The blindfold is off now, because I lost a challenge with David Weinberger - it turns out that I cannot, in fact, liveblog blindfolded. I can, but what results isn’t exactly readable - turns out that I move one key in a random direction every few minutes if I’m not typing continuously.

Anyway. This event is an interesting blend of birthday party, complete with a certain degree of self-congratulation, and academic conference, featuring Berkman faculty as speakers. There’s a lot to celebrate. John Palfrey, our fearless leader, has just been elevated to vice-dean of the law school, responsible for the library and information services of the institution. The Center is moving from a Law School center to a “university-wide” center… though it’s a bit unclear what that move will mean. Yochai Benkler has joined our team, and with Cass Sunstein moving to Harvard Law, we’re hoping he’ll join as well. And Dean Elena Kagan urges us to use this conference as a chance to convince Jonathan Zittrain to accept an offer to take a tenured position at Harvard, where he taught until a few years ago.

Zittrain is the opening speaker, offering an overview of the argument in his new book, “The Future of the Internet, and How to Stop It“. His argument - in a nutshell - is that the amazing power of a programmable computer and an open internet, which he refers to as “generativity”, may be in danger of making the internet such a dangerous place that we try to shut off this generative magic.

Zittrain uses the “g-word” infrequently in today’s talk - instead, he refers to this magic as “the dark energy” of the internet… which is appealing to me, as the world is very dark indeed with this blindfold on. But the darkness of his vision provokes some serious pushback from the audience, which includes net luminaries like Scott Bradner and David Reed, who helpfully point out that people have been predicting the implosion of the internet for a long, long time now… and somehow the network proces resilient enough to survive.

Terry Fisher, framing Zittrain’s talk, explains that most conversation about the net has focused on a debate between market forces and open, commons-based creation. Zittrain offers a different model - a matrix that includes axes from top-down to bottom-up, and from hierarchy to polyarchy. The generative net has lived in the quadrant defined by bottom-up and polyarchy. Many of the solutions to the scary problems of the net move towards top-down, centralized solutions like that offered by the ITU. Zittrain’s hope is for a bottom-up, but hierarchical solution.

That’s the quadrant he’s pointing to on the screen, but his argument seems a lot more basic - we need to trust human nature and people’s willingness to do the right thing. I’m reminded that when I spoke to Brooke Gladstone at On the Media a week or so ago, she told me that all net visionaries she knows ultimately believe that human nature will save the Internet - it’s interesting to discover that JZ is soundly in that camp.

That’s not how it happened for me.

As the medical resident took the bandages off me, I saw nothing but a yellow cloud. She covered my good eye, and asked me to tell her how many fingers she was holding up. I saw nothing, not even her hand.

The main feature of the surgery I had midday on Tuesday was the removal of the vitreous humor from my right eye. That’s the clear jelly that your eyes are filled with. That jelly had turned fibrous in my eyes and was acting as a trellis for blood vessels to grow on. So the surgeon removed the vitreous, the bad blood vessels, the scar tissue and refilled the eye with saline.

So far, so good. But there’s a lot of blood, tissue and crap in the eye, and that’s all mixed with the saline, resulting in a fluid much like muddy water.

Muddy water settles, but it takes a while. I used to carry a small vial of water and sand - the centerpiece from an art piece I installed my junior year - from apartment to apartment early in my life. Each time I packed my things, the water would turn dark and muddy. I’d put it in a place of pride in the new apartment and wait for it to settle. One day, I’d glance at it and it would be clear water and sand again.

And that’s what’s happening right now in my right eye. One day away from the surgery, the world through my right eye looked like a Mark Rothko painting. Yesterday, I’d made it as far as later Monet. Today, the world through my right eye looks like a 1950s Playboy shoot, the kind with heavy vaseline on the lens.

I’d figured that the challenge of healing would be forcing myself not to be dumb, not to race right back into reading and writing email. Truth be told, it simply hasn’t been possible. I can’t read at all without closing my right eye, and that’s painful to do more than a few minutes at a time.

And so… I’ve spent the last three days watching the first season of The Wire, and playing Grand Theft Auto. (Not the new one - I never finished San Andreas.) All of which seems to be helping, though I feel like an absolute and total slug. Aside from not using my eyes, my doctor has ordered me not to work out or even go for a walk at least for the first week of recovery. Turns out I’m very, very bad at sitting still.

