programs to provide free wireless, to expand broadband to poor regions, and to bring people into the digital age -- but it's legitimate and necessary to debate how much, how costly, and how widespread.

The question, as always, is who gets to run it, how democratic it really is, and who really develops.

Example: if the FCC mandates "interoperability" and "net neutrality" merely through a set of rules by fiat from the executive branch, it actually impacts the market adversely Here the courts rightly pushed back on the FCC and refused to allow radical reformists inspired by Timothy Wu to impose regulation of commerce as completely as they wished, particularly leaving out the high-growth area of mobile.

States are going to want to have control of education and infrastructure budgets quite rightly and decide whether they really need more broadband or enforced "neutrality" punishing corporations that have expenses providing scarce resources.

There is the larger question to be asked, however, as to whether "Internet development" really helps economies or individuals. It's now a received wisdom flogged by the "progressives" that the Internet "develops" countries by which they mean that it increases GDP, and even eradicates poverty and raises the status of women and minorities.

Does it? Not enough research has really been done on this topic, but that doesn't stop Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, on Google's much-hyped and controlled social network G+, from exclaiming:

Another reason for countries to embrace the Internet.. better finances, better economics, better growth: http://www.thenbells.com/2012/02/font-face-font-family-cambriap.html

I was right there to respond with the kind of critical comment that other other Google engineers simply remove from a forum like this because it doesn't fit with their views; Schmidt, through design or neglect, let it say:

You know, when you put up self-serving propagandistic messages like this, you are really skewing the picture. The Internet in fact accelerates and amplifies and depersonalizes and is in part responsible for the savings/loan and mortgage disaster in the US and the recession. The Internet takes away more jobs than it creates, and the lobbying group that publishes numbers that claim otherwise, with you on the board, is hardly credible when it does that (the fake "466,000 app jobs" claim).

The Internet has devastated lots of places as I can see just from my neighbourhood in Manhattan. The book stores like Borders; the video stores, killed by Netflix which in fact has less easy browsing and less innovative titles; the cafes and stores along side them; the movie theaters; the newspapers. All institutions gone; all jobs gone. If there is perhaps one more i-phone store, so what? That doesn't replace the jobs and industries and it's not necessarily true that we are "better off".

What you're not explaining is why Greece and Spain, which have the Internet, are broke, even having the Internet. If you answer is that they have less Internet than Germany or the UK that are better off, you aren't proving that there's a correlation.

Why I could call out Google's propagandizing here is because all throughout the month of May, after their resounding Internet victory in April against SOPA, Google propagandized about the supposed "creation of jobs" by the Internet and its "business models" (antithetical to copyright) precisely to respond to the continuing critique of Hollywood and other content creators that in fact the failure to curb piracy was harming jobs and revenue generation.

And even a cursory analysis of this Google spin as I did shows that they really can't make claims like "466,000 app jobs" -- and their own industry of social media, even taken together with all the companies like Twitter and Facebook, soaking wet, can't make even the fraction of the jobs that a one company like GM makes.

The Internet developed *some* parts of America; others, it left jobless, barren, and angry.

How about the rest of the world?

Did you know that India, the world's call center for all its many electronic gadgets, the source of numerous engineers who have come to our country as immigrants or temporary workers and added immense talent and richness to our start-up culture and the staffs of companies like Google, itself has an Internet penetration of only 8%. Here you have to speak not only of a brain drain, but an Internet penetration drain. Whose developing the Indian network while Indians develop everyone else's Internet? Says the Economist:

Internet users in India make up roughly 8% of the population, or just under 100m people. By contrast, China's internet penetration rate already stands at 36% percent of population; Brazil's is nudging 40%. Google expects the number of users in India to triple over the next three years.

Google gets involved in projects like this -- the provision this month of free wireless in the New York City subway is no different -- strictly out of self-interest. They need more people on line to use search and click on and buy ads; they need to scrape more data to serve the ads better.

Note that Internet penetration necessarily really means anything so specific and is in fact a really scientific established marker for good or bad development.

Example: let's take the EU's list of 27 countries and their rates of Internet penetration:

If we follow Eric's logic, Greece's Internet penetration of only 46.9 percent is a marker for poverty, dislocation, lack of opportunity, and a reason why it is now in a crisis, with socialist demonstrators marching in the streets and the rest of the EU challenged to bail it out from economic collapse.

Yet Bulgaria, which had a hard time fighting its way out of the socialist mire as a Soviet satellite and a tough road to EU succession, also has only nearly the same -- 48.8% Internet penetration -- and isn't in a crisis with communists in the streets. Maybe it learned its lessons from the communist era and now lives within its means? I don't know the answers to this question but it has to be asked -- Internet penetration becomes meaningless when you see all the other indicators of a country.

