Ory has a good post on the sacking of the Communications Commission of Kenya board. I’m still trying to digest email I’m getting from friends on the situation. I don’t see any way to read the situation as anything other than a disaster. The CCK has been taking useful steps lately to ensure that Kenya’s internet policies make sense and match international standards. This is a huge, and scary, step backwards. I’ll post more as I understand more.

Some of my colleagues – Joi, Rebecca, John Gage, Dan Gillmor, Noriko Takiguchi, Martn, and Marko Ahtisaari – just presented the work we’ve done over the past day and a half. It’s been interesting to watch the reception – we’ve gotten half a dozen of the routinely positive comments one might expect, and two very precise critiques.

One came from Benjamin Barber, author of “Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age”, who gave a wide-ranging critique of the cyberoptimism of the panel. His argument, as I understood it, is that the very architecture of the Internet has social “bugs” that we failed to address. He asserts:

Virtual relationships are different – and not as important – as real ones.

It’s hard for me to dispute most of these points. (I’d love some data on the 1/3 search hits = porn stat…) But this strikes me as an overview that focuses on fear, rather than on hope. What’s so wonderful and complicated about the ‘net is that it includes fearsome monopolies and creative open source developers, porn and poetry, self-referential circle jerks and genuine dialogue across cultures and between borders. My interest is in focusing on the positive – especially on the dialogue – but it’s irresponsible to deny the negatives. But I don’t think it’s surprising that a group of people talking about the value of keeping the Internet open and accessible despite the threat of terrorists using it would focus on the positives, not the negatives.

A political science professor from Harvard, echoed later by Richard Barrett, who heads a UN monitoring team focused on Al Quaea, suggested that the panel had glossed over the challenges of fighting terror on the Internet. Given the proliferation of terrorist recruitment sites on the web – 4,000, by one count – don’t we have an obligation to do something? Shouldn’t we, for instance, prevent “known terrorists” from posting new web sites?

Martn had a great response: we’ve got to fight speech with more speech. Those sites are surely less effective in creating terrorists – on an internet filled with diverse voices – than madrasas, where the only voice a student hears is a voice of intolerance. If the internet is able to expand the universe of voices that madrasa student hears, isn’t that a powerful way to fight terror.

I offered my own answer to Barrett, who asked whether we shouldn’t take action against terrorist sites on the net, even if that action was only symbolic. I said that I thought the action would be only symbolic. A terrorist motivated to stay anonymous is going to figure out a method to remain unidentifiable even if we make strong efforts to associate IP addresses with human identities (more of this in an upcoming post). While we’re likely to have only a symbolic victory in keeping terrorists off the web, we may well eliminate the opportunity for people who legitimately need to be anonymous – from the human rights activist in China to the gay teen in Wyoming – to be so on the net.

I wish the conversation had continued – it’s useful for the cyber-optimists on the panel to hear the fears – some legitimate, some exaggerated – of the people who see the Internet as a scary place where bad people (both terrorists and corporate monopolists) can hide.

I’ve spent the last two days at the Madrid conference on Democracy, Terrorism and Security, colloquially known as the “Safe Democracy” conference. Joi Ito invited far-flung members of his posse to participate in a conversation about the Internet and its role in “fighting” terrorism. We’re an odd little group at this conference – organized by Martín Varsavsky and Club de Madrid – which is otherwise populated by former heads of state and lots of super-important individuals.

Joi and Martín were concerned that a conversation about the Internet and terrorism would end up becoming a discussion of ways to “fix” the internet so that it’s less useful to terrorists for secure communications. By inviting a bunch of geeks and alpha-bloggers, we ran the risk of giving the standard “keep your hands off my internet” response, a stance that was unlikely to go over with many of the conference attendees.

We ended up spending hours focused on two main issues: anonymity and transferability of laws. (You can see the discussion on the IRC transcript – I did my best SJ impression and attempted to transcribe the main points of the conversation.)

Net people tend to support anonymity as a fundamental principle of what’s great about the net – it’s a feature. To security people and police, it’s a profound bug. With a few alpha geeks around the table, we found ourselves shooting down a range of strategies that would attempt to eliminate anonymity from the net. We ended up arguing that we couldn’t see a strategy that would prevent a truly determined terrorist from hiding his or her identity… but we could see lots of strategies that would make it very hard for activists and dissidents to gain anonymity. Understanding that it’s not something that makes security people happy, we ended up arguing that anonymity is technically impossible, and therefore we argue for the promotion of anonymity, not the contraction of it.

