• Still Counting? 27 More Websites Opened in Xinjiang | Xinjiang: Far West China
  The internet in Xinjiang opens up a little bit… but as a constrained, whitelisted network. Is this the shape of things to come? Or specific to one of the more restive corners of China?
  (tags: internet censorship xinjiang china whitelist freespeech)
• Born Poor? | Santa Fe Reporter
  Interesting overview of Economist Sam Bowles on the need for American economic theory to consider inequality and build strategies that lessen it, otherwise we'll waste money on sectors of the economy which essentially exist to maintain economically unfair structures
  (tags: economics capitalism society development education research poverty labor economy markets employment inequality bowles)
• Is ChatRoulette the Future of the Internet or Its Distant Past? — New York Magazine
  What does a webchat service that randomly pairs you with other individuals tell you about the Internet? Or humanity as a whole? A cautionary tale, perhaps, about trying to engineer a very simple form of serendipity
  (tags: internet technology culture video community chat interactive chatroulette webcam serendipity random)
• Democratic, but dangerous too: how the web changed our world | Technology | The Observer
  Aleks Krotoski is presenting a history of the Internet that worries about the implications of technologies that allow us to "become our demographic" rather than differentiate ourselves as individuals. Some interesting quotes in this short description on insularity and extremism.
  (tags: socialmedia media internet technology cyberutopianism xenophilia serendipity sorting)

We turned off the snowmobile tracks half a mile back, as they bent to the west and GPS pointed north to our destination. The trackless snow is knee-deep and I’m sweating as we push forward, one heavy footstep after another. 250 feet from destination. We scramble up a ridge, heading towards an outcropping of rocks beside a small stand of pine. 74 feet north by northeast. As we approach the largest of the rocks, the GPS reads “Arriving at destination”. One step ahead of me, Kris kneels down and extracts a box from a cavity behind the boulder. A nine-inch square tupperware container, it’s spray-painted grey and otherwise unmarked. Steam is rising from my gloved hands as I pry the lid off. As I open the cache, the contents of the box glow in the winter sunshine: a logbook, a laminated card and seven rubber duckies.

The ducks have been hand-painted, dressing them in different outfits – policeman, solider, college graduate. The laminated card doesn’t help explain their presence here. But it does explain the box we’ve found: “Congratulations! Intentionally or not, you’ve found a Geocache!” In cheerful, reassuring tones, the note explains to the uninitiated – “muggles”, as they’re known in caching circles – that the box is part of a global game, offers an invitation to participate and politely requests that the cache remain unmoved and unmolested if you choose not to play. We sign and date the logbook with our caching handles and, regretting that we haven’t brought a duck-themed gift to trade, seal the container and carefully stash it in its hiding place.

We’re 300 yards away, slogging through the deep snow towards the next cache before I get the joke. On geocaching.com, where we’ve found the coordinates that started our hunt, this cache is titled “An Odd Cache“. The title of a cache is often a clue to its location – here, it elucidates the payload: a set of odd ducks.

You may wonder what sort of odd duck chooses to hide children’s toys in a remote state forest in western Massachusetts. (Or spends their free time searching for them.) I wonder, too. Geocaching can be both a solitary and social sport. At home, logging the finds we’ve made, I look at the profiles of the folks who’ve recently searched for the caches we found. A family with two small children. A diesel mechanic. A windshield installer. And always “Rocking the Goat”, a retired couple who’ve logged 11,500 finds in the past five years, including 120 in an apparently epic day. I’ve yet to meet any of these people in person, but I’m starting to understand bits of their personalities from their cache descriptions, the clues they offer, the design of their hides.

I don’t know what drove “Kathy & Gary” to haul a box of rubber ducks up a mountainside. The other caches hidden nearby – by the same cacher – are well-made and thoughtfully placed in beautiful locations, but none hint at the whimsy of this hide. I look for something clever to say as I sign the log online, but can’t come up with something pithy to summarize my sense of satisfaction, surprise and wonder. So I write what everyone writes – “TFTC” – thanks for the cache.

One of the most inspiring and infuriating conferences I’ve attended in the past few years was the Metaverse Roadmap Summit, held in Silicon Valley in May 2006. Most of the participants were devotees of virtual worlds, online spaces where what’s possible is governed by not by the laws of physics but by the restrictions of the software. The ability to build interactive spaces without constraints seems to bring out the utopian in many thinkers. Much of the conversation focused on aspirations for technologies that seemed divorced not just from their current state of development but from the wildest hopes of their developers. I was – and remain – unconvinced that (even very technically sophisticated) virtual worlds will automagically encourage intercultural dialog and collaboration or increase empathy. (No need to repeat my rantings here.)

I was more impressed with the thinkers at Metaverse Roadmap who were exploring augmented reality, ways of overlaying layers of information over the real world. Rather than starting with a blank canvas as the virtual worlds folks did, the augmented reality crowd started with satellite photos or camera views of the physical world. It was much easier to judge the success or failure of their work – did layering information on the physical world enable interesting new behaviors? Reveal hidden truths? Or did it obscure what was already visible?

Most augmented reality demos I’ve seen since focus on adding information to physical reality to improve decisionmaking. Patti Maes demonstrated Sixth Sense at TED last year, which involved complex hand gestures that manipulated a “data layer” projected on the world via data goggles. She showed one of her students using the system to enhance his experience of a bookstore by pulling up reviews and ratings for the books on the shelves (and, not coincidently, their prices if delivered via Amazon.com). While this particular application didn’t grab my imagination (why not just shop online?), it wasn’t hard to imagine appealing scenarios. My dream: facial recognition goggles that give me a dossier of information about people I’ve already met, so I never have to struggle to remember someone’s name, job or company again.

Whether we’re using technology fresh out of MIT’s Media Lab or the increasingly ubiquitous smartphone, this form of augmented reality is becoming commonplace. Walking down Ninth Avenue in New York, I can query any number of websites and discover that this sushi bar isn’t as highly rated as the one three block south. Dopplr will tell me which restaurants my well-travelled friends prefer; Foursquare can tell me which coffee shop the wired hipsters are jostling to be mayor of. It’s not hard to imagine an augmented 9th Avenue, with Zagat ratings, Board of Health Warnings and Chowhound tips hovering above each eatery, reducing my risk of ever eating a bad meal.

Many of the ways we talk about augmenting reality focus on reducing risk. By adding information to the bookstore, we reduce the risk that we buy a boring title and overpay for it. Augment the grocery store and we reduce the risk that we buy endangered, unsustainable fish or toxic glass cleaner manufactured by a gay-unfriendly conglomerate. Surrounding ourselves with information online – from authorities, friends, from the crowd – we make decisions in the physical world with increasing assurance that we’re getting the best deal, value or quality.

I worry about a world with less risk. With four stars shining over this trendy sushi bar, will I miss the unrated Uzbek teahouse down the street? Or the admittedly crappy dive bar that becomes a sentimental favorite? In a world rich with information, will I still stumble and explore? I don’t want to go back to a world where I can’t pull up record reviews on Allmusic.com… but I fell in love with music buying $2 cutout LPs in the back room of my local record store, stumbling through a forest of forgettable music to my own passions and tastes.

Geocaching augments reality in a different way. It adds a layer of the magical to the mundane.

There are at least 100 caches hidden within ten miles of my house. I’ve found fewer than 30 of them. Driving to the post office or the grocery store, I pass by them and smile at the secret knowledge I have that my neighbors lack – the specific stone that needs to be moved to reveal the hiding place. How many other stones have secrets hiding under them? What other games are played throughout the world, with secrets hiding in plain sight, invisible to us because we don’t know to look?