Or let's take France. Internet reformists in the US constantly whine about expensive telecoms who "thwart" innovation and "aren't like Europe" where people aren't locked into two-year plans. Yet France has only 77.2% Internet penetration, despite having socialism and state corporate telecoms. Italy has only 58.7%, far less than Estonia, which has a robust 77.5% despite its damaging Soviet past. What happened? Socialist Sweden has 92.9% -- and obviously all these different rates and levels have to do with lots of other factors -- how big the country is, what kind of geographic terrain it has, how large the population is, how educated the population is, how much the government invests in the Internet as a priority; how much the government gets out of the way and lets free enterprise do the job of establishing Internet capacity.

In fact, read some of the comments to Schmidt to get a more sophisticated view of what in fact is involved in "Internet development" which has as much to do with levels of both private and public education and start-up financing as it does some state-sponsored notion of "development" common at the UN.

Here's a startling one that makes mincemeat of this very common American "progressive" magical-thinking notion that mobile phones are going to lift Africans out of poverty. Look at what's in the way!

Dominic RichardsonFeb 29, 2012

+1

In South Africa we have companies stifling our innovation more then any kind of technological barriers. Our government owns a large stake (about 52%) in our monopolistic telecom provider "Telkom". Our local interconnect is more expensive to our ISP's then international bandwidth out of South Africa (consider that statement and then look how far away we are from Europe and the US). In fact the government has just classified "Broadband" as 386Kbps! Local Loop unbinding is currently being tackled by the larger ISPs but the regulators that are set up by government are effectively impotent.

Maybe the government should get out of the telecom business, despite all the UN prescriptions for "development"?

Then, of course, there's the intellectual side to all this, and the question of whether Internet use in fact actually leads to education, or better education, or more smart and better prepared citizens.

Just looking at the US, there are already significant signs that it most certainly does not.

Recently the New York Times ran an article about the "digital divide" titled "Wasting Time is New Divide in Digital Age in which Microsoft researcher danah boyd expresses concern (boyd -- who I very much remember from her days as a PhD student hanging with Second Life's Philip Rosedale at the after-party for the "State of Play" conferences at New York Law School -- lower-cases her name for various culty reasons):

But “access is not a panacea,” said Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft. “Not only does it not solve problems, it mirrors and magnifies existing problems we’ve been ignoring.”

Like other researchers and policy makers, Ms. Boyd said the initial push to close the digital divide did not anticipate how computers would be used for entertainment.

“We failed to account for this ahead of the curve,” she said.

I'll say!

The Times won't cater to boyd's naming tic, but I will; although I don't often agree with her, she got this right, in another piece:  "certain values get baked into technology". Boy, they sure do.

Background to US Co-Sponsored UN Resolution on Internet Freedom: the Rights Con

Ambassador Donahoe at a Press Briefing with the 2012 Internet Freedom Fellows. Photo by US Mission to the UN in Geneva, June 2012.

As I noted, the US co-sponsored a resolution at the UN Human Rights Council on Internet freedom which was unanimously passed by 47 members, including such Internet enemies as Russia, China, and Iran.

The US State Department is hyping it as a tremendous achievement for the Obama Administration, in getting this controversial body to pass a unanimous resolution -- over the objections of China, Cuba and other authoritarian states that control the Internet -- seemingly in support of a more free Internet (yet they will be back, and they will be back through those three paragraphs, look out). But precisely because it is a compromise exercise always at the UN, the resolution contains some troubling language that could well come back to haunt the US later, and -- again, particularly in the hostile UN context -- be seized upon by bad actors to thwart Internet freedom.

How did it come about that the US risked sponsoring this gambit in such a hostile environment, and now has compromised on some of its basic principles, i.e. not to allow the drive by socialist countries interested in privileging economic and social rights to trump the more endangered civil and political rights?

This exercise had help, and it wasn't just because Carl Bildt or State Department "Innovation" director Alec Ross are on Twitter with hundreds of thousands of followers.

DEVELOP, DEVELOP, DEVELOP -- BUT WHO DEVELOPS?

As I noted, Frank La Rue, the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, who is from Guatemala, has been working on this issue with US government and Soros help for some time, and brought the Third World perspective of "development" which tasks states with wealth distribution.

That socialist Sweden seized on the effort to negotiate a new Internet freedom resolution for its reasons makes sense -- as Foreign Minister Carl Bildt explains in an op-ed piece in The New York Times, he wants Internet freedom to be seen not as a Western-induced value that undermines Eastern and Southern states but which all states can enjoy for reasons of "development":

Beyond affirming that freedom of expression applies also to the Internet, the resolution also recognized the immense value the Internet has for global development and called on all states to facilitate and improve global access to it.

Such "facilitation and improvement" inevitably puts states back into the job of controlling the Internet, of course, as I've explained -- you have to hope that those "facilitators" are Swedes and not Cubans or Iranians.

