 What I want to do is reflect on the various ways in which technology is affecting how we process information how we maintain it and how we create and grant access to a digital record and For that I want to offer up first a framework of sorts So here's the framework. It's kind of McKinsey-esque in its four quadrants. It's a chart with two axes And along the x-axis here. I divide it between what I call hierarchy and Polyarchy I don't know if these are the perfect words for it. I'm open to ideas, but here's what I mean by it I mean on the left side of the spectrum a System for which there is no alternative either because there just isn't or because law precludes it or for any other reason Those subject to the system don't have a lot of choice or as we might put it in in some theoretical terms They don't have the option of exit. They exist within that system and that's it on the far right here Not politically speaking you have polyarchy Which is to say there is choice and the more choice there is the more you go to the right on that spectrum That's the basic idea of being able to choose among various regimes or systems in which you might exist Then kind of counter-intuitively at a right angle to that axis I put a division between top-down and bottom-up If I were talking more explicitly about the book that the provost mentioned I would say generative here and sterile here, but I'm not talking about the book So I won't instead. I'll say top-down and bottom-up and by that I mean the extent to which those empowered to shape the system to make its rules and enforce them are in identity with the people of the system To the extent that there's a separation between those who make the rules and those who live under them We head towards the top to the extent that there isn't a separation that the rules or constraints whatever they may be emanate as readily from one person as another within the system it ends up at bottom up towards the bottom Okay, so with that kind of introduction stipulation we can start to deploy the various rough forms of government around this chart and See how they might map out so with apologies to political scientists in the room who are about to witness a bit of butchery Here we go. So in the upper left we might put something like authoritarian That's some regime by which the rules are pretty clear there's lots of them they're enforced upon you and you don't get to make them and Generally, you don't get to leave which is why many authoritarian regimes as part of being able to enforce rules that are so Potentially disagreeable with the people who live under them. It's really hard to get a visa out. Otherwise everybody flees You might put a little bit further down Maybe a lot further down but still north of the horizontal axis a democratic system and the reason we would put that there I think is because This is going to be more responsive to those regulated than an authoritarian one Because there are regular elections. You can always throw the bums out But the bums aren't you which is why you get to call them that they're different from you and there's only this indirect ongoing Dialogue that's rather crude between those who regulate and those who are regulated But every so often like the spy and Stratigo get to kill the general every so often they get to Determine the professional fate of those who make the rules It's about as subtle as I once heard grades described as by a law school colleague who said grades are like Feedback the way that hitting a mule across the face with a two by four is feedback. I Never forgot that. I'm not sure why So I of course by democratic I don't mean, you know the Democratic Party I suppose in a way what I'm really describing is a Republican form of government by which there are representatives So I don't know we could call it demublican or something, but I mean by that representative government All right moving right along. We might have over here Elements of federalism or in the European Union the idea of their structure which includes a lot of subsidiarity where Okay, it might be still Not including very much the people down here except via elections But the point of the federalist system and theory and the federalist experiment is that you have choice At least as long as you're willing to pick up stakes and move somewhere else You don't have to live in Utah. I Assume you all know that since you don't live in Utah But you don't even have to live in North Carolina or wherever the idea is there's high transaction cost in moving But less and less over time Railroads are getting faster these days. I'm told and that's what moves this to the right towards Polyarchy as many systems and maybe provokes a certain kind of competition Speaking of competition we might put on the very far right here Maybe I do mean this politically speaking, but that would just be coincidence Corporatism and by that I mean literally Markets as they are classically understood which is to say there's a product you want and the Corporations that make that product or choose to enter that market are desperate for you to buy it They really want to please you they want to make the price as low as they can get away with if it means more sales They want to shape it to your desires and in that sense There's the same kind of feedback between those who buy the products and those who make them the way There is between those who pass the laws and those who live under them But still we would not mistake The entities that make the products for the people who buy them. I don't get a vote in making the product I don't especially get to walk into the building and start making my own be like great I'll have 10 million of those please by Tuesday It's still a difference between those who create and those who buy the creations Okay, moving right along down in this corner. We might put anarchist Definitely. Well, I don't know it's far right or not. I won't get into that dispute But anarchist in the sense of we don't want any government at all The more you just have people able to do what people do the happier will be and sure enough then the source of constraint is as likely to be the person next to you as it is those bureaucrats in Washington or wherever That is a sense of anarchy for better or worse in that the regulation upon you the constraint upon you could come from anywhere Just as you could be a source of it for anyone else And that's why I might put in this quadrant somewhere probably a little bit up as it is placed Libertarianism at least that strain of libertarianism That isn't we need a government to come in and Greatly protect civil liberties libertarianism, but rather the kind of libertarian that is highly skeptical of government at all and Says the best security is a shotgun That is wanting a system where you rely on yourself or your neighbors or your family or your friends For your protections and for what creates your constraint or doesn't in the environment than any external force north of this border Over here in the bottom left you might put something like communitarian Maybe it's the idea that there are times when what everybody wants may outweigh What one particular member wants, but perhaps what people want is supposed to somehow emanate Say subsidiarity again so low within the community that it really is the town hall meeting where people get together And maybe not a formal town hall, but an informal town hall to decide how things are going to work among them It can still bind people on any given decision who don't agree with it and in that sense It's hierarchy if you don't like it It's not as clear that you get to leave in the communitarian conception You owe something to the community including to stay even when things don't go your way But you are supposed to be able to participate in a much richer way than just by casting a vote The way some of the systems in the upper left work All right for better or worse. That's my layout within this four quadrant zone set of zones and Now we see maybe that we can start to tell stories With this chart so for instance one of the stories that we hear a lot is the anti globalization story globalization a problem the kind of people that turn up for protests outside the G blank meetings and Part of their complaint as I understand it as a matter of fact they are asserting There are corporations that used to live over here