We ended up arguing – up until the point we had to give a public presentation of the document we were working on – about a phrase Martín suggested: “What’s illegal off the internet is illegal on the internet.” The phrase was intended to reassure security forces and police that we didn’t think the Internet was above or beyond the law. But while it sounds good on the surface, I find the phrase very troubling. There are large parts of the world where basic acts of communication are illegal – the Internet allows this communication even when it’s illegal. I think it’s critical that these laws don’t impinge on freedoms of communication the Internet makes possible. The phrase we ended up posting on the wiki makes me a bit happier, but still doesn’t quite address my concerns: “The Internet is neither above nor below the law. The same legal principles that apply in the physical world also apply to human activities conducted over the Internet.”

We’ve posted a draft of a joint recommendation on a wiki – please take a look and feel free to make changes and suggestions.

Despite spending twelve hours at a stretch in a session, my crazy, geeky peers do manage to have a good time. Once my digital camera came out at dinner last night, everyone felt compelled to video each other, which led to this odd pass de deux (QT video) by Joi Ito and Dan Gillmor, narrated by myself and David Weinberger…

Some of my colleagues – Joi, Rebecca, John Gage, Dan Gillmor, Noriko Takiguchi, Martín, and Marko Ahtisaari – just presented the work we’ve done over the past day and a half. It’s been interesting to watch the reception – we’ve gotten half a dozen of the routinely positive comments one might expect, and two very precise critiques.

One came from Benjamin Barber, author of “Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age”, who gave a wide-ranging critique of the cyberoptimism of the panel. His argument, as I understood it, is that the very architecture of the Internet has social “bugs” that we failed to address. He asserts:

Ory has a good post on the sacking of the Communications Commission of Kenya board. I’m still trying to digest email I’m getting from friends on the situation. I don’t see any way to read the situation as anything other than a disaster. The CCK has been taking useful steps lately to ensure that Kenya’s internet policies make sense and match international standards. This is a huge, and scary, step backwards. I’ll post more as I understand more.

I’ve spent the last two days at the Madrid conference on Democracy, Terrorism and Security, colloquially known as the “Safe Democracy” conference. Joi Ito invited far-flung members of his posse to participate in a conversation about the Internet and its role in “fighting” terrorism. We’re an odd little group at this conference – organized by Martn Varsavsky and Club de Madrid – which is otherwise populated by former heads of state and lots of super-important individuals.

Joi and Martn were concerned that a conversation about the Internet and terrorism would end up becoming a discussion of ways to “fix” the internet so that it’s less useful to terrorists for secure communications. By inviting a bunch of geeks and alpha-bloggers, we ran the risk of giving the standard “keep your hands off my internet” response, a stance that was unlikely to go over with many of the conference attendees.

We ended up spending hours focused on two main issues: anonymity and transferability of laws. (You can see the discussion on the IRC transcript – I did my best SJ impression and attempted to transcribe the main points of the conversation.)

Net people tend to support anonymity as a fundamental principle of what’s great about the net – it’s a feature. To security people and police, it’s a profound bug. With a few alpha geeks around the table, we found ourselves shooting down a range of strategies that would attempt to eliminate anonymity from the net. We ended up arguing that we couldn’t see a strategy that would prevent a truly determined terrorist from hiding his or her identity… but we could see lots of strategies that would make it very hard for activists and dissidents to gain anonymity. Understanding that it’s not something that makes security people happy, we ended up arguing that anonymity is technically impossible, and therefore we argue for the promotion of anonymity, not the contraction of it.

We ended up arguing – up until the point we had to give a public presentation of the document we were working on – about a phrase Martn suggested: “What’s illegal off the internet is illegal on the internet.” The phrase was intended to reassure security forces and police that we didn’t think the Internet was above or beyond the law. But while it sounds good on the surface, I find the phrase very troubling. There are large parts of the world where basic acts of communication are illegal – the Internet allows this communication even when it’s illegal. I think it’s critical that these laws don’t impinge on freedoms of communication the Internet makes possible. The phrase we ended up posting on the wiki makes me a bit happier, but still doesn’t quite address my concerns: “The Internet is neither above nor below the law. The same legal principles that apply in the physical world also apply to human activities conducted over the Internet.”

We’ve posted a draft of a joint recommendation on a wiki – please take a look and feel free to make changes and suggestions.

Despite spending twelve hours at a stretch in a session, my crazy, geeky peers do manage to have a good time. Once my digital camera came out at dinner last night, everyone felt compelled to video each other, which led to this odd pass de deux (QT video) by Joi Ito and Dan Gillmor, narrated by myself and David Weinberger…