Resistance is Futile
How Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Is Likely to Change Big Media
By Robert X. Cringely for PBS.

Maybe you saw the story this week about a paper from Microsoft Research analyzing peer-to-peer file sharing networks with the conclusion that they can't be stopped -- not by the law, not by the movie studios and record companies, not even by mighty Microsoft and its Palladium initiative for trusted computing. Swapping songs and maybe movies is about to reach some critical mass beyond which it simply can't be stopped, or so the kids in Redmond think...

Of course, the recording and publishing executives, who often work for the same parent company, aren't going to go without a fight. We are approaching the end of the first stage of that fight, the stage where they try to have their enemy made illegal. But the folks at Microsoft Research now say quite definitively that legal action probably won't be enough. That's when we enter stage two, which begins with guerrilla tactics in which copyright owners use the very hacking techniques they rail against to hurt the peer-to-peer systems. This too shall pass when bad PR gets to the guerrillas. The trick to guerrilla or terrorist campaigns is to not care what people think, but in the end, Sony (just one example) cares what people think.

That's when the record companies and publishers will appear to actually embrace peer-to-peer and try to make it their own.

This will be a ruse, of course, the next step in the death of a corrupt and abusive cultural monopoly. They'll say they will do it for us. They'll say they are building the best peer-to-peer system of all, only this one will cost money and it won't even work that well. There is plenty of precedent for this behavior in other industries.

My favorite historical example of this phenomenon comes from the oil business. In the 1920s, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had a monopoly on oil production in the Middle East, which they generally protected through the use of diplomatic -- and occasionally military -- force against the local monarchies. Then the Gulf Oil Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, literally sneaked into Kuwait and obtained from the Al-Sabah family (who still run the place) a license to search for oil.

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company did not like Gulf's actions, but they were even more dismayed to learn that Gulf couldn't be told to just go to hell. Andrew Mellon, of the Pittsburgh Mellons, was the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and he wasn't about to let his oil company be pushed around by the British Foreign Office. So Anglo-Persian and the Foreign Office did their best to delay Gulf, which worked for several years. They lied a little, lost a few maps, failed to read a telegram or two, and when Gulf still didn't go away, they turned to acting stupid. As the absolute regional experts on oil exploration, they offered to do Gulf's job, to save the Americans the bother if searching for oil in Kuwait by searching for them.

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company searched for oil in Kuwait for 22 years without finding a single drop.

Remember that Kuwait is smaller than Rhode Island, and not only is it sitting atop more than 60 billion barrels of oil, it has places where oil has been known for more than 3,000 years to seep all the way to the surface. Yet Anglo-Persian was able to fulfill its contract with Gulf and keep two oil rigs continually drilling in Kuwait for 22 years without finding oil. To drill this many dry wells required intense concentration on the part of the British drillers. They had to not only be NOT looking for oil, they had to very actively be NOT LOOKING for oil, which is even harder.

Back to music and text publishing. Expect both industries to offer peer-to-peer systems that won't work very well, and will cost us something instead of nothing. In the long run, though, these systems will probably die, too, at which point, the music and the print folks will have to find another way to make their livings. This will not be because of piracy, but because of the origination of material within the peer-to-peer culture, itself. We're not that far from a time when artists and writers can distribute their own work and make a living doing so, which makes the current literary and music establishments a lot less necessary.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20021128.html

Resistance is Futile
How Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Is Likely to Change Big Media

By Robert X. Cringely

Maybe you saw the story this week about a paper from Microsoft Research analyzing peer-to-peer file sharing networks with the conclusion that they can't be stopped -- not by the law, not by the movie studios and record companies, not even by mighty Microsoft and its Palladium initiative for trusted computing. Swapping songs and maybe movies is about to reach some critical mass beyond which it simply can't be stopped, or so the kids in Redmond think. The story is interesting, that it came from Microsoft is even more interesting, though the authors carefully disassociated themselves from their employer in the paper.

But this all pales in comparison to the implications of their conclusions. These are smart folks, taking a stand that is surely not popular with their company, so I think there is a pretty strong reason to believe they are correct. If so, then what does it mean? Are record companies and movie studios doomed? Am I doomed, as a guy whose work is regularly ripped-off, too? And will the print publishers go away, leaving us with only weblogs to keep us warm? I don't think so, but the world is likely to change some as a result.

Maybe it would help to deconstruct what publishers and broadcasters and movie moguls do that makes them significant contributors to our culture. They take financial risks by backing talented people in the hope of making money. Publishers and broadcasters and film makers and record executives have taken the time and spent the money to build both a commercial infrastructure and a brand identity. The most extreme version of such financial risk-taking is spending tens of millions -- sometimes hundreds of millions -- to make a movie.

Forgetting for the moment that some of these media people are greedy pond dwellers, let's ask the important question -- how are peer-to-peer file sharing systems going to replace $100 million movies? Peer-to-peer systems can share such movies, but since there is no real peer-to-peer business model that can generate enough zeroes, such systems are unlikely to finance any epic films.

Well, right there we have a problem. People LIKE epic films, but even with the best editing and animation software, there is no way some kid with a hopped-up Mac or PC is going to make "Terminator 4." One can only guess, then, that people will continue to go to movies and eat popcorn and watch on the big screen despite how many copies of Divx there are in the world.

Peer-to-peer movie piracy is practical only in the manner that any organized crime is practical: it works only as long as the host remains strong enough to support the parasite. Tony Soprano can't run New Jersey because then everyone would be a crook and there would be nobody to steal from except other crooks. No more innocent victims. Same with movie piracy, which needs a strong movie industry from which to steal. If the industry is weakened too much by piracy, the pirates begin to hurt themselves by drying-up their source of material. It is very doubtful that this will happen simply because the pirates, too, want to go to movies.

But the same is not true for records. This is simply because technology has reached the point where amateurs can make as good a recording as the professionals. The next Christina Aguilera CD could be as easily recorded at her house (or mine) as at some big recording complex out on Abbey Road.

And text, well, text is even worse because it is easiest of all to steal. My columns are published in newspapers and websites and handed-in as college essays all over the world and there is almost nothing I can do about it because tracking down the perps costs me more than does their crime. From the perspective of the established publishers, there is also the horrible possibility that people might actually come to prefer material they find for free on the Internet -- not just pirated material but even original material. This column, after all, is free, and my Mother claims to find some value in it from time to time.

So movies, while they may be hurt by peer-to-peer, won't be killed by it. But print publishing and music recording could be seriously hurt. Maybe this is good, maybe it is bad, but probably, it is inevitable.

Of course, the recording and publishing executives, who often work for the same parent company, aren't going to go without a fight. We are approaching the end of the first stage of that fight, the stage where they try to have their enemy made illegal. But the folks at Microsoft Research now say quite definitively that legal action probably won't be enough. That's when we enter stage two, which begins with guerrilla tactics in which copyright owners use the very hacking techniques they rail against to hurt the peer-to-peer systems. This too shall pass when bad PR gets to the guerrillas. The trick to guerrilla or terrorist campaigns is to not care what people think, but in the end, Sony (just one example) cares what people think.

That's when the record companies and publishers will appear to actually embrace peer-to-peer and try to make it their own.

This will be a ruse, of course, the next step in the death of a corrupt and abusive cultural monopoly. They'll say they will do it for us. They'll say they are building the best peer-to-peer system of all, only this one will cost money and it won't even work that well. There is plenty of precedent for this behavior in other industries.

My favorite historical example of this phenomenon comes from the oil business. In the 1920s, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had a monopoly on oil production in the Middle East, which they generally protected through the use of diplomatic -- and occasionally military -- force against the local monarchies. Then the Gulf Oil Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, literally sneaked into Kuwait and obtained from the Al-Sabah family (who still run the place) a license to search for oil.

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company did not like Gulf's actions, but they were even more dismayed to learn that Gulf couldn't be told to just go to hell. Andrew Mellon, of the Pittsburgh Mellons, was the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and he wasn't about to let his oil company be pushed around by the British Foreign Office. So Anglo-Persian and the Foreign Office did their best to delay Gulf, which worked for several years. They lied a little, lost a few maps, failed to read a telegram or two, and when Gulf still didn't go away, they turned to acting stupid. As the absolute regional experts on oil exploration, they offered to do Gulf's job, to save the Americans the bother if searching for oil in Kuwait by searching for them.

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company searched for oil in Kuwait for 22 years without finding a single drop.

Remember that Kuwait is smaller than Rhode Island, and not only is it sitting atop more than 60 billion barrels of oil, it has places where oil has been known for more than 3,000 years to seep all the way to the surface. Yet Anglo-Persian was able to fulfill its contract with Gulf and keep two oil rigs continually drilling in Kuwait for 22 years without finding oil. To drill this many dry wells required intense concentration on the part of the British drillers. They had to not only be NOT looking for oil, they had to very actively be NOT LOOKING for oil, which is even harder.

Back to music and text publishing. Expect both industries to offer peer-to-peer systems that won't work very well, and will cost us something instead of nothing. In the long run, though, these systems will probably die, too, at which point, the music and the print folks will have to find another way to make their livings. This will not be because of piracy, but because of the origination of material within the peer-to-peer culture, itself. We're not that far from a time when artists and writers can distribute their own work and make a living doing so, which makes the current literary and music establishments a lot less necessary.

But they won't die altogether because of the record company back lists of music, because peer-to-peer doesn't do a very good job of self-organizing, and indicating what is important, and because people won't take tablet computers with them to the bathroom.

So we will have little movies and little records and little magazines on the Internet because the Internet is made up of so many different interest groups. For the larger population, there will still be Brittany Spears and Stephen King singing and writing for big labels. And that will only start to change when the first really big artists jumps from old media to new, trading 15 percent of $30 times 100,000 copies for 100 percent of $0.50 times 1 million copies.

The Grateful Dead showed that it is possible to make a great living even in competition with some of their audience. This is a lesson all old media must learn in time.

Either that, or die.

Rezrobics is a video providing health and exercise information that comes with a second video designed to make light of the first.

Copies of the videos are being distributed free of charge throughout the Indian communities of North America. While Navajo Health Promotions distributes on and around The Navajo Nation via clinics, schools and video stores, DreamCatchers oversees distribution to the rest of "Indian Country". There is no FBI warning on the programs. Instead, the opening message states, "Please make copies and give them to your friends and relatives".

Senator Robert Byrd and Senator Debbie Stabenow -- Delivered on the Floor of the US Senate
re: THE HOMELAND SECURITY ACT OF 2002
[Excerpted from Congressional Record of 11/14/02]

There are a few things that I know are in it by virtue of the fact that I have had 48 hours, sleeping time included, in which to study this monstrosity, 484 pages. If there ever were a monstrosity, this is it. I hold it in my hand, a monstrosity. I don't know what is in it. I know a few things that are in it, and a few things that I know are in it that I don't think the American people would approve of if they knew what was in there...

And this is one of the most far-reaching pieces of legislation I have seen in my 50 years. I will have been in Congress 50 years come January 3... Never have I seen such a monstrous piece of legislation sent to this body. And we are being asked to vote on that 484 pages tomorrow. Our poor staffs were up most of the night studying it. They know some of the things that are in there, but they don't know all of them. It is a sham and it is a shame.

We are all complicit in going along with it. I read in the paper that nobody will have the courage to vote against it. Well, ROBERT BYRD is going to vote against it because I don't know what I am voting for. That is one thing. And No. 2, it has not had the scrutiny that we tell our young people, that we tell these sweet pages here, boys and girls who come up here, we tell them our laws should have...