If the hides I’ve found make me smile, the ones I’ve searched for and fail to find have a more profound hold on me. There’s a cache hidden on or near the guardrail of a stretch of highway I drive almost every day. I’ve spent two hours, split between half a dozen sessions, looking for the mystery of this cache – the bolt I need to turn, the panel I have to slide, the rock to lift to unpack the mystery. When I drive by this guardrail, it glows pink, just like the trigger points for missions in Grand Theft Auto. I can park the truck, step into the neon glow and start an adventure, or I can drive past and go on with my life.

Enhancing the Berkshires this way invites me to exit my well-trodden paths and explore places I’ve systematically ignored for the past twenty years. I tend to think of my hometown – population 2990 – as a small place. It is, if I describe the locations I visit regularly – a cafe, a bar, a gas station, a sandwich shop. But when you’re looking for a small box hidden in ten square miles of deep woods, the real size of the world is made manifest. It’s small because I drive the same two roads over and over, and too seldom stop to turn over the rocks and look behind the guardrails.

Augmented 9th Avenue promises a world with no unwanted adventures. Geocaching the Berkshires promises an adventure any time I’m willing to bushwhack through the brambles, looking for secrets.

The coordinates point to a junction near the center of my tiny hometown, but the cache description makes clear that there’s a puzzle to solve before I can start hunting. I decipher a pair of messages, each encrypted with a different Caesar cipher and discover the true coordinates – a hillside a mile from town. I park my truck, follow the GPS into the woods and almost immediately discover a rusting 1940s Studebaker pickup, its roof partially caved in, but otherwise remarkably well preserved.

The cache I’m searching for is a “micro”, a size too small to contain little more than a paper log. Micros are often magnetic “hide a key” containers. As I kneel in the snow, poking at the back bumper of the wreck, I realize there are a lot of places to hide a key on the frame of a truck. Hands cold, knees wet, I thought back to the cache description, looking for a clue. The cache’s title implies that the truck is for sale, so I begin to act like a prospective buyer, kicking at the nonexistent tires, climbing in the cab to check the comfort of the rusted spring seat. I lift the hood and poke at the near-pristine engine. The dipstick is still in place and as I pull it from the engine block to check the oil, I find the log in a greasy plastic bag. It’s beautiful.

I live in one of the loveliest parts of the US, replete with rolling mountains, fast-flowing streams, colorful forest and rocky cliffs. To my shame, I too rarely take myself out for hikes, wandering through the woods with no destination in particular. Years ago, I concluded that I was simply lazier than my friends, or less in tune with the ineffable rhythms of nature. Now I think I’m just more teleological.

Invite me for a hike up Greylock, the state’s highest peak – which happens to be in my backyard – and I’ll find an excuse not to go. Tell me that someone’s hidden something halfway up the mountain, in a location that’s probably hard to get to and give me no encouragement other than a set of GPS coordinates and I’m off, dragging as many unwitting friends as I’m able to ensnare along the way. I’m embarrassed that it takes something as silly and arbitrary as signing my name to a log to get me to lace up my boots, but there it is. I need destinations, goals, and it turns out that they’ll shape my behavior even if they’re extremely silly.

The reason to go caching isn’t the rubber ducks or the opportunity to sign a log. It’s the non-zero possibility that something strange, wonderful and serendipitous will happen enroute. Some of us are inclined to wander without a goal in mind – others need goals that encourage us to wander somewhere we wouldn’t normally stray.

Randall Munroe’s webcomic xkcd has as a central theme the idea that we all need more adventures in our lives. It’s unsurprising then that he invented Geohashing, a strange variant of an already strange game, where a coordinate is generated algorithmically from known, changing values (the date and the previous day’s Dow Jones Industrial Average closing) to generate an arbitrary location within a few dozen miles. (Technically, it generates one per “graticule“, which is the cool kind of word you’ll get to use if you start geocaching.) You’re encouraged to visit the coordinates of the day, and especially encouraged to appear at the coordinates on Saturdays at 4pm local time, when there’s an increased (though still pretty low) chance that someone else will show up.

I love the idea of geohashing – the arbitrary nature of the algorithm has a purity to it that appeals to me. But I haven’t gone to find a hash yet. A cache implies that someone else thought a spot was worthy, in some way, to be encountered and appreciated – a hash has none of that baggage, for better or worse.

I’m interested in building structures that facilitate serendipity, because I worry that I, you and everyone else spends too much time walking familiar paths and too little time wandering in the wilderness. I worry about this in terms of news and information most often, wondering how we find ways to filter the rich information flows of the Internet without filtering out the unfamiliar and provocative. I’ve been making the case that we should stumble into unfamiliar territory because it’s good for us. But that’s about as effective as telling me that I should hike because I’m fat. Perhaps someone (me?) needs to start hiding caches of rubber ducks in strategic corners of the Internet.

I’m in New York City after speaking at a conference and grabbing a beer with Global Voices friends in a nearby bar. I should hurry to Grand Central and catch the next train home, but I’ve got my GPS with me and there’s a cache nearby. I’ve printed out the details and have a theory on the hide. I sheepishly admit to my friends that I’m not going to the subway station with them because I’m going to look for a hidden container somewhere on the mean streets of New York.

My friend Jer wants to come with, and so we follow the GPS across town, to the east. As we walk, I’m explaining my skepticism about urban caching to Jer. It’s hard to hide caches in major cities – unfamiliar boxes tend to freak out police, who might term them “infernal machines” and blow them up. So urban caches are often nanos, stuck to lampposts or the underside of benches. I’m a shy guy – the notion of searching on hands and knees for a tiny metal cylinder in public on city streets makes me nervous.

The cache title makes reference to “the M club” and we find ourselves outside a tony private club whose name starts with M. The clues suggest the cache might be hidden near something of interest to firefighters, and so we begin examining the standpipes set into the side of the building. I feel incredibly conspicuous and wait for the cops to arrive and haul us off for questioning. Finding nothing, we start walking to another corner of the building to check out more pipes. The doorman yells, “Broaden your mind, expand your search.”

Say what? He continues, “Why are you walking away? You’re so close! Persistence!” I ask him for a hint as it’s obvious that he knows what we’re doing and where the cache is. He walks us back to the standpipe we’d been examining. Jer begins unscrewing a cap, something he was reluctant to do while looking over his shoulder for cops. Our zen master doorman objects. “Do you really think they’d put something somewhere the firemen would find it?”

And then I see it – a stray wire hanging over the edge of the metal plate the standpipes are set into. Attached to it, a nano. The doorman congratulates us as I sign the log. Having shared an adventure and a surprise encounter with me, Jer gives me a hug and catches the 1 train. I head towards Grand Central, wondering what secrets, what hidden bits of magic surround me as I walk down 57th Street.

I’d been meaning to try geocaching for a few years now. My friend and colleague Eszter Hargittai convinced me to actually start caching, not by saying anything, but by being so clearly in love with the sport. Eszter is one of the most professional and responsible people I know, so watching her show up late for a Berkman meeting because she’d stopped to seek a cache on the way was the most ringing endorsement of a pastime I can think of.

Kristen Taylor, social media guru and foodblogger extraordinare, made the connection between caching and augmented reality for me. I was trying to convince her to augment her reality by looking for African restaurants in the Bronx and she got me thinking about data layers and structured serendipity instead. Googling for geocaching and augmented reality, I discovered that she wasn’t the first to make the connection – Dan Spira has an excellent blogpost on the topic, which makes the case that exploring the world with GPS doesn’t reduce uncertainty and wonder, but can increase it.