Perhaps the resolution also removes the sting, for some, of Sweden's role in asking to extradite anarchist Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, back to Sweden from the UK to face questioniong on sexual offenses -- a move that some radicals paranoically believe is an act of collusion with the US ultimately to force extradition of Assange to face prosecution for WikiLeaks in the US and a supposed "Internet freedom crime" all its own. Of course, one wonders why this danger never ensued from the British government since 2010, since the UK also has extradition agreement with the US. Assange supporters never explain why the US didn't push the extradition with the British government to date, and why they'd be more likely to push it with Sweden -- it just doesn't make sense.

So how and why did the US get involved in promoting Internet freedom that was in fact actually doing just fine without their interference in many unexpected places?

NO NEW NORMS

As the media began to speak more and more of a "new" Internet right in the wake of Frank La Rue's statements and reports at the UN after his appointment, critics began to demand that the UN not add any new norms. The US was already wary of other efforts at the UN to control the Internet, such as a resolution sponsored by Russia and its allies at the UN General Assembly to establish "information security" -- which amounted letting states control information faucets.

By attempting to add any new special norms around the Internet, the door would be opened to having to re-negotiate the entire premise of freedom of expression itself with states that were decidedly hostile to it -- China, Russia, Iran, and others who are all in the Human Rights Council regardless of their own dismal human rights records.

The US had also taken the position of demanding that no new norms be set on a previous resolution that had threatened freedom of expression, a call to condemn "defamation of religions" which some members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation would use to prevent criticism of theocratic states and state religious leaders. The US successfully fought off that attempt in a resolution co-sponsored with Egypt on religious intolerance, which kept to norms in fact were decided by US Supreme Court Decisions -- only calls to "imminent violent incitement" could be criminalized. Groups like Human Rights First greeted the effort as skillful US diplomacy that avoided being coopted by enemies of free speech under the guise of working against discrimination -- yet the enormous efforts they go to "myth-busting" on their website let us know the real problems lurking in and around this resolution that will not go away.

Even so, with this victory under its belt, next, the US became caught up for various reason in promoting a Swedish-sponsored Internet freedom resolution at the UN Human Rights Council which contains a number of problematic features inviting state interference, as I wrote.

The backdrop for these negotiations, of course, is the Arab Spring, and the surge of expression that people in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and other countries began to enjoy through the use of new social media such as Twitter, Facebook and other local and glocal social networking sites. Those concerned to bring Internet resoultions to the UN felt they had the wind of the Arab Spring demonstrators at their backs, as they had succeeded in toppling dictators and bringing about social change. And as always, they thought they could boost their version of social change at home with internationalization of the issue.

Of course, the outcome of the Arab Spring is still uncertain and increasingly showing grave signs of oppression, not freedom. No matter -- the nature of the Arab regimes had changed at the UN, too, and they were less resistant to human rights resolutions than in the past.

But even before the stirrings of the Arab Spring, there was another development coming to pass  -- Barack Obama was elected president and his administration brought the US back into the UN Human Rights Council, which had been scorned as politicized and hijacked by the world's worst rights offenders as a forum to distract from their own records and obsess with the real or more often hyped wrongs of the US or Israel. Under the Bush Administration, the US had left the Council -- after suffering such indignities as losing one election to Austria, even when Austria was denounced by the other democracies of Europe for having elected Jorg Haider.

Amb. Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe, an Obama supporter and campaign contributor and bundler of $500,000, was rewarded for her Democratic Party loyalty to Obama with the appointment as ambassador to the HRC as the US rejoined the UN Human Rights Council. Donahoe is the wife of John Donahoe, president and CEO of e-bay, the online auction site. California -- Silicon Valley notabley -- provided most of the fund-raising for the Obama presidency.

The US team at the State Department working on international organizations wanted to co-sponsor this Internet freedom resolution for its reasons, which have to do with appearing positive and wishing to advance human rights in this very contentious body where awful things happen, such as states praising Sri Lanka for killing 40,000 civilians in putting down a terrorist rebellion. In a context where the US can have minimal effect when the rest of the members do little or nothing to protest the mass violations in Sudan or Iran, even as the microscopes are taken out to examine every offense by Israel in a special agenda item, US diplomats and internationalists want some positive achievements that they can show to conservatives like Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who would be just as happy to cut the entire budget for US involvement in troublesome bodies like the UN Human Rights Council because of their perceived ineffectiveness.

WHICH INTERNET FREEDOM?

