 Good afternoon. I'm David Thorburn, Professor of Literature and Director of the MIT Communications Forum. I'd like to welcome the audience and especially our distinguished panel. My hope is that when the panelists conclude their presentations, that we will have a lively discussion with those of you who are in the audience. And one of the great hallmarks of the forum is the back and forth that occurs in those question and answer sessions. So I hope you're preparing your comments and your questions as you're listening to our speakers. It remains for me simply to introduce our moderator, to whom I'm especially grateful. He's made a long trip to get here. And in the short time, he's officially been at MIT. Ethan Zuckerman has become almost a kind of recognizable fixture on campus. He's already appeared in a number of events. He's so overloaded with jobs moderating and talking himself that I'm especially grateful that he's been able to make time for today's event. One of the reasons, of course, is that it's a topic that's close to his own heart, something he himself is deeply interested in. It's hard to imagine a topic more central to our current lives and to the digital future now impending for all of us than the topic of surveillance and citizenship. And it's a pleasure to introduce Ethan, who will introduce our panelists. Well, thanks so much, David. And thanks, everyone, for joining us today. I would like to point out that by being in this room and participating in this event, you too are under surveillance since we video record and broadcast all of these. So so many to keep in mind as we get into the question and answer section of this. As David mentioned, I've just come over to MIT. And I've spent the last eight years at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, where one of the topics that I've been working on is this question of internet freedom and essentially what are the different ways in which the internet is becoming constrained as a possible space for discussion, as a network public sphere. A lot of the research we've done has focused on sort of very obvious threats to that network public sphere, things like government-based filtering or denial of service attacks, ways of silencing different people. But the question of surveillance came up as the notion of an implicit threat. How does the notion that you may be under surveillance being watched in digital spaces change how you behave? And my research partner at Berkman, Hel Roberts, thought about this for a while and came back and said, you know, the problem with this is that if surveillance is any good, you have no idea that it's there. And that tends to be true both in physical spaces and in virtual spaces. The surveillance that's actually there and the surveillance that you imagine can turn out to be radically different things. And in the space of the internet, when we study surveillance, we often end up studying the potential more than anything else. What could possibly be watched because on the occasions where surveillance breaks and becomes visible, those are the moments that you actually get a chance to watch it. One moment that's actually been fairly fascinating as far as watching surveillance inject itself into everyday life has been different ways of thinking about surveillance in the context of the recent events of the Arab Spring. And two very sort of quick stories about this. One is that, as I think everyone has probably heard a dead horse beating the death several times, the role of Facebook within the Arab Spring. What many people don't know is that Facebook in Tunisia, where the Arab Spring really started, was under intense government surveillance and had actually been thoroughly compromised by the Tunisian government. By the time people were trying to go and use the tool, the Tunisian government had actually installed at the National ISP a tool that allowed them to grab the passwords of everybody using Facebook and go in and literally document people's social networks coming out of it. What was fascinating was that this was actually widely known in Tunisia, changed how people were using the tool but didn't actually prevent people from using the tool and in some cases in using the tool in very, very constructive ways. The second story on surveillance is thinking about the ways in which citizens are now in an age of participatory media having the opportunity to surveil their governments and to surveil each other through the simplest of means. The idea that most of us now have mobile phones that have powerful still in video cameras that in many cases are able to let us flip the equation a little bit and engage in what some scholars have called sue valence watching from the bottom up rather than from the top down. And in some ways, if you think about the triggering events of what went on both in Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia of documenting protests and government's violent reaction to it or in Egypt in documenting police brutality, that's the victory of sue valence in some ways as a countervailing force to surveillance. So one way or another, this view of either being watched or participating in watching is an idea that has profound implications for how we think of ourselves as citizens in a digital age and also thinking of ourselves as citizens in physical spaces. We're very lucky to have with us tonight three scholars who thought about this topic from different angles at tremendous depth. Furthest from me, we have Marcos Novak who's a professor and artist as he tells me a trans architect which is a term that he promises to describe. That in term allows him to be the director of the trans lab at UC Santa Barbara. We have in the middle Sandra Braiman, a professor of communication who's worked on the co-construction of technology, law, and society. She works at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She's the author of Change of State, Information, Policy, and Power, and she's also edited a series at the MIT Press on technology and policy. And then closest to me, we have Susan Landau who is a visiting scholar of computer science at Harvard University. Despite my attempts to rope her into the Berkman Center, she's not there yet, but she was most recently a Radcliffe fellow. Prior to that, had a wonderful career, a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems, and she has a new book out called Surveillance or Security, The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies. Because these people know vastly more about surveillance than I could possibly say, I'm going to shut up, turn the stage over to each of them, and turn for about 15 minutes to talk about what they're working on. And then we're gonna bring this into a dialogue with the folks here. But we're gonna ask Marcus to lead off first by showing us a couple of videos that help frame these issues and then sort of talking about your work in this space as an artist and a scholar. So if you'll lead us on, I'd appreciate it. Thanks. Thank you, it's wonderful to be here. And thank you all for coming. I'm gonna go quite quickly because I have many things to show in a staccato kind of way. The videos are actually embedded in the thread that I'll try to share with you. So they're not separate, they're just... I'm at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and I direct something called the Trans Lab, which is a lab whose mission is the transformation that leads to speciation. That has all sorts of aspects. There are too many words on the screen for you to read. But what's interesting in this context is that it is an environment that tries to borrow from all the sciences the atomic, the fine-grained, and use all these atomic things holistically to create new worlds. And so we borrow from science and biology from computer science and from neurophysiology and wherever there is an element, we try to learn from it. This leads to ideas like trans architecture and trans virgins and trans modality and many things that are all about transformation. This environment is also affiliated with another apparatus that we have a three-story high sphere making virtual environments called the allosphere, which I won't describe here. And both of these are part of the Media Arts and Technology program at UC Santa Barbara, which is affiliated with the California Nano Systems Institute. And what this slide shows very, very quickly is that it goes all the way from art and music to computer science, eventually all the way down to theoretical physics. And the director of this won the Nobel Prize for quantum electrodynamics, David Gross. So it's at a very high level, but also very wide in its scope. Now, I'm not going to talk about any of the lab work that we do and I'm really not going to talk much directly about my work, although the attitude is implied. I really want to take the opportunity to talk about surveillance and citizenship and the predicament that we find ourselves in. Now, both in my own work and at MAT, we're all interested in the future. And so I want to start with the future and I want to start with sci-fi and to make a reference to a novel called Accelerando, which you can actually download. It has a kind of anti-copyright. And it's written by someone named Charles Strauss that you might know. And it describes in it a society called the Agalmic Society, which is a strange word. What is Agalmic? It's a society run by this sort of hacker group that can get into anything in a kind of surveillance kind of way. But instead of being organized around the idea of taking, it's organized around the idea of giving. So this person is acting as an agent that is giving things away as much as possible to the dismay of everyone who wants to keep things. The idea itself comes from someone named Robert Levin and something that he calls Agalmics, which is the marginalization of scarcity, which I won't refer to except to just point you there. But what's interesting to me, because I grew up in Greece, I speak Greek, I speak ancient Greek, I read ancient Greek and have this other life to me, is the word argalma, which means statue but actually a lot more than statue. So Agalmic has to do with this word argalma and we'll come back to it at the very end of my comments. But we do a kind of prehistory to all of these things. And I've already stated that we're interested in the future and so in a sense, in a research environment, we want to become future. And as soon as you try to do this, you realize that, well, you've got a lot of work to become contemporary. You can't assume that where you were born, when you were born was actually contemporary with respect to your planet. You have to catch up. You may have been born in the rainforest and then you have some work to do. You may have been born in the city and then you would have work to do to become contemporary to the rainforest. So you backtrack. Then you realize that, well, everything, whatever you choose to do, well, I have a history and in a certain sense you have to become ancient to understand the history of what you're doing. And then as you all know something of math, you actually can't just know the history of math, you eventually have to know how to derive something. You have to go to the principles. The principles are the arché, the arc in architecture and you have to become archaic. You actually have to get to first principles and then once you've done all this work backwards, you might be able to get to the future again but with a different point of view. So I want to show you some bones and leave you with a question that will unfold as I go forward. So suppose you saw these images as Costas and I saw in Italy this summer. So you see these bones sticking out of the earth. What would you think? I'll just leave you with that for a moment. Now I was discussing this with my students and they directed me to a site for something called Take This Lollipop. Has anyone seen Take This Lollipop? So I'll show you the video. There's actually a website that requires your Facebook information and once you give it your Facebook information, you see the Lollipop with the razor blade. Once you give it your Facebook information, it incorporates your information in what you're going to see. Now I'm not going to do this live, it would take too long but you can go to the site and do it. You would see something like this except with your own information in the video. This person is taking information and it gets very ominous. And in reaction to that, we have all this other counter surveillance to protect us from characters who would take our information and do bad things to us and harm us. So we have the counter force and this is another thing. This is from today's news. Big brother is watching. There's some people are up at arms for discovering that with federal funding, these lights have been commissioned or ordered or whatever one does with such things. And I'll show you a bit of the video describing these lights. Each light is basically a little computer. It has a speaker, it has a camera, it's Wi-Fi, it's networked and it can actually listen and do a lot of things which I'll just... I'll just let you watch for a few seconds, minutes. Looks very, very calming. IntelliStreet's energy management system creates the most flexible and longest lasting LED luminaires available. Flexibly programmed and dimmed with additional thermal monitoring, our systems can extend luminaire life as much as 50% more than current industry standards. So the argument begins with efficiency. Music is calming. Simply by taking advantage of the nightly needs of your lighting system, you can provide full brightness during peak usage and then later, say when a vehicular, parking or pedestrian traffic is lower, reduce the lighting and energy usage to not only save money but extend system life. IntelliStreet's takes advantage of the existing power supply and in many cases can even reuse your existing poles. You can achieve