Hi everyone. I’m going offline for about a month to recover from retinal surgery, which will take place tomorrow morning. I’ve had this surgery twice before – once in April 2008, and again in August 2009. This surgery is a repeat of August’s surgery, which was – unfortunately – not entirely successful, and I’ve continued to have vision problems with my left eye. There’s background on the procedure I’m having – vitrectomy – and the reasons I’m having the procedure in this blogpost here… and the success I had on the surgery on the right eye.

As with the past surgeries, there’s a long recovery period during which it’s painful and difficult for me to read. While I use assistive technologies and can be online a small amount each day, I usually don’t blog while recovering. (I’ve got a post or two queued up that might arrive after this one…) For anyone trying to reach me via email – please don’t expect a speedy response. Looking forward to seeing you when I’m back online in March.

UPDATE. Mowjcamp.com is back up! Friends at EFF were able to broker a conversation between Yahoo, Moniker, Melbourne IT and Access Now. The situation is complicated, and I’m still trying to understand the details of the resolution, but it’s fantastic news that the site is back up. Special thanks to friends at Yahoo! who ended up taking the brunt of the criticism for the downtime. That wasn’t fair, and was in part my fault for not understanding everyone’s role in the situation. Yahoo! worked extremely hard to resolve the situation after being called out and deserve special thanks for their hard work, as does everyone who took action to get this important site back online.

Twitter users may remember recent downtime for the microblogging site that didn’t involve the familiar fail whale. For a couple of hours on December 17th, 2009, Twitter’s home page was replaced with a picture of a green flag and the message “This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army”. Twitter’s administrators explained that their domain name records had been “temporarily compromised”, pointing the twitter.com domain to a rogue site rather than to Twitter’s servers. Chinese search engine Baidu was hit with a similar attack on January 12th, also by the Iranian Cyber Army, and regained control of their site within four hours.

Screenshot of hacked mowjcamp.com site by Josh Self, cc.

It’s one thing to recover from this sort of political cyberattack when you’re a well-financed company and something entirely different when you’re a volunteer-run alternative news site. Mowjcamp.com, a popular citizen media site associated with Iran’s green movement, was hijacked the same day as Twitter, by the same attackers, using similar techniques. (A blog post from activist Austin Heap explains that the techniques were probably not identical, which may explain why it’s been harder to restore Mowjcamp.) It’s still down six weeks later. The story behind their struggle to get back online shows how vulnerable the internet is to this new form of attack and how disruptive it can be for a small, grassroots organization.

Mowjcamp has been a major channel for disseminating news and video from the Iranian green movement. Their YouTube channel, filled with videos from university protests, gives a sense for their content, and their English-language site has become a critical resource for journalists covering Iran’s protests. While Mowjcamp is now accessible online in Farsi at mowjcamp.ws, mowjcamp.com, .org and .net remain in limbo, resolving to a NameDrive.com domain parking page.

I’ve been in regular contact with the administrators of Mowjcamp as they’ve tried to regain control of their site. For six weeks, they’ve been getting the runaround from Yahoo! (where they’d originally registered the domain names) and Moniker (where the hackers moved control of the domain name). Yahoo has been informed that the site was illegally moved by hackers who managed to access a Yahoo Mail account and authorize a transfer to Moniker – they’ve told the site administrators that there’s nothing they can do, and the problem’s in Moniker’s hands. Moniker, in turn, tells the administrators that they’ve responded to Yahoo, which will resolve their problem. In the meantime, the site continues to be inaccessible from the URLs by which it is most widely known. (Yes, I’ve contacted friends within Yahoo! So have many other well-connected friends, who’ve put pressure on Moniker as well. That I’m complaining in this blogpost shows just how successful we’ve been so far going directly to the companies involved.)

AccessNow, an online free speech organization born in the aftermath of the 2009 Iranian election, has been working on behalf of Mowjcamp admins to regain control of their domain. (Some of the Mowjcamp administrators are in Iran – some are not. Those in Iran are at constant risk of arrest, which explains their need to remain anonymous and seek help from groups like AccessNow.) I traded email this weekend with Brett Solomon, Executive Director of AccessNow, who explains his frustration with the situation: “The system is clearly broken when multi-million dollar enterprises like Twitter and Baidu can retrieve their sites in a matter of hours, and yet we have been trying to get mowjcamp.org back for more 6 weeks now. We keep getting stonewalled despite the vital role the site plays for the Green Movement in Iran.”

When the “Iranian Cyber Army” attacked Twitter, they embarrassed a prominent technology company and made a striking political statement about the company’s apparent support for the Iranian opposition. (You may remember that the US State Department asked Twitter to delay maintenance to keep the service accessible in Iran during post-election protests.) But ICA’s attack on Mowjcamp is different – it’s a denial of service attack by bureaucracy.

I spoke last week with a Mowjcamp admin who explained that their site has been under near-constant attack for months. They’ve moved the site to Amazon Web Services machines so they can better fend off distributed denial of service attacks. The irony is that the attack that crippled Mowjcamp is far less technical than a DDOS – attackers compromised a webmail account which allowed them to intercept DNS control panel login information and issue an authorization code to move the site. The admin I spoke with tells me that attackers evidently attempted a move half a dozen times before they were successful in hijacking the Mowjcamp domains.

When Twitter was hijacked using similar means, it was easy for Twitter to prove to registrars that they were the legitimate owners of the domain names. That the Mowjcamp administrators are still struggling to regain their domain is evidence that the system doesn’t work for ordinary users, though it clearly accommodates prominent corporations. The hijackers may not have expected their hack to work for more than a few hours. That it remains unresolved six weeks later shows that the system isn’t prepared to handle the phenomenon of political domain name hijacking. Perhaps the dispute resolution process that Mowjcamp, Yahoo! and Moniker is going through will eventually give Mowjcamp control of their site. But the time the process has taken is crippling for a site releasing timely political information. Given the success of this attack, it’s a template for this same sort of harassment against political campaign sites, protest movements and citizen newsrooms – any site that needs to release information in a timely fashion.

At Berkman, we’ve been studying internet censorship for several years, focusing primarily on state-level internet filtering. We’re now seeing a rise in other forms of censorship, attacks that attempt to make websites inaccessible everywhere, not just from within a repressive state. These attacks use DDOS to make sites inaccessible, social engineering attacks to spearfish for critical information, and legal threats to encourage hosting providers to exile targeted websites. It’s been difficult to determine if these new attacks are sponsored by government entities or carried out by nationalist hackers acting independently of the government. In either case, these attacks appear to be on the rise, and Mowjcamp’s experience suggests that they can be devastatingly successful.

What could we do to fend off these sorts of attacks? Everyone running a human rights site needs to double check their security precautions. Ensure your domain is locked at your registrar. Make absolutely sure that no one else is accessing your webmail (check login records to see that no unfamiliar IPs have accessed your account.) Avoid cascading failures by removing login information for other sites from your webmail mailbox. Use strong passwords, and different passwords for different online services.

But there are steps the web community could take as well. If domain name hijacking becomes a common form of attack, groups like Mowjcamp will need help navigating bureaucracy and undoing the damage. The State Department has had a great deal to say about Internet Freedom in the past weeks – perhaps someone at State should be available to groups like Mowjcamp to help them work through bureaucratic red tape when they experience situations like this one. Companies like Yahoo! have made commitments to freedom of expression through their participation in efforts like the Global Network Initiative – perhaps they could back up their commitment to free speech principles by providing a prominent human rights group with some actual customer service? Maybe Yahoo! and other providers need a team that can respond to complex situations like this one and treat them as something other than routine customer service matters?