Furthermore, the US official "progressives" in the Obama Administration hoped to accommodate a growing powerful movement of "Internet freedom fighters" made up of an amalgam of anarchists, leftists, open-source software cultists, start-up engineers and Silicon Valley technologists with business models on giant platforms with millions of users, whose success depends on avoiding prosecution for carrying copyrighted material unlawfully on their servers -- or indeed, encountering any friction at all in their rush to move us all online along with an "Internet of things". Some figures in these online movements, such as Rebecca MacKinnon and Evgeny Morozov, have been heavily critical of Secretary of State Clinton for her more moderate positions on Internet freedoms.

Under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the US has advanced a number of Internet freedom funding programs, activities, and resolutions and yet faced at times vicious domestic criticism for supposedly being "hypocritical" in promoting freedom of the Internet in Egypt or China but also accepting Congressional or US Trade Representative efforts to pursuing copyright enforcement and cybersecurity, inevitably seen as "chilling" on speech by "progressives" ( a term I'll always put in scare quotes because they are actually quite paleolithic on attitudes toward Russia and China and promoting outdated 1960s or 1980s Democratic Socialist of America agendas on a variety of domestic and foreign issues).

Amb. Donahoe seemed determined to strengthen the hand of the "progressives" and give this UN effort lift by bringing it out of the obscure processes of the UN in Geneva to an arena where she had a lot of connections and where it could get more visibility -- Silicon Valley.  And the agenda of the anarchists and opensourceniks and Google engineers didn't seem to trouble her, but only represented new "grassroots energy".

THE RIGHTS CON

Hence the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference (known as the Rights Con in more ways than one) where none other than John Perry Barlow presided, the grand-daddy of "information wants to be free", founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (which got its start trying to exonerate hackers who had committed cybercrimes) and himself the author of an Internet manifesto which I've countered and critiqued for years. Watch JPB on Youtube (he doesn't view intellectual property as property, especially in the Internet age), and you'll realize he recognizes NO copyright (except possibly if you were to filch unattributed one of his Grateful Dead lyrics!) EVER -- it's an outdated concept only putting a "chill" on "innovation".

So this gang -- which managed to draft for attendance Michael Posner, the Obama Administration's appointee to the office of Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights --  ambitiously set about drafting the Silicon Valley Principles -- principles which I've critiqued heavily as in fact not being rooted in any rights-based approach but in privileging technologists and their technology as the arbiters of freedom and privileging undemocratic decision-makers about technology. Access Now is one of the NGOs avidly pushing access to the Internet as "a human right" because it fits their agenda. Privately, I know that some staff in the Dept. of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor -- Posner's office -- didn't like the goofy direction this was going in, but they didn't publicly antagonize it at all, merely privately worked at cooperatively shaping it.

The process of promoting the more ambitious and lengthy "Silicon Valley Principles" went its course, but meanwhile, a shorter version of some of the same ideas, in concordance with the Swedish effort and Frank La Rue, was being worked up at the Human Rights Councils.

The Daily Caller exposed some of this effort as the usual "progressive" Soros-funded operation, but it makes it seem somehow lurid and conspiratorial and doesn't sufficiently challenge the ideas as distinct from the affiliation. In fact, there's nothing wrong with non-governmental organizations and think-tanks like the Open Society Institute working with UN officials to promote the human rights agenda, even paying for discussion meetings. It's done all the time, and by forces on the left as well as right, by NGOs and governments, and it's how things get done at the UN. The UN rightly responds to civil society -- the problem is merely in the war over who gets to be civil society at the UN. It's not a surprise and perfectly normal for the left-leaning cadres of the Obama Administration to seize upon this Internet cause as part of restoring US cooperation with the UN -- something I agree is a must in the modern world.

What is troublesome is that people supposedly devoted to "no new norms" and "fundamental human rights principles" deliberately put in three mentions of the "development" concept, even harness on the Internet to "accelerate" such development -- all code expressions for state involvement. What were they hoping to achieve?

Both NGOs and increasingly, Internet corporations, feel they have "ownership" or a "stake" in these issues, and they demand a "multi-stakeholder approach" so that not only states decide matters of rights that affect us all. There's some obvious pitfalls in this approach, of course, because some of these "multistakeholders" -- the IT corporations notably -- have never signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights or other international laws and are not recognizable subjects of treaties in any event. They might affirm this or that coalition statement carefully worded to avoid real accountability, but they are not going to start really putting teeth into human rights by beginning to practice due process right on their own servers -- in making sure, for example, that a man trying to gain lots of followers to get attention for his daughter's rare disease doesn't find his account banned by automatic processes detecting "spam" -- for which he was lucky only after persistence and getting old-media attention to reverse.

So the US is busy spinning its victory in the Internet freedom war now by simply remaining silent about the three "development" paragraphs in the resolution that could contain some very unpleasant demands for them to suddenly supply free broadband for everyone and have the state (in the form of the FCC) restrain companies from legitimately load-balancing demand by insisting on "net neutrality".