a fully featured system by simply changing the street light. The intelligence of the system resides in the unique dual band radio system and miniature computer. So this goes on like this. It tells you how it works. It shows you that it's a network. It shows you how the information is collected per lamp, per street, all the statistics that are gathered, how it responds to even the light, how it has a speaker built in, how it has a computer built in, how it has banners built in that can show all kinds of information. Eventually, as I scroll through, you'll start seeing flags and things on these banners too and everything is information oriented. Sounds good, you know, fine. You don't need to dig anything up. We're all happy. And I think... IntelliStreet also enables a myriad of hallblant security features. For more information, call your local agent or contact us at info at intellistreet.com. Now we feel safe, right? Now this is another thing that was just released. The ACLU released this graphic regarding the Patriot Act and regarding exactly how much information is collected versus how much information actually leads to anything. So how much protection were promised versus how much actually happened. So 143,000 reports have been filed but only 53 referrals have actually come from it. So there's a massive reaction of collecting information with, you know, you can read the numbers of a small return. And then you wonder what balance were actually after in doing these things. Of course, nobody wants bad things to happen and we shouldn't be careful. I don't want to sound like I'm demonizing good things. But there is this funny word in here, Patriot. And I want to use that as a portal into something. So there's the word Patriot. And if you happen to speak Greek, Patriot, you realize, you know, as a Greek word and that leads you conveniently to Hector in the Iliad, Homer's Iliad. And to a phrase which is interesting. Is ionos aristos amines de peripatris. Which means one omen is excellent or faultless to defend the Fatherland. So we have the Fatherland, we have the Homeland Security, we just heard it, right? It's like, it's right there. But this is spoken by Hector who is being asked what omens he's watching about going to war. And he says, you know, I'm trying to defend Troy. The only omen that matters is, you know, defending the Fatherland. Now, of course, this is embedded in a long story in which there is also Achilles who knows he's going to die, but dies anyway. And there is Odysseus. And there's a narrative structure that goes from the Iliad to the Odyssey. And what you see is a situation of omens and protections in the Iliad that yields eventually to another narrative which is one about attention and action. And in the narrative of the Odyssey, Ulysses or Odysseus learns how to be watchful, but has to always tame himself right from the beginning. He's always watching his own behavior versus the signs that are around him. The next thing I want to inquire into are some of the words of what we're doing tonight, citizenship, and how citizenship, of course, comes from city, but we forget, we forget. City actually comes not from city as we know it. It's not Los Angeles or Boston. It's city-state. And we have this situation here of surveillance and the state. And so it comes from a city-state. When a city-state was a polis, and a polis had citizens which were called polites, or polites as a single one. And from that, you have the word polite, nice. But we seem to learn from it the word police, which is not part of that language. It's like, it's a skewing of ideas. Another word from that is idiotis, whose contemporary English version is idiot, and it means the private citizen. The citizen isolated from the city. Okay, surveillance, and we heard surveillance, which I like very much. We think we understand, but actually, if you look at surveillance, it's not from veiling. It's from vigilance, and vigilance is from vigil, and vigil comes from vigio, and vigio comes from health, and health comes from iya, and iya, if you look far enough back, shows up on this star, which is actually not a star, it's actually part of a circle. So you have a notion of the healthy implied in surveillance, which is actually a circular idea, which is then taken to be used in other ways. Now, let's go back to CSI and crime scene investigation, and forensics, these bones that were from Da Vinci that I showed you. If you see them like this, I don't know what you're wondering, but what if you saw them like this, and then you saw, after the bone in the earth, you saw this? Now, what would you say? This is, hmm? It's fake. Fake? It's not fake at all. It's not fake at all. It's been there for centuries. Hmm? Now, these are actually under the Acropolis. I have others from Italy, but these are actually under the Acropolis in Athens. Not far from this, there is something that once upon a time looked like this. Very detailed. These things would be like, you know, tiny. It's the top of a building that still exists in bad shape, and you're about this tall here. So all that detail is in there. And this whole rooftop is invisible to anyone. You can't see it. It looks like this, and it's actually really, really beautifully designed. But why would someone design something beautifully if you can't see it? So there's this word, aralma, which actually doesn't mean statue. It means to do something perfectly, according to Areti, which is a kind of flawlessness, because that's what you do. It's a pleasing thing for the gods, but the gods don't really exist because they're the laws of nature in this worldview. And it comes from a worldview in which the world is seen concentrically, and hence the concentric view of health. Now, it's embedded in these ideas of the timely, the good and the well-formed, which are attributes of beauty. Architects know them as firmness, commodity and delight. And it's always a whole. It's always a circle. Now, what do we do? What we do is we do this. It's 100%. The circle is now all of a sudden 100%. And as soon as it's 100%, it's actually something that can be fragmented. And the fragments look like a circle, but they're actually fragments. They're not a circle, and they're all broken up, which is actually consistent with the state in which things like this are found. And consistent also with another state. Can anyone tell me where this is? It's actually here. So this is one of the most amazing buildings on the planet. And yet it has no place for humans. And that is actually consistent with this worldview in which the balance and the health of things is actually set aside. This is the work of Irvin Verm. He's done this with the philosophers. This is the next image is the commentary of the internet, which knows so many things, about one worldview and another. And then a whole series of other articles that I could show you, but what's interesting is that this is 2008 about obesity and how bad it's going to be in 2030. And in the map of it. And then just a few days ago, how it's actually going to be worse than we thought, because even though we knew it for a few years, it doesn't, we're not learning anything from knowing it. We're simply just proceeding along the same line. So here's the kind of situation. We have an epidemic of obesity, an abundance of edibles, a poverty of nutrition, an equivalent information obesity, also epidemic and abundance of messages with a poverty of meanings, a lot of signal, a lot of noise and very little signal and disintegration. So I'm finishing someplace in the ethics. Aristotle says that ethics comes from habits and that ethics, the word ethics actually means the habits of a creature in its natural environment, behaving normally. We forget all that. And we forget that there was once a culture, there have been cultures around the planet whose ethos came from a balanced education that contained everything from Homer to how you lived and how you fought. Those ideas actually have contemporary equivalents. I'm showing a hyperbolic space for the circle and I'm showing you what a healthy planet looks like if you actually let it happen. I was just there this summer, it's in Greece. But that's exactly what's actually forgotten. The wholeness of things and the health of things is actually forgotten. The finishing two words regarding surveillance and citizenship is that surveillance assumes an adversarial relationship between people and between oneself against oneself and it assumes that the world is a dangerous place from which we must be protected. This view, this alternative view and the reason I'm ending on this slide is that that isn't a necessary conclusion that actually one could think of the world as whole, one could think of the world as good, one could think of the issue that we have not as one of defense but as one of balance. And I would play some of these problems there and thank you and that's it. It's incredibly stimulating. I have to say as I sat down to prepare for this, I had no idea that we were going to be doing Greek linguistics but I wanna ask you a follow up actually very specifically on that which is it's incredibly helpful I think to bring this into the realm of the polis and to bring this into the realm of the city state and to think about what you've put forward as far as sort of polite and police. And one way to read that evolution is sort of the assumption that if we're finding ways to treat each other as citizens and behaving the polite way that we would as in a collective city state then we're able to sort of stay in the balance that you're talking about. Whereas when we find ourselves going beyond it this is the moment at which we look for someone to enforce and someone to try to hold us within the balance. I'm wondering if there are cases where the sorts of surveillance that you're bringing up in that video are less sinister and less worrisome and we sort of all found those all seeing lamp posts. And I find myself thinking with your last image on the beach I'm very interested in the dumping of industrial waste off the coast of Somalia a part of the globe that has no functioning polis at this point and therefore there's no way of policing that space. And the only way that we could sort of think about keeping in check people not dumping radioactive waste where it ends up showing up in the shores of that country is some sort of ability to watch and wait. Are there circumstances in which the polis and the polite breaks down where we do want the police and we do want the surveillance to be into this? Aren't there systems where we should be feeling good about having a watchful eye that's trying to keep us in the sort of balance that you're hoping for? I saved an image regarding the Greek part is this can just come back on please? Did it go to sleep? There you are. This is the gravestone of Buckminster Fuller and it's really interesting why he says call me trim tab but one of the things that Buckminster Fuller was that he stopped talking for two years. He was married, he had a new child, he just didn't talk because words betrayed him and he needed to think through the words that he used and so when he started talking he wouldn't stop but he reconsidered everything. I think we are actually quite confused so regarding your question about surveillance, I think or the watchful eye, I think there's a huge problem there and it's the abdication of personal responsibility. I need to be watchful, not someone needs to watch for me. You know that's a huge thing and then regarding Somalia or my example would have been what's going on with Mexico and Los Narcos or El Narco and the new book that's out on that that where you have a situation where the state and its surveillance and its guardianship has failed. It's curious if you're in this country and you're watching the elections, there are plenty of people who think that any kind of supervision is bad and that maybe we should just abdicate everything and then we have chaos. The conclusion, the pivot here is and I showed specific books, I didn't choose any books, I chose a set of three books. Pedía, which means the bringing up of children is something that we're also failing at and basically by the time people get to be adults in Somalia or in Mexico or in the United States or just about everywhere, they don't really know because we haven't really taught them how to be citizens. So then they need to be watched because by then they're old enough to carry guns and to break into things and to do all sorts of damage but they might have learned better earlier and so I don't think you can, I think I have, regarding a topic like this, I have to place the topic at this scale because the problem is at that scale. The two fullers died, just before that slide goes away, I think it's fascinating. The reference to the fact that they died within two days of one another, that's it. It's a wonderful observation. I knew bookings. Thanks. Oh, you did? Yeah, great. So Susan, I'm hoping you're going to take us perhaps onto Martira Fermo on some of this. Absolutely. I know that you've been very involved with these questions of how citizens get involved with issues of cybersecurity and policy and I'm sort of hoping that you're going to bring this to us in a way that's closely tied into the technology. So I wanna... I'm actually gonna talk about something else but it will be Tara Fermo. Wonderful, okay. But I might pull over there towards the end. So I wanna start with three stories and the first story is about East Germany in 1989. Now, at that point, East Germany had 91,000 people working in the Stasi, the East German secret police. This was out of a population of 16 million. There were 173,000 informants in addition to the 91,000 people working for the Stasi, which means one in 63 East Germans was directly or indirectly working for the German secret police. So that means people's wives, people's husbands, people's apartment concierges or the equivalent, people's