This is a hoax. This is a hoax. To tell the American people they are going to be safer when we pass this is to hoax. We ought to tell the people the truth. They are not going to be any safer with that. That is not the truth. I was one of the first in the Senate to say we need a new Department of Homeland Security. I meant that. But I didn't mean this particular hoax that this administration is trying to pander off to the American people, telling them this is homeland security. That is not homeland security.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/11.20A.byrd.home.htm

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t r u t h o u t | Address
Senator Robert Byrd and Senator Debbie Stabenow
Delivered on the Floor of the US Senate

THE HOMELAND SECURITY ACT OF 2002
[Excerpted from Congressional Record of 11/14/02]

Thursday, 14 November 14, 2002

Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan:

"...as Senator Byrd has said so many times on the floor, we need to look at details. We need to know what is in this bill. It is a different bill that came back. I was deeply disturbed as I looked through it. I want to support homeland security. I support developing a department. We all share that. This is not a partisan issue. We want to have maximum safety, security and ability, communicate it effectively and efficiently, and create the kind of confidence people expect us to create in terms of the ability to respond and ideally prevent attacks. But my fear is that under the name of homeland security we are saying special interest provisions are put in this bill which are outrageous and should not have the light of day. I think it is our responsibility to shine the light of day on those provisions."

Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia:

"I remember years ago, when I was in the House of Representatives, sending out a little booklet to the people in my then-congressional district of how our laws are made ...[describes the process of hearings, committees, debate, reports, etc. etc.]... we all remember how those laws are made according to the script as prepared there in those handsome little booklets that we send out. That is how the American people expect this Congress to operate. That is the way we are supposed to operate.

But the way this bill was brought in here, less than 48 hours ago, a brand-new bill. It had not been before any committee. It had undergone no hearings, not this bill. It is a bill on our desks that has 484 pages. There are 484 pages in this bill.

It has not been before any committee. There have been no hearings on this bill. There have been no witnesses who were asked to appear to testify on behalf of the bill or in opposition to it. It did not undergo any such scrutiny.

It was just placed on the Senate Calendar. It was offered as an amendment here. And so here it is before the Senate now. There it is. That is not the way in which our children are taught how we make our laws--not at all.

The American people expect us to provide our best judgment and our best insight into such monumental decisions. This is a far, far cry from being our best. This is not our best. As a matter of fact, it is a mere shadow of our best. Yet we are being asked, as the elected representatives of the American people, those of us who are sent here by our respective States are being asked on tomorrow to invoke closure on these 484 pages.

If I had to go before the bar of judgment tomorrow and were asked by the eternal God what is in this bill, I could not answer God. If I were asked by the people of West Virginia, Senator Byrd, what is in that bill, I could not answer. I could not tell the people of West Virginia what is in this bill.

There are a few things that I know are in it by virtue of the fact that I have had 48 hours, sleeping time included, in which to study this monstrosity, 484 pages. If there ever were a monstrosity, this is it. I hold it in my hand, a monstrosity. I don't know what is in it. I know a few things that are in it, and a few things that I know are in it that I don't think the American people would approve of if they knew what was in there.

Even Senator Lieberman, who is chairman of the committee which has jurisdiction over this subject matter, even he saw new provisions in this legislation as he looked through it yesterday and today. As his staff looked through it, they saw provisions they had not seen before, that they had not discussed before, that had not been before their committee before.

Yet we are being asked on tomorrow to invoke cloture on that which means we are not going to debate in the normal course of things. We are going to have 30 hours of debate. That is it, 30 hours. That is all, 30 hours; 100 Senators, 30 hours of debate.

And this is one of the most far-reaching pieces of legislation I have seen in my 50 years. I will have been in Congress 50 years come January 3... Never have I seen such a monstrous piece of legislation sent to this body. And we are being asked to vote on that 484 pages tomorrow. Our poor staffs were up most of the night studying it. They know some of the things that are in there, but they don't know all of them. It is a sham and it is a shame.

We are all complicit in going along with it. I read in the paper that nobody will have the courage to vote against it. Well, ROBERT BYRD is going to vote against it because I don't know what I am voting for. That is one thing. And No. 2, it has not had the scrutiny that we tell our young people, that we tell these sweet pages here, boys and girls who come up here, we tell them our laws should have.

Listen, my friends: I am an old meatcutter. I used to make sausage. Let me tell you, I never made sausage like this thing was made. You don't know what is in it. At least I knew what was in the sausage. I don't know what is in this bill. I am not going to vote for it when I don't know what is in it. I trust that people tomorrow will turn thumbs down on that motion to invoke cloture. It is our duty.

We ought to demand that this piece of legislation stay around here a while so we can study it, so our staffs can study it, so we know what is in it, so we can have an opportunity to amend it where it needs amending.

Several Senators have indicated, Senator Lieberman among them, that there are areas in here that ought to be amended. What the people of the United States really care about is their security. That is what we are talking about. We don't know when another tragic event is going to be visited upon this country. It can be this evening, it can be tomorrow, or whatever. But this legislation is not going to be worth a continental dime if it happens tonight, tomorrow, a month from tomorrow; it is not going to be worth a dime. There are people out there working now to secure this country and the people. They are the same people who are already on the payroll. They are doing their duty right now to secure this country.

This is a hoax. This is a hoax. To tell the American people they are going to be safer when we pass this is to hoax. We ought to tell the people the truth. They are not going to be any safer with that. That is not the truth. I was one of the first in the Senate to say we need a new Department of Homeland Security. I meant that. But I didn't mean this particular hoax that this administration is trying to pander off to the American people, telling them this is homeland security. That is not homeland security. Mr. President, the Attorney General and Director of Homeland Security have told Americans repeatedly there is an imminent risk of another terrorist attack. Just within the past day, or few hours, the FBI has put hospitals in the Washington area, Houston, San Francisco, and Chicago on notice of a possible terrorist threat.

This bill does nothing--not a thing--to make our citizens more secure today or tomorrow. This bill does not even go into effect for up to 12 months. It will be 12 months before this goes into effect. The bill just moves around on an organizational chart. That is what it does--moves around on an organizational chart.

The Senate Appropriations Committee, on which Senator Stevens and I sit, along with 27 other Senators, including the distinguished Senator who presides over the Chamber at this moment, the Senator from Rhode Island, Mr. Reed, tried to provide funds to programs to hire more FBI agents, to hire more border patrol agents, to equip and train our first responders, to improve security at our nuclear powerplants, to improve bomb detection at our airports. That committee of 29 Senators--15 Democrats and 14 Republicans--voted to provide the funds for these homeland security needs. Those funds have been in bills that have been out there for 4 months.

But the President said no--no, he would not sign it. President Bush is the man I am talking about. He would not sign that as an emergency. These moneys have been reported by a unanimous Appropriations Committee. But this administration said no. So that is what happened. These are actions that would make America more secure today. Did the President help us to approve these funds? No. Instead, the President forced us--forced us--to reduce homeland security funding by $8.9 billion, and he delayed another $5 billion. This is shameful; this is cynical; this is being irresponsible. It is unfair to the American people. And then to tell them Congress ought to pass that homeland security bill--that is passing the buck.

Mr. President, I call attention to a column in the New York Times. This is entitled ``You Are A Suspect.'' It is by William Safire. I will read it:

"If the homeland security act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:" Listen, Senators. This is what William Safire is saying in the New York Times of November 14, 2002. That is today. This is what the New York Times is saying to you, to me, to us: "If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you: Every purchase you make"-- Hear me now-- "Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend--all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as ``a virtual, centralized grand database.'' ... "Political awareness can overcome "Total Information Awareness," the combined force of commercial and government snooping. In a similar overreach, Attorney General Ashcroft tried his Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), but public outrage at the use of gossips and postal workers as snoops caused the House to shoot it down. The Senate should now do the same to this other exploitation of fear." [ see complete Safire article at http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html -- Byrd reads the entire article to the Senate]

If the American people, if the American public is to believe what they read in this week's newspapers, the Congress stands ready to pass legislation to create a new Department of Homeland Security. Not with my vote. Passage of such legislation would be the answer to the universal battle cry that this administration adopted shortly after the September 11 attacks: Reorganize the Federal Government.

How is it that the Bush administration's No. 1 priority has evolved into a plan to create a giant, huge bureaucracy? How is it that the Congress bought into the belief that to take a plethora of Federal agencies and departments and shuffle them around would make us safer from future terrorist attacks?..."

Wow! I got a mention in the New York Times. How totally cool.

Telling All Online: It's a Man's World (Isn't It?)
By Lisa Guernsey, for the NY Times.

But women's blogs about current events are out there too. Leslie Veen writes about politics in California, when she is not musing on baseball. Lisa Reins makes regular postings promoting online freedoms and ways to avoid war with Iraq. Lynne Kiesling writes about economics and energy deregulation. (She also links to a knitting blog.)

Ms. Sessum and Elaine Frankonis, her co-pilot at Blog Sisters, say they are already witnessing some slippage between the stereotypes as both men and women get comfortable in the new medium.

"I think that what's happening is that we're meeting in the middle," Ms. Frankonis said. "The men started by writing about technology and opinion and the women were writing personal diaries. Now the men are putting more of their hearts into their Weblogs and women are talking about the issues."

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/28/technology/circuits/28blog.html

The New York Times The New York Times Technology November 28, 2002

Telling All Online: It's a Man's World (Isn't It?)
By LISA GUERNSEY

A FEW months ago I joined legions of other online narcissists and decided to start a Weblog, one of those personal Web sites where people spout their thoughts for the world to read. Within a few days I was browsing through other Weblogs, commonly called blogs, for inspiration. And within a week, it hit me: the sites I was visiting were all run by men.
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The bloggers I knew of, to name a few, were Andrew Sullivan, a writer; Scott Rosenberg, the managing editor of Salon.com; Glenn Reynolds, the force behind Instapundit.com; and Jim Romenesko, a monitor of the media. The sites they linked to were also mostly written by men. Articles in mainstream publications, like one that ran in Newsweek last summer, dropped some of the same names, all male. Garry Trudeau even tackled blogging recently in "Doonesbury," and the blogger he created turned out to be a man.

Where were the women?

Over the last few years blogging has become an international pastime, embraced by Web aficionados around the world. Its popularity was spurred by new software that enabled anyone to build a site and post commentary without knowing a lick of Web code. It is impossible to count exactly how many blogs have sprung up (let alone how many have an audience), but Rebecca Blood, the author of "The Weblog Handbook," reports that the number has swelled from a few dozen in early 1999 to hundreds of thousands today.

The allure of blogging lies in the thrill of circumventing the establishment, of being able to publish worldwide without having to be an op-ed columnist or a famous writer. Blogs can be nurtured at all hours of the day and night - an advantage for anyone juggling work and children. Virginia Postrel, one of the few women who is commonly listed among well-known bloggers, points out that blogging is actually quite friendly to women.

"You don't have to be part of quite literally an old boys network," said Ms. Postrel, a former editor of Reason magazine (and a contributor of monthly Economic Scene columns for this newspaper's business section).

Her point made the seeming dearth of women all the more a mystery. Was there really a gender gap in Blogville? The answer, I soon learned, was complicated. And it was wrapped up in knotty issues like the power of celebrity, the male tilt of the computer industry, the grip of sexual stereotypes (women keeping diaries, men droning on about politics) and the preciousness of time - specifically, the fact that women with children and jobs have almost none to spare.

I, for one, was probably feeling the disparity with hypersensitivity. I became a mother last spring and started my blog to keep up my writing. (The fog of sleep deprivation made me crazy enough to think I would have the free time.) After spending hours dealing with technical glitches and typing with one hand while trying to soothe a colicky baby, I started to assume that women who blog, particularly mothers who blog, were a rarity.

But women are, in fact, blogging in big numbers. Mr. Rosenberg, who keeps an eye out for new bloggers and links to them from his Salon.com blog, estimates that the ratio of women to men is something like 40-60, or perhaps 50-50. Once I dug around, I found plenty of company. Blogs typically publish links, known as blogrolls, to kindred blogs. So whenever I found a woman's blog, I would find links to another handful, which led to another dozen, and so on.

There are even sites designed to showcase female bloggers, like the Blogs by Women home page and Blog Sisters, which has 100 registered female bloggers.

Why didn't I find these sites to start with? Web experts assign some blame to the mainstream media, which has focused its attention on a predominantly male group of bloggers who write about terrorism and Iraq and have come to be known as the warbloggers. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, for example, is the one of the most frequently cited warbloggers, and his blogroll is heavily weighted toward men.