The good news, however, is that the surgery was a complete success. I’m just looking forward to some moment in the future where I’ll actually be able to see those results. And I’m beginning to get my head around the idea that it might be another week before that happens.

I share Andrew’s joy in that moment where the phone goes silent and the wifi fades away - I suspect everyone who’s overwhelmed by demands on their time does. (And I suspect almost everyone is overwhelmed by demands on their time.) However, the signature joy of that moment, for me at least, is that I get to read everything that I’ve been saving up for the days or weeks between flights. And that’s not an option for this particular downtime.

Tomorrow morning, I’m having “23-gauge pars plana vitrectomy” on my right eye. In my past experience with less intrusive, laser-based procedures, I’ve recovered distance vision very quickly, but had a very tough time getting my eye to the point where I can read. I’ve heard varying prognoses on recovery from vitrectomy, from two weeks through six. A lot depends on what the doctor finds inside the eye, whether scar tissue on my retina has caused a tear, which would make recovery longer and much less comfortable.

My plan is to take a week off from driving and at least three off from reading. For those attending Berkman@10 - and you should, as it’s going to be a great event - I have high hopes of seeing you there (with one or two eyes) but offer no guarantees. I’m also planing on ignoring the blog and email for the duration. My wife and other friends have promised to help me keep up with incoming missives, but I offer no guarantees on my ability to respond.

Several friends have offered the wonderful suggestion that I ask blog readers to read to me during the weeks I can’t read to myself. I love the idea conceptually, but am a bit worried about asking friends to help me finish reading Paul Starr’s “The Creation of the Media”, for fear that nasty, toothy lawyers from Basic Books will come chasing after me. That said, I wonder whether asking if people are interested in reading academic papers would somewhat reduce the risk. I’d really love to read “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks” by McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook (30 pages) and “Self-Segregation or Deliberation” by Farrell, Lawrence and Sides (26 pages) in the net couple of weeks. If you’re interested in getting together with a friend or two and recording a podcast of either paper, let me know and I’ll have Rachel send you the PDF (use the comments to leave your email address and your willingness to read…) (And for any of the paper authors - if this isn’t okay, let me know and I won’t circulate the papers.)

Thanks for all the kind words and good wishes I’ve received thus far and for any that are to come. Have a wonderful May, and hope to see/read you in three weeks or so.

David is right, of course. (He usually is.) But being famous to fifteen people is a very old phenomenon, not just a very new one.

I spent last evening in the small, stuffy gymnasium of the high school I graduated from 19 years ago. Like three hundred others, I’d come back to Danbury, CT, to celebrate the brilliant fifty year teaching career of Korb Eynon. Korb was - unhappily but steadfastly - the headmaster of the school when I enrolled in 1984. By the time I graduated, he’d returned to his natural environment, the classroom, introducing seniors to King Lear. His technique included offering himself as a picture of the half-mad king in his declining years. I bet that trick works even better twenty years later.

After patiently receiving praise from five decades of students, Korb took the stage to explain, “It’s not me, it’s the institution.” Patiently - as if we were especially slow pupils struggling with iambic pentameter - he explained that he was simply “part of the Pantheon,” part of an ever-rolling stream of teachers who’d preceded him and who now follow him. He invoked their names - Hobart Warner, Joe Grover, Donald Schwartz, Aaron Coburn, John Verdery - to murmurs of respectful approval from the crowd.

Don’t bother Googling those names - they’re not famous men. This is a small school - in just over eighty years, there are probably no more than a few thousand students who’ve passed through, and perhaps a thousand who’ve shared a classroom with each of these local legends. But in that gymnasium, to that audience, those names resonate like those of biblical prophets or Red Sox MVPs. Looking around the room - my sister to my right, three of my closest high school friends to my left, the older sister of my first girlfriend seated behind me, old friends and rivals scattered about - I saw an extended family, a small tribe. There are only 556 references to Korb Eynon on Google, but to that tribe, he’s Plato, Bobby Kennedy and Carl Yastremski rolled into one.

It’s easy to think of this “new” type of fame as being smaller, less profound than the broadcast model of fame. But this older fame is more personal, more intimate and likely much more important.