Mowjcamp’s situation is aggravated by US Treasury regulations that make it extremely difficult for Iranians (and citizens of a handful of other nations) to do business with US companies online. While Mowjcamp wanted to use US servers to host their politically sensitive content, the administrators living in Iran couldn’t directly register their site due to these Treasury restrictions. As a result, the Mowjcamp team is working through intermediaries rather that interacting directly to solve this problem. If Secretary Clinton wants to “to put these tools in the hands of people who will use them to advance democracy and human rights”, perhaps she could start by making it legal for Iranian dissidents to register and host sites in the United States. And if she were looking for a tangible way to make good on her rhetoric, perhaps her team at State could lend a hand to the people at Mowjcamp.

Professor Julie Cohen of Georgetown Law School is visiting at Harvard Law this year and working on a book, “Configuring the Network Self”. Speaking at Berkman today, she explains that she’s had two motivations to undertake this work – an understanding of information technology possibility framed through the idea of the “structural conditions of human flourishing”. One is a sense that discourse about IT policy (in the US – she distinguishes US from European disrouce) tends to use “grandiose language” about poicy choices for free speech and free markets, but generally seem to create circumstances that don’t appear especially free. Users face complex rules about content they can and can’t use, but there are very few rules that govern how users can be watched, monitored and aggregated. There’s a disconnect between the copyright debate – where much of the discourse is unquestioningly in favor of openness – and the privacy debate. We need a discourse that makes a space for privacy in the environment of openness.

Second, she notes that most (US) discourse comes from liberal political theory, a space where there’s a great deal of discussion of autonomy and freedom. This discourse comes with an assuption of rational choice, the idea of disembodied individuals at play in the realm of the virtual, exercising autonomous choice. “This is not a worldview that has much relation to reality, in my opinion.”

Cohen wants to explore ideas of internet policy based on the “experienced geography of the information society”. This means accepting that people are real, embodied, located in cultures and context, and experiencing the network mediated by platforms and devices. The framework we’ve inherited from liberal theory doesn’t give us very good tools to examine these questions – fortunately, there’s lots of folks thinking about embodied use, just not in the legal field. People in anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies and information studies look closely at these questions… and they tend to be dismissed, pejoratively, as “postmodernists” by legal thinkers. Cohen’s goal is to unpack this set of literatures and ask how the information society works in terms of situated, embodied users, and then ask how this understanding might then inform our law and policy.

She traces her narrative framework to Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s discourse about “capabilities for human flourishing”. She wants to articulate a regime of law and policy for information technology spaces that seeks to let humans flourish. Acknowledging that there’s a danger of turning anything into a requirement for flourishing, she suggests we start by looking at these literatures, at the relationships between self and culture, self and community, and identify what’s really necessary for human flourishing. “Selves are constituted by culture -there is a mutually constituting relationship between information technologies and our embodied perception” of the world through them. These tools reconfigure our acess to the world, change the nature of geography as we experience it.

Cohen wants to root thinking about internet policy in the concept of “everyday practice”, which she describes as an “anti-paradigm”, a useful tool for describing what people actually do, rather than what we ideally believe they do. The dominant paradigm in legal literature, she tells us, is to evaluate a technology in terms of its effects on freedom of speech or a user’s ability to make free choices within a market. This paradigm tends to lead to reductive models of human behavior – do humans simply make rational choices in markets? Are we always motivated by romantic concepts of dissent? Everyday practice describes the welter of other motives that accompany our interactions with information technologies.

When thinkers critique copyright in intellectual property literature, they often talk about the concept of “play”, the idea that people should have freedom to play with cultural resources. The value of play is stated in terms of its links to creativity and invention. Cohen wants to broaden the discourse around play to encompass “the play of circumstances”. She theorizes that creativity blossoms not because an individual decides to play, but because life puts random incidents in your path. Policy needs to foster this sense of play – not play by individuals, but play in terms of random circumstance.

Cohen cautions the limitations of the Access to Knowledge movement. She acknowledges the importance of A2K, but suggests that it’s insufficient to provide a base for human flourishing. The A2K paradigm, she arges, doesn’t include rights to reuse the materials you have access to. It doesn’t guarantee a user’s rights of privacy – she worries that most privacy frameorks tend to put forward a vision in which more openness is always best.

Future policy strategies need to consider issues of operational transparency. It’s insufficient to build policy based solely on what information about a user is going to be collected. We need to know how that information is going to be used. “It’s not enough to offer a choice between Google and… whatever else there is. Between iPhone and Blackberry. We need to be given sufficient information to know what’s being offered as a possibility to us and what’s being closed off.”

Cohen hopes that information technology policy will provide open spaces through “formal incompleteness”. It’s a mistake that we need to invoke a catch-all defense like fair use in the copyright space – we need space to play with technologies, to repurpose and remix media without bumping into creator’s rights. Within rules about aggregating and monitoring the use of online spaces, we need to ensure there’s space for users to play with identities. With this in mind, Cohen worries that an architectural presumption – that everything will be better if we have seamless interoperability between platforms – is limiting our choices. In a seamless universe, our data moves around with no one to stop it. We may want some friction in our platforms as well as whitespace in which we can play and experiment.

(I caught only part of the question and answer exchange.)

Q: If “churchlady43″ is also “pornstar565″ and “terrorist 12″, we could see a security theater response to online speech, an attempt to squeeze out anonymity and make it harder for individuals to engage in identity play. An integrated online environment means that every environment is a workplace environment because someone might connect my unpopular opinions in one identity to my professional one. Will this lead to a revival of McCarthyism?
A: A great comment. There’s a tendency to say that if we restrict the flow of information, we’ll move down the slippery slope to Chinese censorship. That’s an oversimplication – we need to consider times we might restrict information flow to maintain the capabilities of these new spaces.

Q: (Charlie Nesson) I perked up at the mention of copyright and play, the idea that a playful person needs a defense besides fair use. How would we get there?
A: We should look back to the copyright law of 1909, a law that’s generally reviled by publishers. Under the 1909 law, there were narrowly defined categories for copyright – you couldn’t get the rights to a work unless it fit within the categories. Rights were far more limited. It’s possible to build a copyright system that gives significant rights to copyright holders and reserves rights for users.

1909 copyright law reviled by publihers – categories, couldn’t get the rights unless you fell without the categories. And rights were much more limited.
define rights to reproduction, adaptation which gives significant rights to copyright owners, reserves rights to users

Q: (Christian Sandvig). A book from a decade past, called “The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach”, makes the argument that the Internet is culturally embodied and located. In short, the authors argue that if you’re in Trinidad, the net is one thing – if you’re not, it’s another thing. The authors rushed the book into print because they thought they were about to witness a trend of scholarship that saw the internet as culturally embodied. That trend hasn’t caught on – why not?

A: Our discourse about cultural embeddedness tends to not go further than the digital divide. If your connectivity is limited, your knowledge is limited, and we want to help you overcome those limitations. That’s okay – it would be nice to have a comprehensive broadband policy designed to give access to everyone. But the assumption that there’s a uniform digital ethos, a universal competency to strive for is troublesome.

Q: (Salil Vadhan): Could you elaborate on the implication that interoperability implies a desire for information to flow freely between systems – those seem like two separate things.
A: We probably shouldn’t decree by fiat a set of randomized incompatibilities between systems. But there’s a value to not fixing all these incompatibilties. The challenge is to design a framework that encourages and rewards gaps between systems. But everything is driving against it… it might just be quixotic to think we can avoid this seamless integration.