Mr. Rosenberg, whose Salon.com site has become a gateway to blogging for many newcomers, keeps a list titled "Some blogs I read." All but one (Virginia Postrel's) are written by men. Many are opinion writers with journalistic backgrounds, a group that is understandably of interest to Mr. Rosenberg, given that he is a journalist himself. (Media types often write about other media types, skewing the sample.) Others are gurus of technology, like Marc Canter, the founder of the software company Macromedia, who is often called a "founding father of multimedia." Mr. Rosenberg conceded that the list needs updating, and he has linked to several new women's sites in the last month.

Ms. Postrel said that the imbalance was probably a holdover from the world of print, where men continue to dominate the opinion pages.

Continued
1 | 2 | Next>>

The New York Times The New York Times Technology November 28, 2002

Telling All Online: It's a Man's World (Isn't It?)

(Page 2 of 2)

And that is where things get touchy. People who track blogs hate to make generalizations, but many acknowledged that female bloggers often have more of an inward focus, keeping personal diaries about their daily lives.

If that is the case, the Venus-Mars divide has made its way into Blogville. Women want to talk about their personal lives. Men want to talk about anything but. So far the people who have received the most publicity (often courtesy of male journalists) appear to be the latter.
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Why men are more likely than women to write about news and politics is a question that existed long before the dawn of the Web, and the answer is rolled up in cultural trends that span centuries. Men's continued dominance in the software industry, where they are apt to fiddle with a new computer art form, stacks the roster too.

But some women see the tables turning.

It was the sense of male blog domination that led to the birth of Blog Sisters, a site where female bloggers come together to support one another, talk about gender issues and spread the word about their existence.

Jeneane Sessum, who has been blogging for a year and who started a blog called Baby Blogger for her daughter, Jenna (now age 5), awoke in the middle of the night with the idea for Blog Sisters last February. "At that time, I wasn't reading as many women's blogs as I was men's and I wondered, 'Where are all the women like me?' " she said.

Julie Powell, who runs a blog called the Julie/Julia Project, had a similar question. "When I started, it did seem more like a guy thing," she said. Nevertheless, she kept writing. Her site cropped up on Salon.com's list of most-visited blogs this fall. (In it she regales readers with what she calls a "deranged assignment" to make every recipe in Julia Child's classic "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." )

Some sites where women are raising their voices do reflect traditional roles. (Blogs about knitting are popping up everywhere.)

But women's blogs about current events are out there too. Leslie Veen writes about politics in California, when she is not musing on baseball. Lisa Reins makes regular postings promoting online freedoms and ways to avoid war with Iraq. Lynne Kiesling writes about economics and energy deregulation. (She also links to a knitting blog.)

Ms. Sessum and Elaine Frankonis, her co-pilot at Blog Sisters, say they are already witnessing some slippage between the stereotypes as both men and women get comfortable in the new medium.

"I think that what's happening is that we're meeting in the middle," Ms. Frankonis said. "The men started by writing about technology and opinion and the women were writing personal diaries. Now the men are putting more of their hearts into their Weblogs and women are talking about the issues."

Ms. Sessum concurred. "Men are getting riskier too with what they are telling," she said. "There are many who dare to tell what is going on in their family and their hearts and their everyday lives."

Ms. Postrel said she had noticed some of that heart-baring too. "I'm seeing men writing about their kids," she said. "It is something that happens in blogs but does not happen very much in regular journalism."

As for me, I'm still in awe of anyone - man or woman - who has time to blog and be a parent at the same time.

I think of the hours that I have so far spent setting up my blog, learning the software, combing the Web for links, fiddling with graphics. Each minute I have been vaguely conscious of the things I should have been doing instead. I should have been reading Dr. Spock, gazing at my snoozing child, vacuuming the dog hair off the rugs, finding a child-care provider, doing research for work, paying bills, talking to my mother-in-law, writing thank-you notes, washing dishes, making dinner.

Heck, I should have been sleeping.

But the chance to bend sexual stereotypes is all too tempting. And I can't pass up what is starting to feel like a parallel form of motherhood: the experience of raising a Web site that I'll soon feel guilty about neglecting.

<

I play a small role and sing the theme song for Monsturd. The film will soon be released on DVD, but it's already starting to get some rave reviews from the video release:
Foywonder Squeezes Out A MONSTURD Review!!

MONSTURD is without question the greatest movie that Troma never made! Fortunately, filmmakers Dan West and Mike Popko, who also play the dimwitted deputies, didn’t make some of the same mistakes that Troma tends to. While I have enjoyed a few of Troma’s films, my favorite being MONSTER IN THE CLOSET which this film most closely resembles, many of them try so hard to be over-the-top from beginning to end that they devolve into being very abrasive movies loaded with obnoxious characters who feel compelled to constantly yell their lines. MONSTURD, on the other hand, is bold enough to play it with a straight face, much like an old A.I.P. monster movie, so that when the goofy stuff happens, it’s a lot funnier than it would have been if everything were done in an in-your-face manner. The acting is very relaxed and natural and nobody makes the mistake of trying to force they’re performance. While no one in the cast is going to win an Oscar anytime soon, nobody is particularly bad. It’s quite obvious that everyone on the screen is having a ball.

Here is the full text of the review in case the link goes bad:

http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=13915

Tuesday, November 26, 2002
Foywonder Squeezes Out A MONSTURD Review!!
Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Because sometimes you just feel like laughing...
MAN IN SHIT SUIT! MAN IN SHIT SUIT! MAN IN SHIT SUIT!

Don't know if you got this email from me with this review before because of a glitch with my mail server, so if not, then here it is and, if so, my apologies. If you love cult movies, then this one is certainly noteworthy.
MAN IN SHIT SUIT! MAN IN SHIT SUIT! MAN IN SHIT SUIT!

Most AICN reviewers give you their opinion of some of the most anticipated films of the day that they’ve been fortunate, or unfortunate in many cases, to get a sneak peak at. Me, I’m here to tell you about a new movie featuring a monster comprised entirely of human excrement and while this movie isn’t on the same cinematic plateau as MEGIDDO, it is still worthy of being brought to the attention of lovers of cult films. And yet, I feel no shame.

Now I suppose a direct-to-video movie about a 7-foot feces monster isn’t normally the kind of film that gets reviewed on Ain’t It Cool News, but then as I look over at the current Coaxial News section and see a glowing review of a random episode of SHE SPIES, I become fairly confident this review isn’t going to lower the bar any further.

The film I am here to tell you about is named MONSTURD and while it is the shittiest monster movie of all time, and I actually mean that in the literal sense, it is anything but crappy! Believe me, I’ve sat through both of those JACK FROST killer snowman movies, 4 out of 5 LEPRECHAUN films, those wretched RUMPELSTILSKIN/UNCLE SAM/PINNOCHIO horror films, the first two WISHMASTER movies, BENEATH LOCH NESS, the entire WARLOCK franchise, 3 out of 7 CHILDREN OF THE CORN films, FILIPINO BATMAN & ROBIN, every movie Hulk Hogan has ever made, and countless movies about killer snakes, bats, crocodiles, octopi, etc. that have been unleashed in video stores as of late all in seemingly futile quest to find an entertaining piece of celluloid schlock. So are the perils of a bad movie lover. Sometimes you just have to roll the dice and hope for a winner. After enduring all of the above, I can honestly say that even I’m surprised that MONSTURD would prove to be a breath of fresh air.

So what exactly is the plot of MONSTURD, you ask? Serial killer Jack Schmitt, infamous for killing people on the toilet and leaving messages scrawled on the wall that usually say something along the lines of “DON’T GET CAUGHT WITH YOUR PANTS DOWN,” escapes from prison and hides out in the sewers below Butte County’s peaceful suburbia. Meanwhile, an evil scientist who works for a research conglomerate called Dutech has developed a mutant strain of flesh-eating bacteria. Why? Well, we’re never really told. Hey, he’s evil! Because he is insane as well as evil, he decides to experiment by dumping a barrel of the stuff down into the sewers. When police confront the homicidal maniac, he ends up falling into a pool of the mad scientist’s chemical concoction. I assume you’ve seen SWAMP THING so you should know what happens next. Just substitute plant life with fecal matter and add the flesh-eating bacteria that can dissolve human flesh on contact, which is how the man-turd feeds. Everyone thinks that Schmitt is dead, but in fact he has transformed into a half-man/half-feces monster that dwells in the sewers and pops out of toilets to devour hapless victims. While the mad scientist anoints himself master and protector of his monstrous creation, the local sheriff, two bumbling deputies, and the female FBI agent who originally captured Schmitt join forces to warn the disbelieving populace and destroy the killer crap creature before the town’s Annual Chili Cook-Off. Did I mention that they attempt to accomplish this while wearing diaper armor and carrying super soakers loaded with Pepto-Bismol?

MONSTURD is without question the greatest movie that Troma never made! Fortunately, filmmakers Dan West and Mike Popko, who also play the dimwitted deputies, didn’t make some of the same mistakes that Troma tends to. While I have enjoyed a few of Troma’s films, my favorite being MONSTER IN THE CLOSET which this film most closely resembles, many of them try so hard to be over-the-top from beginning to end that they devolve into being very abrasive movies loaded with obnoxious characters who feel compelled to constantly yell their lines. MONSTURD, on the other hand, is bold enough to play it with a straight face, much like an old A.I.P. monster movie, so that when the goofy stuff happens, it’s a lot funnier than it would have been if everything were done in an in-your-face manner. The acting is very relaxed and natural and nobody makes the mistake of trying to force they’re performance. While no one in the cast is going to win an Oscar anytime soon, nobody is particularly bad. It’s quite obvious that everyone on the screen is having a ball.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of gross-out humor, but surprisingly, MONSTURD is not loaded with wall-to-wall gross-out gags or an endless stream of poop jokes. While it definitely has more than it’s fair share of those, the grossest being the world’s longest vomiting scene, most of the humor is a bit more subtle like when a potential victim’s young daughter casually walks into the living room and tells her apathetic dad about the giant doodoo that came out of the toilet and started saying bad words or when someone tries to lure the mutated Mr. Hankey out of hiding by leaving a trail of cream corn on the ground while making fart noises as if it’s some sort of bird call or when the deputies drive around the town with a bullhorn advising citizens not to use their toilets and then listing other means by which they should relieve themselves. In addition, a lot of humor comes from the way in which this insanity plays out in traditional 50’s monster movie fashion. While this does create a lull in the loonacy every now and then as certain clichéd scenes have to play out, in the end it works to the film’s overall benefit. One can only imagine what relentless, stomach churning crap the Wayans Brothers would have bombarded the audience with if they were responsible for this film.

As for the title monster itself, I’m happy to say that it’s a good, old fashioned, rubber suit creation. Or as Harry would put it – MAN IN SHIT SUIT! It’s a disgusting looking pile of crap with arms and legs and a pointy head with bowel movements detailed all over it. While the crap creature’s costume is hardly a creation on the level of Stan Winston or Rick Baker, it’s still an extremely professional looking costume that would make Paul Blaisdell proud. Maybe it’s just me, but I thought it looked sorta like what one of the Rock Men costumes from 1959’s MISSILE TO THE MOON would look like after somebody took a flamethrower to it. Oh, just as the mummy in the recent MUMMY films was terrified of cats, the man-turd is deathly afraid of flies or as it bemoans in a frightened Frankenstein-like voice, “Flies hurt the shit man! Flies eat the shit man!”

As strange as this might sound, MONSTURD is actually a very nice looking movie. It’s hard to believe this movie was made for only $3,000 because it has really nice production values for such a low budget feature. Visually, it’s far more impressive than most other shot on video films like THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. Hell, this $3,000 shot-on-video movie looks better than most Troma and Full Moon productions that have much larger budgets.