Driving home late last night, I realized he’d done it again, 19 years after I left his classroom for the last time. Korb hadn’t impressed his thinking on me - he’d shared something that caused me to explore my own line of thinking. In other words, he’d taught. Just like he’s been doing for five decades. Thanks, Korb.

So far, the research I’ve done has given me a sense for just how far back in time I need to go to understand scholarship on this issue… which appears to precede Aristotle, who writes about the phenomenon in Nichomachean Ethics, but who may be quoting Diogenes when he references “birds of a feather flock together”. Guess I picked a terrific time to take a month off from all reading…

One of the most exciting (for me, at least) conversations that’s come out of the post was one I had with Brooke Gladstone on Wednesday evening at WNYC’s studios in New York City. I was in NYC doing a bit of consulting for friends at Open Society Institute when I got a call from Jamie York, one of the producers of On The Media, my favorite public radio show. He’d shared my post with Brooke and they were kind enough to invite me into the studio to discuss the problems of homophily in digital media and possible solutions. You can listen to my segment on the audio player above, or on the page for our conversation. But I’d urge you to subscribe to the podcast - if you’re interested in smart, sharp, relavent critique of media around the world, this show is for you.

It was a great honor for me to be on the air with Brooke and I’m looking forward to thinking through these issues a bit more so I can speak more intelligently next time (and so I can be a bit less of a stuttering fanboy around one of my favorite public radio figures.)

I’ve written at length about the situation in Somalia over the past couple of years. For a quick intro to the situation, you might try “Somalia: Possibly More Complex than Nigeria”. If you’ve got lots of time to kill, you could follow some of my other posts on the topic:

December 7, 2006 - UN Peacekeepers in Somalia - Is that a good thing?
December 21, 2006 - Ken Menkhaus’s insights on Somalia
December 28, 2006 - Ethiopian Army Seizes Mogadishu
December 29, 2006 - Ethiopian Liberators greeted with cheer and flowers
January 4, 2007 - A historic opportunity for what?
January 11, 2007 - A quagmire no one wants to be stuck in
June 22, 2007 - An update on the “third front”
November 19, 2007 - The possible resumption of the world’s stupidest war
December 14, 2007 - Somalia spirals out of control. Or it’s completely peaceful. Depends on who you ask.
February 18, 2008 - Steve Bloomfield breaks new ground in Somalia reporting

Or you could accept this incomplete, biased and massively oversimplified summary:

Somalia has been without a central government since 1991 - it’s been run by somewhat functional governments in northern provinces Somaliland and Puntland, and by competing groups of warlords in the south. There have been thirteen unsuccesful attempts to create national unity governments for Somalia, all of which have failed. Attempt #14 - the Transitional Federal Government - has support of the UN, the US and has been able to occupy southern Somalia with the backing of the Ethiopian army. The TFG, backed by the Ethiopian Army, supported by US military assistance, chased out the Union of Islamic Courts, a group of warlords who managed to bring some semblance of stability to Mogadishu and its environs by introducing a form of sharia law.

Ethiopia got involved because it sees a strong Islamist Somalia as a threat - specifically, it is fighting a civil conflict in its eastern Ogaden region, which shares a border with Somalia and which some Somalis see as a part of Greater Somalia. Eritrea may have gotten involved on the side of the UIC, as a way of opposing their enemy Ethiopia… with whom they are threatening to resume fighting the world’s stupidest war. The US got involved because it feared that a UIC-controlled Mogadishu would become a haven for Al-Qaeda. Got all that?

Ethiopia invaded in late 2006, with intelligence, training and logistical support from the US, rapidly routed UIC, which dispersed, a common tactic in guerilla warfare. Since then, it’s become increasingly clear that Ethiopia is trapped in its own “Vietnam”, an unwinnable guerilla war that’s sapping its strength. The US has bombed Somali targets several times with limited success. The AU is on the ground as a peacekeeping force, but only 1600 of a promised 8,000 troops have shown up. Meanwhile, violence is increasing and spreading north into previously stable Puntland.

And, in the meantime, there’s a refugee crisis in Somalia that’s at least as serious as the situation in Darfur - at least 1.5 million Somalis are believed to have fled their homes to avoid violence between the FTG/Ethiopian forces and militias like al-Shabab. Public spaces, like markets, have become extremely dangerous for citizens, as Ethiopian forces have shown willingness to shell public spaces to target militants.