school teachers, people's nurses, people's doctors, everybody was being spied upon by everybody. People didn't know who they were being spied upon. It was really quite devastating once East Germany fell. But I've already told you the conclusion which is that East Germany fell. So what happened in the spring of 1989 was that there was discontent in the country over local elections. But the government itself was concerned with the 40th anniversary of the German Democratic Republic and it was focusing all on the celebrations there. In the summer and fall of 1989, what happened is Hungary had opened its borders to Czechoslovakia and a whole bunch of East Germans fled from East Germany. They went into Hungary and then across to Czechoslovakia. The East German government was very upset with this. They had been shooting people, fleeing East Germany for decades and objected. Hungary closed its borders, but the East Germans didn't stop fleeing East Germany. There was tumult, there was a revolution and the East German government fell. Now, how could a government fall when it was monitoring its people so closely? It's the first story. Second story is about Iran and Iran in 1979, so a decade earlier. In that case, I wanna talk about the US government in Iran. And the US government at that point was very closely allied with the Iranian government. The Shah was our friend and we worked closely with the Shah. Now, the Shah had someone who opposed him, Khomeini, who was a dissident mullah in Paris, shipping tapes that got played in mosques that didn't seem like much of a threat, except there were protests in the street and protests in the street and protests in the street and the Shah's government fell. And the US government had no idea that this was gonna happen. And this was a precursor to the kind of complications that the US government found post the end of the Cold War. So during the Cold War, the US government, National Security, the NSA, the CIA, knew what they had to learn, how many ICBMs there were, how powerful they were, where the East German spies were and so on. They knew the issues they had to confront. They might not find the answers, but they knew the questions they wanted to find out. When the Cold War ended, the game went from finding out secrets to solving mysteries, where the biggest part of the mystery was they didn't know what the mystery was. In the case of Iran, they didn't know that there was a mystery. They didn't know, they knew that the people were dissatisfied with government. The Iranian secret police, in that case, the Savak, was very active and the US certainly understood that the Iranians were unhappy with their government, but they didn't know there was a threat in terms of Khomeini. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism, we've been dealing with many more mysteries than secrets, and the complication with mysteries is you don't know where to look. There are other complications for US National Security, which are worth a minute, which is, of course, post 2001, it's become more difficult for US National Security forces to operate in many parts of the world, and so they rely a lot more on human rights workers and industry, the oil people in Nigeria, the human rights workers in Indonesia. They don't employ them directly, they just try to monitor, they try to find out what they're learning. But of course, in order to find out what they're learning, those people's communications have to be protected from the Nigerian government and from the Indonesian government. So an interesting thing happening there. The third story I wanna tell is a story that hasn't ended yet. It's Occupy Wall Street. And that story is a story where we have Facebook and we have Twitter and we have a free press and lots of communication, and until Occupy Wall Street happened, we didn't know that 23% of the US population supported Occupy Wall Street and was really angry about the 99%. Now, democracies only work with the consent of the governed. Here was a case where the governed were really unhappy and the government didn't know that aspect of it or at least a large piece of the government if you look at the policies being promulgated in Congress. A large piece of the government didn't understand that. So the surveillance, and by this I mean the surveillance by big business, Facebook and Twitter and all the information that was available for anybody who wanted to search didn't capture the unhappiness. Point is that privacy is essential for democracy. That's why we have the First Amendment, it's why we have the Fourth Amendment. Democratic discussions happen first in private. Organizations happen first in private and then they move to the public sphere. Without the privacy, you can't have democracy acting. I wanna tell you two more things. One is, then in our wonderful Twitter, Facebook, open source world, it's become a lot harder for national security to operate. For those of you that missed WikiLeaks, secrets are a lot harder to keep and they don't last as long. And it doesn't matter whether it's last year's WikiLeaks or whatever happens next year. National security is undergoing a change in which they understand, they haven't learned to operationalize it yet, but they understand that secrets are hard to keep and they won't last long and that means what you keep secret has to change. I wanna talk last about the difference between national security and law enforcement. We tend to lump them together after all, both of them wanna discover what the people are thinking and they try to do it secretly. But in 2000, we had a major split between US national security and US law enforcement. So before 2000, both of them were arguing that cryptography, the technology that keeps communication secret. Cryptography, strong cryptography should not be available to the masses. Now they didn't argue this publicly, they just controlled it or the US government controlled it through export controls. So computer equipment with strong cryptography couldn't be exported, could be sold domestically but computer manufacturers didn't wanna sell one type of equipment domestically and a weaker type of equipment abroad because it's really hard to sell the stuff abroad when you say, well it's really fine. Oh yeah, yeah, we have something stronger here. Also they didn't wanna support two different kinds of equipment. So for a long time, between about 1975 to 2000, the National Security Agency, the NSA, supported this type of ban. First it tried to ban the research in academia and industry. Then when that wasn't successful, it simply tried to ban the sale of goods. And starting in about the early 1990s, the FBI was firmly in the same camp. Before the early 1990s, the FBI hadn't been concerned about this issue. But in 1999, the two communities split. The FBI would still like to see the use of strong cryptography withheld within the United States. But the NSA doesn't. In 2000, the NSA supported the loosening of export controls. In 2001, two months after the attacks, the NSA supported the approval of a very strong cryptographic algorithm for use in public systems. This was an algorithm that went through the National Institute of Standards and Technology. But it was an algorithm that was a billion billion times stronger than the algorithm previously available. In 2003, the NSA supported that use, the use of that algorithm for classified documents. Now what that means is that that algorithm will then get used in a lot more equipment because if it can be used for both classified and non-classified purposes, computer manufacturers are gonna just go full force into implementing it. In 2005, the NSA supported the availability of a whole suite of algorithms, not just to encrypt communications, but in fact, to secure networks, communication networks. Public algorithms to secure communication networks. So what's going on? Doesn't the NSA have the job of listening into everybody? Yes and no. The NSA has the job of listening into everybody abroad. And domestically, the NSA is actually concerned with protecting domestic communications. And occasionally, it gets asked by other parts of the US government to listen in on certain kinds of communications. But it's more concerned with actually protecting domestic communications. It doesn't say this very loudly. But I've just described a whole trajectory of behavior. So the NSA wants to protect domestically and listen in abroad. So when we think about surveillance, we've got a very complicated government picture on it. And that's what's informing things here. And I'll stop here and let you ask some devastating question. Well, that's a wonderful set of provocations there. I mean, I think the paranoid's amongst us, and maybe not even the most paranoid's amongst us, might respond to the NSA story by wondering whether the NSA has the escrow key behind all of this. And that's really the solution all of that. But you've forgotten more about computer science than I will ever know. You feel fairly confident that that algorithm is secure? So yeah, I feel fairly confident that that algorithm is secure, mostly because I would not like to be NSA testifying to Congress, oh yes. We knew that algorithm wasn't 128 bits secure, but only 67. And we let the banks and everybody else use it. Because you don't wanna be NSA testifying like that. You can say, we knew it was only 126 bits secure. But to say it was 90 bits secure, you don't wanna be in that position. Let me tell you one more story, which was when I was writing my latest book, I was talking to the technical director at the information assurance directorate. So NSA, everybody knows about the surveillance mission of NSA. That's 85% of the budget, but only 50% of the mission. The other 50% of the mission is information assurance, protecting communications, protecting communications of the US government. And what the technical director was saying to me was that he was concerned about land mobile radio. So during a crisis, during a hurricane Katrina, September 11th, what have you? Cell phones don't work. Wireline phones often don't work. Satellite phones don't work if you're in the canyons of New York or mountains or it's cloudy. What works is land mobile radio. And what the technical director told me he wanted was to see secure interoperable land mobile radio available for sale in Radio Shack. Because if it was available for sale in Radio Shack, every fire department, every police department, every hospital would be able to interoperate during an emergency. Well, of course, if it's available in Radio Shack for the police departments and the fire departments and the hospitals, it's also available for any criminal. And he knew that. And then he said, I shouldn't have said that. The problem with what he said was, he shouldn't have said Radio Shack. They're not allowed to talk about a particular vendor. But the statement was, yeah, he wants to see it. Beyond that, I think they've rebranded as the Shack, which has a wonderful 1970s vibe to it. Yes. I'm realizing that we have the blessing that we get to talk later tonight. And I'm realizing the first question that I want to ask you then is the question that I'm going to ask now, because it's only fair, which is, I want you to just play slightly further with this notion of secrets versus mysteries. If in the era before the Cold War, what we cared about was finding secrets. One of the implications there is that we know who's important and we know who's talking to whom. And what we simply have to find is the message that Alice is telling to Bob. What you're talking about now with mysteries is more a sense of something is going to happen in some part of the world, whether it's Iran and the Shah falling, whether it's Tunisia, and suddenly an uprising successfully getting rid of a dictator. How does the national intelligence community react to that shift from secret to mystery? So one of the things they did post September 11th was develop Intellipedia, Wikipedia for the intelligence agencies. Now they have a real conflict there. At the one level, they want to share information widely. At the other level, when you want to share information widely, do you let every private get access to the information? So it's a very complicated dance. You have to figure out what the pieces are that you're going to protect and you protect very small parts of it. At the same time, you want to look very broadly and that dance you have to constantly reevaluate. And I think that's the complicated part that they're dealing with, along with the complicated part of, now, what piece of things you actually really have to keep secret? What is the important aspect? And I guess the way I think about it is analogy with cryptography. It's really easy to develop cryptosystems where you're protecting a communications network and you have this set of keys. When you think of Kerberos, which was developed here, you have the set of keys on a message. You have this set of keys on this service and so on and so forth. By the time you look at it, you'll have a complicated key management function. And it's only at MIT that I can talk in this kind of way. You have a complicated key management function. But what I heard from Earl Barber earlier this year, is in any system you develop, you want to manage exactly one set of keys. You want to keep only one set of things secret and everything else should devolve from that. Same way with keeping nuggets really small. So what we're really talking about here are the ways in which technological change, societal change, political change are co-evolving in one fashion or another. And here I'm trying to move into some of the language that Sandra's been using about all of this. And I'm hoping that perhaps you'll sew together some of these threads that we've been playing with into perhaps something of a big picture. Yes, I think there are common threads across what we're thinking I'm going to come in with a slightly darker