Q: (David Weinberger) That the Internet is a different thing from Trinidad and from Cambridge seems incontestible. That said, as long as the internet is present in any recognizable form, in Trinidad, Beijing or Cambridge, you’ll have the sense that ideas can be linked, that there’s more information than you could ever consume, that much of that information is from people like you, and that there’s a lot of disagreement. Are these characteristics really universal, embodied within the technology, or is this culturally embodied? Is there something that can be said about the internet cross-culturally?
A: It depends on your level of abstraction. Technodeterminism comes into play if you think there’s only one set of rules that could apply within a digital space. It’s not at all obvious that there’s a single way the internet could (or does) work.

When we start talking about aspirations for how the internet should work, liberalism makes its way back into the project. We don’t want to throw away all the aspirations – but aspirations are a crappy descriptive tool. Critical subjectivity is an aspiration of liberalism, but it’s something we’re not very good at getting to.

Q: (Fernando Bermejo): Scholars of linguistics have been accused of creating an object – language – at the expense of speakers. Similar accusations can be raised about cyberlaw, internet studies and the spatial metaphor for cyberspace.
A: I wrote a paper about this, and agree that there’s a tendency to reify, separate cyberspace, then project our fantasies of social ordering on it. I prefer “network space”, a real space created by networks, defined by what people can do. Network spaces include the realization that Paris and New York may now be closer than New York and Williamsburg, VA, because there’s a regular flow of people from New York to Paris, a networked connection that reshapes realworld geography.

Please see David Weinberger’s excellent notes from the talk here.

I lost an hour this morning to a documentary on Liberia, which I stumbled onto through Twitter. VBS – the television and video arm of Vice Magazine (wikipedia article, official site) – has produced critically acclaimed content including “Heavy Metal in Baghdad“, a documentary about Iraqi metal band, Acrassicauda. This month, they’re releasing an eight-part series titled “The Vice Guide to Liberia”. The first seven sections are available online – the next will be released within 48 hours. I’ve just watched the first seven episodes, and I’m not at all sure what I think.

There’s no shortage of earnest, thoughtful, responsible documentaries about Liberia’s civil war and its aftermath. A partial list might include “Liberia: America’s Stepchild“, “Pray the Devil Back to Hell“, “Iron Ladies of Liberia“, “Liberia: An Uncivil War” and “The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here“. Vice’s production – narrated by magazine/production company/media empire co-founder Shane Smith – is an abrupt break from the careful interviews and swelling music that accompany most of these films. Then again, what would you expect from a group “which reliably regards the world with unbridled ridicule”? (Jon Fine, in Businessweek).

Shane Smith and Vice are in Liberia expanding on an earlier Vice Magazine story – “Gen. Butt Naked Versus The Tupac Army” – which considered the civil war from the perspective of fashion, reporting the widely reported but still titillating “news” that Liberian rebels fought dressed in hiphop t-shirts, women’s wedding dresses or naked. So it’s not a big surprise that Vice’s story is designed to shock at least as much as it is to enlighten. The third of eight episodes looks at UN and international relief efforts in the country, and dismisses their failure by focusing on a neighborhood with no plumbing where residents shit on the beach. (This may be shocking to Canadian hipster filmmakers, but isn’t especially shocking to anyone who’s spent time in West Africa or any very poor parts of the world.) As the end of that episode description puts it, “From there it’s off the visit a heroin den, where we watch a twelve year-old smoke heroin and describes raping a woman at gunpoint. It gets worse.” Much of the Vice travel aesthetic seems to come from Canadian journalist Robert Young Pelton, whose “The World’s Most Dangerous Places” isn’t the world’s most helpful travel guide, but is one of the most entertaining.

Much of what seems to scare Smith and his crew – situations they inevitably describe as having “a heavy vibe” – are cases where they (a bunch of white guys with expensive camera equipment) are surrounded by poor Africans who’d like some money. It’s hard not to notice that most of the uncomfortable situations are ones they’ve chosen to put themselves in – “Hey, let’s go film inside a brothel in a tough part of town in the middle of the night – what could go wrong?” On the other hand, some of the footage that comes from these poor decisions is evocative and worth watching. Their experience trying to get a former rebel general released from a police station so they can interview him – and, predictably, getting shook down for a bribe – gave me warm feelings of familiarity as I remembered my worst experiences with law enforcement in difficult parts of the world.

Charles Taylor Jr. with Vice magazine reporter in Monrovia, Liberia

So, is this a straightforward case of overprivleged westerners making fun of the poor, a contemptible piece of exoticism? I think the filmmakers see themselves doing something different: showcasing the strange culture collisions that occur in a world as interconnected as ours. This interview with aspiring hiphop star Charles Taylor Jr. – son of the notorious warlord and former President – captures that aesthetic neatly… as does the photo of Taylor Jr. sporting a Boston Celtics throwback jersey (what does Larry Bird think about this photo?)

The cultural collision at the heart of the Vice documentary is the story of Joshua Blahyi, the aforementioned General Butt Naked. Blahyi developed a reputation as a particularly savage rebel leader loyal to coup-installed President Samuel Doe. He and his men fought naked, except for their guns and Chuck Taylor sneakers, believing the rituals performed before battle protected them from enemy gunfire. Blahyi says the rituals involved slaughtering children, eating their hearts and drinking their blood. In testimony before Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he estimates that he and his men killed at least 20,000 people during the civil war.

The TRC accepted Blahyi’s testimony, and he is a free man in Liberia – a circumstance that some point to as evidence that Liberia needs a war crimes tribunal, not just a TRC. In recent years, Blahyi has converted to Christianity and now prefers to be known as “Evangelist Blahyi”. He leads the Vice filmmakers to the abandoned hotel that served as rebel headquarters, through a malarial swamp to the mission where he shelters former combatants, to a graveyard where he talks about exhuming bodies and sleeping in empty graves. In this last scene, he and Smith are dressed in matching white suits, looking like televangelists. They discuss cannibalism in the graveyard, then proceed to a church where Blahyi takes the stage and preaches about his conversion.

Are we to take Blahyi’s conversion seriously? The pairing of the evangelist and the skeptical filmmaker in matching suits suggests that the Vice crew is having fun with the scene, looking for a laugh. But they’ve put their finger on some of the most difficult questions that face contemporary Liberia. How does a nation recover from a brutal past – does it embrace those who’ve asked for forgiveness, or turn them away? Is Blahyi genuinely repentant about his ghastly past, or has he simply adopted an identity likely to allow him to survive (and thrive, evidently) in contemporary Liberia?

It’s worth watching Vice’s time with Blahyi (in episodes 6 & 7) and then the promo for Gerald K. Barclay’s film, which also centers on Blahyi. Barclay features chilling footage of Blahyi talking about his past crime, overlaid with pieces of Peter Gabriel’s score for the film “Passion”. It embraces the conventions of the American socially-progressive documentary film: an outline of the challenges facing a group of disadvantaged people, a set of stories that illustrate those challenges, a moving story behind the making of the film. Barclay is a Liberian exile, and he returned to West Africa – first to Budumburum refugee camp outside Accra, Ghana and then to Liberia – to shoot “Liberia: The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here.”