and compete with each other But either they got together in a smoked filled room and cut deals or One or two of them got so big that there's no meaningful competition and as a result We live under corporations that are placed here. That's part of the anti corporatist Global anti globalization story that corporations some of them have managed to move from here to here And then we don't even get to throw the bums out Because they're not only responsive to us as consumers and that's not effective Because too many groups of consumers aren't in the market for their particular products, but still get affected by their so-called externalities another story we could tell might be the race to the bottom which is to say you start with a government over here But because capital and people can flow so easily from one place to another Those trains are really running fast now you end up with the government sliding all the way as just as if it's another corporation envisioned so beautifully by Neil Stevenson in the book snow crash For which as long as you get through the first chapter about the pizza delivery guy great read and it's a book that envisions a Set of franchised Corporations that can run your life you can be part of uncle Enzo's Italian Enclave whether or not you're Italian or There is I think still the United States of America, but it's just competing with other franchises to earn your loyalty and when that happens any hope of regulating in a positive sense can be greatly thinned out Because if you push too hard boom everybody leaves and goes somewhere else So that might be a problem or depending on your pre-elections and commitments as you might call it No, no, no, no, this is the race to the top. This is where usurious taxes get forced down through competition because businesses will flow to the places that offer them the best package I Think it was just recently a town in Kansas to pica Just renamed itself Google for the next month in the hopes of attracting Google's attention as a way of Giving it preference as one of the sites for new broadband deployment What's it? It's the capital of Kansas, but now it's Google is the capital of Kansas Particularly hard to Google whenever you Google Google doesn't it feel weird. You do I really mean to be yes I want to Google Google right now. So Yeah, that's an example of the confusion that's taking place and an example of what a government entity is willing to do to satisfy a particular corporate interest I Don't know what Microsoft has to say about maybe they'll rename themselves Microsoft next month and away. We'll go okay, so let's now start to use the chart to tell a story about information and History and how we remember what we remember and for that we can also have models of how information accumulates and is retained and For probably a really 1.0 model We might turn to this metaphor which I'm going to use in two different ways over the course of the talk So here's the first way right the first real statement about information in our Particular cultural history is a garden of Eden Which you know has a few landmarks in it one prominently of which is the tree of knowledge Guarded by a flashing sword that goes every which way it was at the tree of life There are different guards one of the systems not as effective as it was supposed to be I think there was actually no guard next to the tree of that's how they just talk about like the trust system It's like the library has nothing in and out, but strict sanctions unspecified beforehand Should you steal a book so okay? You have that as a source of knowledge coming from one particular place You might call it Oracular and for that then we'd say that's kind of library 1.0 Oracular god-given knowledge which in the modern context is basically state-defined knowledge There's some entity that's privileged either as a source of information because the state tends to gather Knowledge either about its own workings or because it's got Satellites and a few others do it's got privilege over that or because it is the regulator It's got the monopoly over guns. It has a certain privilege to define what counts as knowledge What's in bounds what's out of bounds through traditional regulation? So we might say then there's some knowledge that gets Produced and accreted in the upper left corner Then we might add to that over in the polyarchical zone the marketplace of idea Of ideas there's more than one represented by books and booksellers by newspapers and yes by libraries Libraries, I think many of them. They may be dot org. They're not dot com But they're not run by the patrons. There might be advisory committees or something That's why I might put them lower But there's still entities that answer to their own boards and such independent of the patrons who use them Particularly if they're affiliated would say with universities So these entities end up as sources and repositories of knowledge independent of governments in many societies And that's another place where traditionally we park the canonical things that we think people ought to know or have access to Without having to learn it casually And speaking of learning it casually you get into this zone. I think Polyarchical and bottom up when you talk about things like cultural memory or oral traditions or you know pamphleteers The kind of stuff that doesn't really have much of a structure But that occasionally you find hanging on your doorknob A question about hellfire and you're not sure exactly where I come from I hope it's not just me to whom this happens I'd like to think it's spam rather than behaviorally directed But there are sources of information that are probably quite rich. Who can say differences in accuracy? But all sorts of things that have to do with what you hear And believe from elders from friends from family that then create Culture and the knowledge component of culture we put in that corner Okay with this array we can then start doing some models of control How do we actually see these sources and repositories of knowledge get shaped by A smaller group than all of us that might want to shape it for one reason or another and so to simplify the diagram You've got governments over here. We're just going to call it people down here And the basic idea is well the governments can make laws about what the people are allowed to see or know or say You know sedition or copyright infringement or you name it. There's all sorts of laws defamation Triggered by fellow people but mediated by the government in most cases there that have to do with what you're allowed to directly Utter or be the source of whether or not you launder it through another platform There's forms of regulation designed to keep you in line for better or for worse and I mean both of those quite plainly and then there's a form of Knowledge shaping to people who really where does knowledge really repose at the end of the day? It's always got to be people right I mean a book is just a book until some eyeball reads it and Decides to comprehend what's inside and there you can see that decisions made here by libraries about what to stock or remove By newspapers about what letters to the editor to ron or what articles to commission And edit and then publish or by booksellers about what to put on their shelves Of course then starts to define the range of reliable knowledge of you know mainstream knowledge that we Come to rely upon to form our views of the world and there might be reasons why these entities for their own purposes May want to shape what they send you or There's of course a move where governments will tell these guys what they are and aren't allowed to do because there's fewer of them than there are people And by doing that governments have a bit of a shortcut And that in turn ends up shaping what people detect through that indirect route And in fact, this is the story we can still tell About the internet and it's a story about the internet that we've heard from Articulated so nicely by people like professor Boyle, professor lessig uh professor ridenberg They saw as we move from an online configuration in 1990 By which you can basically replace the booksellers here with these gated Proprietary services these gated communities that people would get access to but the configuration is still the same if you You know slander or defame somebody on one of these