view. But I think we are actually all pointed towards the same sort of pieces of light that are available to us in this environment. I start from the position that there's no going back on the use of the technologies. So step one is for whatever your civil liberties concerns, just assume that they're here, assume they're always on. So that would be my response to Marcos' question about when is it on, when is it off? Just assume they're always on. There are ways in which the practices of surveillance have changed the way that the law operates. We're increasingly seeing the disappearance of the space between the action and the judgment. If you're out there, if the minute you speed through the light, your license plate is captured, the judgment about your speeding is made in the tickets in your mailbox by the time you get home. Steps in the legal system that allow for other forms of decision making, compassion, judgment, evaluation have disappeared. We're seeing some destruction to fair trials. There are many ways in which this happened post 9-11, but one of them is that if you are brought to trial on the basis of information gathered through surveillance based on the USA Patriot Act, you don't have to be presented with that evidence in the courtroom. So you can be convicted on the basis of evidence that you are not familiar with and have no opportunity to counter. There was, of course, an effort after 9-11 to have an even higher percentage of US population than the Stasi did be surveilling each other and the citizens, the Total Information Awareness Program, which what they said when there was an outcry about that, what they said was, we're going to stop talking about it. They didn't say they're not gonna do it. They said, we're going to stop talking about it. And there's an impact on the nature of citizenship. So one of the things that came in Attorney General interpretations of statutes after 9-11 was the idea that if you had a relationship, an associational relationship with an individual who was involved in one of the activities that became defined as terrorist, that you would actually lose some of your rights as a citizen. And there was a Patriot Act too that was proposed that would have had you, under which you would have ultimately lost your citizenship rights. There was a lot of outcry against the Patriot Act too. That didn't pass. Pieces of it have been appended to legislation, but I bring this up because in the course of surveillance of associations, let's remember that in the US government's pursuit of the WikiLeaks event, they've now succeeded in getting information about Twitter accounts and what they're interested in is not only the particular target individuals who are tweeting on certain subjects, but everyone who is following those tweets. So that's an association. And so if in the course of the surveillance of those kinds of associations, you lose some of your citizenship rights, then we have an impact on the operations of the legal system and on the nature of citizenship itself. Changes that are coming because of surveillance, and I point you all to Susan's books if you want the sort of single best way to swallow that information. But they're not the only ones that are going on in the legal system today. We have many things that have actually been quite inversions of our legal system. Judgment of intention rather than behavior. Preemption rather than deterrence. And this actually links to the notion of mysteries. Brian Misumi has been brilliant on the difference between prevention, deterrence, and preemption. And of course, if you're working with prevention and deterrence, you're working with known knowns. Or if it's deterrence, it's the known unknown, but you know what it is you're trying to protect yourself against, you simply move into an ontological stance of constant preparing to defend against it. When you move into preemption, you're in the world of unknown unknowns. And one of the accomplishments of the way in which terrorism and anti-terrorism has become so fundamental to law around the world, there's global harmonization driven by the UN, the USA Patriot Act was simply the first exemplar of that. One of the things about terrorism is the fact that it is not defined. There are global mandates for things that every nation has to comply with and it's laws in order to fight terrorism. But the definition, what you choose to stick in that box gets to be local. So it could be students in El Salvador protesting the rise in bus fares. It could in fact under contemporary US law be every single person who's in an Occupy Wall Street or an Occupy Boston environment could be accused of terrorism under existing statutory law. We have the question of the border and my difficulty with the optimistic distinction between the international and the domestic is what has happened to the border, which is now extremely permeable, of course, you have not bright geographic lines but broad zones. The US has exported the border to other countries around the world. It has established borders internally in free trade zones. The border is now mobile. If you're an immigrant to the country you carry the border with you at all times. And all of these things are particularly important because the Department of Homeland Security has been given explicit permission by Congress to operate above the law when it is protecting the border. Also undefined there is what is protecting. So whether or not you have any of these versions of what's being defined as the border you still might be protecting the border. So I think I would like to take more hope from the distinction you've drawn than actually than I do. And another thing that has changed in the nature of our law is that it has become practice driven rather than principle driven. We'd like to believe that for a long time in US law at least as the case with which we're most familiar here that we start with constitutional principles. We work down through stages of operationalizing that through statutes and through regulations and then judgment of individual cases in the courtroom. But at this point the harmonization of anti-terrorism laws that is now global has been driven by what Interpol believes is most necessary for policing practices. It's not principle driven. It's practice driven. All of these things have generated a legal context even here in the United States in which the possibilities depending on national leadership the possibilities for repressive action on the basis of information gathered for surveillance is really quite extreme and it's not understood I believe by most of the population. We're also seeing changes in the nature of the state and I'll here I'll just point you to that book by Bremen about the evolution of the informational state that is worth mentioning here because of course when we say the state there have been many many changes since the Greek city state or since the emergence of the secular state several hundred years ago and different forms of state specialized in the use of different forms of power with our contemporary state which I call informational specializing in the use of informational power that operates by manipulating the informational foundations of weaponry, instrumental forms, organizations and rules, structural forms of power and our communications, our symbolic forms of power and bring into being new forms of power. So we're seeing we can fairly well document the evolution of the informational state but there are I think we haven't given enough thought to the con commitment emergence of the informational citizen. The nature the concept of citizenship itself has also changed over time although it has always been linked to the notion of agency and to practice. Latent citizenship in a sense passive citizenship has been much less important and not seriously treated actually from a political perspective in the way that active citizenship practices have been emphasized. Michael Shudson has pointed out that there have been a number of different ways of thinking about what's required to be the informed good citizen over time. Did you need to know what your party prefers, what your candidate prefers, what your rights are, the moment of having to know how the world works was just one moment in that history. We've seen in the last couple of beginning in the 1970s a lot of attention to changes in the notion of citizenship in part because of globalization practices in part because of the impact of the use of digital technologies, the appearance of the EU by the time we get further down the line and so forth. And some of the new concepts that are coming up that have been particularly important are the notion of flexible citizenship. You choose your citizenship for convenience at whatever the moment. Rupert Murdoch wants to be in US media. He simply becomes a US citizen. We have distinctions between thin and thick citizenship, how many features of your social and political life are incorporated in the citizenship bundle and how many are given up to other operations. We have contextual or differentiated citizenship that what is required of you and your citizenship identity may be specific to particular context. Susan Silby here at MIT talks about the sociological citizen, the sensibility that you're related by your relational classes as opposed to party lines or socioeconomic class decisions that it operates more sociologically, which again I think is what we're seeing with the Occupy movement. We have the concerns about robotic citizens. We have in the legal system attention to the essentially the rights, the legal rights of machinic systems often treated as more privileged than attention to the needs of social citizens and so forth. From an informational perspective, the three dimensions of citizenship that are particularly important include the developmental dimension. What are your skills actually for operating as a citizen? Historically, the emphasis has been on literacy and on production and I think in our contemporary environment. Again, let's talk to MIT. There's a lot of emphasis on producing the content, producing the data. Since World War II, we've begun to think about the importance of access to information and knowledge as what's required for citizenship. But I would argue that today we need to be much more proactive and include also the analytical skills. We have a lengthening referential chain, a lengthening causality chain and our ability to actually manage that information the glut that Marcos referred to is something that is relatively lacking still. Second dimension is fairness that you're actually involved with the decision making on the basis of the information to receive and that which you distribute. And there I would argue that it still is important to actually engage with the legal system, to actually engage with the political system to be involved in elections and so forth. We've seen an interesting phenomenon in Wisconsin when people who chose not to vote went out to march and complain about policies taken by candidates after the election not seeming to have lost the thread between cause and effect when it came to elections and policies put in place. And the third is the instrumental domain is what you're doing actually effective and I would put that challenge to the feet of the Occupy movement as well beyond making the very large point that a lot of people are unhappy where it's going in terms of effectiveness is still not clear. So I've been thinking about what are some of the techniques that the informational citizen might be using vis a vis the informational state in an environment in which the most important forms of power are informational whether they're purely informational or the application of informational techniques to alter the ways in which power and its instrumental structural and symbolic forms are used. We have some traditional techniques. We had the Freedom of Information Act you have constitutional principles saying we should know stuff about the state by the 70s you've got to put that into statutory law. At this point again post 9-11 significantly undercut you no longer if an agency doesn't want to release information and you drag that agency into court all they have to say is because we don't want to as opposed to identifying the harm. There's an interesting quid pro quo if an entity like a municipality decides to share its information about things like say infrastructure with the Department of Homeland Security the quid pro quo is it never has to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request again. And we have less information one of the consequences of deregulation of course is that less information is being gathered about the corporations that folks are concerned about about the environment that we're concerned about and other kinds of things. Regulation is another way that citizens can get knowledge of the state that is traditional and I think this is actually something that the Occupy Movement has lost track of there's some confusion we could go into this more later I don't want to tell the whole story we have time to tell the whole story right now but the concern about the effects of the Citizens United Supreme Court case which released all of the restraints on essentially released all the restraints on corporate involvement in elections in a way that's already significantly had an impact to move from deregulating corporate speech during elections to saying we should have no corporations operating as fictive persons is if you extend that is to say that then there should be no ability to regulate corporations at all and we would know less and obviously if there's no regulation at all then the very things that concern the Occupy Movement would also be unfettered and the concerns that they're speaking about would become much deeper. We have also as a traditional means of knowledge of the state simply knowing how the government works as somebody who teaches the law