Now with all that said, the movie does have its fair share of shortcomings. For starters, the film has bookends featuring a daughter telling her father the story of the movie and the film cuts back to them a few times along the way as she acts as the movie’s narrator. I really don’t think they were necessary, but at least the big punchline she delivers at the film’s end was pretty funny. Then, there’s the subplot about widower sheriff and the hint of romance between him and the female FBI agent. This staple of lazy Hollywood screenwriting manages to fall flat even when the spoof film attempts to poke fun at the cliché. My biggest disappointment is that the build up to the final showdown with the bowel movement behemoth is about 10 times longer than the actual battle. This short, abrupt climactic battle seems to have been a casualty of the movie’s miniscule budget.

Still, it’s impossible to not like a movie that features dialogue like “The shit man’s got me, Bobby!” and has a scene where a police sketch artist attempts to draw a detailed picture of the creature while casually asking the witness if she saw any nuts in it and, if so, could she describe what kind of nuts they were. And let’s not forget the song that plays during the closing credits. Entitled NUMBER TWO: THE BALLAD OF THE MONSTURD, it sounds like something Cybil Shepard would perform in her lounge act were she whacked out of her mind on painkillers at the time.

While MONSTURD doesn’t quite reach the level of such classics as KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER, it’s still an inspired nugget of utter loonacy that’s destined to gain a cult following. According to co-director Popko, Dead Alive Productions, an affiliate of Spectrum Films, has picked up distribution rights and plans to release the film on video and DVD on April 8th. But if you can’t wait that long, you can purchase a VHS copy of the film directly from the filmmakers by logging on to the movie’s homepage www.monsturd.com where you can also watch the trailer and listen to the theme song. If this movie sounds like your cup of tea, I recommend you give it a look. There’s never been anything quite like MONSTURD and somehow I doubt there ever will be again.

The Foywonder
Thanks, man. And if you want a laugh, folks, plug “Megiddo” into our search engine and check out Foy’s review for that one, too...
"Moriarty" out.

Click for previous story Talk Back More on this story Click for next story

1. "a new movie featuring a monster comprised entirely of human excrement" 2002-11-26 08:21:36
2. I'm still trying to decipher what Salma Hayek said during that scene 2002-11-26 08:25:48
ACTUALLY, the shit monster was first done long ago in the 70s 2002-11-26 08:57:31
Wow, and I thought this was another bad review of THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE or VIEW FROM THE TOP 2002-11-26 09:04:37
Jack Schmitt 2002-11-26 09:14:51
Monsturd vs. Jack Frost 2002-11-26 09:54:21
This guy is a total studio plant! 2002-11-26 11:15:00
I'm no plant, and I have seen MONSTURD and the damn thing is FUNNY! No ifs, ands or butts about it, you'll be flush from laughing so hard. No shit.) 2002-11-26 17:12:42
I'm no plant, and I have seen MONSTURD and the damn thing is FUNNY! No ifs, ands or butts about it, you'll be flush from laughing so hard. No shit.) 2002-11-26 17:16:14
In the immortal words of Rick McCallum 2002-11-26 17:36:10
What, no Hulk Hogan references yet? 2002-11-26 17:38:31
I guess nothing is sacred in the movie industry... 2002-11-26 19:09:14
I wanna see Hulk Hogan as Steven "Sh*t For Brains" Seagal in "On Doody Ground" 2002-11-26 19:51:59
YOU HAD ME FROM THE WORD "SHIT" 2002-11-26 20:12:18

MATTHEW PAVLOVICH, v. DVD COPY CONTROL ASSOCIATION, INC

Small Webcaster Settlement Act of 2002

Of course what does it all really mean? Can't tell you that yet. Working on it....

THE DISRESPECTED STUDENT — OR — THE NEED FOR THE VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY
A Talk with Roger Schank

(Thanks, Clay)

Universities are scrambling to get into the distance education business. They see the computer as vital to this enterprise but it is not obvious that they know why it is vital. Universities want to deliver courses via the web. They want to do this because they are frightened that someone will do it before them and gain more prestige or more student revenue. The people who are putting their courses on the web are not doing it because they are interested in the exploration of new teaching methods. They do not see the web as a revolutionary instrument. But that is just what it is...

...Web courses are basically parodies of existing courses. They have what the real courses have, only less. No real interaction with faculty, no real doing, no real excitement. But, this state of affairs will not continue for long. In a competitive market, the web will open up competition in university education (and later on in secondary education) in a way that few have imagined. Web courses will undergo a transformation over time and that transformation will begin to change education (and perhaps society itself) forever.

Web courses will be different from existing college courses for three reasons. (1): current college courses aren't very good; students are often dissatisfied with what their school is offering; (2): the length, material covered, and general methodology in college courses were derived from practical considerations that are irrelevant in this new medium; (3): it's on a computer, dammit — and computers are inherently doing devices rather than listening devices, so courses can be based upon doing...

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge59.html

(8,112 words)

THE THIRD CULTURE

Roger Schank

THE DISRESPECTED STUDENT — OR — THE NEED FOR THE VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY
A Talk with Roger Schank

We know that Virtual U will serve up electronic courses, and therein lies the excitement. People are actually thinking about designing courses in a new way. They are not doing this because of the opportunity to redesign and rethink the concept of what a university can and should offer. They are designing courses in a new way because the new medium forces them to do so. Nevertheless, we suddenly have the opportunity to ask: What exactly should the offerings of a university be? What should a course be? Should there be courses at all? How can we make education better?

DIGERATI

(From Wired Magazine's press release - August 11th:)
...
" Power Agent Sees Book Publishing's Digital Destiny
New York's John Brockman has been stirring it up for decades, and his
latest quest is notorious among publishing's "technophobic tweeds". Wired's
Warren St. John spends a day in the life of this mad-dog maverick.
...
"The September issue of Wired hits newsstands Wednesday, August 11th."

THE REALITY CLUB

Doug Rushkoff on Judith Rich Harris' "Children Don't Do Things Half Way"

George Dyson on "The World Question Center"

THE THIRD CULTURE

THE DISRESPECTED STUDENT — OR — THE NEED FOR THE VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY
A Talk with Roger Schank

Roger Schank is a computer scientist and cognitive psychologist who has worked in the AI field for twenty-five years. Like Marvin Minsky, he takes the strong AI view, but rather than trying to build an intelligent machine he wants to deconstruct the human mind. He wants to know, in particular, how natural language — one's mother tongue — is processed, how memory works, and how learning occurs. Schank thinks of the human mind as a learning device, and he thinks that it is being taught in the wrong way. He is something of a gadfly; he deplores the curriculum-based, drill-oriented methods in today's schools, and his most recent contributions have been in the area of education, looking at ways to use computers to enhance the learning process.

— JB

ROGER SCHANK, a leading Artificial Intelligence researcher, is the Chairman and CTO for Cognitive Arts and has been the Director of the Institute for the Learning Sciences since its founding in 1989. He holds three faculty appointments at Northwestern University as John Evans Professor of Computer Science, Education, and Psychology. Previously, he was Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at Yale University and Director of the Yale Artificial Intelligence Project. His books include: Dynamic Memory: A Theory Of Learning In Computers And People , Tell Me A Story: A New Look At Real And Artificial Memory, The Connoisseur's Guide To The Mind, And Engines For Education and Virtual Learning: A Revolutionary Approach To Building A Highly Skilled Workforce.

Further reading:

"Information is Surprises" — Roger Schank in The Third Culture— Comments by Murray Gell-Mann, Marvin Minsky, Francisco Varela, Steven Pinker, W. Daniel Hillis, and Daniel C. Dennett

Roger Schank's "Education Outrage" Column #6: "The Professor Fails the Test"

THE DISRESPECTED STUDENT — OR — THE NEED FOR THE VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY
A Talk with Roger Schank

ROGER SCHANK: Universities are scrambling to get into the distance education business. They see the computer as vital to this enterprise but it is not obvious that they know why it is vital. Universities want to deliver courses via the web. They want to do this because they are frightened that someone will do it before them and gain more prestige or more student revenue. The people who are putting their courses on the web are not doing it because they are interested in the exploration of new teaching methods. They do not see the web as a revolutionary instrument. But that is just what it is.

It is easy to imagine that universities have suddenly become fascinated by the power of the computer, or that they have begun to worry about the kid from Dubuque who will never get to Boston let alone attend Harvard. But what is really going on has nothing to do with computers or with education for the masses. Universities are concerned that if Harvard ever got their act together and decided to deliver every Harvard course via videotape lectures and developed some way for students to interact with TAs to have homework graded, then everyone else would be out of business.

JB: Is this what Harvard has in mind?

SCHANK: Harvard isn't going to do this because they are Harvard after all, but what if some other very reputable and less stuffy place decided to give it a try? Would anyone go to Contra Costa Junior College if Virtual Harvard were available at the same price and at whatever time fit your schedule? This is what everyone is worried about.

This is not what we ought to be worried about however. Rather we should worry about what kind of education these Virtual U's are going to serve up. I am afraid I know the answer: the same old stuff they have been serving, only this time there will be no football, no fraternity parties, and nobody to b.s. with until three in the morning. It is reasonable to ponder how living in an isolating society is going to get even more so, but that is not our issue here. No one will stop this rolling freight train. But giving the train a reasonable direction wouldn't be a bad idea.

We know that Virtual U will serve up electronic courses, and therein lies the excitement. People are actually thinking about designing courses in a new way. They are not doing this because of the opportunity to redesign and rethink the concept of what a university can and should offer. They are designing courses in a new way because the new medium forces them to do so. Nevertheless, we suddenly have the opportunity to ask: What exactly should the offerings of a university be? What should a course be? Should there be courses at all? How can we make education better?

As with most aspects of society that we take for granted, courses have been with us for so long that we simply accept that they have the structure, length, and characteristics that they have and leave it at that. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

Web courses are basically parodies of existing courses. They have what the real courses have, only less. No real interaction with faculty, no real doing, no real excitement. But, this state of affairs will not continue for long. In a competitive market, the web will open up competition in university education (and later on in secondary education) in a way that few have imagined. Web courses will undergo a transformation over time and that transformation will begin to change education (and perhaps society itself) forever.

Web courses will be different from existing college courses for three reasons. (1): current college courses aren't very good; students are often dissatisfied with what their school is offering; (2): the length, material covered, and general methodology in college courses were derived from practical considerations that are irrelevant in this new medium; (3): it's on a computer, dammit — and computers are inherently doing devices rather than listening devices, so courses can be based upon doing.

JB: Is doing important to how people learn?

SCHANK: That people learn by doing is an idea that has been around for a long time. In fact, John Dewey (1916) lamented that even though everyone knew that people learn by doing and cannot "learn by pouring in" there seemed to be no way to change the schools. Well, now there is. Learning by doing needs a medium and computers can be that medium. Existing college courses, when they allow for doing can succeed. But, a great many courses, especially introductory courses and service courses have little or no doing in them at all. This will change when the Virtual University ascends.

Current college courses fail not only in their means of delivery, but also in what they are trying to deliver. This is true for a variety of reasons, the two main ones being the idea of a curriculum and the concept of service courses. Colleges have the sense that they know what students should learn so they create curricula that require students take a course in X or fill the Y distribution requirement with a number of possible courses. So students who are interested in learning to do Y find a set of hoops to be jumped through in order to do Y, including a variety of prerequisites.

The problem is that every time a student takes a course because he has to, he finds himself faced with a serious motivation problem. If you don't know why you need to know something it is difficult to learn it and what you learn won't stay in memory for long. If we don't use something, or at least see how we might use it, it is difficult to retain it. A course in calculus may well be useful for an economist, but since the actual course likely has very little to do with economics and the calculus that would eventually be used by the economist, the student will have trouble caring about or retaining what he learned. If he never uses what he learns, he'll forget it entirely.

JB: How long should a college course be?

SCHANK: The current answer is about forty hours of seat time spanning a twelve-week period. Does some great educational truth underlie this? No. It simply has always been done this way. How long should a course actually be? As long as it takes to learn to do what the course is teaching you to do. This is so obvious it seems almost absurd to mention it. And, it would be absurd if it weren't for the fact this ideal is violated in nearly every college course

JB: Isn't one big exception the PhD thesis which takes as long as it takes.

