Would You Trust Any Organization That Doesn't Trust 4,000 Of Its Employees? What If It's The NSA?

It's becoming increasingly clear that one of the reasons Edward Snowden was able to access so much secret information -- and walk out of the door with it -- is that the NSA is an organizational mess. A fascinating post by David Ignatius in the Washington Post underlines another way in which the NSA is deeply dysfunctional by any normal standard: 

On Techdirt.

Jaron Lanier's Virtual Reality

There is now a well-established class of writers about the digital world whom I fondly dub the Old Curmudgeons. Basically, they agree, things there are getting worse all the time; this modern online nonsense is bad for us, and will give us all fallen arches or something. Leading exponents of this view include Nicholas Carr, Andrew Keen and Jaron Lanier.

I think Mr Lanier is the most interesting of these, because he has a solid technical background and has been creative in the digital sphere a long time. That makes his Savonarola-like denunciations of the same particularly striking.

Against that background, it was perhaps inevitable that he would weigh in on the Wikileaks business – and equally inevitable what his line would be, as his title makes clear: “The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks”.

If I had several hours to spare, I might try to go through it addressing his various arguments, many of which amount to unsubtantiated assertions about “The ideology that drives a lot of the online world”; ad-hominem sniping (for example, “we didn't necessarily get to know where Mr. Assange was at a given moment” - maybe because he is doing things a lot of governments and organisations don't like, and so discretion is the better part of valour); outright misapprehension (“Wikileaks isn't really a "wiki," but it is designed to look and feel like the Wikipedia” - er, well, no actually, it doesn't look like it in the slightest); and various straw men: “What if we come to be able to read each other's thoughts? Then there would be no thoughts. Your head has to be different from mine if you are to be a person with something to say to me” - as far as I am aware, nobody is calling for mandatory telepathy.

But I'd rather examine Lanier's peroration, because I think it exposes the fundamental flaw in his indubitably entertaining essay:

Anarchy and dictatorship are entwined in eternal resonance. One never exists for long without turning to the other, and then back again. The only way out is structure, also known as democracy.

We sanction secretive spheres in order to have our civilian sphere. We furthermore structure democracy so that the secretive spheres are contained and accountable to the civilian sphere, though that's not easy.

There is certainly an ever-present danger of betrayal. Too much power can accrue to those we have sanctioned to hold confidences, and thus we find that keeping a democracy alive is hard, imperfect, and infuriating work.

The flip side of responsibly held secrets, however, is trust. A perfectly open world, without secrets, would be a world without the need for trust, and therefore a world without trust. What a sad sterile place that would be:A perfect world for machines.

What the Wikileaks cables show is precisely that those sanctioned “secretive spheres” are not currently accountable to the civilian sphere. They show all the shady deals made in backrooms, the outright lies told to the public to keep us quiet, the connivance with big business to ensure that profit comes before ethics.

Lanier's logic seems to be that everything's fine and the revelations of Wikileaks will only mess things up. And until Wikileaks' revelations, people might have gone along with that analysis, since that was the story that governments were feeding us. But in the wake of Wikileaks, that is simply not a tenable position: as the words of diplomats delineate time and again, everything is not fine, and the social pact of accepting those “secretive spheres” in return for a responsible use of the advantage they bring has been broken.

I would love it to be the case that Lanier's analysis were true, and in some scaled-up, digitised version of Athenian democracy we could have a responsible wielding of state powers, with secrecy applied wisely and justly. But Wikileaks has confirmed what many have suspected, but hitherto been unable to prove: that politicians use secrecy to hide their continual and continuing breaches of the trust we placed in them.

Until they change in the light of what Wikileaks is showing, we cannot trust them as we did before. And the more they – and their defenders, however well intentioned – deny the situation revealed by their own words through Wikileaks, and try to stop us seeing it, by hook or by crook, the longer that is likely to take, and the messier it will be.

And given that proven record of abuse, when they do finally change we will need more transparency about what they are doing – but not *total* transparency, which is neither feasible nor necessary – to make sure that they are not falling back into their bad old ways under the convenient, comforting cover of secrecy.