I can tell you most of our students these days really have no idea how it works even as depicted formally let alone how it's actually working for example the Office of Management and Budget and the White House has put in significant constraints on the use of the results of research as inputs into policy making that radically changes the ways in which our decision making operates the notion of the informed citizen or even the informed politician changes its flavor in that environment and so forth. Then we have the new ways in which the informational citizen can operate and some of these have already been mentioned the surveillance from below which I think we could actually be more systematic about and more insistent about but one of the earliest examples actually was fascinating it was in the mid 1980s an adult with arms control ever since the end of World War II folks have been talking about the possibility of mutual verification so you knew how many weapons were out there and whether or not new weapons were being tested and governments kept saying we can't do it we don't have the technologies it's not the right thing to do it's too politically fraught and finally in the mid 80s the Natural Resources Defense Council an environmental group and I can just imagine this starts at 3 a.m. and there's been a fair amount of drinking they're sitting around and they're saying okay the governments won't do it why don't we do it and they wake up the next morning this is my imagination of the process but Philip Shreg has written a book documenting the process over a few days they start realizing that maybe this is a serious idea and so in 1986 US citizens who are members of this environmental group go and meet with citizens who are members of the Soviet scientific organization and they reach an agreement to start surveillance of what's going on in the nuclear industry all over the Soviet Union on the ground and they start acting on that and they start verifying what's going on in the development of nuclear weapons it actually took much longer to get that in play in the US than it did in the former Soviet Union but that was what broke open the entire verification of arms control movement which then led to significantly contributed to arms control reduction obviously research in an area that I need to take up again given recent developments but that was a fascinating example and a great model I think of citizens surveilling where governments ought to and we see an example today with Japanese citizens surveilling radiation levels in Japan which the government is seeming to prefer not to do the leaking which Susan already mentioned is extremely important from an information policy perspective I think it's a game changer but one of the things we wanna remember there and it gets back to the issue of skills and analytical capacity is that the first thing that Julian Assange did when he launched WikiLeaks was to put together a massive database of information on banking activities that he believed would then form the basis of journalistic and citizen investigative reporting and huge barrages of analysis and critique of the banking industry this is before the 2008 financial crisis he puts together this massive database based on information he's gotten through leaks he releases the database and nobody touches it citizens don't touch it journalists don't touch it dead silence and that's why when he got to the cables and those kinds of information he went and worked with the newspapers and did it selectively and tried to shape the editorial process because he found that when the information was out there people didn't actually use it we had an example here of that earlier we have what I'm calling boomerang surveillance and I kind of love this but some of you may have caught the story a week or so ago that there were hundreds of drug convictions that were abandoned I think it was in both New York and LA because it turned out the police had to meet their quotas for drug arrests and were planting cocaine on individuals the convictions were thrown out because in one case the policemen described what he was doing without realizing there was a camera on him at the time and in the other case the same thing happened the guy forgot he was wearing a wire so I don't know how we can promote more boomerang surveillance yeah and then we have on the flip side state knowledge of citizens and I think of I'm distinguishing between citizen knowledge of the state and state knowledge of citizens because at the constitutional moment there are actually 21 different constitutional principles dealing with information not just the First Amendment but the initial notion was some balance some mutuality so there are principles mandating government exposure of information about what it's doing to the citizens and there are those things that give the state the right to know things about citizens that it would need in order to operate and that actually goes back to just after the French Revolution when we see the appearance of the word surveillance in the way in which we're using it now surveillance was one of the first new concepts to come into use in the after the French Revolution at the same time that statistics came into use as a concept in both cases of the government needed to know what its citizens were doing if it was going to serve the citizens so just very quickly the overwhelming of data we have the artist Hassan Elahi who has successfully found ways of getting himself through airports by revealing huge amounts of data about himself to the border guards constantly something that could be done more leaks again I'll put this leaking on both sides because of course the US government has massively used information that came out through WikiLeaks Cablegate for its own purposes one of the reasons it's kind of ambivalent about what to do about it right now I've written about and would just point to the role of narrative creativity and artistic creativity in this environment if you are seeking modes of political communication that will elude algorithmic detection in online environments the narrative creativity becomes particularly important and I think there's a now we keep talking about the rhetorical turn within academia but the behavioral choices we talk about the chilling of speech and maybe shyness about seeking out certain information in the online environment because we're concerned about the always on surveillance but I think there's a way of manipulating that and again talk about complexity but behavioral choices and laying down your own data trail and then I just finally want to talk to everyday citizenship practices and I think this links also with both of the previous speakers if we treat every public moment as a rest public and a rents description of that as the shared table between us as we build the world in which we live in together then treating any moment if we think of privacy as a boundary defining mechanism then any moment in which we are mutually sharing information with each other can itself be just defined as a policy as a moment in which politeness and civility are needed and I think if we thought about those things and every one of our interactions it would also do us some good in reversing some of the extraordinary changes we've seen in what we consider acceptable political behavior acceptable political discourse and acceptable political leadership. So Sandra in some ways you had promised a darker vision than we got from Susan and you put perhaps the most optimistic idea that I've heard so far tonight which is this notion that we can think of regulation as a form of surveillance and that if there's one thing we might ask our friends over at Occupy to be pushing for regulation is it and what I'm wondering is whether it's reasonable to take your wonderful provocative example of environmental groups monitoring nuclear disarmament and try to apply it to something of the complexity of say the financial system where it seems like one of the major problems we've had is an utter and total failure to regulate in a meaningful way or at least in an anticipatory fashion but you offer the sort of intriguing possibility that we might in fact find a way as citizens to surveil and understand that system whether it's through Asanja's database or whether it's through some other way of going are we letting governments off the hook if we take on that sort of surveillance capacity on our own or are we in fact engaging as these sort of informational citizens that you're projecting that we're becoming? Well, there are about 18 different questions bundled up in that. Part of what happened with the banking system was that the government was failing to operate on existing regulations. So for example, about the mortgage crisis or about Ponzi schemes there was plenty of warning that was not acted upon. So some of it is still monitoring government and holding the government accountable which it has now begun to do. I do think that I would come back to I think the skill level. What I'm really concerned about in terms of whether or not the Occupy Movement is thinking about regulation is the low level of analysis. Which is why I brought up the Citizens United case. It is in an environment in which one of the things that's going on in the financial system is this stochastic multiplication of levels of probability that you get with derivatives. So you're betting on things that you have no idea where they are. To move from that into just like abandon the regulation altogether is to take what used to be trained as the ability to at least follow a multi-step argument. If we can fantasize that there was a moment in which our literate educated population could follow a multi-step argument. We're in an environment in which the length of the arguments that need to be followed has gotten longer and it seems as if the political conversation has gone to single step arguments. So in your question that was both should there be more regulation? It depends on what it is. I'm not just saying we ought to regulate but we ought to recognize that regulation is a tool for acquiring information. When the Office of Management and Budget says don't get information about the children of migrant farm laborers because it's not cost effective for the agency to collect that information then we know we're not providing those children with education or with healthcare. Secondly is the question of whether or not the government is actually operating in accordance with the regulations that are in place and I guess then third is our importance as citizens if we want to make use of that information and enhancing our own analytical skills and intellectual sophistication regarding what's going on. So I wanna grab that notion of analytic skills and sort of put a question to all of you that I'm hoping will sort of synthesize some of the threads that came through here. One of the ideas that Mark was put on the table early on is this notion of overload and this notion of informational overload and one of the technological changes that sort of gone on in an era of social media, in an era where our lampposts are spying on us is this notion that we have vastly more information than we even had in the days where one out of six of our fellow citizens were spying on us. At the same time, Sandra, you're positing this idea that we need this sort of third level analytic skills beyond just being able to produce information and access it but being able to analyze it. And so what I'm wondering in all of this is there's a seduction of surveillance. There's this notion that somehow if I can watch and if I can have an eye on the world as someone in a position of power, I can know and I can anticipate and I can find the secrets and I can unriddle the mysteries. But there's also this interesting potential sort of coming at the moment that by having all this information coming in, if I don't yet have the analytic skill, if I don't have the way of synthesizing all of this, then maybe I know in fact less than I might know before. What's that tension between is it possible that all of us who are worried about surveillance are actually in some ways worried about the wrong thing is maybe somehow the absorption of all this data and the fact that we're being watched in so many different ways. Does that actually make it easier for us to hide in ways that we might have in an earlier age? I don't know if you wanna jump on the person. I wanna jump in first. I've been thinking about wiretapping for a long time, first because I was very interested in cryptography and then because I got very interested in wiretapping and when I was working at SUN, it was very hard to work on wiretapping from a civil liberties perspective, both because there are plenty of people at ACLU who can do it a lot better than I can and because it's not a SUN issue, it's not a SUN stock shareholders issue. But it was of concern to SUN because wiretapping and building wiretapping capability into communications networks does affect innovation and the pace of innovation. So SUN was very concerned about laws that would require that. So I had SUN interested, but this was the mid 2000s and to go down to Washington and say, you can't build surveillance in because it's bad for innovation. It's not an argument that would work post September 2001. However, you could talk about the threats to security. When you build surveillance into security into communications networks, you create security risks and in fact, you create lots of security risks. Security risks that parts of the government are actually quite concerned about. And so I began following this thread, pushed to it somewhat by necessity, but also pushed to it because it was in fact of great importance. And what I have found as I began writing this second book was at one point I stopped and I said, no, why is this person from the NSA talking to me and that person from the NSA talk? And I began looking at