So, who was Ayro, who are these al-Shabab guys, and will this latest development make things better or worse?

After the Union of Islamic Courts was ousted from Mogadishu, the alliance that had helped stabilize the city broke up into at least three forces. My friend Abduhrahman Warsame, a Somali who works in Qatar, offers this analysis:

It’s becoming clearer that Islamic Courts were only an umbrella for diverse groups each with a different agenda. One of those groups was the clan militias, led by a warlord nicknamed “Indha Adde”, who held the biggest force within the Islamic Courts, they were used to defeat the warlords allied with the US. Another group was the Islamic Courts militia, mostly militias of the powerful businessmen in Mogadishu. Then there’s the hardcore Al-Qaeda-type group, mostly Somalis who fought overseas alongside the Taliban and elsewhere, and unlike the other groups their aim was to capture the whole of Somalia. However, the leadership of the Islamic Courts were more realistic, and that’s what kept this group in-check.

One of the “hardcore” militias Abdurahman refers to is Al-Shabab, and Ayro, who analysts believe trained in Afghanistan, was one of the leaders of the militia. There’s no doubt that Ayro was an extremely bad guy, and that techniques he and followers use are similar to techniques being used in Afghanistan and Iraq. But does it make sense to identify him as the head of al-Qaeda in Somalia?

I’m guessing this question is being asked in newsrooms around the world today. The New York Times ran a story initially titled “Qaeda Agent in Somalia Killed in U.S. Attack”. It’s now titled “Key Militant in Somalia Killed in U.S. Attack“. (At present, the link above leads to a story with the first headline in the title bar and the second headline on the webpage.) The BBC story mentions al-Qaeda, but only in references to US military assertions about the target: “The US says al-Shabab is part of the al-Qaeda network, although correspondents say it is impossible to accurately establish those links. Al-Shabab leaders say it is a purely Somali movement and they deny any involvement with al-Qaeda.”

And there’s the question. If Al-Shabab is the local chapter of a global terrorist organization, attempting to train fighters to wage jihad against US interests around the world, it makes sense for the US military to target it. But if Al-Shabab is a violent, brutal, domestic terrorist organization aimed at ousting the TFG and Ethiopian soldiers from Somalia, what the heck is the US doing in the fight? Are we simply doing favors for Ethiopia, in exchange for continued military and diplomatic support? Or do we now have a policy of bombing terrorists anywhere we’ve got the possibility of doing so without the complaints of the local government? (Easy enough to do in Somalia, where the government has been installed by the Ethiopian military with US backup.)

I’ve asserted that the US strategy in Somalia represents a new form of military strategy - a proxy war, using our special forces and airpower, but the ground troops of another nation, designed to fly under the radar of media scrutiny. While this particular strike got a good deal of coverage, articles have largely picked up the “US got a bad guy” storyline and have had little speculation on the larger security and political situation.

Two stories written prior to the strike that killed Ayro might shed some light on the larger context, and might have useful predictions for the future. Abdulkadir Khalif, writing in Kenya Today, notes that UIC and Al-Shabab militias have been reclaiming territory that had been controlled by TGF forces. Other large swaths of territory appear uncontrolled either by TFG or by UIC-related forces. Khalif notes, “For many people, this has come as a surprise since few expected the Islamists to regroup and gain ground so fast. Their defeat by the TFG forces, with the help of Ethiopian troops, over a year ago seemed so decisive that no one expected the Islamists to recover in just about a year.” It will be worth seeing whether the strike killing Ayro will slow this process - if not, it’s a pretty good sign that Al-Shabab isn’t the only powerful milita fighting TFG, or that killing a single guerilla commander isn’t as relevant in winning a war many reports are making it out to be.

Nick Wadhams, writing in Time, has a stark analysis of the situation in Somalia. Though pubished before the strike on Ayro, his words may prove prescient:

The al-Shabab used to be the military wing of the Islamic Courts Union, the group of Islamic militias that had taken over towns across the country before being ousted by the Ethiopians. Now, however, they appear to be gaining power, raising fears that moderates among the Islamic groups are being sidelined. “What has been happening is the steady deterioration in the security situation and the inability of the TFG and the Ethiopian forces to contain the insurgency and impose some sort of stability,” Andebrhan Georgis, an adviser to the Africa Program at the International Crisis Group, told TIME. “I’m afraid what we’re seeing is increasing radicalization.”