I’m much more comfortable with the motivations behind Barclay’s work than with the newer piece from Vice. But I have no doubt that Vice’s piece – even if distributed solely online – will reach a wider audience. Smith and his crew aren’t shooting for an audience predisposed to care about Liberia – they’re making a film for an audience that’s looking for excitement, shock and the unexpected, qualities their story has in spades. This isn’t a usual documentary audience, as tweets about the series indicate:

Something about the VBS documentaries – the high quality of production, the unfamiliarity of the subject matter, the narrative of “adventure” rather than history – is generating a lot of buzz. As much as I want to object to the VBS video, which sensationalizes, uses historical footage with little context, and is a classic example of parachute psuedo-journalism, I have to admit that it’s a compelling piece of storytelling and that it caught my attention. Rather than critiquing it, I’m interested in picking it apart and starting to understand what makes it work. What could documentary filmmakers learn from VBS to generate a wider audience for their work? Is it possible to broaden your audience without playing to their desire to see something shocking and outrageous? Is it acceptable to use shock and outrage to get people to pay attention to parts of the world they know and care little about?

I’m fascinated by VBS because they appear to be getting people to pay attention to a part of the world that receives very little media attention. At minimum, Vice’s documentary demonstrates that there are stories to tell about Africa’s history that can reach an audience beyond the NPR/PBS community. The open question for me is whether the story they tell is a constructive one, one that can help Liberia move forwards, or merely a shocking, exploitative one. And, as I said 1500 words back, I’m not sure what I think – what do you think?

Many good friends are in Washington, DC today to hear Secretary Clinton’s speech on Internet Freedom, and will be offering their reactions across a swath of online and offline media. I’m enjoying my own brand of internet freedom, the one that allows me to get the transcript of her speech as it’s delivered and offer my reactions online, while helping Rachel look after the joy and terror of our lives. I’ll link to their posts or tweet them as they come in, but I was asked by friends at the Index on Censorship to offer some thoughts on the speech, and I thought I’d (expand on and) share what I wrote for them.

It was encouraging to hear Secretary Clinton sounding like a dyed in the wool cyberutopian. Her description of the Internet as a “new nervous system for the planet” reflects aspirations much more than reality. Yes, we’re getting information from Hunan and Haiti… but we’ve got a lot of work to do to ensure that these networks allow all people to speak and to be heard. That’s not just a function of open networks and a battle against censorship. It’s a challenge that forces us to consider digital divides, language barriers, parochialism and patterns of news coverage and information flows. (I’ll be talking about these issues in a lecture – delivered online – at Stanford tonight.) I’m excited to hear Secretary Clinton offer her unambiguous conviction that the internet is a force for positive connection, even in the face of dangerous uses by criminals or terrorists – I hope that we can move on from offering the potential of a “new nervous system” into a conversation about the difficult realities of achieving that vision.

I’d been worried that Clinton’s speech might propose a new “charter of internet rights”, an idea that’s been percolating in Washington circles since early in the Obama administration. I’ve opposed the idea that the US should propose a novel set of rights, both because the rights we’d advocate for are well covered in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, particularly in article 19, and because US advocacy for a new set of rights would make it easier for some nations – including nations that actively censor the internet – to claim that the right to information on the Internet was a manifestation of US first amendment freedoms, rather than a universal right. I thought Clinton did an excellent job of connecting her support for a “freedom to connect” in American tradition and history, but rooting it in international law. (I doubt she meant to give such a boost to my friend David Isenberg’s Freedom to Connect conference…) It’s hard for me to believe that the international institutions, like the UN Human Rights Council, will be especially effective guardians of these freedoms, given the embarrasing track record of international agencies like the ITU… but I think she’s wise to challenge international institutions to protect these rights.

I hadn’t heard about major policy initiatives linked to the speech, so I wasn’t especially surprised that there wasn’t much policy meat to the speech. (By the way, the speech had been scheduled well in advance of Google’s China announcements – it wasn’t a response to those developments. That, in turn, raises questions about the logic of the speech, since it wasn’t scheduled to be timely, or to make a major policy announcement. I think it’s simply a priority of her tenure, and a speech she’s wanted to give.) The US government is going to keep sponsoring tools and services that allow people to circumvent firewalls, as they’ve done for years. A number of commenters – and a couple of journalists – responded to my suggestion that Google could become a major player in the internet circumvention space by asking, “Wouldn’t that mean Google was declaring war on China?” If so, the US declared war on China years ago. Support for anticensorship tech is old news. Alec Ross has made clear – in some excellent speeches – that State would engage in diplomacy in the internet medium. The idea of a contest to develop new applications is cool, but not especially new.

What was interesting was hearing Clinton suggest that taking a stand against censorship should
become part of the “American brand”. It’s possible that we’re going to see the Google/China controversy revive discussion of using export bans to prohibit American companies from doing business with countries that censor. I think that’s a bad idea – it punishes a company like Cisco and provides more opportunity for Huawei, who are perfectly capable of building censorious routers all on their own. (A better path is the idea advocated by Tim Wu and others that the US seek trade sanctions against countries that censor the internet as an unfair restraint of trade.) By suggesting that companies embrace the branding opportunity of promoting freedom, I think she’s signalling a hope that companies will do the right thing rather than endorsing new export constraints.

The endorsement of the GNI was encouraging – GNI is a collaboration of major industry players, academics and NGOs (Berkman colleagues are closely involved in GNI, and I was involved in early meetings that led to the group’s formation.) Google’s been a big voice in GNI, and Clinton’s endorsement of the group sounded like like a hearty endorsement of their recent decision to change China business practices, and a challenge to other US companies to reconsider how they engage with nations that censor the Internet. Of course, it’s not clear that challenging companies to embrace their best aspirations is going to have any effect on Microsoft’s engagement with the Chinese market, for instance.

In other words, it’s encouraging to see Clinton and the State Department unambiguously on the right side of these issues. It’s hard to know whether there’s any concrete implications to these words today beyond a worthy set of aspirations. Here’s hoping the next step is a conversation about how we would move from the right intentions to real-world outcomes, not just on censorship, but on the provocative idea of the “freedom to connect” and the vision of a “new nervous system for the planet.”

When disasters strike, one natural – and admirable – response is an outpouring of sympathy and support for those affected. Another natural response is more troublesome – the tendency to ask the question, “Could the same disaster befall me?”

My local newspaper, evidently short of news to report, ran this wonderful non-story two days after the tragic Haitian earthquake: “Berkshires unlikely to get major quake“. The article quoted an eminent geologist at nearby Williams College, who explained that the largest earthquake to hit Massachusetts had occured hundreds of years ago on the other side of the state, and that there’s essentially no seismic activity in our valley. I tweeted the link, noting “I understand the need to make news localy relevant, but this is absurd.”

Turns out there may be good reasons to report than an earthquake is unlikely to happen. Many Ghanaians spent Sunday night sleeping outside, for fear that a major earthquake would hit Accra, destroying vulnerable buildings and trapping their occupants. The story, coming out in blogs and news reports, reads like a textbook example of how bad information spreads and how hard it can be to contain.

Around 8pm on Sunday the 17th, people began receiving this text message: “Today’s night 12.30 to 3.30 am COSMIC RAYS entering earth from Mars. Switch off ur mobiles today’s night. NASA BBC NEWS. Plz pass to all ur friends.” As this message passed via voice and text message, it somehow morphed into a message about an impending earthquake, a message taken very seriously by Ghanaians who were watching the situation in Haiti closely. By early morning, the messages had grown more specific – some report receiving messages that the impending quake was an aftershock of the Haitian quake. David Ajao slept through much of the excitement, but woke to a pair of rumors, which he laughed off:

* an earthquake had already shook a town around Kasoa and was headed towards Winneba and Cape Coast
* an earthquake was due to shake Accra

Megan had a harder time shaking off the warning, in part because everyone around her was taking it quite seriously:

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

Frantic knocking. Check my watch. It’s 4am. Stumble out of bed to the door, and find a stranger standing there, already knocking on my neighbor’s door.