all the different, are they using me? And I thought, well, wait a minute, if they're using me, they're using me in a way on an argument that I actually believe is correct. And I'm using them and they're using me and that's okay. And so I would say that, yeah, within the government, there are people who say, sure, we've nice to have that data. I can always use that data, but acquiring that data also puts us at risk. Building that stuff in puts us at risk and that data isn't so valuable to me that it's worth putting us at risk. So I would say that within the government you certainly see people who view it that way. I view it that way. There are lots of people outside the government who view it that way. That acquiring the data is not always so useful and having the analytical skills that Sandra's talking about is actually critical. Can't think analytically, the data isn't gonna do you any good at all. So Marcus, one of the provocations you put forward is sort of the notion that this data could be collected almost anywhere, that whether it's on the street, whether it's on Facebook, how does that leave you feeling about this question of whether we get overwhelmed at a certain point, even in our own act of surveillance? Does at some point the surveillance become self-defeating or do our capabilities sort of scale to measure with that? I'm listening to the conversation and I'm really fascinated by how the conversation itself illustrates what I was pointing to, which I think hasn't really registered and may not register for a long time, that there are two models at work, one which is a pie chart and one which is a concentric system and that we're totally seduced into believing that terra firma is our piece of pie. And I have to say very simply that curing the leaves doesn't fix the disease and the roots and we have a root problem and we can talk about the details, we can talk about the technique, we can talk about all sorts of policies and little things and never get to the root. So I can't, I mean it's really, really interesting but as I'm listening, I'm thinking of something that I would call the arrogance of the presence, present of the present, which is that we think because we're now, that now is what's important and we don't dare think what Florence must have thought before the Renaissance, which is that uh-oh, we're a thousand years late, some other people had this right and we've been screwing up for a long time and we had better become daring and fix it. I'm saying that because I think in what we heard, you know the really interesting statement that people didn't know about the Occupy, Wall Street, that they didn't know that people were unhappy, just really an incredible statement because I know for a fact that Noam Chomsky has been saying this, he's been saying it for 40 years, he's been referring to James Madison, who's been referring to Aristotle, to whom I referred to not by accident and I can pull up the quote in which James Madison in the writing of the Constitution states that the role of the Constitution, and I'm now quoting both Madison and Chomsky, the role of the Constitution is the protection of the opulent few from the many. It's been known for 2,500 years that the situation will happen, it has happened with all sorts of consequences all over the planet, it will continue to happen because we don't want to look at the problem. You discussed dimensions of citizenship, it was fascinating to me that in the dimensions of citizenship, one of the dimensions of citizenship isn't the consideration of the good, like how do we make a society that is actually good for people? Not how do we spy on people more efficiently? How do we make the place better to begin with? It's not a new idea, but you have to be totally arrogant to assume that all the new ideas belong to the now and if you realize that maybe some other people got some things right, it might be a good idea to listen to good advice. I don't know that I'm answering your question directly, but I want to point out, you might think I'm not answering directly, but I want to point out something tangible and economically true. It was on the radio the other day, it's unfortunate that Steve Jobs died. Everybody seems to have liked him for all the complaining. It was reported that when they were making the Apple One, he was fussing with the engineers about the circuits not being neat enough. And the engineer's saying, well, what do you care? No one will see them. The computer works just as well. What are you worried? He says, no, I'll know it and you'll know it. That is actually the word Aralma. I don't know where he picked it up, but the idea that you do something well because you do it well, because you're watching over it and it's not anyone's surveillance that's making you behave well, that's the idea that actually produces civilizations. So I want to say in this conversation, I think it's important, and I'm embedded in technology. I'm a pioneer. I've been the first to do something on the planet for several things that I've done in my field. So I'm not afraid of any of this, but I have to say, technology equals slash, does not equal civilization. And here we are at MIT. It's not just about the skills. The analytical skills won't get us there. I don't think they'll get us there because we're not looking at the roots. So let me add one more thing because the word mystery came up and the thing about words is actually not me just exercising Greek. It's about confusion. The word mystery does not mean mystery. The root miss actually means muscle. What it actually means is those things that you have to exert yourself to learn. You have to exercise. It's difficult for most people to do that, so they don't. But the mystery is simply something that you have to exert yourself. You want to learn mathematics? You're going to work at it. You want to play the piano? You're going to work on it. You want to have a good society? You're going to work on it. Why don't I open it up at this point and let's see if anyone else wants to jump into this conversation which is complicated and multi-layered. I invite you to jump in on questions of surveillance on citizenship, whether they're contemporary or whether they cut back to the roots. I'm going to ask that questions be interrogative statements that preferably end with a question mark at the end of them. And let's start there. Hi. So I have a question for Susan and a question for Sandra. A question for Susan is based on your point that privacy is a requirement of democracy and that democratic practices that begin in private deliberation and then get taken in the public sphere. So in my introduction to civic media course, we were talking about this idea and one of the notions being that subaltern counterpublics and social movement formations before they become visible have always done this, but now as increasingly this activity moves online, are we losing some of the private space that social movements in early stages of formation used to enjoy before they move into the public? And should I do the question for... Well, so let's just pause for a moment here. By the way, this is Sasha Katsanza-Chak of Comparative Media Studies here. We're also going to ask questioners to identify themselves only because I love Sasha very, very much as he get two questions. Everybody else gets one, but we're going to stop you here and let Susan actually answer the question and then we're going to let you ask question two and it's you and only you. So in fact, you know, if I hadn't known... If Ethan hadn't told me who you were, I would have said, gee, this sounds like more a question that one of the Berkman people should answer. Perhaps Sasha Katsanza-Clarke, for example. You're really asking a social question and I feel a little bit out of my expertise there, but I'll answer it anyway because I'm sitting here and I have to. And the answer is I think Occupy Wall Street gives a really good example of that. So there was some organizing by ad busters and so on prior to the occupations starting to happen, but lots of people turned up who weren't part of that conversation. And I think that you... We have always had some people who are willing to be public early and some people who aren't willing to be public early. And I think that the media enables, the new media enables those discussions to happen and they may appear to some people that they're more private than they actually are, but the people who really need to be private are gonna stay private and they're still gonna participate but they're gonna stay private first. And the question for Sandra is really about secure communities. So there's a big discussion and debate both within and around the immigrant rights movement around secure communities and sort of the history of it. So SCOM is the information sharing program between local police agencies and ICE. And the debate is around at what point... What do you know from looking at sort of the flow of that program as it's originated and then spreads? The debate is to states and local police agencies who are now saying we wanna be able to opt out of this so that we can do more effective policing in immigrant communities. Is that really true or is this part of sort of a public play that's being put on? So this is a debate that's raging around whether there's just a pretense here and there's a sort of good cop, bad cop thing going on as secure communities extends around to every local agency. So some states have tried to opt out and they haven't been able to and that's where the controversy has come. So I'm really curious if you have more information about that from looking at the spread of different, I guess, surveillance programs through different arms and state agencies. Do you wanna quickly define ICE for everyone? Immigrations and customs enforcement. So this is not something I've looked at in depth myself but we want to be aware of being monolithic about treating everyone who's involved in criminal justice or in the military as if they're all going to take the same perspective and we wanna remember that in over 350 municipalities the police force has taken the position that it will not follow certain mandates that would flow from the USA Patriot Act. So I don't think it's good cop, bad cop. I think in the cases where we're seeing that kind of thing it may be good faith, best practice beliefs on the part of those who are taking those positions. So let's get another question. Please identify yourself and then far one ready. Hi, I'm John Hawkinson. I write for the MIT student newspaper or sometimes about cameras on campus and I wonder about the role of the citizen. It seems like MIT's security office adds one prominent camera every three or four months somewhere on campus and they say the footage from those cameras can only be used by approval of the MIT campus chief police. But I kind of continue to be a little concerned. Recently they started adding remote controlled cameras that can move and change what they're pointing at and there's one of top MIT's 20 story building up there. And I'm not sure what to do about these things. We print notes about them in the newspaper. There's very little feedback that we receive. It seems very few people care or are concerned. So I wonder about the role of the citizen. I sort of despair about it, but I ask you what do you think the citizen should be doing in reaction to surveillance in their local communities like that? Marcus, do you wanna take a crack at that? Well, I think you should assume that everything is visible. You know, I think we all agree on that, that any notion that something won't leave a trace is unlikely to change for any time. And I don't know that there's much to do about that. So I would actually like to jump in, which is that one of the very good arguments as we have more and more surveillance is to constantly ask the question, well, how effective is this? How much are you spending on it? How much time is being spent watching those cameras? What could you be doing instead? And the effectiveness argument is actually remarkably effective. So there I will point you to an article that appeared in communications of the ACM. I wanna say about a year ago by Angela Sasse on looking at CCTV closed-circuit television in the UK, which has a remarkable number of CCTVs, and how they do not appear to be particularly effective. And I would try to use the tack of effectiveness. There's only a finite amount of budget. Is that where you should be spending it on? Instead of accompanying people walking back to places at night or whatever it is. And it's sort of the counterpart to the security argument versus civil liberties argument that I've been using on wiretapping. And if I can jump in here with, I think it'll be a threefer. So in response to your immediate question, those were the, that's where I was offering the kinds of techniques like narrative creativity, designing behavioral streams in response to the expectation it'll be surveilled. We actually, there are theater groups who are doing this now with those kinds of cameras and so forth. So I think there are those kinds of techniques available. I would attach them to a response to Sasha and the question about where the privacy goes and point again then to the need for narrative creativity as a means of speech even when you're in public that would still be private. And there's thousands of years of practices of that kind and it's time for sort of some reinvention in that domain. And I would attach both of those to your question about when is too much information, too much information because there were really two separate things there. One is, can you ever achieve total meaningful knowledge? Well, no, and the history of arms control is very instructive in that regard because it was clear that you get this ever greater multiplication, what started as a simple world turns into hundreds of pages of protocols about how to do it. And there