services or through them You can still find yourself having to answer for it as long as you're under the jurisdiction or reach Of one of the governments or these guys find themselves getting ordered by the government to allow something up or take something down And the key move as the 1990s unfolded I think is to see that these things start to get First added to by the internet which is developed the internet itself developed in this quadrant There's no venture capitalist behind the internet as an idea. It wasn't like FedEx like let's just sit down and try this out We'll paint a bunch of planes and put on a bunch of shorts and see what happens It's like there's people experimenting about networking in a much more Bottom-up kind of way, which is why these guys didn't see this coming They thought they were competing with each other and I think it's an important lesson that no matter how much competition You have what you got were different Shades of one color different services all of which were pretty much competing along a very Narrow and strange set of axes and then the internet comes along and unlike each of these and other counterparts I don't name It doesn't have a main menu It doesn't have a ceo It just assumes that the bits are going to get from here to there and you'll figure out whom you might want to communicate with Person or corporation or organization on the other end So in fact what you see as time goes on Is that the internet starts to become so popular and garner so many subscribers That it starts moving leftward in the sense of it becomes hierarchy It's like if you don't want to use the internet Yeah, you can use these but these guys start to fade away and it's as isps are introduced actually a commercial element Let's be clear. That's up here. You have a great conspiracy Between the internet as protocols and the isps as commercial implementers of the protocols that want to make money And this wonderful conspiracy between quadrant 2 and quadrant 3 Ends up kicking the butts of those that are only in quadrant 2 either killing them outright or forcing them to rebrand As basically mere isps may be with some content thrown in So by the time you see things moved forward You basically get to a point where you've got internet and isps is almost the only game in town And you've got applications running on the net with no business development deal needed to put frenster in front of people And then frenster becomes wildly popular who knew and it's a dot com. So it's up here But then it turns out frenster isn't as fun as we thought it would be but other stuff comes along and starts occupying this quadrant and By the time I guess we get to 2008 actually First make one thing clear each of these Is capable of shaping what its subscriber sees and experiences The way that those intermediaries and corporations of a prior generation did too and Sure enough you can still try to reach people over the net who do bad things It gets a little harder because you don't have built-in authentication and identity The way you did when the proprietaries were in town But you know if people screw up just a little bit you can usually catch them at least identify them And then it's a question of do they want to move to sea land or not to avoid the reach of your jurisdiction Sea land very small but real sort of real Anti aircraft platform abandoned off the coast of england a guy who works at a shellfish processing plant Comes over to sea land and like declares himself prince roi I think it's still bottom up because he's the only subject as well But then they get invaded by some german businessmen And like a war breaks out and the businessmen become prisoners of war Inside the pylons of sea land, which remember is an anti aircraft platform And then there's negotiations and they're finally released and anyway, it's worth looking up the wikipedia entry We're paying a visit if you really want direct evidence But the modalities of regulation remain the same and that's why when professor boyle said In the late 90s that we think That if you add to this mix the likes of china over here as a regulator You know, it might seem that there's what he calls a libertarian gotcha that if china's going to adopt the internet and all that comes with it It's going to face the attenuating problem of how to regulate its own people Because of the difficulties of regulating the internet. He says no, not so Because you've still got plenty of intermediaries That you can lean on to do regulation and in fact We're seeing a shakeout as we move to 2010 of an increasing handful of intermediaries that If you weren't allowed to access them You would truly feel your internet experience incomplete There's a lot you would feel you were missing If I took the top Five sites you visit on a regular basis Out of where you were allowed to go and that observation says Hmm, maybe the polyarchy isn't as poly as we think That stuff is starting to slide a little bit over to the left and as it does then the opportunities for top down regulation emanating from this corner Whether you think the source is legitimate or not as legitimate Depending on the embrace of the rule of law by the source of the regulation. It's still happening plenty That's basically the blowback story that we still some of us tell in 2010 even as we know That your access to information your ability to get to stuff your government doesn't want you to see Is greater today than it was yesterday and tomorrow. It's going to be a little greater That's a weird thing to reconcile. We can talk more about that, but there's still this modality That exacts a real influence on things I would probably fit library in here somewhere as well If you are from the library community You have different values. You may be less likely to cave When this orange arrow comes looking for you It was libraries that led the charge objecting to certain provisions of the record Retention and collection provisions of the patriot act Saying that you know what books people took out ought to be something that the government can get with a national security letter Interesting because you know what sites you've visited through your isp Or what you've been doing on google is in a way far more realistically sensitive than the books you take out But it was the libraries that I think led the charge because of their values that weren't having as much to be reconciled With some of the other values in dot com land But even libraries are feeling some of the push here and it may not just be regulation directly from the governments, but regulation effectuated By the governments initiated by third parties. I mentioned defamation As that before but copyright is a good example too copyright Rights exist because governments decree them so and they're enforced because governments enforce them But it's the private parties that hold the copyrights that do it and that's how you can get to digital rights management And libraries still in mesh, right? This is the cleveland public library That has a new program to lend audio books out in a 2010 kind of way So here's one follows account of what you do you find the book you check out the book you get a link you boot up windows You need special proprietary software you install it. It doesn't work You google your problem. You need to update the security system. You open the player you download the certificate And then you have to update the player you install the update you reboot windows You start up the proprietary thing and you get another error message you give up You give up on the library and you go to bit torrent So that's an example of libraries getting caught in the middle as they are facing more and more Refined and contractually based not just copyright based but contractually based restrictions on what they can do And if they don't want to do it that particular monopolist provider of information who has monopolist over that information Not necessarily information like it, but that particular information. It's like take it or leave it That's a real dilemma facing the libraries. Okay, but let's Move aside just from the library angle on things and look at some of the ways in which the rise of the net and of digital technology Is changing both how we perceive risks to the public record and how we insist That it be revised in some way and let me be clear by we I don't mean the