SCHANK: Right. By and large graduate education is much closer to a learn by doing philosophy. In fact, courses that take as long as they take are really not possible in current university environments. Each student can't get his own length course; professors can't be available for as long as this takes. There had to be some standardization on time.

The web changes all that — take a course when you want and learn as much as you want until you can demonstrate that you can do what the course is trying to teach you to do. This makes sense. Naturally, this is not what current web-based courses are doing for the most part. Just as early films were just filmed plays, early web courses are just regular courses on the web. This will change. And when it does the structure of the university system will have to change with it. You won't need so many course credits to graduate because the concept of "credits" will have become meaningless. What is needed is a new concept, based upon performance. Graduates should have accomplished certain things, not necessarily have sat through certain courses.

JB: Let's talk about how the computer fits in to all of this.

SCHANK: Education on the computer has been, by and large, a disappointment, over-hyped and under-realized. Computer-based training has meant putting a book on a computer, allowing the student to press a button to get the next page and take a quiz at the end. Edutainment has meant some silly game that purported to be teaching valuable facts to children.

JB: So can we do better?

SCHANK: You bet we can. The air flight simulator is a very good piece of educational software; there is no better way to learn to fly that isn't dangerous. Learning by doing is a practical reality given good simulations. The problem is both to build those simulations and to reinvent a curriculum based upon this new technology and the idea of learning by doing.

JB: How does the Virtual University work?

SCHANK: The rise of the Virtual University allows us to reconsider education. It is reasonable to assume that education involves learning and we are all under the impression that school is a place where learning goes on, or at least it is a place where learning is supposed to go on. Business is so dissatisfied with the state of education today that we find corporation after corporation creating their own "universities" where employees may attempt to relearn what they failed to learn in school or where they can learn what they might need to know on their jobs. Even so, those businesses that have recognized that school didn't work out for their employees are nevertheless of the belief that school is the right model for learning Curiously, business training tends to be a copy of existing school systems. This seems quite odd to me, because everyone agrees that the schools are broken — although very few people agree about why they are broken.

At the beginning of my classes I usually ask students why they are in college and they tell me things like, "it is a four year vacation," "the parties are goo d," "it will get me a good job later," "it is what everyone does so I never thought about an alternative" and so on. The issue of learning never comes up. Why is that? School isn't really about learning at all. It is about certification. College students attend school to get a degree that they hope will get them something they want. They pick schools on this basis, and they attend school with the concomitant attitude. We never ask a student if he learned a lot, we ask how well he did. Self-evaluation is based on the judgment of others when it comes to "official" learning. Students feel they did well when others say they did well. It is the rare student who says that he learned a great deal and thus was very happy with his education.

Recently I attended the commencement exercises at Columbia University because my son was graduating. The valedictorian gave a speech in which she said that she had always disliked school and that while she felt that she couldn't help but work to be the best at it, she was sorry she worked that hard and would never do it again. It was an odd speech, and most people in the audience were upset by it. I, on the other hand, was happy to hear someone tell it like it is. Education ought not be a competition. Learning should be fun. The stress that students endure in school and the arbitrariness and general lack of real world relevance of what they learn make learning anything but fun.

While I was pondering this young lady's speech I glanced at the program notes and was reminded of why school is the way it is. The notes mentioned that the commencement address had been given in Latin until quite recently. Latin has been a dead language for well over a thousand years and yet still, because it once was the language of erudition it remained so for a thousand years. Talk about inability to change! How can we fix the schools if it takes a thousand years to get rid of something as basic as what language is being spoken!

We have the opportunity to create some massive changes in what it means to be involved in obtaining an education. To do this we must change the model of school completely. Many professors in today's universities are not motivated to provide high quality teaching. They know students will not act like consumers despite the fact that they are paying the bills. Rather, since students need the certification and recommendations universities provide, professors are in a power position and not in a service providers position.

Professors understand that they can dominate students and create various hoops for students to jump through in order to get a good grade, but that they don't really have to worry whether anyone has learned anything. In this model it is all too easy to just lecture and test and forget about real education.

This is all okay with students as it turns out. There is an implicit gentlemen's agreement about school. Teachers make demands, students satisfy those demands, and those who play the game by the rules win. "You give me the grade, I'll get the degree, I'm out of here."

JB: What motivates professors? Why do they teach?

SCHANK: There is a certain naivete on the part of students in universities about why the professors who teach them are there. They assume teachers teach because it's their job and that the model that held in high school of the professional teacher applies to the university as well. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Professors at the top universities teach because they have to, or ought to, rarely because they see teaching as fundamental to their life's work. At my university, professors who don't get research grants or contribute to the university in other ways are "punished" by having to teach. A top notch professor, one who is world famous and brings in lots of research dollars, may teach as little as one course every two years. On the other hand, his colleague who has none of these attributes may teach as many as four courses a quarter.

The best professors may or may not be the best teachers. This is actually a complicated idea because the issue of what defines "best" is subject to question and what defines good teaching is a very open issue. In the competitive world of American universities "best" has a clear meaning. Universities vie for the services of professors who have the biggest reputations. Top professors get great deals as they are sought after by the top schools. These deals include higher salaries, but as universities can only go so high, other issues matter as well. One of the biggest is teaching load. As a result, the best professors have teaching loads of nearly zero and sometimes of literally zero. Clearly, in such an environment teaching is not valued, despite what these same universities say to their prospective students.

Nevertheless, these same professors who happily avoid teaching are often the best teachers. The reason why this is so is not obvious to the prospective buyers of these services. Typically, when students attempt to decide between Harvard and Amherst for example, they say in Amherst's defense that the professors there are professional teachers and care more about the students and pay more attention to teaching. Like any generalization this one can be dead wrong, but on the whole it is true. The real question is: of the professors at each institution, who knows more? On the face of it this seems like a silly question. A course in the classics is a course in the classics. The best teacher would teach the best course, and the knowledge of any teacher is likely to be the same.

While this may be true for the classics it is not at all true for a field like Artificial Intelligence (AI). Artificial Intelligence as a field is being invented today. The people who are inventing it reside at big, well-funded research labs that allow them to build their toys and experiment with all kinds of hardware. They don't do this at Amherst. If you want to learn about AI you can take a course about it at Amherst, but the teacher of that course will be someone who read some books about it rather than someone who is doing it. (Actually Amherst students can sign up for AI courses at the University of Massachusetts nearby which despite not being a university considered to be of the quality of Amherst is far better equipped to teach them.) At the very best the small college teacher is out of date on the subject, at the worst he really doesn't understand the issues all that well. I have been doing graduate admissions in AI for thirty years and I can count on one hand all the applications we have gotten from students at the "best" small colleges. Students at these schools never even find out about this subject much less decide to make it their life's work.

Of course, you could go to MIT (a very good AI lab) and take a course from the best professors in AI. But these are the very same people who don't teach all that much, who don't value teaching, and who, when they do teach, have classes with hundreds of students in them. The best professors in AI are not professors because they want to be teachers, they are professors because they want to be researchers. They want to build robots or explore how the mind makes generalizations or figure out how to get a computer to be world chess champion. Teaching is one of the last things on their minds.

So, the short answer to the question is that in the best schools they teach because they have to not because they want to, and in the good teaching schools there is a very good chance that they teach what they don't understand all that well.

JB: Let's talk about curricula.

SCHANK: The curriculum is one of the major problems with today's schools. When you tell a professor he is to teach a certain class, you might assume this means he will teach what any other professor might teach in that class. One high school history course is like another, so one might assume that this is true of college as well. But curricula in college are professor-dependent. This wouldn't be such a problem if it only meant there was slight variance in how a given course was taught from year to year and professor to professor. Unfortunately, the issue is bigger than that.

Professors teach what they know. There is no standard set of things to be taught in anything but the most introductory courses. So, introduction to psychology is pretty similar in every university, as is freshman calculus. But, any advanced course is subject to the professor's unique view of his field. This is fine because one goes to university to meet interesting faculty and to learn what their view of the field is. Or one ought to. This is what universities have to offer, an opportunity to engage a world expert on his own turf to discuss ideas he created or is deeply involved with and for just a few weeks to pretend that you are a world class economist or sociologist dealing with issues just as professionals in those fields do. This is the ideal. The reality is something else again.

One of the problems with this view is that students by and large don't share it. Most college students go to class expecting to learn the facts. They want to know how economics or sociology works. When I teach a class on how the mind works, students want to know how it works and I should please tell them. The difficulty with this view is that most professors don't actually know the answers to the questions students pose. Economics professors don't know how the economy works and sociologists don't know how society works and I don't know how the mind works. What we all do have are deeply held beliefs about these subjects. And we all fervently want to get students to see things our way, to absorb our point of view and to understand why our academic enemies are idiots.

Students have no idea that this what they are getting into. They just want to know what is true. They don't want to hear one professor's viewpoint. But that is what they get every time. For this reason one university is quite different than another and every course in AI is different at every school. This is the fun part of teaching. Professors like talking about their own work and their own ideas. They love trashing their enemies. They love talking about the research they are doing. The question is: Is this what students came to learn? By and large I think it is not.

JB: How do university requirements get established?

SCHANK: Requirements get set in a university body, from general graduation requirements for a B.A. to PhD requirements in any field, by a committee. This committee represents various interests. When I became a member of the computer science department at Yale I noticed that in order to get a PhD in Computer Science one had to take a course in Numerical Analysis (NA) and a course in AI. I couldn't imagine a bigger waste of time for my graduate students than to take a course in numerical processing by computers when they were trying to build smart machines. One thing had nothing to do with the other. The requirement was there because of political compromise. No one knew what it meant to get a PhD in computer science so they simply required a little bit of everything of everybody. This could take an entire year out of a graduate student's life for no reason, but no one questioned it. I got rid of the requirement by making a deal with the top guy in NA. His students didn't need to take our courses and ours didn't need to take his.

Now, it turns out that deals like this are very hard to make in a university. The top NA guy was reasonable, and more important he was someone whose livelihood was not threatened by such a deal. When professors lose students they may find themselves in deep trouble. Nontenured appointments can be eliminated and tenured faculty may wind up teaching subjects they know little about. Unless your subject is very popular, the only way to keep teaching your favorite subject is to make it a requirement. Believe me NA was not popular, but it was well funded so the NA guys weren't worried. But there is no way to eliminate the Linguistics requirement at Northwestern short of a revolution. No one would ever take such courses otherwise. University requirements are about politics not education.

JB: Do the students understand this? What are their expectations?

SCHANK: Students tend to have the view that the university knows what is best for them and that if they follow the recommended course of study their lives will work out fine. I once had a freshman advisee who asked me what courses to take. This was at Yale where course requirements were quite minimal. I said the world was open to him and he should take what he had always wanted to know about. He told me this was no good. He needed to know what would get him ahead in life and that he thought I was pretty successful so he wanted to know what courses I had taken my freshman year. I assured him that I went to school in the dark ages when one had no choice at all and that he should be happy he lived in such enlightened times. He insisted. So I mentioned that I had taken Western Civilization, English Literature, Physics, Chemistry, and Calculus, all required of all freshmen at Carnegie Tech. Those are the courses he took.

Students expect that the curriculum set forth for them by the faculty is meant to help them get where they want to go after school. This simply isn't true. In computer science for example, the skills that will get students jobs include various programming skills that are used in industry. One might think that computer science departments around the country would make sure that all these employable skills are taught in their curriculum, indeed one would expect them to be the center of the curriculum. Sorry. Most computer science professors are not familiar with the commercial packages that are in use on a daily basis in industry and even if they happen to know them, they consider them to be of little intellectual interest. So, a computer science student will learn the mathematics involved in making calculations about what is computable, they will learn the theory of designing programming languages, but they will not learn much of what they will ever use in the real world. Computer scientists want their field to be a science and they want students to attempt to practice that science despite the fact that the students are there because they want jobs in industry.