And of course, that's exactly how it will be used and that's exactly the plan by some of those demanding an "Internet freedom" agenda which is actually a socialist-style "social change agenda" -- like Google, they're confident that if smart people like themselves run the state, it won't do evil.

"INTERNET FREEDOM BEGINS AT HOME"

In promoting the Internet freedom agenda in Geneva last month as the prospect for the vote on the Internet resolution grew near, Amb. Donahue took the tactic of emphasizing US wrongs rather than international rights to soften up third-world objections. She presided over a panel with US-funded Internet fellows from all over the world with keynoter Rebecca MacKinnon, sponsored by the US mission to the UN through the State Department's Speakers' Bureau, who gave a talk called "Internet Freedom Begins at Home" based on a Foreign Policy article she published in April. As I've noted in my critique, that article incredibly found the US the "greatest" threat to the Internet in the world (!)  and didn't focus on killing of journalists in Syria or the kind of increasing controls put on the web by Russia or China, but obsessed about US legislation --  both SOPA (where Congress was flashmobbed and didn't even get to vote on the measure) and CISPA (a cybersecurity bill that unlike SOPA, has the support of Facebook and other Internet companies privately fed up with being hacked by Russia, China, Iran and others).  (I've called out MacKinnon before for her myopic views of Internet freedom in harness to the "progressive" agenda.)

Yet typical of the way these exercises are spun in different ways for different audiences, in a blog posting on state.gov, Amb. Donohoe makes no mention of the  perceived US ills or US legislation, but puts the focus more properly put again on the real menaces to the Internet like the Syrian government and the need to protect people like Dlshad Othman, a Syrian IT engineer and activist.

Perhaps other hands got involved in the editing as they would inevitably in any process at State, but it lets us know how this entire process is being handled -- signing bills that in fact mollify third-world objections to corporations and insist on government-controlled "development," that resonate particularly in the recession era by calling for restraint of capitalism and a greater role in "development" for states; holding sessions that bash the US more than the real enemies of the Internet abroad (MacKinnon was also invited with US support to the Dublin Conference on Internet Freedom last month); and then spinning it at home as merely a big affirmation of the fundamental freedom of expression we all support.

Indeed, the State Department's circular today on the accomplishments at the 20th session of the UN Human Rights Council has this to say about the Internet Freedom resolution -- and not a word about the thrice-mentioned "development" problem:

Internet Freedom: The United States was proud to work closely with the main sponsor, Sweden, and over 80 co-sponsors, including Brazil, Turkey, Nigeria, and Tunisia, to help unanimously pass a landmark resolution that underscores that all individuals are entitled to the same human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of expression, online as they are offline, and that all governments must protect those rights regardless of the medium. We will continue to work with our partners to address challenges to online freedom, and to ensure that human rights are protected in the public square of the 21st century.

Even as over at NPR, Donahoe goes back to invoking domestic legislation as a problem:

SYDELL: But Donahoe says it isn't just China or repressive Arab regimes that fear the Internet. She says even the United States sometimes struggles with its openness, whether it be the release of documents by WikiLeaks or downloading of illegal music files. What the new resolution does is open a conversation that's likely to take decades to resolve.

Er, the US "struggles" with openness when an anarchist group incites hackers to steal its classified cables? And just how does the administration plan now to combat piracy after pre-emptively nullifying any Congressional vote by announcing a veto, by having input to a rules process at the FCC? The idea that this might take "decades" overlooks the incredible speed at which the Internet itself amplifies and accelerates change, for good or bad.

My objection to this exercise is that it is not sufficiently democratic nor managed by the democratically-elected Congress or even a larger more diverse group of NGOs and think-tanks. It's essentially a product of the left-leaning international justice jet-set, the Soros-funded and other liberal-funded NGO and US official " gov 2.0" enthusiasts for the "progressive" agenda which now  very much has the feeling of a Silicon Valley hustle as well because of the more radical groups like Electronic Frontier Foundation which have pushed the anti-copyright campaign.

I've debated these people for seven years ever since I first found them in Second Life, the 3D virtual world that has prototyped and predicted many of the events and phenomena we have come to see in the real world of Internet policy -- with many of the same actors like Barlow and Mitch Kapor. And the reason I debate them is not only because I think their position on copyright in fact damages the livelihoods of the little guy making digital content in online virtual worlds or social media content, not just big evil record companies.  More urgently, they distract from real freedom of expression problems such as occur in China or Iran or Syria when they obsess about legislation that doesn't even pass in America. And most of all, I debate them because I am troubled by their lawlessness and anarchy in never accepting that anything about cyberspace can ever be prosecuted as a crime; whether combating piracy, or terrorist incitement or child pornography, they imply it can never be legislated without furious shrieks that the US is "becoming like China" and "censoring" and "putting a chill on free speech".