bottom two quadrants I mean somebody in the top quadrants So all right, what might that look like, you know, there's all sorts of reasons you can see Some more noble than others, but it's hard to find somebody who never thinks The public record which is to say that which is available to the public should be left utterly Untouched anybody who believes that in q&a. I will work mightily to come up with the hypothetical that says, okay I would get rid of that And uh, here's some of the examples and of course it's probably worth it to break it down by source Is it a government source? Is it the particular author who's asking to have it taken down or some third party that feels harmed by the information and beginning Uh early we saw ways in which the internet was raising dilemmas here There was one particular science paper that just showed how easy it would be to poison the milk supply Milk terrorists would even go after milk the most wholesome substance in the world Well, they haven't yet But this paper says they could and then you end up with those charged with defending us Panicking I mean like why do we need another problem to look out for like? What is this paper really useful for when you balance out the harms come on guys just ditch the paper What does it take to get this information out of public view? And of course you get what's these days called the stricend effect Where the more you try to say x-na on the ilk may Everybody's like what what's this I hear about the milk supply Until finally it even reaches caves where they hear about what's going on Same thing happened Long time ago. This is 1998 over the epa's lunately titled worst case scenarios The epa asked various chemical plants and factories to say Imagine the worst thing that could happen that could hurt as many people as possible Involving your instrumentality, you know bomb goes down your smokestack Tell us what could happen next and they compile this database of worst-case scenarios for the purpose of Informing nearby people just so you know You all could have something really bad happen. That is all And okay public has a right to know but then the government's like no no no We are not putting this up on the internet in a big tar ball. Are you kidding? Like that's just like you know a total menu. Where do you want to go today? For those who have one bomb and need to know which smokestack is most productive to send it down And the compromises attempted with this I think they seem so quaint government reading rooms It's not allowed on the net But you can go into a government reading room after being frisked and showing id and part of the frisking is to take All recording devices away from you Then you may in the privacy of your own mind Read the worst-case scenario And leave and at least if you're dr. Evil you have to commission tons of people to go in and do this And then try to remember what they read And that was the compromise totally well meaning But it has an element of comicalness to it Especially when you start to think about the historical record Do you really want to make those facts if you think they're important enough to be exposed to the public and to build reading rooms, right? I don't I guess rent them from the christian scientists, but still to build the reading rooms But Not so important that really what it will end up with is oral tradition That's how it's going to be conveyed unless you go to the source, which can always be yanked very very puzzling One of the little known sections of the copyright act 503 has his remedies for infringement impounding and disposition of infringing articles That's where like the cow pusher breaks into the warehouse that has all of the knockoff DVDs in it and it's like i am elliott ness. We're seizing everything It's usually not used to break into your house And take away books you happen to have bought that it turns out are or contain infringing material So this has been pretty much dead letter among those who file copyright suits. It's pretty rare. You get to this kind of remedy But you start to see in the digital environment actually opportunity to impound or block Material that you find or a court finds objectionable or outright contraband So here's just one of so many block pages or non block pages people can see if you're in Mayan mar slash berma You're trying to get to free berma.org. It's like thank you for playing you lose Like you can't get there and that's that unless you really are creative and willing also to expose yourself as a possible Dissident by downloading all sorts of complicated software restarting your computer several times updating your security statistics, etc Etc 22 step process kind of thing You even see a sense that if we can't It's one thing to block our own citizens from it But maybe it's material we think no one should be able to see the difference between say orthodoxy and fundamentalism It's not just like I think this is wrong everybody else had better think it's wrong too, or I'll think it's wrong for them And what you see, uh, this is from 2001 The interior minister of germany saying yes, there are neo nazi sites illegal in germany And if they're housed elsewhere And we find it hard to filter or we just think no one should see them we reserve the rights The right to plan an attack a cyber security attack bring the thing down and that way nobody can get to it I love this um very, uh Droll dry wired piece beginning berlin the germans are planning an attack There's a certain slice a generational slice that granted does not read wired That might perk up at that kind of lead star wars kid A guy who filmed himself using a golf ball retriever as if it were a jedi sword Left it on the tape inside the camcorder that he borrowed from his school in canada returned it had no intention ever of it Going on to the internet It goes on to the internet bad news for star wars kid and He's not able to do much another example then of a category of information You really might want to see if you could try to put the genie back in the bottle Most recently just a couple days ago something like that A video of a disabled kid being bullied physically being hurt ends up on youtube And of course it goes down as soon as youtube is told they have some famous statistic now that like 3000 Hours of video comes in every minute something like that. It's a lot in a very short interval We couldn't possibly pre-screen it they say and it only says too bad strict liability If you let this thing through and it automatically ends up a featured video You're going to pay the price criminally for letting that happen if it means changing your business model for youtube Well, you know crimey a river. That's what you're going to have to do And of course google starting in 2006 and google.cn Agreeing to self-censor under threat exactly this process of the quadrants working Microsoft jumping on the bandwagon too. This is their msn spaces blog Platform hosted in china if you wanted the title of blog i love freedom of speech human rights and democracy in chinese You would get the following error message You have to enter a title that cannot contain prohibited language such as profanity Please type a different title another example then of being able to regulate around this curve And even lots of fights that i won't go into in real depth that have to do with government Initiated documents for which the animating idea behind an america an act like foya the freedom of information act Is that it's our property these documents now? Maybe we're not entitled to see them automatically But we ought to have a right to ask for them and the government better come up with a reason not to give them to us Since it's our taxes that paid for them and it's such an important historical record And in fact we saw our ruling just as email was getting really going in 1995 that said that a government plan to deal with all its emails Knowing that there might be important federal records in there Which was anybody writing an email that thinks it's an important government record should print out a copy Lodge it into the filing system and then the email is a mere duplicate that can be deleted at any time It's up to the discretion of the author of the email whether or not to do that The court says that's a joke In part because part of the data generated and not captured by the printout was who read the