That’s been a major embarrassment to Ethiopia and, by extension, the United States, which supported Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s decision to invade, on the premise that it would quell the deepening Islamic fundamentalism that seemed to be taking hold. So far, events in Somalia suggest that it has had the opposite effect, driving moderate factions of the Islamists out of the country and shifting power to the best-armed and most hardline among them.

Why pay attention to Somalia? Because this new strategy of proxy warfare may prove more dangerous, in the long run, than fighting directly. Because evidence is mounting that toppling governments is easier than building nations. Because we’re discovering that fighting guerilla armies is different from fighting standing armies. Because US actions in the world have relevance for US citizens whether they know it or not.

One problem: if surveillance is performed competently, it should be undetectable. Second problem: it’s often to someone’s advantage to claim that surveillance is taking place, even when it’s not, as it can change behaviors. (Think about “dummy” cameras mounted on your house as part of a fake “security system”. If they’re convincing enough, perhaps they don’t actually need to work.) Conley mentions my comments about the panopticon effect of surveillance in a recent Newsweek article - I assert that Zimbabwe isn’t able effectively monitor the Internet… but by stating that they will, they’ve forced a large number of users to remove sensitive information and conversations from the Internet.

In attempting to understand and explain surveillance to academics, activists and the general public, Conley would prefer to study what’s actually happening. Unfortunately, that data’s pretty uncommon. We know about situations where surveillance is discovered by the target and cases where information is either leaked or publicly released, but these situations are quite rare.

Instead, in many cases, we do better to study capabilities. What tools are available that individuals or governments could use to monitor networks? What tools can be used to scan a hard drive over networks? What are the capabilities and vulnerabilities of tools like GMail, Google Docs and Facebook? How is the network laid out and what does that mean about technological constraints on monitoring?

It’s been widely reported - though only very thinly disclosed - that there’s widespread domestic surveillance taking place in the US with the intention of monitoring suspected terrorists. And CALEA - the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act - provides a legal framework to enable wiretapping of traditional, mobile and VOIP phones in the US. These facts have implications for privacy, for civil liberties and human rights.

Conley wishes that those doing surveillance will consider more carefully the possibility that transparency is sometimes in their best interest. Unfortunately, that’s very counter to the ethos of the surveillance community. He quotes Ed Giorgio, a security consultant to the NSA, who says “We have a saying in this business: privacy and security are a zero-sum game.” The fear is that revealing surveillance would allow potential targets to avoid detection and monitoring. But he believes that there are cases where transparency might make surveillance more effective for the surveillers.

Transparency can raise awareness of surveillance - which might be to the advantage of a program designed to alter the behavior of people under surveillance. He notes that the effects of transparency depend on the purpose of the surveillance. Facebook, for instance, surveils your activity constantly to report it to your friends, but users really disliked it when Facebook began surveilling purchasing behavior on other sites via their Beacon program. He also suggests that transparency might need to be very specific to achieve a desired end. The RIAA can claim to surveil filesharing networks, but most users believe they won’t be caught. If the RIAA advertises that they can detect 5% of all illegal filesharing, that might be an incentive to stop sharing. But if they announce the can detect only BitTorrent sharing, that will likely drive people to alternative tools.

If Conley could influence those implementing surveillance, he’d suggest that the following types of disclosure might benefit the people performing surveillance - this is information with “limited negative effect and substantial benefits to disclosure”:

- the mere existence of surveillance programs
- the purpose of the program
- the scope of the program - is it targetting everyone, or just pre-selected targets
- third party cooperation which is nominally voluntary

There’s a complex set of legal issues that arise over surveillance in a digital environment. For one thing, there are many more channels for surveillance - systems like OnStar, a vehicle tracking system, can be turned on for law enforcement purposes. What are the legal rights for an OnStar user? What sort of US Fourth Amendment (privacy) restrictions apply to data you’ve stored online? As the project goes forward, analysis of these legal questions needs to complement research on what we know about surveillance and what might and might not be possible.