They never met a law that controls the Internet they like -- they don't recognize the principle that like all human artifacts and means of communications and transportation, this one, too, will have to have some enforcement of freedom as well as prevention and prosecution of crime in order to prevent powerful authoritarian governments, corporations and anarchic social forces from trampling on all our rights and to protect one right from being trumped by another.

It's as if they don't recognize all the other organic institutions of real life -- Congress, the courts, the media, NGOs --  make a context for the prosecution of crime utterly unlike China or Iran. It's as if they've left them all behind when they migrated to cyberspace and became anarchic flashmobs and ethics-free hackers.

There are many troubling implications to such non-democratic and manipulative processes that in fact go against what wiser heads even in the US government have crafted. These include not only the bulk of the Internet freedom funding projects, including efforts on circumvention software, but such a resolution as was advanced at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Fundamental Freedoms in the Digital Age, which sticks to the basics of merely affirming that all rights agreed on freedom of the media, freedom of expression, and freedom of association apply on the Internet, and which contains no such worrisome invocations of "development" and instead affirms "prosperity" (more on that to come in another post).

 

US Backs Troubling UN Internet Freedom Resolution, Lets State Control In Through "Development" Back Door

Does the Internet bring development or dependency? A man texting on his mobile phone as he fishes on the East River. June 2012. (c) Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

The UN Human Rights Council, a 47-member political body with the world's worst human rights violators as well as those doing the most to promote human rights in the world, passed a unanimous resolution on Internet freedom last week that contains multiple troubling references to "development" that in the UN context, could well signal increased governmental interference in what has been largely a free realm of cyberspace.

You would never know this problem exists from the huge celebratory greeting of this resolution by the tech press (which includes confusion about the roles of different bodies like the Human Rights Council and the ITU). Yet in fact the UN resolution is only one banner waving in a highly contested battle for the Internet, summarized very well by Hillicon Valley -- freedom means very different things to the US, China, or Russia (all of whom endorsed this vague resolution) and both "progressives" and Ron Paul libertarians are battling for the word "freedom".

The UN resolution has not yet been formalized and posted on the UN website, but here it is: Download Internet Freedom Resolution.

Here are the very worrisome paragraphs that while seemingly benign actually contain a world of problems within them in the UN context which "progressives" have been silent about -- whether unwittingly or deliberately:

2. Recogniizes the global and open nature of the Internet as a driving force in accelerating progress towards development in its various forms;

3. Calls upon all States to promote and facilitate access to the internet and international cooperation aimed at the development of media and information and communications facilities in all countries;

5. Decides to continue its consideration of the promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights, including the right to freedom of expression, on the Internet and in other technologies, as well as of how the Internet can be an important tool for development and for exercising human rights, in accordance with its programme of work.

Disturbingly, the resolution, although mercifully short, contains not one, not two, but THREE references to "development" -- code word for state economic measures that can involve control of commerce and hence control of the heart of the Internet's success -- the big US-based global companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook that helped foster mass usage of the Internet -- and the many individual and corporate entrepreneurs that make it a place of vibrant commerce and livelihood for people.

The minute the Internet has to be harnessed to a vague and easily-manipulated social goal like "accelerating development," it has lost its freedom. American diplomats should know better. I don't know what happened in Geneva, but I have an idea -- as I explain in the background to this effort here. 

The references to an "open" Internet, i.e. a web based on open-source code as distinct from  proprietary code -- are also codified terms that suit a particular lobby, like "development" -- and this has powerful support in some quarters from Silicon Valley.

Let me focus here on the slippery slope of "development" as "state control" and cut a very long discourse on the history of the loaded term "development" at the UN by simply quoting the plaintive question of a Tibetan official I once managed to get into the UN to attend a side meeting of the Economic and Social Council, in response to China's flogging of the notion of "development" against civil and political liberties.

"Whose development?" he asked, pointedly. Indeed.

Oh, I get it about the realities of UN diplomacy. One such reference to "development' in the UN context is a necessity -- ever since the West had to pay for a truce on "civil and political rights" versus "economic and social rights" at the Vienna conference in 1995 with conceding a "right to development," we've been stuck with this strange politicized portmanteau concept. The Soviet Union was the main promoter of exclusive focus on economic and social rights or "development" which they didn't even do a good job of supplying to their hapless subjects. After the USSR fell, the Russian delegation at the UN was taken over by human rights leaders including ex-political prisoners Sergei Kovalev and Vyacheslav Bakhmin, and they insisted on promoting the integral nature of both sets of rights -- because the economic justice the Soviets claimed to provide was hollow without a free media, free trade unions, and many other exercises of freedom of expression and association to curb and prevent the state's abuses. Even so, as the Russians sadly noted, Soviet pupils like Cuba still continued to flog the line at the UN for years to come.