email and when It's one of these gated community email systems Um, so you see that as kind of a positive thing Of course most recently a report written last year just released to the public through foya over the past few days Talking about issues in the department of justice and various lawyers there does note This is now in the voice of the report We're told that most of you's email records had been deleted. We're not recoverable and that's it You know like sorry can't get there and when you only have it in one place It can be easy to destroy the record before it even has a chance to settle And like this is not a new problem Right for years businesses end up with records that turn out to have a certain Newtonian Momentum to them because you have to affirmatively shred them And what if it's something you need so sometimes they'll just go on shredding escapades They'll hire services like this accurate document destruction ink We bring new depth and dimension to document destruction the third dimension finally I know documents are two-dimensional, but if they're three-dimensional we'll destroy them too But the interesting thing to me are services that actually promise to turn the Newtonian momentum into Aristotelian Motion where unless you keep pushing it forward it stops So an example with that would be a company that used to be called disappearing ink Now it's called omniva. I think it's since folded, but here's the plan The plan is the problem with email It's easy to distribute and nearly impossible to erase. Yes, that's the problem with email So That's bad They have a solution that basically entails every email you send having to be read by a proprietary kind of client just like the cleveland public library has for the audiobook And it gets read and displayed using keys You get the keys from the mothership and the keys allow it to happen. The keys are time based And they're just set to expire after say a year and exactly one year in that key from a year ago gets thrown away And now all the copies out there that require that key to be decrypted no longer accessible So you see the flip then it's not it exists until you destroy it It's it doesn't exist unless you affirmatively find a way to save it And that then starts to get implemented in various places in fact one of the lesser known features of the whole google book system Should it come about If it comes about and succeeds you'd be crazy as a library to have Dead trees books in your basement in the off chance that somebody will come in and actually want that particular book I was remember feeling sad when you used to stamp the backs of books with Successive due dates and you get a book from like 10 years ago and you're the first one And then you're like i'm so glad I took it out so that at least someone could love this teddy bear You know, it's like that kind of thing um so The google book's plan is that there's basically one master copy of the book logically speaking in google's possession And then the library partners display it and access it according to particular privileges and sometimes get to print it out But who cares about that it costs a lot It's you can get to it from anywhere the library or if you're an appropriate subscriber and you pay you just get it at home But this raises a huge problem not an economic one although this slide might indicate that but rather what I call the fort nox problem You put all the stuff in one logical place It means that if there's a book containing infringing material, don't forget that section of the copyright act I can now get an order saying that page of the book containing that stuff Needs to be deleted from the google server google has nothing to say back to that except Okay, at least so long as the order is coming from the united states. They can't move out of mountain view very easily and that affects every book That is distributed through the google platform and if you don't have the book in your house But you're in your house and now you get your books through google just like you're getting your music through la la or pandora these days You're now no longer getting to that section of the book or that book at all Add in defamation and any other reason and you can see how you can start to have holes appear in the historical record In a way that they did not Before and this is a threat. I think That everybody once it's pointed out thinks of as important But nobody thinks of as urgent will deal with it later even as the systems are being architected right now At least one helpful catalyst has been an incident that you couldn't have invented any better than reality produced, right? Which is on the kindle somebody offers through amazon 1984 by george orwell people buy it And then amazon has reason to think there's a copyright issue with it That wasn't cleared by the source that put it through amazon the whole thing about canada versus the us rights And they panic and they send a signal that actually deletes 1984 off of all the kindles You never bought 1984 There was no 1984 But you have your 99 cents back Right that is terrifying And it is the fort nox problem even though It's not literally cloud computing because when you have 1984 for the period of time you have it It technically resides physically on your kindle But because it's not yours To copy or to process and it's amazons to reach and do something with it It's as good as the google book's configuration or in this case as bad Okay, let me put in one more set of thoughts and then turn to solutions and then wrap up There's a chance Of compromise and i want to ask you if you think it's the kind of compromise That like the government reading rooms for the epa worst case scenarios is like the worst of all worlds perhaps Or if you think nah, this is what could make it work. What if the record wasn't binary? It's not like either the record exists or it doesn't But like it exists depending on where you are because here's a video long time ago put on to google Video now merged with youtube for the most part and it's just somebody in iraq Actually a member of the us military films a controlled detonation of an ied They found it before it went off. They blow it up to make it safe If you're in the uk, this is what you see when you push play if you're in the us This is what you see which looks to be a statement of physics But We know physics is universal or at least we'd like to think so What it really means is that the person submitting the video Actually gets to restrict where it will and won't be shown And then what record is available to you turns out to depend greatly on where you're from And jurisdiction is the most common way, but as soon as you get into more credentialing It can be like i only want this video to be shown to republicans not democrats or vice versa And it's this kind of thing that i wonder you see it as possible compromise Because now youtube can say to the government of thailand for a video that insults the tai king and is in fact illegal in thailand Fine, we won't show it to the ties, but we don't have to take it down Is the glass half full or half empty when you start to see that happening more and more and there's no one universal vantage point Except mountain view from which to see the mountain of all the information All right one other Piece of the puzzle worth noting and this is what i call scratching the historical record in the sense of trying to distort it Or not take down facts, but surround it with so many decoys Do you have no idea what's true or what's not anymore? And this is an idea suggested as soon as napster came about What if we flood the napster network with songs that sound at first like the songs people want But then devolve into madonna swearing at you for trying to copy her songs which she did and this idea Nearly a decade later nine years later is now. Yes, let's do the same for ebooks Let's flood the network with ebooks that look like the original books But in fact aren't and so subtle that you might have read the whole thing and enjoyed it Before you realize that harry potter and the walk up to dragon is a chinese knockoff rather than something commissioned by jk Rawling so we see this happening Whenever somebody powerful has a stake in information. Here's rumsfeld complaining about how the terrorists are doing it Right, they are much better at manipulating the press than we