Why is Introduction to Psychology in every university a tedious survey of every aspect of psychology that no student likes and that no student can avoid? This is a simple question. You can't get around this awful course because, anyone who has taken it will recall, you are required to be the subject of psychological experiments in order to pass it. That requirement is made by the faculty because they need those subjects for their experiments. Without a course that anyone who wants to take psychology must take, there would be no subject pool. Psychology professors lobby long and hard to make this course required for graduation from the university so that they will have even more subjects in the subject pool. They make sure every aspect of psychology is covered so that any faculty member can teach it and thus no one hogs all the subjects. A typical student signs up for a course in psychology because he wants to understand his parents, or his friends, or analyze his various personal problems. Universities make sure there is no way you can take courses on these subjects without having gone through other psychology courses that no one would want to take (on visual perception or on statistics for example). If departments responded to what students want, there would only be clinical courses offered and all those experts in experimental psychology would lose their jobs. When research interests of the faculty fail to coincide with student's course interests, ways are invented to make sure the faculty wins.

This conspiracy is not always supported by the faculty actually. I once asked some chemists who were interested in improving teaching in chemistry about the required first year chemistry curriculum. I asked what percentage of their student were premeds and got the unsurprising answer of 95%. I asked if the first year of college chemistry had anything in it at all that would be relevant to the life of a doctor. They said "no." I asked if there was chemistry that might be of importance in the career of a doctor. They said "of course." So why wasn't the chemistry curriculum revised to include the chemistry that might matter to doctors as opposed to the chemistry they will never need? Because medical schools and various certification boards and publishers had established what courses would be counted towards the requirements for medical school and there was no changing it. In this case even the chemistry faculty was frustrated by this, but there was nothing they could do about it.

JB: How does a first-year student decide what to study?

SCHANK: One of the serious problems with required courses, standard curricula, and other unchangeables in the current university system is the effect they have on the future of students. It is the rare student who comes to college knowing what he wants to be when he grows up. He usually knows what subjects interested him in high school, and maybe he knows something about the profession of his parents or other people he admires. But, those are usually the only guides he has. The fact that the high school curriculum is also unchangeable means that each student is familiar with having taken math, English, history and some science and thus their first thought is to continue this course of study.

Students want guidance. The guidance they get is not necessarily what they need however. My daughter loved biology in high school and had thoughts of becoming a biologist. When she went to sign up for college biology it turned out that she had already taken the course in high school so she was told to take a required chemistry course that was a prerequisite for second year biology. She hated the chemistry, didn't finish the full year course and had to find a new major. She never got to find out if she really liked biology.

Students are typically directed, either intentionally or through coercion of other students, into the majors that are "in" at their school. At Yale vast numbers of students are English and history majors despite the fact that there is no call for such majors in the job market. They decide on these majors because it is well known that the faculty at Yale in these areas is first rate. Students at Yale have absorbed the ethic that a liberal education is what matters, not job potential. I was once booed at a meeting where department chairs advertised their departments to freshman when I said "major in computer science and you'll get a job when you graduate." This was not the zeitgeist at Yale. College education at Yale is the same as it was in the nineteenth century, a place to study the classics. Fortunately, the students of that era had daddy's business to go into. Today, students get the same advice, but find themselves with only law school to attend when they graduate.

JB: There appears to be dissatisfaction in corporate America with the students of many universities. How do employers view the graduates?

SCHANK: The dissatisfaction is real enough but the blame is often oddly placed. What would employers like students to know that they don't know?

Corporations across America worry about students knowing basic business concepts (like accounting), knowing about how to work in teams, knowing how to write well, make oral presentations, and generally knowing how and why businesses work. But, where would students learn all this? Even a major in business might not learn all these things, and most universities discourage undergraduate majors in business. So, a student interested in business is likely to major in economics where he learns about macro and micro economic systems and learns next to nothing of what I have listed above.

Of course, I am not recommending that a college education ought to be proper training in business. (Although the idea that, in our world, understanding business is considerably less important that understanding Dickens is of some mystery to me.) The problem is really with the conception of a liberal education and the monopoly on education that is held by those who have that conception. Students think they should go to college to get a job and colleges think students are there for some other reason entirely. A compromise might be nice. Colleges do have some obligation to raise the consciousness of students beyond their initial aspirations. On the other hand they also have the obligation to respect the practical exigencies that are extant in today's world.

Political science majors presumably want to work in politics and usually do not want to work on the theory of political systems. Psychology majors presumably are interested in the mind and might want to work in health related fields and are not likely to become experimental psychologists. Do these fields care about this when they design their curricula? You bet they don't. Professors often share the idea that they are really training their students to become academics like themselves and that their job is to cater to the one or two students who show promise in that regard. All other students, those who will become practitioners in these fields, are given short shrift and not taken seriously by the curriculum committee. Individual professors can and do work around the system they have set up, but by and large the system does not enable or even care about future student employment.

JB: Given this focus on making students into mini-academics, don't colleges prepare students for graduate study? How do the graduate schools view the graduates?

SCHANK: When a student enters nearly any PhD program the U.S. he is assumed to have learned little of value in college. The only time we ever give credit to PhD students for work they did in college is when they took the identical courses we offer to our first year graduate students. Given what I said about the idiosyncratic courses offered by professors around the world, this means, in effect, that only the undergraduates who went to our school, who actually took the identical courses they would be forced to take again, actually get credit for and can skip some courses.

All around the U.S. the best graduate programs believe that if a student learned anything in college it is a mystery how this could have happened and that they certainly couldn't have learned it the right way (that is "our way") so they better take it again. Given that this is the prevailing attitude in graduate school, and given that employers have roughly the same attitude, one is left to wonder why students go to college at all. The answer is simple: both employers and graduate schools require an undergraduate degree. They don't much care what you studied in college because they know they will have to teach you all over again. This is, of course, a vicious circle, one that allows colleges to continue their total disrespect for the needs of students since no one expects the product to be of value anyhow.

JB: So, who or what, is to blame?

SCHANK: Deep down inside this drama of the disrespected student is the real villain in the piece: grades and tests. We assume there should be grades and tests because there always have been, and school is almost unthinkable without them. After all, how will we know who is the best, who succeeded and who failed, who did the work and who sloughed off without grades and tests? How will graduate schools know who to accept and how will employers know who to hire?

To put this another way, everyone involved in the drama of indifferent education, faculty, students, and administrators, knows that the real role of our universities is certification not education. You can't certify without grades and tests, or can you?

Imagine a professor lecturing to a class of 500 for a semester course. How does the professor know if anyone is paying attention? In fact, it is a safe bet that most students are drifting off most of the time. Students know there will be a test and so they try hard to stay awake. No test? Then why fight the hangover? May as well stay in bed. Without tests, the system doesn't work.

Actually tests are indicative of why the system needs fixing. The problem is that tests and grades are so ubiquitous it is difficult to imagine a school functioning without them. The problem stems from the certification mission of schools. As long as the next school or employer expects that the current school will tell them who is good, the system can't change. One wonders why the onus of certification is on our educational institutions at all. Why shouldn't employers figure out who is good on their own? (One of things I have always been amazed by in this regard is the following: Andersen Consulting actually requires new employees (hired from college) to list their SAT scores. This might make sense if the SAT were something other than what it is, — namely a test about geometry, algebra, synonyms and antonyms--but there is little on the test that is germane to working at a consulting firm.)

As long as tests are the yardstick in school students will go along with the measure. Students vie for grades and refuse to learn something if it won't be on the test. Students routinely inquire whether they are "responsible" for the material being discussed and if they are not, they turn off. They cheat, they compete, they wangle their way around, they argue for grades, they whine and complain to teachers about their grades; they stress out, they cram and then forget what they crammed. They do everything but love learning.

JB: But they do love getting the right diploma.

SCHANK: Universities will never grow out of their certification mission. Too much depends upon it. It is hard to imagine that as many people would go to college as do now, if no one really cared about whether you had been to college. No one would fight to go to Harvard if going to Harvard didn't matter. But what matters about it? Not the education. No one asks if you learned a lot, they just assume you are smart because you went there. It is time to rethink this.

We won't get rid of certification but perhaps we can contemplate new kinds of certification. Students should be certified as having accomplished something or as being able to do something. Like Boy Scout merit badges or Karate black belts or Truck Driver's licenses, the proof should be in the pudding. A student should show his stuff, he should be able to do something and the attestation to the doing should be the certification.

Such changes are unlikely to occur in current universities. It is the rare faculty member who will willingly stop teaching the same old course he has taught for thirty years and design a new one that will be more work for him to teach because it requires more individual effort. This will not happen unless the venue and the circumstances of education change radically.

Here then is why we can begin to have some hopes for the Virtual University. It is not the case that these changes can occur only at VU. They could occur anywhere, but they won't. The inertia is too great at State U. VU has such promise because VU is virgin territory. There is no entrenched establishment that will block change. John Dewey would have been ecstatic.

JB: In the face of everything you have outlined, why are university administrations acting as though they are paralyzed.

SCHANK: The most well meaning college president can change none of what I describe. The former Provost of my university used to say "with faculty, everything is a la carte." He couldn't ask a professor to do a single thing beyond his normal duties without being prepared to promise something in exchange. As they say, tenure means never having to say you're sorry.

The uproar amongst students and faculty alike would be enormous if grades and tests were eliminated, if lectures were abandoned, if tenure were abolished, if all requirements were dropped, even though it is all these things that keep the universities forever promising real education and only partially delivering. There is simply no way to implement such things. Take tenure for example. No administrator thinks tenure is a good idea. Every first rate university is saddled with "dead wood," — professors who once were good but are no more. There is no way to get rid of them. My university employs a professor who goes around the country denying that the Holocaust ever took place. Can they get rid of him? No. They can't even lower his salary. (Though he hasn't gotten a raise in a long while, you can bet.)

If Harvard eliminated tenure other universities would surely follow, but even they can't take the first step. As soon as they did, Yale would get a great many more faculty applications. When requirements were eliminated at various schools in the seventies this was seen as the decline of standards and soon other schools were bragging about their "core curriculum" that centered on the humanities. When grades have been eliminated they have often been replaced by essays on student performance that were both onerous for the faculty to write and annoying for employers and graduate schools to read. When professors have been required to teach more than they do (in a good university they typically teach one course a semester) then the best of them went off to another school where they could get a better deal. Research universities hire great researchers not great teachers and they will not be motivated to stop this practice unless their very roots are attacked.

There really is no way to fix all this because universities are not motivated to change. But they will be motivated when they are seriously challenged in the free market. Right now, and maybe for a long time, Harvard is safe. But what if the best physics course in the world was put together virtually using the best faculty in world? Would it be better than Harvard's physics course? Would Harvard use it? They might well use it if students preferred it. They wouldn't be seriously upset by having to use it since the average Harvard physics professor can be assumed to not want to teach introduction to physics in the first place. Harvard would then say that was fine because now students would have even more real contact with faculty and labs because they had already taken the virtual course. This is fine with me, too.

But, one should be aware that after awhile there will be many great courses out there and the system may evolve such that courses themselves are no longer the currency of a university education. Further it might happen that the line between high school and college might be blurred by these courses as they become available to high school students. Little by little change will happen.

DIGERATI

(From Wired Magazine's press release - August 11th:)
...
" Power Agent Sees Book Publishing's Digital Destiny
New York's John Brockman has been stirring it up for decades, and his latest quest is notorious among publishing's "technophobic tweeds". Wired's Warren St. John spends a day in the life of this mad-dog maverick.
...
"The September issue of Wired hits newsstands Wednesday, August 11th."

THE REALITY CLUB

Doug Rushkoff on Judith Rich Harris' "Children Don't Do Things Half Way"

From: Doug Rushkoff
Submitted: 7.5.99

Terrific conversation.

What inspires me most about Harris's work is the way it blasts holes in the conservative/xtian-extremist argument for "family values" at the expense of school budgets and other civic expenditures. Her evidence and conclusions will find no friends among those who are hoping to replace genuine community interactions with a pair of Bible-thumping parents.