It's a constant skirmish in every council, commission, and committee, and you can't get by without at least a nod to "development". But three mentions?! And with even a role for the "international community" for "development" -- which makes it all the easier for the ITU to claim a role now in controlling the Internet!

Today, the "right to development" is still hotly debated but scolded even by some of its fans as just too amorphous and ineffective. The game at the UN continues -- Cuba and other socialist authoritarian states continue to insist on the primacy of economic rights; the US doesn't even recognize these concepts as "rights" even though it may do a better job than many states that do in supplying social goods like housing, education, and health care.

With the incantation of "development" three times, it will be very hard to stop the grab by both states and NGOs interested in selective state control for various political agendas that involve power struggles over the Internet -- whether for US government interference to ensure "net neutrality," or US government interference to supply broadband or "interoperability" of various gadgets. Say, why even have telecoms like AT&T and Comcast and proprietary companies like Apple or Samsung at all, charging for their cost of innovation and service and manufacturing, when you can just have all communications for free supplied by Google? (In exchange for privacy and freedom of choice, of course...)

With this incantation of "development," there's also a subtle but very troubling re-surfacing of the bane of UNESCO some decades ago, the Soviet- and Cuban-led "New World Information and Communications Order" ultimately defeated by the West.  (Wikipedia's version of this story is quite biased, making it seem as if opposition to NWICO was merely a Cold-War Reagan Administration stunt, when in fact a number of Western liberals in the World Press Freedom Committee and Freedom House justly fought this illegitimate attempt to induce more state control).

Few are old enough to remember these struggles, which is unfortunate. This "order" involved harnessing the press to socialist state objectives like "economic justice" or "people's democracy" that meant the press was no longer free to criticize those abusive states, but had to praise their efforts and enforce "balance" against what they saw as "Westernized" media (in fact, NWICO, preceding the Internet, was an effort by authoritarian states to stop even the communication tools of that era that were making it increasingly hard to maintain closed societies and keep news under state control).

The truth is, any time you ascribe a social mandate to the press like "development", you muzzle it -- and open up the issue of who or what will enforce this social-mandate requirement other than conscience. We've forgotten that in an era of blogs and social media eroding the notion of an objective press, which is scorned by gurus like Jay Rosen as "the view from nowhere".  But what, indeed, is "development" and who gets to decide what is good development?

When Frank La Rue, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, formally released his report on Internet freedom June 7, the media widely covered his demand to make "Internet access a human right". The tech press in particularly greeted the news that an obscure UN process had resulted in something that seemed to encourage their industry, but the claim wasn't without critics. None other than Vincent Cerf himself, the grand old man of Google, in a widely-read and discussed op-ed piece, explained that Internet access is not a human right -- a position I said was right but for the wrong reasons.

It's wrong to glorify access to a right because providing access to the Internet is a positive human right -- a right in which states have to expend resources and take action to provide -- whereas freedom of expression is a "negative right" -- a right that states fulfill by doing nothing and getting out of the way. We never had the "human right to the telephone" or the "human right to the fax machine" or even "the human right to e-mail". Instead, we have the durable and enduring right to freedom of expression in any medium under Art. 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which is perfectly fine and in fact needed no new special resolution to enjoy and promote in the 21st century:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

Cerf didn't want "access as a right" because he instinctively knew this would mean more state interference in his gigantic global ad-selling business with its free search loss-leader. So he took a position that contains with it as many dangers as state interference in the Internet -- he said, essentially, "leave the driving to us" -- Silicon Valley's engineers and coders will be trusted stewards of the Internet and take care to observe the values of freedom and openness that customers have come to expect. That they also readily help states maintain censorship -- and with the help of some of the famous Internet "freedom fighters" --  is something they prefer we overlook.

So many online news sites and blogs covered Frank La Rue's report last year as a "new right" and riled so many governments seeking to avoid "new norms," that by the time he appeared as a keynote speaker at the Dublin OSCE Conference on Internet Freedom last month, he was stating emphatically that he was "not for any new norms". Yet in the next breath, he introduced in fact what were two new norms, and in fact crept into the final resolution -- notions that I immediately challenged from the floor as problematic during the Q&A.

The first notion he introduced was the idea that states had to "provide" the Internet -- that's a developmental, positive right -- meaning that inevitably the state then becomes involved in the market of Internet services which opens up the gateway for state control. Currently, the free market supplies the Internet, with some government and corporate programs helping to provide more access for the poor and disadvantaged. Be careful what you wish for if you want *more* government involvement in supplying broadband to the masses -- it can come with conditions, it can be taken away.

The second notion he introduced is that the media "should have" used the Internet more to uncover injustices like the banking scandals that led to the recession and "must" cover such social injustices.