are You know, we manipulate the problem. We're not that good at it. We have a lot we can learn from those guys and sure enough you see part of the official doctrine of our armed forces includes Psychological operations, which is to convey selected information and indicators. What a wonderful word indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions motives objective reasoning And ultimately the behavior of foreign governments organizations groups and individuals now that's interesting Of course, it's a little vague on whether the information or indicators have to be true I think the answer in practice is no they do not have to be true That's why we limit the foreign audiences. You can't poison them well at home But hey, feel free to let it fly anywhere other than the us and sure enough We saw over the course of many years in foreign theaters of operation Right groups like the lincoln group Which um, it turns out was paying people to write Under nominally their name, but in fact the lincoln group authored it particular editorials That were favorable to the us government as if this was the view of the people getting paid And they agreed after there was an investigation Um, there's a certain degree of competence professional in information operations And then um, here's what the report said. This is the us government report. Um That they complied with applicable laws in their use of a contractor to conduct psychological operations their use of newspapers as a way to disseminate Information part of our official policy and then you go back and look at those newspapers 10 20 30 years later Whether you're an american trying to learn something about the environment or an iraqi And it doesn't say later like a scratch off lottery ticket. By the way, this was fake It's like no, it's part of the record and that's that now I mentioned we only do it on foreign soil. We don't do it at home and in fairness this happened on foreign soil This was uh in latvia tony snow the president's uh, uh, press secretary giving a press conference And he starts off some things and then he gets asked a question He says we're gonna have to go off the record for that And what does that mean was you look at the transcript on background? What it means is now instead of it saying mr snow It says senior administration official and he's up there with dam Bartlett They've both been talking on the record for a while But now all the answers are senior administration official and the press goes right with it Here's a press question Can I get back to something the senior official on the left said your left or our left? It makes clear that my left and then I'll help you even though i'm on your right and our left I will take on it's like what? What bizarre kabuki theater, but then you look at the newspapers the next day right the old gray lady the paper of record Here's the new york times About this issue that was discussed at the press conference. The president has confidence says tony snow That's in the on the record part next paragraph when he's joined by dam part Then they go off the record to senior administration officials who insisted on anonymity in exchange for talking about a classified memo It makes it sound like they're you know in a parking garage playing deep throat When in fact they're just at the podium being like now you cannot say who we are It's not like they put on sunglasses It's like everybody in the room put on sunglasses and they could stay How they were the only thing that actually disrupted this that made it come to my attention and anyone else's was wonkett Which then ran this thing white house officials magically become anonymous halfway through briefing The white house notices wonkett's entry and later that day does another briefing This time now from jordan. They've just flown the jordan and tony snow says let me introduce to one and all senior administration official To give you a readout and answer your questions. He doesn't leave the podium. It's still tony snow But now there's the record and when you go back and look at the record years later to figure out what was going on This is what you're going to see now. Is this catastrophic? Will it mean you can't put together? You know what happened i mean i'll understand talk about half full half empty Like we don't have a whole lot of records from like Aristotle's time right, but This is just so pervasive That this one example is just a huge set of cracks and a lattice work The otherwise might not notice And it includes spoofing not just from governments, but from anywhere that then get transmitted Here's a photo sequence again in the new york times Uh during the israel lebanon hamas. Sorry israel lebanon hezbollah war Here's a guy wearing a green hat backwards as he's talking about the air strike that the israelis had done in tire And he's pointing and there's rubble and here's another photo as they're all trying to help Here's the guy again with the hat on his back as they're trying to get to the Survivors or those who were killed and now later in the sequence It says uh here at the bottom the mayor of tire bodies were still being buried And here's the guy being taken out of the rubble and then you look There's the hat It's actually the guy pictured earlier in the thing clasping his hat to his side with his arm As somebody now portrayed as someone dead Now is there some explanation that makes us innocent? I don't know. Maybe he fell in the rubble and they're taking him out, but not with that caption And it turns out more and more photos Produced through mainstream sources turn out to be just crudely photoshopped And it takes a right-wing guy who's less right-wing these days than it used to be And little green footballs to say all right. This is just blatant. Come on. How clear do I have to be people to show you? It's just copy and paste we can go back and forth between the real photo and the doctored one This is a Reuters photo So what happens first as this gathers steam you go to the photo as linked on yahoo Oh, sorry. Here's another photo where they found the same thing copy and paste You go to the photo as it's found on yahoo and it's like oh, sorry. It's gone You know there was never a photo you're on the wrong page You know oceana has always been at war with eurasia. Just move along and then It gets worse people start continuing to complain and Reuters finally Gives a response in relevant part. It says okay There's a mistake the rule of thumb in the news businesses You must not do more with photoshop than you used to do in a dark room in the days of 35 millimeter film I for one feel much better about what's going on knowing that And now they say by the way all the photos that leave a rocker edit by a highly experienced and capitalized chief Photographer who works seven days a week during his or to well, that's good. I'm glad he gets no sleep It's now held by a 400 dog over 27 years experience the guy that doctored the photos 10 years experience But the extra 17 years Teaches you the difference All right, I promise to talk about solutions. What do we do? About the various ways in which the rise of digital technology is not necessarily making for a more complete or accurate historical record first Get rid of fort nox's or at least back them up It is information after all if you want to have fort nox fine, but keep a copy of the gold Somewhere else so how might that work? Well again the libraries have stepped forward a little bit There's something called locks lots of copies keeps stuff safe Organized among some of the big libraries of the world It's uh icon is a tortoise because the tortoise lives so long and because it's so boring No one will notice it. That's the kind of thing Although I confess when I was at oxford All the talk for a while of the bailial senior common room was that the bailial tortoise had expired And it was should bailial get a new bailial tortoise Unresolved I can't give you the answer As of right now So locks is a role for libraries to play That you could start to see As an answer to the problem of the google or even kindle situation where you can say to google fine Do exactly what you're doing But these trusted libraries each get their own gold copy Of what you have and they put it under their own lock and key and what they do with it every so often Is they check it against the other libraries to make