never is enough information because it all boils down to political will. In order to achieve political will, you need argument. In order to achieve argument, you need the analysis. So I'm gonna bring all those three together. Thanks for your time. Let's take another question from that side. Please identify yourself, John unknown. Hi, thanks for the interesting discussion. I'm Sunny Sidhu. I'm one of the master students in the comparative media studies program right now. My question concerns a sort of repeated motif that keeps recurring in some of the criticism about the Occupy protest movement. I think I've seen it enough times that it qualifies as a meme. And that's the sort of snarky observation that a lot of people here seem to have Apple computers. And I think what's unspoken there is sort of, you know, isn't this a little bit hypocritical? You know, how can they say that they wanna keep corporations at an arms length if they embrace the products from the country's largest corporation, yada yada. So I kind of, I think that there might be a spark of something interesting there, which is that hardware-like software designs can kind of be an over-determining structure to which we all must submit if we want to use them. And I was wondering if you could all talk a little bit about sort of the end-user identity politics of hardware choices and whether this is something that people can escape from and whether something needs to be done in order to sort of defend against these sort of politically motivated statements. Please. I think it's a really interesting question. You know, the thing, it's not a, it's not a matter of the 99% demonizing the 100% or all corporations or all of that. It's really a question of motives and incentives and priorities. And Apple winds up being in the position that it is because it seems that Steve Jobs actually was behaving with a code of integrity that everyone else is not going by, to the point where again, it's been reported in the recent news that his last advice to Tim Cook, who was going to take over, was not for him to try to do what Steve Jobs would have done, but to just do what's right. And it sounds, I know that everything I say sounds like a generality, but that's only because we have this massive filter on our head that says that if it isn't a piece of the pie, a little piece of the pie chart, it's not sharp. And we actually have to realize, as I think Steve Jobs and Apple proved, that you can operate completely differently and completely effectively and completely to the benefit of yourself and your corporation and also the whole. Of such things that are made with these technologies, these things wind up being better made than they need to be made. They're made better because someone cares to make them well. Everyone else is actually having a different priority, which is not coming from a positive place. It is to earn more in a certain sense, or to protect from a danger, in any case, to assert either a negative or a kind of selfishness of a kind. I think that's what made Apple different. That's why those people love it. And I'm not a spokesman for Apple. I have no such thing, but I think it's really something singular and it's to be explained. It's not inexplicable. And I don't think it's a mistake that he was a Buddhist. And I'm not a Buddhist, but I think that's not actually a mistake. The style thing can work in both directions. I'm reminded of Phil Agri, who in the early 90s was saying, look, if you wanna keep your email private, write your own program, idiosyncratic program. So when you take it down off the net, nobody can track it. And I thought that's great, Phil. I'm glad you can do that. I can't do that. It does draw our attention to different, what are the kinds of literacy we need in this environment. But I think that becomes actually more pretentious I have deep admiration for Phil, but that was more pretentious than simply picking up the tool that's there. And I think there's also, there's like a cost-benefit analysis that the individual makes. Do I wanna spend my time trying to mod my own computer or make one from scratch? Or do I wanna get down to the job that I'm here to do and take the tool that works that's available that I can afford? So I would go with Sandra and say that I have an Apple because when it breaks, I can fix it. And that's not true with the other machines for me. And I'm telling you about my level of skill. I know when my Apple breaks, except for the time that the hinge broke. But every other time my Apple has broken, I knew I could fix it and that enabled me to fix it. At the same time, I was visiting a Google engineer last week and he was really mad because he can't play with the code the same way you can play with on Linux. So I think those are the two images that I have about the answer to why Apple or why not Apple. I'm giving you a technologist's answer. And that doesn't answer it for the rest of the people over in Occupy Wall Street. I am somewhat amused by the fact that when you come and do these events, one of the things that David tells you as the moderator is that he doesn't want us to put bottles of water on the table because it looks like we're advertising the brand of water. I'm hiding my Diet Coke down here so that you don't see me endorsing Diet Coke. But I realize implicitly that we sort of look like we're making a pro-Apple argument here. I have to argue that that's purely incidental. It isn't, in fact, intentional. Let's take a question over here. Hi, my name is Kate. I work for the ACLU of Massachusetts. I was really interested to hear the differing responses to the question about surveillance cameras. Marcos, it sounded like you said basically there's nothing you can do. Don't walk around naked in the street. Susan, your response, right? I mean, you said everything you do is visible. I did. But I also, you know, I think there are things that we've forgotten and we won't even consider. The culture that I was pointing to had people walking around naked in the streets and it was okay. Our shame is a really bizarre thing. It's not really a natural thing. That was a bad example. I mean, essentially you said, you know, assume that everything you do is public, right? Susan, your response was, you know, that you should make an argument about efficiency and efficacy. I find that to be a really troublesome response, actually. And I think it's interesting in the context of what you said earlier about privacy being a necessary quality in a democracy. Those two statements don't really mesh so well. I guess you could say tactically that the former would work better in some circumstances. But I actually think it's really important for privacy advocates to advocate for the latter position as a principle, you know, on ideological grounds. But my question, I think, is gonna be interesting in light of those two responses to hear what you folks have to say. It's sort of the final frontier of privacy and the final frontier of surveillance, which is mind reading. And, you know, people don't discuss it very often. And certainly not discussed in the press hardly ever. But really rapid advances in mind reading technology are being made by doctors, actually, who are looking into the science in order to communicate with people who have ALS and such things. But I'm sure many of the people in this room would not be surprised to hear that it's the military that's funding this research. And, you know, me as a privacy advocate, the thought that the government will in 10 years be able to pretty accurately read my mind is terrifying. And so, you know, my question to all of you is essentially, you know, is there a bridge too far? You know, are there some technologies that we just like should not even, you know, flirt with? Should we, you know, try to get organizations like the ACLU to outright ban mind reading technology in the United States, to ban mind reading in the state of Massachusetts so that there's a free place where you can go, you know, in 20 years where, you know, the FBI won't be able to read your mind at a traffic light or wherever. And so I'm curious to hear what you have to say sort of in the context of your answers to his question about cameras. So, I wanna say on the privacy versus efficiency, I'm relying on you guys to do the privacy argument. And that's actually an important point. I think that if you can argue effectiveness and efficiency, you don't have to get to the privacy argument. And here I'm talking politically and not philosophically. Philosophically, what drives me there is the privacy argument. Politically, it is much more effective at times to make the efficiency argument. If every time you pull out the privacy card, the privacy card stops working so well. So sometimes you don't wanna pull out the privacy card. And if the thing isn't effective, and I'll pull back to the National Research Council, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, did a report on data mining and behavioral surveillance. And they said, first question you wanna ask is whether this stuff is effective, each particular thing you wanna do. Because if it's not effective, you don't have to debate any of the other issues. And I think that's really important. I think it's a very valuable lesson. Second, before I get to mind reading, I wanna talk a little bit about location data. So of course, all of you, except for me, because I keep my cell phone mostly off, all of you are beaming your location all the time. But there is a case coming up to the Supreme, to the courts now about location data and whether or not the police should have to have a warrant to put a GPS tag on your car and track you. Now the police can put a beeper on your car and they can follow you through tracking the beeper. But when they follow you through tracking the beeper, they have to keep you under reasonably close visual surveillance. And if they're not doing that, they don't know within a couple of blocks where you are. Sometimes more than a couple of blocks, sometimes a half a mile. If they have a GPS tracker on you, they don't have to track you physically, which means it's a lot cheaper to do. It means they're sitting in the office and they're doing it. It means they're getting much more precise data. And the argument by the technologists is, this is effectively a very different kind of tracking. It's technologically different. And therefore it can't go under the same rules as the beeper argument. It changes the technology, okay? And there's a case that came up to the Supreme Court, Kylo, in which thermal imager was used to detect whether or not somebody was heating their house high enough to grow marijuana. And the police argument was that they didn't go inside the perimeter of the house and therefore they didn't need a warrant. And the court ruled no. What you can see from the outside of the house, not by standing by the way next in front of the bushes and looking in through the window, but by standing on the sidewalk, you don't need a warrant for. What you need to do by going inside the house you need a warrant for. And the thermal imager essentially goes inside the house. It changes the police capabilities. The argument in the location data by the technologists is it changes the capabilities. So now I'll finally get to your question about the mind reading. That changes the police capabilities. And I would like to argue it purely on that way. I'd like to argue it also that it is so intrusive that one should never use it. But certainly it changes capabilities a huge amount. I'll take you one further. So we're about 10, 12 years past the point when the Department of Defense first issued a call for research on the co-design of humans and weapons. So you've got a certain kind of intelligent weapon but you wanna design the eye to go with it and so forth. The reason that I started my introductory comments by saying there's no stopping it is because we're, that's the kind of animal we are. There were people who before the first atomic bomb was tested, actually there were scientists who believed it could possibly ignite the atmosphere but you could not use it. We're not going to be able to stop the use of surveillance technologies and we're not gonna be able to stop the development of those technologies that simply isn't gonna happen. It's not in our species to do that. So I think there, but there are levels, there are layers and stages of acceptability of the use. The first time in US law that the ability to take into account state of mind showed up was in libel law in 1974 when it was deemed to be possible, that that was an argument in court, state of mind that you could use that. And so I will again point to the law as a place where we can look to guidelines about when and when it's not going to be acceptable. I'm with Susan on the fragility and perhaps thread-beariness of the privacy argument and I say that as somebody who lived off the grid for 10 years and loved it, no phone, no visuals, no nothing. It was wonderful and I deeply appreciate the role of privacy and what it is to be human in the most profound ways. But I also at this point believe we are actually at a moment of species change and that to learn that's true for many reasons. I'm not into the whole transhuman send us off the planet zone, but I do think that it's a moment of species change and what it means to have the intimacy of the conversations, whether personal or those we need for public purposes in terms of forming organizations. All of that is we're into new territory there in terms of how to think about it. Marcus, would love to hear from you on this. Well, to keep the salad nice and tossed, I wouldn't be literal about the transhumanist or anything like that, but I would say that among our arrogance is the idea that we're so evolved that we won't continue to evolve. That's unreasonable. I think we will continue to evolve and it'll take some time, but once there were amoeba that couldn't