This is a simplistic analysis of the global recession as it implies that journalists (rich, bourgeois, northern journalists?) didn't do their job in sufficiently policing banks (evil banks, engines of imperialism!). Of course, this perspective overlooks not only the actual reporting that was done on the savings-and-loans crisis but the role of the Internet itself in accelerating and making less accountable everything from loan applications and decisions to stock market transactions. And any time the state or the multilateral state institution ascribes a social role to the media, it loses its freedom, even if the outcome is seemingly positive.

In my question to Frank La Rue, I put my question in terms of the tensions between freedom of expression (journalists, bloggers, readers/sharers) and freedom of association (corporations supplying Internet services). Indeed, those tensions exist and the use cases intending to illustrate this only create more problems than they solve. For example, at the Dublin meeting, Rebecca MacKinnon characterized as "censorship" and a problem for the "Internet freedom movement" the decision by Apple not to allow an app in its store with drawings of naked men -- a comic-book treatment of James Joyce's Ulysses. A non-state actor can't be accused of censorship, but more to the point, Apple was only taking the usual and standard minimal measures to prevent what we all know happens anywhere on the Internet where the expression slider is pushed on "high" -- penising. 

Fortunately for those who felt Apple went too far in this largely automatic process, they were able to restore the app -- which in any event, contained a book that was visible on another site on the Internet anyway -- freedom of expression doesn't mean you have to see something on your phone in one medium as distinct from another link on your phone or PC or tablet! After a petition to the company, it was restored, suggesting that the problem is more about user preferences and taste than "freedom of expression" -- and a company, if it is to enjoy its own freedom of expression and Supreme-Court tested right to freedom of association, has to be able to pick what it wants to sell or store on its servers. I also pointed out in my intervention that MacKinnon had no grounds to insist that Amazon continue to store WikiLeaks' stolen State Department cables on its servers -- its terms of service requires that you warrant the materials you store are your own, and these were stolen. She opted to duck my question by saying she would "use her prerogative as chair to move on."

Meanwhile, Frank La Rue responded to my question saying that "international rights should apply to states as well as to businesses". This sounds like something we should all hurry to affirm, but again, states are the actors and signers and implenters of international treaties; corporations are not. Efforts like the "Ruggie principles" that seek to enforce various rights norms over businesses, sometimes with their active involvement to avoid regulation by governments, are filled with problems not only of justiciability and vagueness but lack an important context: the same UN bodies wishing to rein in corporations have never affirmed the right of private property or the right to engage in commerce or make a profit, but instead, function in a context where many countries and movements of the world hold these very normal human activities in suspicion if not outright contempt.

More to the point, the selection and taste problem of the Ulysses comic app was not a job for the First Amendment (by which Apple, which enjoys freedom of expression, too, is not bound to supply endlessly to its customers); it was even less a job for international law; it was not a job for Frank La Rue. WHICH freedom of expression norm -- the more free US First Amendment or the EU's more restrictive application of the UN's Article 19, the foundation of his mandate?

To hear the tech press tell it, the resolution is a big world event, affirming that "online" freedom of expression is the same as "offline" -- a word that has in rather creepy fashion come to signify "everything that isn't on the desktop computer, laptop, smart phone, tablet or other electronic screen we spend most of our working hours gazing at" -- as if organic institutions of law have ceased their relevance (and indeed they have for the cyber-globe-trotting set -- they hate Congress and think all congress people are stupid and technologically inept).

But the UN didn't see fit to put it on the front page, nor did it get its own press release, and it's buried in a summary record of the whole 20th session with only a one-line reference.  (It's true that the much bigger news of this session is that the Special Rapporteur on Belarus, a Soviet holdover in Europe that has been a bastion of repression of Internet freedom, has been reappointed -- despite the concerted efforts of Russia and other allies.)

And as Reuters reported, while nominally endorsing the resolution, Cuba has done so with reservations, complaining that the resolution dealt with "only 30 percent of the world's population" that had Internet access and side-stepped the problem of corporate America:

"Nor in the text is anything said about Internet governance. When we all know that this tool is controlled by a single country globally and this is something which hampers free access to this very important tool."

Count on Cuba in the future to latch on to the three "development" paragraphs and flog them to reverse civil society gains on the Internet and put the states back in control.  And count on China to invoke "people's democracy" kind of socialism to insist, as the Chinese UN delegate did, "As the Internet develops rapidly, online gambling, pornography, violence, fraud and hacking are increasing its threat to the legal rights of society and the public."

The Internet is a contested space, as I "storified" after the Dublin conference. This very troublesome resolution fostered by the Obama Administration not only papers over very real differences in conceptions for Internet governance which are going to be cured by assertions of sovereignty whether we like it or not, it introduces very disturbing "development" aspirations that are definitely going to end up in the wrong hands.