sure it hasn't changed and they check it against the google master copy And if there's a change ha ha Somebody's had a hand in the cookie jar and we know and then we can start to talk about what happens next But we get the libraries into the mix Rather than just having one place you serve process or a national security letter Now you have to do 15 20 25 And have to see whether each of them is ready to turn that key together And decree that the past shall be changed You could even see inverting the whole thing about disappearing ink So instead of having digital archives of classified and government information that automatically delete themselves after a period of time Why not encrypt them with keys that after that 30 40 or 50 years Go public one day at a time So on this day in 1940 This is the batch of documents representing what our government thought And it's only if they want to go back in and hold something back that it stays back But otherwise you could put those keys in the hands of the libraries or some other escrow And only when the right time comes to the vaults automatically open That seems to me a really workable compromise best of both worlds rather than worst The centralization Represented talk about something started in the bottom right corner the way back machine by a guy named bruster Taking his profits from a particular search facilitator Alexa And he ends up deciding somebody needs to keep a copy of the web And in what must be the largest copyright infringement ever He copies everything Like it doesn't get any bigger than that He copies everything Puts it into a database. I ask for duke.edu. It's like you want duke. We got duke Down to the day as the website changes Now that's wonderful. Like bruster is doing the lord's work here But he's still one address to serve process. He's one person to arrest or die It's a lot to rest on one guy who has now gone over to this zone because it is such a singular utility The reason I think bruster hasn't been sued is because if you call him up with a problem He's very agreeable. You change your robots.txt and say not only stop copying me, but delete all the prior ones He says okay He doesn't delete them. He just restricts public access because he's thinking about 50 years from now and Because it's so damn valuable. Nobody wants to sue it out of existence and it's not like he's trying to make money from it So that kind of has so far given him a buy But this is the kind of thing. I think we could distribute as well lots of copies keeping stuff safe Now let me advance a proposal That is meant to deal with the cyber security problem We haven't had time to go into and won't but that also speaks a little bit to the filtering and zoning problems I talked about before so here's an average internet user at the computer looking to Go somewhere he goes to a website and he asks for a web page and gets it And the page has links in it and the links often go to another site. That's the whole point of the worldwide web That's a beauty of it So he then clicks on a link which means his computer then goes off to this other site And he gets the information and he's happy Unless it turns out this site has been brought down By a denial of service attack by a government order. You name it. This site goes down That's it. He sees the link, but the link does not persist To the internet engineers and web engineers including tim Berners-Lee who built this stuff That's a real problem Uniform resource locators are meant to be uniform not just across place but across time And it's not good that they could just go down So this is this is today. This is the status quo So what could we do that doesn't involve a centralized fort nox solution like the internet archive to prevent this from happening? Well I think there's strength in numbers and we can draw upon the principles of mutual aid Which are what built the internet to begin with as compared to the proprietary counterparts In order to gather what otherwise are pretty powerless entities together into a stronger force I think animals sometimes do it too as demonstrated here by these elk So, um Okay, how would that work here? Consider this proposal Mirror as you link So what it means is this guy asks for a website here. He sees a link The link is to this site As this website is rendering the page of links. It actually goes and fetches The contents of the links so it has not only the web page, but everything right under it This guy then goes off to this site finds he can't get there But because of this he can actually go up to this server and say hey I can't get there where you just sent me would you mind and this server can send him a copy And like bruster being conflict averse you can make this system opt in In the sense that before this thing slurps the contents from here before it went down it checks to see if that's okay Would you like this mutual aid? Which is to say in the event that you go down your information will persist in an exchange Should others go down to whom you link you agree that you will preserve their stuff If you don't want to do it fine. All right, no copyright problem. We'll just let you die. That's fine But otherwise you see exactly this happening this extremely simple configuration implementable Through the two major and essentially only web servers in the world apache and microsoft would transform The nature of information retention and the building of a historical record that now Contains so much information that is born and stays digital Rather than coming out and being archived and catalogued through traditional means The other added bonus is if this doesn't go down through a denial of service attack But it's unreachable because of filtering imposed somewhere in the network by the isp or by a government that using the curve Can affect the isp This system still works flawlessly and this website is not intentionally taking a stick and poking it into china's eye It's just participating in a web robustness scheme that just so happens To deal with this problem as well as that problem Okay, how do I then summarize the solutions that i'm talking about they basically all involve the fourth quadrant You have a problem over here That you can solve maybe without resort to a corporate solution or a government solution each of which comes with its own drawbacks This might be the zone Where you can ask for help and you can even initiate the project like the mirror as you link project over here You just start it off and see what happens the way that bruster did With the internet archive and then it ends up over here if it gathers enough momentum It just becomes the fabric of the web like the web itself did the web started here and moved there the internet started here and moved there And indeed what we've seen is wikipedia Is one such thing that started here and now moves there How do we know it's moved here because of wikipedia has something bad about you in it? The fact that you can choose not to use it is not much solace That fact means wikipedia is over here rather than over here competition isn't exactly helping that problem But i see this fourth quadrant is extremely powerful So i don't know if any of you has read the book the cartoons that shook the world by professor yet clafson Yale university press they are about the jillens post-ins cartoons The cartoons in which a right wing newspaper In europe was asked to uh in denmark to portray muhammad as you see him And some cartoonists responded huge furor erupted after word after a delayed fashion got around in the middle east And cartoons were slipped in that weren't part of the original set and it had nothing to do with it But they were particularly offensive She then wrote a book about the whole incident Talking about the cartoons and in the book had a copy of the cartoons and a ton of other depictions of muhammad dating back centuries To show how he had been portrayed by people from the islamic worlds themselves Yale university press right before the book went to press Excised all the depictions all the cartoons taken out of the book Their reasoning was We consulted a number of people the overwhelming judgment was that violence might occur should we print them That's it. It might be violence. Now. I can't say that was a bad judgment Boy, I don't know right. I don't know what the provost is thinking if it's duke university press