“There’s going to be an earthquake. You have to get out of the building.”

Ama and I walk outside together, confused, a little scared. Outside I see all 80 or so students who live in the ISH, milling about in their pajamas. The especially studious ones are hunkered down with flashlights reading microbiology (there’s an exam at 9am, and yes they are that intense), while the rest just mirror my own dazed look.

As she woke up, she began deciphering the rumors. “Everyone was just passing on the story they heard via cellphone from ‘a friend’ or ‘my family.’ I started to doubt the whole thing when I heard the followup rumors that ‘Cosmic rays are going to hit Earth from Mars!’ and got really upset that the person who felt the need to wake 80 students didn’t have the leadership to actually inform us of his sources, his information, or any school-wide evacuation plans.”

She explains that one of the problems was that radio stations – the most pervasive source of information in Ghana – were neither confirming or denying rumors in the early morning hours. According to BBC’s David Amanour, PeaceFM – one of Accra’s best radio stations – began calling the phone messages a hoax early in the morning, helping calm people’s fears. Unfortunately, by the time government ministers began taking to the airwaves to calm people, thousands – perhaps millions – had left their homes. Professor Stephen Yeboah paints a vivid picture:

Within minutes, the news had circulated down to even the last village you know of without proper access to telecommunication services.

Almost every Ghanaian was caught at parks, open fields and playing grounds with the notion that earthquakes are limited to houses only or less devastating in open places where there are no structures. Last prayers were said with diverse modes on biblical and unbiblical tongue speaking.

It’s unclear whether the initial message was a prank, an inside joke that got out of hand, or something more sinister. Close observers of Ghanaian politics won’t be surprised to learn that the propoganda secretary of the ruling NDC party has declared that the hoax was orchestrated by a rival political party to detract from NDC’s party congress in Tamale, the largest city in northern Ghana. Perhaps he’ll be proven right – The Ghanaian Times reports that various intelligence services are now trying to determine who started the rumors and why. Their article cites a businessman, who suggests the rumor points to a need to register all mobile phones and SIM cards. The Ghanaian Times reporter put this idea in front of a former Director of the Bureau of National Investigations, who praised the idea but made clear that it would be unlikely to pass parliament on grounds of individual privacy.

For me, the earthquake rumor is an interesting illustration of the strengths and weaknesses of various communications networks. A rumor like this one might start with malicious intent, but it’s spread by people who’ve got the best of intentions – they’re sharing critical information with friends and loved ones in the hopes of preventing disaster. The stranger knocking on Megan’s door wasn’t playing a prank – he thought he was saving her life. The pervasiveness of the message says a lot about the “we’re all in this together” nature of Ghanaian society, as well as the incredible reach of the country’s mobile phone networks.

The spread of the rumor evidently served as a stress test for mobile phone companies. David Ajao reports that the friend who reached him at 6:15 am had been trying to text and phone him since 2am – MTN’s mobile phone network had evidently prevented her from getting through, jammed with panicked phonecalls from other users trying to warn friends. If you’re a network engineer for MTN or competing carriers, this should serve as a wakeup call – a real emergency would likely unfold in much the same way, and if the networks can’t remain up in a hoax, it’s unclear they’d stay accessible in a real emergency.

I’m interested in the power of broadcast media being used to combat misinformation. It sounds like many Ghanaians didn’t realize they were in the clear until authority figures took to the airwaves to calm people down. Misinformation spread rapidly over mobile networks, taking multiple paths to its destinations, and gaining authority from the invocation of authorities like the BBC and NASA in the text messages and the imprimateur of a friend forwarding the message. Is it possible that the correct information could have spread over the mobile networks as well? Or does misinformation spread better through person to person networks and authoritative information through broadcast media? It’s an interesting thought experiment, if not something we’d want to test in the field.

Lest anyone conclude that rumors are restricted to the developing world, it’s worth looking at some of the hoaxes that sped around Twitter in the days after the Haitian earthquake struck. Twitterers shared the joyful news that American Airlines would fly any doctor or nurse to Haiti for free, and that UPS would ship up to 50 pounds to Haiti for free. Neither piece of “news” was accurate. It’s possible that someone posted a suggestion that AA should fly doctors for free, and that well-meaning retweeters turned a suggestion into fait (not) accompli. Again, it’s a demonstration of the power of well-meaning people, social media and the infinite human capacity for misunderstanding.

Yesterday, Google announced a major change in their policy in engaging with China – they will no longer censor search results on Google.cn to comply with Chinese policy. This almost certainly means that Google.cn will be blocked by the Great Firewall and that Google will no longer be able to operate in China.

While this aspect of Google’s announcement is sparking a great deal of conversation online, it comes at the end of a bombshell of an announcement – Google’s decision follows what appears to be a coordinated act of espionage aimed at its servers by Chinese attackers. The attack resulted, Google reports, in a theft of their intellectual property. They also report that a goal of the attack was to access the GMail accounts of Chinese human rights activists and supporters of Chinese human rights around the world. MacWorld reports that the attack targeted an internal system that Google had built to comply with search warrant requests for information on users. When it became clear that this internal system – evidently set up for the benefit of Chinese authorities – was being attacked and used to compromise Google’s internal networks, Google began discussions about disengaging from the world’s largest internet market.

There’s at least four ways to read Google’s decision:

Google decided to stop being evil.
Google has received reams of bad press from their decision to comply with Chinese government regulations and censor search results for Chinese users. It’s never been entirely clear to me why Google’s received more criticism than Microsoft – who admit they censored Chinese bloggers, and whose Chinese-language tools prevent posting of articles about human rights and democracy – or Yahoo, who turned over information on user Shi Tao to Chinese authorities that led to ten years imprisonment for “leaking state secrets”. I suspect we want to hold Google to a higher standard because they’ve put forth an informal motto: “Don’t be evil”, and compromising with the Chinese government looks like a violation of that stance.

Google’s taken steps to minimize the exposure of user data in China – services like Gmail, which contain sensitive personal data, or which permit publishing, like Blogger, are hosted in the US, not China. (This has made it harder for these tools to achieve market share against Chinese competitiors.) They censored in a more transparent fashion than some of their competitors, displaying a message at the bottom of each page, stating that sites had been removed from the results to comply with regulations. Google is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, a partnership between industry, academia and the nonprofit community designed to develop best practices for engaging in closed societies like China.

In my opinion – shaped, no doubt, by the fact that I’ve got a lot of friends within Google and have worked closely with the company in a couple of contexts – Google was a lot less evil than some of its competitors. But continued involvement in China continued to be a thorn in the side of Google on the PR front, and I know many people within the company questioned whether engaging in China was worth the compromises it entailed. The move to leave the Chinese market may be an example of Google returning to its core values and demonstrating an unwillingness to compromise.

Google retreated from a very tough market.
Google wasn’t doing all that well in the Chinese search market – they were a distant second to Baidu, and faced extreme challenges in gaining market share. Google’s main properties – google.com and related sites – are frequently inaccesible through the Great Firewall, and Google’s Chinese site – google.cn – was subject to a great deal of scrutiny from the Chinese press and from regulators. CCTV ran an “exposé” on Google.cn, demonstrating – horror of horrors! – that the internet includes links to pornography – this story led to increased oversight of Google’s Chinese site. Friends within Google tell me that it was a constant struggle to respond to complaints from Chinese regulators, and that they believed competitors like Baidu were reporting Google’s alleged violations to regulators, increasing scrutiny on the company.

