NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Obama and Others: When "Transparency" Becomes a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
Obama and Others: When "Transparency" Becomes a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001028.html
When you're basically a techie who thinks a lot about policy -- as I
am -- there's a natural tendency to approach issues specifically and
individually, like bugs to be stamped out of complex program code.
Frankly, it's also easier to write that way, to focus on individual
issues rather than broader, often conflicting concepts -- that can be
far more difficult to paint into an intelligible portrait of words.
But the old platitudes and idioms like "not seeing the forest for the
trees" or "connecting the dots" exist for a reason. Sometimes you do
need to take the "long view" -- both in space and time -- to really
understand what's going on, and how we're likely to be impacted.
I was reminded of this today, as I noted all the excitement around the
Net over the Obama administration's announcement of a "government open
data" initiative, to help make previously unavailable or hard to
access data broadly available to the public to "Enhance Government
Efficiency and Fuel Economic Growth" -- as the White House press
release puts it.
This is certainly a welcome development in government transparency,
well deserving of praise. The excitement is understandable.
And yet ...
Over the last few days there have been other reminders relating to
this administration -- paralleling distressing events in Europe and
elsewhere -- that remind us how "transparency" can be a nightmarish
technological trap as well, depending upon how "transparency" is
defined, and who is defining it.
For it's the same Obama administration pushing for "open government
data" that is also pushing for a vast expansion of FBI access to our
telecommunications and other personal data.
The reported scope of this thrust is both deep and wide. Demands that
Internet services provide "real-time" wiretapping facilities -- ironic
for an administration pushing cybersecurity, given that such
mechanisms actually weaken security by providing new avenues for black
hat hacking.
And this is the same administration that is actively fighting to
maintain the intolerable legal structure under which warrantless
access to our centrally stored email and other data has become such a
travesty, threatening consumer confidence in the very cloud-based
services that are a crucial aspect of our modern Internet environment.
It appears that President Obama doesn't only ostensibly want
government to be transparent to us, but also that everything we write
or say on the phone or Internet should be "transparent" to government
as well.
That's a rather Faustian sort of bargain that I suspect most of us
didn't know we were signing up for, so to speak.
To be sure, this isn't a mindset restricted to Obama, or one political
party, or even the USA.
Over in Europe (and elsewhere) a similar "wolf in sheep's clothing"
hypocrisy has also taken hold in governments, in dimensions ranging
from censorship to surveillance.
In the EU, demands for massive law enforcement inspired,
government-mandated consumer data retention regimes have become
common, at the same time that dangerous, Orwellian concepts like "the
right to be forgotten" and micromanaged censorship of search results
are frequently promoted by regulators and other officials.
Meanwhile, we see a fetishistic focus on harmless Web cookies and
anonymous ad personalization systems that have hurt nobody, while
government demands for politically expedient censorship (doomed to
ultimate failure, but still intensely harassing and treacherous)
continue to intensify.
Some of these specific hypocrisies are also beginning to show up here
in the U.S. as well.
It is almost a given that governments -- going back to the dawn of
human civilization -- will rarely be able to resist the urge to try
entice us with shiny baubles with one hand, while eviscerating our
liberties with the other.
You don't even need to invoke concepts like "evil" to understand this.
More often than not, these leaders genuinely feel that they're doing
this for our own good, to protect all the "little people" who just
don't understand what we really need.
Given that this is pretty much the historical status quo, you may feel
comfortable with this state of affairs, or at least resigned to it.
That would be an unfortunate attitude in the extreme, for all of us.
Because the Internet, with its inherent ability to allow us to
communicate directly and instantly between individuals, countries, and
cultures in a manner never before imagined, does provide us with
enormously powerful tools and capabilities unavailable to citizenries
of the past.
This is why, not at all coincidentally, that so many governments
around the globe are trying so very hard to control the Net, to shape
it to their own image -- a task fortunately made very difficult by the
Internet's fundamental design philosophy.
But that technological genius will be of comparatively little use to
us if we don't avail ourselves of it, and especially if we don't
"connect the dots" and "see the forest for the trees" in terms of the
issues where the Internet's communications power can be brought
productively to bear, especially when governmental hypocrisies are
involved.
Governments will keep trying to entice us with their baubles, but the
Internet is the very foundation of our rights and freedoms for the
future -- most especially for the "little people" like us.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
- Data Wisdom Explorers League: http://www.dwel.org
- Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://vortex.com/g+lauren / Twitter: http://vortex.com/t-lauren
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
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