talk about a tough call What would you do You would have printed them. All right Have I got a second edition for you? That's called calling the bluff Oh, we have a lot of kevlar sounds dangerously like bring it on. Okay So what what do you see earlier in the letter? But by the way, these were designed to pick a fight Of course there. He's only talking about the gillens postings cartoon Not all of the other depictions that got taken out And then yale university press says in addition the illustrations are wildly widely available elsewhere You can see them right now on wikipedia hint hint or dozens of other sites That's actually a powerful point I don't know that it's reason not to show the cartoons in the book But the fact that you can get to wikipedia and see them Certainly affects the digital record as we know it and why isn't wikipedia afraid? Because wikipedia is an unthinking information machine Located in this quadrant Jimbo is its god king, but honestly if he tried to keep them out. I'm not sure he could and that means that Decentralized threats coming at you that can be very scary Here are met so effectively by decentralized information media rather than The kevlar reinforced media that we expect to uphold certain standards of freedom of information And if you go to the wikipedia page, you will see a thumbnail of the cartoons Not knowing the provost's view on the subject. I covered them up with a white block I just you know you're in someone else's house. You don't want to just you know be the skunk at the garden party If you go to the site, but now that I know we can talk If you go to the site, you see them, but it's only a thumbnail It's very very vague you click and it expands So it's one click away and then on the discussion page They explain that these aren't going anywhere, but here's a plugin you can use if these kinds of depictions offend you And in fact it will block for you only all depictions of mohammed across wikipedia That's the wikipedia is trying to fashion a solution that works and it isn't meant as the university press said to enrage Although maybe in a sense of smirkiness There's a separate article on wikipedia that shows just how many newspapers dared to print the cartoons Not in the original round where surely they were meant to provoke and enrage or at least provoke But in the follow-up round where they became such news the only way to understand the situation was to look at the cartoons And it turns out only a handful of papers in europe dared to do it and within united states none next to none College newspapers sometimes published them and the college editors paid the price some of whom were suspended from their newspapers For printing these cartoons. Was this a good or bad idea? The only way you will know is if you look at these cartoons I think so check out wikipedia and see what you think star wars kid another example When you compare the difference between the quadrants because here it turns out that the thing that bothers star wars kid Most is that people might know his name And the wikipedia entry on star wars kid, which is predictably expansive Does not have his name in it and if you turn to the discussion page It's a counterpart to every article on wikipedia The one for star wars kid has an extensive argument and conversation about whether the article should include his name Part of the argument of which is in a weird symmetry to the point of Yale university press that hey wikipedia has the photos They're saying hey the mainstream press names him. Why can't we? And the wikipedia and say because it's not relevant to the historical record And we're not going to do it And they've actually come to a judgment when you now look it's like any addition of the real name without first establishing Consensus will be removed immediately and could lead to sanctions. That's it. The decision's made talk about wikipedia being in this side Not this side right communitarian Bad apples you can't just put the name in because you want to And the result here I think I wrote a brief op-ed for the times of london that said wikipedia one mainstream media zero Describing this situation The times of london then without consulting me published it with a picture of star wars kid with a caption had his name in it For which I then wrote a letter to the editor of the times that just said wikipedia two mainstream media zero So This is the power of the fourth quadrant Loosely confederated with others And of course you may have noticed this particular Iconography right this is from xkcd. Here's the actual full cartoon. Are you coming to bed? I can't this is important What? Someone is wrong on the internet Now maybe he's wrong or she but To get involved with something like wikipedia Is to become a participant In the process of making sense out of knowledge And understanding that you might be wrong or they might be wrong or you might have a view that you're not going to change But you still have to justify it. Sometimes with people you think are absolute wing nuts and their only name is hotpants 15 But it's this kind of dialogue and fight And I don't mean to say wikipedia is the apotheosis of it, but it's a good example That I think is at the center of what should be An education the idea that schools are running away from this kind of thing Rather than running towards it and looking to basically take it over Puzzles me to no end I told you two views of the garden. I end with the second conception Of the garden, which is a public park Public park is great people gather and then you get the tragedy of the commons Something that again the professor boyle has written about in such inspiring ways And we now can impose the four quadrants on it and try to understand when those tragedies come up Call it litter. How do we deal with it? Well, the upper left quadrant says you have the litter police Fine 300 dollars if you're caught littering and then you have the litter police on like little segues and they arrest people Or they tick at numbers. Okay. It's a way to cut down on litter But boy does it carry costs and not just the cost of hiring the police officer You have this quadrant zone, which is to say Corporate solution you hire somebody to come through the park once a week and clean up all the litter Or you bring prisoners over from the local jail Okay, that's a corporate solution But that carries its own costs and further divorces people in my view from the park that they're enjoying Over here, there's not that much because it just leaves it to individual kind of You know, do I litter or do I not? Well, it turns out a lot of people litter You know, this is why you don't get a whole lot of grip in this zone But it's this quadrant over here to me that has the low hanging fruit to mix metaphors It's this quadrant where we haven't yet tried so many solutions and we know the shape of it then yada yada yada This is where the potential for innovation lies and before we jump here or here to address the really Grave and real problems that can happen here. This is where we should be focusing our attention And what would it mean for the park? It would mean trying to structure the park with Litter bins with nudge-like signs. I don't know in my office place right in the bathroom now There's just a sign that says something kind of Supercilious about the environment, but it turns out like I only use one sheet of towel now because of this stupid sign and in fact Talking about really great lengths to save water. I went to the bathroom here and it's like don't wash your hands I'm like, no, there's been 35 years of people talking. You're saying I don't I know use this special solvent I was like, okay, you know, you're Duke. I'll do it It's that kind of prevailing on people to act humanely That we know won't work for everybody, but if it works for enough It's not just trying to implore people not to litter But occasionally somebody feels enough identity with the park. It's their park It's not someone else's park that they're allowed into or that they paid to enter. It's their park That they pick up the litter themselves and throw it away Even though it is not theirs and they feel better after they've done it than if there had been no litter at all So that's the quadrant to me That contains the most promise for maintaining for arguing about for producing our digital record Thank you very much