sense what we do and now we are and you can imagine that in the length of time that should happen again. However, you know, we've had this conversation. I've been giving talks like I'm sure everybody else has and over the past, you know, an amount of time, I'm sure I've spoken to thousands of people. I've published, I've been publishing papers and showing work for decades, so thousands more have heard what I've had to say. I have no guarantee that even in this comment, let alone this evening, let alone this week, month, year, decade, life, I've been understood the way I would think so. So I have no real valid way of saying that if someone tried to read my mind, they would actually make any sense of it. So the question isn't really whether someone reads my mind and whether or not I have secrets in there. They might be doing me a favor if they found a secret that I didn't realize, you know? And they pointed out to me, the problem is really that if I go across the city, as I will tomorrow, go to the Visa Institute, they have little flies that are drones and there are other people that have drones that are bigger and the bigger drones can carry charges and can shoot at me, they can kill me because they've misunderstood something. It's quite possible that they'll misunderstand and quite possible that they can terminate me as I'm sure people have been terminated in war zones in the world already by mistake. So the whole conversation that I'm having is not in the absence of the technological, it's actually because the technological by itself is really stupid, you know? I hate to use such a crude word, but really it doesn't guarantee anything. When there are problems in the world that intelligent creatures that can put drones, not drones, they can put drones on Mars too, they can put rovers on Mars, build the internet and iPhones and change genetics and deal with quantum physics in all sorts of different ways. When such creatures can't solve problems on the planet, it's because they don't want to solve the problems on the planet. You know, the reason there's the narco problem is because it makes $300 billion in a couple of years, a trillion over a few years and that's pretty convenient, you know? So all the surveillance in the world isn't going to solve that because it does, you know, it's a problem that doesn't want to be solved. I don't know what benefit someone can have by reading someone else's mind, but by misunderstanding, I'm sure they'll think of something and that's the part that's dangerous. If we could figure out, now, if we could figure out how to make better sense of each other and how to have the thoughts in our mind in a way that we can take responsibility for them, so I don't care if you go in there, what I like is I like, what I like, it's my right, you know, so what if you know that I'm there? I went down the street, I visited that address, yeah, that's where I was, leave me alone. Let's take a question over here. I invite you to be at least as provocative as mind-reading. Well, I was actually going to bring us out of the realm of Robocop, if that's all right. But you need to identify yourself first. Yes, I'm Chris Peterson. Because we're serving, because of the surveillance. So, Sandra, you mentioned the distinction between constitutional principle and practice and we've talked about the importance of private personal sphere to foster civic discourse. I'd like to play out something that Sasha asked about the formation of Publix, which is basically this. We've seen increasing private in the corporate but not personal sense enclosure of public spaces on and offline. This is squashed both the physical space for civic discourse and also the conceptual space, which is something Sandra that we talked about in CMS790 the other day about no constitutional right for free speech in banks. Which kind of elides the question of whether or not the space, whether or not that space is being squashed in which to speak. My question is this, what effects will this continuing closure have on civic conversations given the importance that we talked to at the very beginning of this discussion and what can be done to help preserve what we valued about them in this new technological environment? You got a cheat sheet there. It's a great question. Let me just clarify, I did in passing in the course of a class, so you don't have a right to speak in banks. But I didn't mean actually that there is no constitutional right but that we have rules about when you can restrict speech in privately owned public spaces or publicly owned spaces that are committed to specific purposes if the speech or behaviors in those spaces would disrupt the purpose to which the spaces are put. Just to clarify the constitutional point there. There are many different meanings of the word public and actually the bank lobby might be a very good one because if you are there having even a political organizing conversation while you're standing in line, you're creating a public, a shared table between you that can serve purposes of political organization without disrupting the space even if it's privately owned and under those kinds of restrictions that are acceptable under US constitutional law. So the privatization act, I would take it in another direction that's the property rights. One of the things that's interesting in US law is that even information that is in the public domain or is publicly available if it is processed it becomes subject to property rights. And so one of the things interestingly that the police do is they take information that is publicly available, process it in their own databases and using their software and then it becomes no longer publicly available. And this is among the things that will happen with whatever information we're releasing into the public domain. So I think the question of restrictions on this, I'll take that in two more directions. One is the issue of ownership of the media and the quelling of, so we have global conglomeratization of the media now, Illinois, Columbia is tracking this, it's not just Italy, it's not just the US, reduces the diversity of opinion in the most public spheres. We know that at what we don't know. Some people say they have evidence that, in fact even tweets dealing with the Occupy movement have been censored and there's those kinds of restrictions. So I think the question of where there are restrictions and when they're meaningfully there is an important one. I'm not sure that the restrictions are always those that are getting the most attention. So I'll stop there. So we've hit the point of reloading on questions. This is by the way the clever way around my Sasha principle. Although I think we now have folks lining up on both sides. I think in interest of fairness, I probably need to give the question to the person who's yet to ask. So let's go there first. Well thank you, Joshua Kaufman from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. I think one way of reading these conversations is that we have a crisis or opportunity of agency. That with the tools of surveillance we have new tools of seeing and new tools of understanding. And if we're defining citizenship somehow in the realm of agency with exposure to new types of information, we have enhanced or increased agency across the board. It's a social question or governmental question. To what extent can our current governance systems absorb these increased types of agencies? Can we rely on them to absorb these agencies? Should we look elsewhere outside of traditional governance? How should we incorporate increased agency in general in the realm of citizenship? That's the $6 million question. Thank you for asking it. You gotta get up in the morning and you continue on with your professional career and one's personal life as a citizen and as a human being. I'm not at all optimistic. I don't believe actually that we are capable of that. And so where does this go? It means that, but it's the only means that we have. So where it's going in terms of policy analysis and thinking about the government is analysis of ways in which lost state society relations are shifting and that shifts where, and this is gonna be too complex to come, something to get into in detail here, but it shifts where it is that you want the regulation and the accountability and sort of designing streams of accountability and reportage and then ability to act on that information. So it enormously burdens the governance system. It means we're beginning to use complex systems analysis to think about governance systems incorporating the private sector and cultural practices as well. So that's one of the sort of within the world of policy thought development that has been taking place. And then although I sort of stake myself publicly on a law and policy kind of research agenda, in fact there I do include not just the formal laws and practices and decision-making entities of geopolitically recognized governments, but also the formal and informal practices, habits, decision-making entities and processes of private as well as public sector entities and the cultural habits and predispositions that support them both. So I think we're at an extremely difficult moment regarding even the possibility of effective governments right now. So I wanna take a somewhat different turn and get technical for the last few minutes that we're here. And back in the late 1990s, early 2000s, the US Naval Laboratories built a tool called TOR that many of you are familiar with, the Onion Router, that enables the hiding of transactional information who is communicating with whom. And that's very important because in fact who is communicating with whom is often far more revelatory than what the communication is about. In January 2010, after Google announced it had been broken into by the Chinese government with software taken that pissed them off quite a lot and also emails hacked, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech and it was a very interesting speech because what it talked about was the importance of openness and the importance of the open internet and the importance of communication. And then this past April or May, the White House came out with its international strategy to secure cyberspace and it talked about security, talked about cyber exploitation, and talked about all those things, but it talked about the importance of an open internet. And the US government is putting in a large amount of money into securing communications and hiding transactional information because they find it useful of course for human rights workers, for political protesters in other parts of the world and so on. But you can be sure that those tools will also be used domestically. I'm not saying this is going to solve the privacy problem, it's not even close to solving the privacy problem. But it is an interesting ray of hope in the midst of all the gloom that we've been talking about. And it's an interesting ray of hope being promulgated by the US government. Marcus, I'm going to give you the last word. You can be hopeful, you can be gloomy, you can be in the present, you can be deeply rooted. I'm always hopeful and I think that actually being optimistic is an ethical responsibility for anyone who has the opportunity, the mind, the talent, the will, the time, all the resources, whatever it takes. So I would be so anyway. But I think that the way you get to it is by putting your finger on the actual problem. You can't solve a problem, you can't name. And I think when you look at the Occupy movements around the world, because it's not just here, it's happening all over the earth right now, what you're seeing is a clamor, which is quite, quite explicit, a clamor for a more direct democracy. A manner in which what the Demos wants is actually reflected more immediately. Because the system that is in place does not seem to deliver an equitable distribution of the resources that are there. Without saying that all the resources should be equalized, one could say that there ought to be some balance. And that balance is actually articulated, as I said, in Aristotle, in the politics explicitly. And it's actually taken up, and I've pulled up the quote, it's taken up in the Federalist Papers, statement 1787, 0626, notes of the secret debates of the Federal Convention of 1787, where it stated that the Constitution that's to be made ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The trick there is that that statement propagates through in a way that creates all sorts of breaks that are specifically intended to reduce agency. They're intended to put a system of stops so that if the imbalance becomes too great, there's nothing anybody can do about it. And that is in place. And so if any of these imbalances, whether it's economic or whether it's informational, becomes too great, there's nothing anybody can do about it. Unless it becomes such a problem that everybody on earth all of a sudden flares up and says enough, that seems to be happening. If we were wise, we would pay attention and we would pull back and bring everything down. But it's not entirely clear that we're behaving wisely. And so this is where one has to remember history and realize that there was a French Revolution and there were people who were saying, eat cake and their heads rolled. Bad things can happen. And it's not really good to be complacent and it's not really good to be arrogant and it is good to name the problem when you see the problem. And the problem is holistic. It's not my expertise. It's not about my field. It's about us. There's a kind of sense of us in a democracy and over decades, that's been corroded. And it's corroded in this country and it's corroded in all the countries. And so we just need to take note. What I would say. In the small polis that is the Bartos Theatre this evening, I wonder if we could get consensus and polite applause perhaps for our speakers who've been provoking us. Thank you.