The situation within Google China was already quite complicated. Kai-Fu Lee, Google’s China chief, quit in September, giving no clear reasons for his departure. His departure started speculation that Google might be discovering that they couldn’t be competitive in a Chinese market without making even larger compromises to corporate ideals.

It’s hard to imagine Google walking away from a market as potentially lucrative as China, even if they were in a tough battle for second place. And they certainly didn’t walk away quietly. By (obliquely) accusing the Chinese government of involvement in corporate espionage and challenging the government to shut the company down for providing uncensored search, “Google has taken the China corporate communications playbook, wrapped it in oily rags, doused it in gasoline and dropped a lit match on it.” (Those evocative words are from top Chinablogger Imagethief.) This isn’t a temporary strategic retreat – this is a retreat where you detonate the bridges behind you.

Google abandoned Chinese users.
Despite its second place in the market behind Baidu, there are millions of dedicated Google users in China, and many of them are deeply disappointed today and worried about losing access to services they’ve grown to depend on. Reading their comments in translation on Global Voices, thanks to Bob Chen, it’s clear the frustration is less with Google than with the Chinese authorities. One translated tweet is especially poignant:

The sin of facebook is that it helps people know who they wanna know. The sin of Twitter is that it allows people to say what they wanna say. The sin of Google is that it lets people find what they wanna find, and Youtube let us see what we wanna see. So, they are all kicked away.

Bob also shares a joke about China in the years after Google’s departure:

People born in 90s: Today I stepped out of the Great Firewall and saw a foreign website named Google. Shit, it is all but a copy of Baidu.
Born in 00s: What do you mean by stepping out of Great Firewall?
Born in 10s: What do you mean by website?
Born in 20s: What is “foreign”?

Perhaps most striking is a campaign to lay flowers in front of Google’s headquarters in Beijing. Rebecca MacKinnon reports that Tsinghua University’s security department has banned students from taking flowers to Google headquarters without permission.

(Here’s a sympathetic view of Google’s decision to pull out from Chinese activist Michael Anti, who’s been censored in the past by Microsoft.)

Google is about to join the front lines of the anticensorship wars.
Hal Roberts, John Palfrey and I published a study of tools designed to subvert and circumvent internet censorship a few months back, based on research we conducted over the course of three years. In the course of that research, we ended up with a simple realization about the design of censorship circumvention software:

A robust anti-censorship system has, at minimum, three components:
- Lots of non-contiguous IP addresses, making it difficult for censors to block the entry points into the system
- Huge amounts of bandwidth that can access the public internet, as a censorship circumvention system is basically an ISP
- Multiple methods to feed fresh IP addresses to your users

This isn’t a complete definition, of course – good anticensorship systems use SSL encryption to prevent keyword blocking, but that’s a solved problem. The three components above tend to be very hard for small anti-circumvention projects to solve. It’s very hard to obtain lots and lots of IP addresses, and very expensive to provision sufficient bandwidth… unless you’re Google, in which case, these obstacles should be trivial. There’s still lots of work that needs to be done ensuring that users of circumvention systems get fresh IP addresses, but a Google-backed anticensorship system (perhaps operated in conjunction with some of the smart activists and engineers who’ve targeted censorship in Iran and China?) would be massively more powerful (and threatening!) than the systems we know about today.

These tools would have a built-in market – the millions of users who were enjoying Google’s tools from within China – and could radically change the landscape of the internet freedom field. An emphasis on internet freedom tools would allow Google to engage with a smaller Chinese market, but would allow them to maintain a toe in the waters while maintaining a stance of disengagement with the Chinese government.

Is Google going to do this? I have no idea. I hope so. They could have done so previously, but it would have been viewed as a shot across China’s bow. Now that they’ve launched a torpedo, that shot across the bow seems more likely.

At Global Voices, we were thrilled that Google chose to partner with us and Thompson/Reuters in offering the Breaking Borders Award “to honor outstanding web projects initiated by individuals or groups that demonstrate courage, energy and resourcefulness in using the Internet to promote freedom of expression.” It would be very exciting to see Google becoming one of those groups using their energy, resourcefulness and resources to combat censorship online… and it would certainly take some corporate courage on their part.

We’ll know a lot more about what Google’s doing in the next few days. Responses are already piling up online. Evgeny thinks Google is bluffing, or simply retreating from an unsuccesful market position. Jonathan Zittrain sees this as a masterstroke, aligning Google’s business with its values, and shares my hope that Google will dedicate major resources to censorship circumvention. Dharmishta Rood links to a bevy of reactions from around the web. I’m anxiously awaiting Rebecca’s analysis, which she promises when she finishes two other articles that are due. (Man, I know that feeling.)

A massive earthquake hit Haiti last night, with an epicentre only 15 kilometers from Port au Prince, the capital city. It will be some time before the extent of the devestation is known, but early reports suggest that thousands are likely to be reported dead. Major landmarks, including the Presidential Palace, National Assembly and Port au Prince cathedral have been destroyed. Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, and the damage from the earthquake will compound the massive challenges the country already faces.

Reporters are racing to Haiti to report on the disaster, but voices are already making themselves heard from the decimated city. Georgia Popplewell, Global Voices’s managing director and pioneering Caribbean blogger, has been rounding up tweets coming from Haiti on our site. Some of the tweets include photos that show the intensity of the destruction.

Photo sent to twitter user marvinady by Carel Pedre of Haiti’s Radio One.

Georgia has started a list on Twitter, aggregating accounts of people who are posting from Haiti. Pooja Bhatia is apparently posting from Port au Prince and reported last night, “quake happened as sun was setting but in plenty of time to see that all the slum houses built into the hillsides disappeared”. Her posts today have documented the devestation of various landmarks and people’s increasing concern about obtaining food and water. Other Twitter users are enroute to PAP and writing about their progress and setbacks in reaching the city.

Troy Livesay, a missionary in Haiti, is writing long, informative blog posts as well as tweets. This morning’s post reveals the extent of uncertainty the island is feeling:

There are buildings that suffered almost no damage. Right next door will be a pile of rubble.

Thousands of people are currently trapped. To guess at a number would be like guessing at raindrops in the ocean. Precious lives hang in the balance. When pulled from the rubble there is no place to take them for care Haiti has an almost non existent medical care system for her people.

I cannot imagine what the next few weeks and months will be like. I am afraid for everyone. Never in my life have I seen people stronger than Haitian people. But I am afraid for them. For us.

Response to the tragedy has been rapid online. My twitter-scanning scripts estimate that 1.5-1.8% of tweets on Twitter this morning have mentioned Haiti – that’s much higher than mentions of “china” or “google”, refering to the major story breaking in technology news, Google’s decision to stop censoring search results in China. Much of the Twitter conversation centers on ways to help the Haitian people – in the US, texting “haiti” to 90999 donates $10 to the Red Cross to support Haitian relief efforts. Chris Sacca offers five more ways you can help, donating to other worthy organizations and learning more about relief efforts as well as about Haiti’s history and resilience. Jen Brea is tracking reactions from the Haitian diaspora and efforts to help, including the project organized by Haitian-American rap artist Wyclef Jean.

We’ll be tracking the crisis and response in Haiti closely on Global Voices and expect to have a special coverage page up within an hour. Our thoughts and prayers are with everyone in Haiti and Haitians in the diaspora around the world.