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The Anti-Intellectual Monopolies Trust

Apparently, there's something called the Intellectual Property Education Trust, a UK registered charity, with lots of dosh to give away:

"The Intellectual Property Education Trust proposes to make a closing award in the region of £25,000 for the promotion of education in the field of intellectual property, and seeks applications from interested institutions.

The Trust was established in 1995 with the object to advance education and promote research in the law and practice of Intellectual Property. The Trust proposes to make a final substantive award with its remaining funds. Institutions interested in making an application for the award should first notify the Trust's secretary by phone (01458 270 882) or email by 28 February 2009 with an expression of interest, and should submit a formal application by 17 April 2009.

So long as the purpose of the application is within the above object of the Trust, there are no other limitations on the nature of the application. Thus the award may be given, purely by way of example, for the preparation of courses or course materials, the establishment of courses, the award of bursaries to assist students to attend courses, or the preparation of material to educate the public at large.

Maybe it's time to set up an Anti-Intellectual Monopolies Trust: anyone want to fund it?

Investing Out in the Open

As the recent financial fun has shown, investing can soon turn into an ungrounded exercise in fantasy wealth creation based on trickery, deceit and general exploitation of ignorance. Part of the problem is the lack of openness.

So here's an interesting idea from a company called Covestor: investing out in the open.

Covestor is not a bulletin board or fantasy trading game, it's all about actions. Covestor is about real-trades, real people and real results - where you can both build your credibility and see what other real people are doing to achieve their goals. Secondly, it's about helping people make more money by leveraging the hard work that is already being done. Of course, discussion is part of the investment process.

Many of our members also have their own stock blogs and are active on discussion sites. Our role is not to replace that, but to help add trust to what they are saying elsewhere.

Ah yes, trust: that's the glue that holds the opens together; it's also the stuff that, in the financial world, was melted down and sold off like lead from a church roof. Let's hope that Covestor can get its idea to, er, stick. (Via Mark Taylor.)

In Google We (Don't) Trust

Here's a little reminder why you can never trust Google, even if it has the best intentions:

Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled.

Yes, that includes *you* - not that you've ever watched anything dodgy there, of course....

Banking on Benkler

Trust Yochai to give us a way forward - and some hope:

In the mass media environment, there was a general culture of "I saw it in print, therefore it must be true." This culture led to a relative atrophy of critical faculties, and made the public sphere highly manipulable, or simply prone to error. It is not, for example, that well-trained media critics could not point out the dozens of ways in which any given news report or television program were biased or incomplete. They could. But the readers, viewers, and listeners by and large adopted a trusting relationship to their media. We long spoke about the need to teach critical television watching. But that never happened, really. I think as a new generation grows up reading things that never have a clear voice of authority, that have only provisional status as inputs, we will begin to see a more critical, investigative form of reading, as well as listening and viewing. The act of reading will be more like an act of investigation, as one picks up pieces of evidence with variable levels of credibility, triangulates them, and arrives at a conclusion that continues, nonetheless, to be revisable and falsifiable. This is the essence of the scientific method. It is high time that people adopt it more broadly. I embrace this uncertainty, for with it comes critical reading. This trend is then strengthened by the widespread practices of cultural production, what I have characterized as the re-emergence of a new folk culture in the digital environment. People who create know how to be more critical users.

A Question of Trust

Back in the 1990s, I used to write about VRML quite a lot. VRML - Virtual Reality Modelling Language - seemed like the future, but turned out not to have one, at least not in that form. As you may have noticed, it more or less disappeared, though I now realise where it went.

I also often wondered where the VRML pioneers went. One of them is Mark Pesce, whom I've just discovered through this post called "Trust, But Verify". It's of note for two reasons.

First, it's well written, and worth reading for that alone. But secondly, because it touches on what is becoming a key issue in the Web 2.0 world, that of trust. Trust - and reputation systems - lie at the heart of openness. It's a subject of particular interest to me, and I'll be writing more about it here and elsewhere in due course.