As for her discussion of memes, however, I wonder exactly how her notion that "BETWEEN groups there's a motivation to reject the memes of the other group and do something different" really plays itself out. If the meme is 'strong' enough, the new group adopts it. Their pride simply forces them to rename or recontextualize the meme to make it *seem* original.

The kinds of variations that Harris points out (holding a fork one way vs. another, or tomahto vs. tomato) are packaging distinctions that actually ALLOW for the adoption of a meme by a group that wants to FEEL it's still behaving in an original fashion. (Changes to the viral shell, as I'd put it, and not the memes encased within it.) The ability of the meme to appear or be pronounced differently in different contexts attests to the power of its fundamental command set.

This is why I've always felt that memes really can't be accurately tracked independently of their viral shells. (But that's probably just my way of making Dawkin's ideas feel somehow original to me!)

George Dyson on "The World Question Center"

From: George Dyson
Submitted: 7.4.99

I was recently transcribing an interview with Herbert York (science advisor in the Eisenhower administration, a founding director of ARPA, and the person who signed the first check--$999,750.00--for Project Orion) and noted the following:

"And Fermi, long before, in 1951, he loved to raise rhetorical questions, and one rhetorical question he raised is, suppose you had 200 million dollars to spend on science with no social or other inhibitions or pressures on how you spend it, what would you do? And then he immediately answered, 'Dig the deepest possible hole.' And he said, from a scientific point of view, we know less about what's under our feet than almost anything else about the world of nature in general."

I'm not sure what $200 million (1951) translates to in 1999, but $1,000,000,000 sounds about right, and raises a good question--which to some of the people on your list is not purely rhetorical.

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher | Kip Parent, Webmaster

I went to the San Fransisco Department of Elections page to learn about volunteering to be an "Election Officer" (Poll Worker).

So I've decided that I'm going to volunteer to be an Election Officer here in San Francisco and that it would sure be great if you did the same in your town.

This way, we can all learn about the nuts and bolts of our country's elections together. Doesn't that sound like a blast! It sure won't be fun on my own, I'll tell you that much.

It's also going to take a lot of us on our toes in all fifty states if we're actually going to be able to make a difference in 2004 -- so working together on a little thing like this seems like a great starting point.

So far I've stumbled across and downloaded a Election Officer's Training Manual and an Application Form. More soon...

A Howard Rheingold Trading Card

I went to see Howard Rheingold speak at some bookstore on the Haight a few nights ago -- I've read excerpts from a friend of mine's copy of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, and I can already highly recommend it. Howard also recently did an interview on the well too.

This is not to say that smart mobs are wise mobs. Not all groups who use new technologies to organize collective action have socially beneficial ends in mind. Criminals, totalitarian governments, spammers, will all be able to take advantage of new capabilities -- just as the first to take advantage of tribes, nation-states, markets, networks included the malevolent as well as the cooperative.

Here is the full text of the interview in case the link goes bad:

http://engaged.well.com/engaged/engaged.cgi?c=inkwell.vue&f=0&t=166&q=0-

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Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
Topic #166, 83 responses, 0 new, Last post on Mon 25 Nov 2002 at 08:09 AM

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#0 of 82: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Thu 21 Nov 2002 (07:24 AM)

Howard Rheingold was an early Internet adopter who understood quickly how
computing and 'net-based communication could enhance human capabilities. This
fed into an interest in human potential that led Howard to create or
co-create such works as _Higher Creativity_ (1984), _The Cognitive
Connections_ (1986), and _Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind: A Book of
Memes_ (1988). Howard became involved in the WELL in 1985, and this led to
his authorship of _The Virtual Community_, a book about his life online and
the potential for community in cyberspace. Howard was editor of Whole Earth
Review for several years, and of the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, which
was published in 1994. Howard was the first Executive Editor at HotWired,
but left to build Electric Minds, which was more of an online community/jam
session than a magazine. Howard continues to explore the human impact of new
technologies in _Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution_, which explores the
impact of increasingly ubiquitous wireless communications devices on social
networks, and the evolution of moblike adhocracies that can be either
positive or destructive.

Bruce Umbaugh leads the discussion with Howard. Bruce is a philosopher who
teaches at Webster University's main campus in St. Louis (MO, USA) and via
the Net. His interests include computer ethics, epistemology, philosophy of
science, cognitive science.

Please join me in welcoming Bruce and Howard to inkwell.vue!

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#1 of 82: virtual community or butter? (bumbaugh) Thu 21 Nov 2002 (07:44 AM)

Thanks, Jon.

Howard, I've really enjoyed your book. The ideas you're pursuing are as
interesting and engaging as anything I've come across in awhile. So, it's
exciting to have the chance to talk with you here about all this.

I think one of the first things likely to occur to anyone bumping into
*Smart Mobs* is that the title itself is a bit jarring. We usually think of
"mobs" as dumb (and in part for that reason dangerous). We often think of
only individuals as "smart." So a place to start is asking you what smart
mobs are.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#2 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Thu 21 Nov 2002 (12:01 PM)

The briefest definition is that a smart mob is group of people who use
mobile communications, PCs, and the Internet to organize collective
action. That doesn't mean a whole lot without unpacking it. Maybe it will
help for me to briefly describe the clues that led me to suspect that we
are at the beginning of an important social-technological revolution.

In Tokyo, in early 2000, I couldn't help noticing that so many people were
looking at their telephones rather than listening to them -- and many were
using their thumbs to send text messages to one another. Interesting --
but there are many interesting sights in Tokyo. I recalled this unusual
sight (unusual for American eyes -- elsewhere in the world, around 100
billion text messages are transmitted every month) -- when I found myself
in Helsinki a few months after my Tokyo experience. I was sitting at an
outdoor cafe, drinking a cup of coffee, when three Finnish teenagers
encountered two older adults -- maybe the parents of one of them -- right
next to where I was sitting. I had no idea what they were saying -- they
were speaking Finnish -- but I noted that one of the teenagers glanced at
his mobile phone (all Finns carry their telephones in their hands and
glance at them from time to time) and smiled. Then he showed the telephone
display screen to the other two teenagers, who also smiled -- but he did
not show it to the other, older, adults. And all five of them continued
conversing as if this was normal.

I started asking around, and both my Japanese and Finnish friends told me
that many young adults "flocked" -- showed up at the same mall or
fast-food joint at the same time from eight different directions --
because they had coordinated and negotiated through flurries of text
messages.

Again, this was curious, but not world-shaking. I started doing some more
serious research when I read reports about the "People Power II"
demonstrations in Manila. The Estrada government was accused of
corruption, and everyone in the Philippines was glued to their TV set for
a time, like Americans during the Watergate hearings, as the Philippine
Congress investigated Estrada. When Senators linked to Estrada abruptly
shut down the hearings, tens of thousands of Philippine citizens started
gathering in EDSA -- the same square where the anti-Marcos demonstrations
had taken place. But they showed up within minutes -- almost all of them
wearing black. In hours, millions showed up. It was all summoned and
coordinated by text messages. Telephone trees are old organizing tactics,
but cumbersome compared to texting. Once you get a text message, y ou can
forward it to everyone in your address book.

I realized that the flocking teenagers and the demonstrating Filipinos
were taking advantage of a recently-lowered threshold for collective
action. And when I looked into collective action, I realized that much
more could be in store. It was when I understood that the mobile
telephones so many people carry are becoming miniature computers and
Internet terminals that I began to realize that we are on the verge of the
third great wave of change, following and building upon -- and going far
beyond -- the PC and Internet waves.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#3 of 82: virtual community or butter? (bumbaugh) Thu 21 Nov 2002 (01:28 PM)

So these "mobs" depend on particular technolgies in order to exist as
mobs. (And to be "smart" as well? Or is the smart part human, rather
than technological?) And they differ from what preceded them relying on
the Internet and PCs in being mobile (and relatively ubiquitous).

Anything else that's distinctive about the tech?

And why is this revolutionary, rather than just more of the same?

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#4 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Thu 21 Nov 2002 (01:47 PM)

Let's talk about the big picture for the moment: communication
technologies, social contracts, and collective action.

For a LONG time, humans hunted small game and gathered roots and berries
in small family groups. At some point, not all that long ago in our
evolutionary history, those family groups began to cooperate with others
who weren't directly related to them, organizing big-game hunts -- a form
of collective action that brought in more meat than any one family could
eat before it spoiled, thus creating the first public goods. Whenever a
means of communication, a social contract that enables people to trust one
another on a new scale, and collective action produce new public goods,
human society becomes more complex: agriculture, alphabets, printing
presses, etc. The printing press broke out the secret code of the
alphabet, which had been invented by the accountants for the first great
empires and had been reserved for the ruling elite for millennia. Within a
couple centuries of the emergence of literate populations, the collective
enterprises of self-governance and science emerged.

The Internet enables people to connect with strangers in other parts of
the world, getting together around shared affinities -- the whole virtual
community story. Ebay adds a reputation system, and a new market emerges.
Peer to peer methodologies enabled 70 million people to share their hard
disk space via Napster, and 2 million people to amass 20 trillion floating
point operations per second of CPU power to search for messages from outer
space.

What will happen when billions of people carry devices that are thousands
of times more powerful than today's PCs, linked at speeds thousands of
times faster than today's broadband connections, perhaps with distributed
reputation systems that enable us to find people with whom we have some
common cause -- on the fly, in the real world? That's the essential
question of smart mobs. The flocking teenagers, the Philippine
demonstrators, the Napster and SETI@home and eBay crowds -- they are only
the first outbreaks. After all, the PC I used when I first joined the Well
in 1985 had 640K RAM and communicated at 1200 baud. Now, fifteen years
later, I can access the Well from a handheld device (I use a Treo 300)
that is a thousand times more powerful, and a fifth the price. And the
speed is probably a thousand times faster.

This is not to say that smart mobs are wise mobs. Not all groups who use
new technologies to organize collective action have socially beneficial
ends in mind. Criminals, totalitarian governments, spammers, will all be
able to take advantage of new capabilities -- just as the first to take
advantage of tribes, nation-states, markets, networks included the
malevolent as well as the cooperative.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#5 of 82: virtual community or butter? (bumbaugh) Thu 21 Nov 2002 (02:33 PM)

One aspect of the historical arc you're describing, Howard, is the
diminishing importance of geography or physical proximity in organizing
human affairs (or collective action, at any rate). Once upon a time,
our mates were limited to our mates (and offspring and forebears).
Spoken language made coordination and a host of personal relationships
feasible with others near enough to speak with. As communications
technologies developed, larger groups could work together across
distances.

Two important constraints were (1) a time lag that limited the pace of
activity and (2) central control over the technology (early on a
matter of limiting literacy, later owning the press or antenna) that
could try to limit who communicated and what.

PCs and the Net have made a serious dent in the second (setting aside
digital divide issues for the moment, but knowing we'll get back to
them): everyone's a publisher now. (I remember you made the point
forcefully in *The Virtual Community* that it was important to preserve
the ability to communicate "upstream" on the Net for that value to
flourish.)

PCs and the Net have surely altered the first radically, as well,
checked to a degree by the need to be at a jack in the wall to be
online.

But the new technologies you're describing are faster and nimbler. And
they travel with us. So they allow coordination with arbitrary people
wherever they are (without even having to meet them). They allow
coordinating right past other people who are physically near (as in
your Finnish teens example).

That change of pace and transformation of geography (replaced, I
guess, by various network topographies and other relationships?) does
seem profound. It would be surprising if our existing social norms and
habits regarding privacy, trust, and so on, proved to be easily applied
right out of the gate for dealing with this new arena.

If these technologies stand to empower some people (or The People),
that must threaten some other people. That was obviously true about
literacy and printing, and almost everyone reading Inkwell will be
familiar with the last decade of political wars over the Internet.

Are we on the brink of the greatest power struggle since the discovery
of fire?

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#6 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Thu 21 Nov 2002 (02:35 PM)

One other element regarding my contention that we are at the beginning of
a revolutionary wave of change: Mobile telephones, which are quickly
morphing into portable Internet terminals with significant and growing
onboard computation power, are used by people who have not had access to
PCs and the Net, and are used in parts of our lives that computation on
online communication have not reached.

One in eight people in Botswana have mobile telephones.
Six weeks ago, in Sao Paolo, I saw barefoot people in the slums talking on
their mobile telephones.
Somali traders of the coast of Dubai make deals via telephoneIn rural
Bangladesh, the mobile telephone has been introduced via payshops run by
local women -- and the shops have become new social centers.

The PC (except for laptops) and the Internet have been confined to
desktops. Now we carry computation and online communication into the
streets, automobiles, trains -- places where computing and instant global
communications were not available before.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#7 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Thu 21 Nov 2002 (02:45 PM)

(Bruce slipped while I was adding that last post)

Part of Smart Mobs examines the relationship between knowledge,
communication and power -- most famously pioneered by Foucault -- and the
power struggles that cut through the many technological and sociological
issues raised by smart mobs. Central power versus decentralized power is
an ongoing arms raised. The Internet is now the site of control struggles:
Cable companies are merging, resisting wireless rebroadcast of bandwidth,
petitioning for the right to discriminate against content from competing
providers. Control over the root domain servers could grant what had
previously been considered technically impossible -- control of the Net.
The Hollings bill, the DMCA, trusted computing initiatives purport to be
about intellectual property, but they are most centrally about control of
innovation -- will a 19 year old dropout be able to shape the new medium
and become the richest person in the world, will a Swiss physicist be able
to reconfigure the entire network because he gives away an idea, or will
the innovators of tomorrow have to be employees of Sony, Disney, or
AOL-Time-Warner? The anti-WTO protestors in Seattle won that battle in
part through the use of smart mob technologies; not too long after, the G8
summit was held in a remote part of Canada, and wireless communications
were blocked locally. Will top-down schemes like 3G bring wireless
broadband to the masses, or will it grow fromt he ground up via Wi-Fi
networks? Will the FCC continue to favor today's telcos and broadcasters
and regulate spectrum according to the technological regimes of the 1920s,
or will Wi-Fi, cognitive radio, ultra-wideband technologies force a
radical restructuring of the way spectrum is regulated? There are power
struggles between political power holders and the disenfranchised, between
existing business models and disruptive innovations, between content
aggregators are consumers. It wouldn't be wise to be too optimistic.
Unless citizens gain a great deal more knowledge, and wield a great deal
more influence than we wield today, it doesn't take a prophet to predict
that the powers that be will win these battles. I wrote this book not
because I believed that disseminating knowledge of these struggles will
guarantee a victory for liberty and for tomorrow's entrepreneurs and new
technologies, but because I am convinced that without widespread knowledge
of the stakes and the players, entrenched interests will certainly win.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#8 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Thu 21 Nov 2002 (02:46 PM)

(I meant "arms race" instead of "arms raised" -- interesting Freudian
slip).

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#9 of 82: virtual community or butter? (bumbaugh) Thu 21 Nov 2002 (02:59 PM)

Well, that's a great image, anyway.
. .
\o/
|
/ \

Can you say a little more about one of the examples in there? Maybe
one of the more hopeful scenarios for now--cognitive radio or WiFi
networks? What are they, how do they stand to help the causes of
liberty and entrepreneurship?

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#10 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Thu 21 Nov 2002 (03:13 PM)

Our crusty old Wellite, Dave, is in the thick of the battle over spectrum
regulation.

Disclaimer: I think I do a pretty good job at perceiving broad patterns,
but I make no claim to technical expertise. Perhaps a less polite way of
describing me would be "ten miles wide and a quarter of an inch deep."

The FCC was set up to regulate the spectrum on behalf of its owners -- the
citizens. It happened in the wake of the Titanic disaster, where
"interference" was an issue. Radio waves don't physically interfere with
each other -- they pass through each other. But the radios of the 1920s
were "dumb" insofar as they lacked the ability to discriminate between
signals from nearby broadcasters on the same frequencies. So the regime we
now know emerged -- broadcasters are licensed to broadcast in a particular
geographic area in a particular frequency band. For the most part,
licenses to chunks of spectrum are auctioned, and the winner of the
auction "owns" that piece of spectrum. We have seen in recent years that
the owners of broadcast licenses have amassed considerable wealth, and
that those owners have consolidated ownership in a smaller and smaller
number of more and more wealthy entities. And of course, political power
goes along with that wealth. These aren't widget-manufacturing industries.
These are enterprises that influence what people perceive and believe to
be happening in the world.

Recently, different new radio technologies have emerged. Cognitive radios
are "smarter" in that they have the capability to discriminate among
competing broadcasters. Software-defined radio makes it possible for
devices to choose the frequency and modulation scheme that is most
efficient for the circumstances. Ultra-wideband radio doesn't use one
slice of spectrum, but sends out ultra-short pulses over all frequencies.
It is possible now to think of "intelligent" broadcast and reception
devices that use the spectrum in a way similar to the way routers use the
Internet: devices can listen, and if a chunk of spectrum isn't being used
by another device for an interval (millionths or billionths of seconds),
the device can broadcast on that frequency; reception devices are smart
enough to hop around and put the digital broadcasts together, roughly
similar to the way packets assemble themselves as they find their way
through the Internet. Again, let me caution that there are probably many
people who read this who can point out gross technical generalizations and
slight inaccuracies in this description. The point, however, is that
spectrum no longer has to be regulated the way it used to be. Politically,
however, those interests that benefitted from the traditional regime have
the ear and pocketbooks of rulemakers, whether they are regulators or
legislators. Yochai Benkler at Yale has proposed an "open spectrum"
regime, and Lawrence Lessig has discussed a mixed regime, in which parts
of the spectrum continue to be owned and sold the way they have been, but
other parts are opened to be treated as a commons.

Now the notion of a commons extends beyond spectrum. Indeed, part of Smart
Mobs is about the way biologists, sociologists, economists,
mathematicians, political scientists have begun to converge on issues of
collective action, problems of commons, the evolution and maintenance of
cooperation.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#11 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Thu 21 Nov 2002 (03:37 PM)

As for Wi-Fi, as I note in the book, there are some problems with scaling
-- "interference" problems among them. But the interesting part is that
you can put a $100 box on your cable modem or DSL line and broadcast
broadband Internet access in a sphere of a couple hundred feet to a couple
hundred yards. If you use inexpensive directional antennae (most
notoriously constructed from Pringles cans), it is possible to extend that
range to several miles. Anyone with a $100 (and dropping) card in their
laptop can tap into that bandwidth. You can go to Bryant Park or
Washington Square Park or a dozen other locations in New York City and
similar "hotspots" in other cities around the world and tap into WiFi
access points that have been deliberately or inadvertently left open.

The community wireless movement combines the many to many publishing
capabilities of the web with Wi-Fi: put up an access point, send someone
an email, and it appears on a website map. Some parties, notably certain
cable providers, don't like that at all. To them, it is theft, and breach
of contract. NYC Wireless legallyprovides bandwidth in public places in
NYC because they can find upstream ISPs that are happy to give them a
contract that permits bandwidth sharing.

An economic case can be made that WiFi access could be provided
cost-effectively as a municipal utility. It's certainly useful, and
definitely orders of magnitude less expensive to provide than water or
power or sewage. Dave Hughes has been selling the Welsh parliament on a
scheme to blanket the entire country with WiFi access.

If you would like to attract young, entrepreneurial, culturally
interesting people to your part of a city, one way to do it would be to
put up WiFi hotspots, and they will begin congregating. This is a larger
issue -- cellphones and wireless Net access are changing the way people
use cities. I get into this at slightly greater length in the book.

Some will argue that there are flaws and inefficiencies to WiFi, and so
far, it operates in only a small slice of spectrum allowed for unlicensed
operation. But as Larry Lessig says, the 1200 baud modem wasn't an
efficient means of accessing the Internet, but it was a catalyst and a
bridge to applications and innovations that helped create the broadband
Web as we know it.

So far, for the most part, WiFi has been a grassroots phenomenon driven by
amateurs and enthusiasts. However, telcos in Japan and Korea are getting
into it in a big way, as a supplement to or substitute for more costly 3G
infrastructure. And here in the US, ATT and Intel are teaming up to
provide tens of thusands of hotspots. Interestingly, Larry Brilliant,
cofounder of the Well, is deeply involved in that.

All I can say is that my world changed when I could sit and write barefoot
in my backyard (as I have been doing since the first PowerBook) and not
have to trot into the house for Net access.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#12 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Thu 21 Nov 2002 (04:09 PM)

Here's an interesting back-of-the-envelope speculation.

Some people think the PC took off in the marketplace when the price
dropped down to around the average monthly salary of the American middle
class consumer -- around $2000/month.

The average monthly income of the world is around $40.

Moore'slaw is going to drive the price of today's handheld PC -- itself
around 1000 times more powerful than the first PCs of 20 years ago -- to
around $40 in about 6-7 years. And that included broadband wireless
capabilities.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#13 of 82: Dave Hughes (dave) Thu 21 Nov 2002 (10:27 PM)

bumbagh says in 3 "...why is this revolutionary, rather than just more
of the same.'

Forget the digital technology. Start with the human communicative
technology that has been with us for millions of years. The voice,
produced in the throat, is technology. Hearing, through ear-drums
is technolgy.

With those two only, humans could 'communicate' going from grunts
to words. But only within limited ranges - a few dozen feet, except
for shouts. So human 'groups' stood, sat, lay in close proximity
to each other, and organized themselves.

Sight is technology. And real time. And while one can 'see' far,
one must be pretty close to 'see' detail. And signalling came
out of that. From hand waving to semaphore flags or smoke signals.

All technology beyond what animals did except in the most primitive
forms.

Then drawings were made on cave walls. Pictures. Followed by symbols.
Fixed on walls or rocks.

So while groups of people moved (while hunting, for example) they
took, thanks to the technology of memory, images, sounds, ideas
to other groups.

But it wasn't until symbols - early languages - were put on either
practical pots, or carryable tablets - that ideas could move
between groups, independent of who was carrying them.

So cultures arose, limited and circumscribed by natural boundaries
of course, but kept alive and evolving because of human forms
of 'communications.'

Then came light paper, writing surfaces, making carrying easier. And
scribes painfully duplicating the important ones in small numbers.

Then of course, the printing press. Lots of copies, widely
distributed.

All 'technology.'

And then voice over a wire - a telephone. Two way, interactive, but
perishable. Then came teletype - printed words over wires. Opening
when coupled with mass printing, whose new ways people 'related'
to each other in local groups, neighborhoods, towns, cultures,
nations.

Then came radio and television. Essentially ONE WAY broadcast
'communications.' From the center out. The edges being passive
consumers of what communications brought.

Then came personal computers, permitting individuals to write
and locally publish. Followed by modems.

But THEN the erstwhile 'consumer' could become (1) a producer
(2) organize with others at a great distance, (3) become part
of 'other' than their primary, and/or local 'group.' Even
many groups. And with the speed, low cost and ease of being,
even only for a few minutes, part of a scattered 'group' which
does not recquire 'real time', but 'asynchronous' dialogue, with
this 166 is, individuals could become intimate parts of large
numbers of groups. Groups which cut across local physical lines,
town lines, state/regional lines, national lines - and someday
galactic lines.

BUT, almost ALL communciations by modem, PC, to/from others was
a commercial activity. Telephone and ISP 'services.'

Then came the kind of unlicensed, spread spectrum, secure,
digital, wireless, communications in which the only key
cost was the price of ones wireless device - radio - attached
to a pc, a laptop, a mobile pda.

i.e. between two points, which can be 1, 10, 50, 75 miles apart
from each other, the 'communications' AND in voice, sound,
written, image, or running video form, as cheaply as when
the first humans 'talked' to each other!

And linking these local 'last mile free' links capable of - soon
now - communicating what is in one mind to that of another
with bandwidth as wide as the human brain can function with
communciating with another, THAT I propose is Revolutionary.

Mind to Mind communications. Limited NOT by the speed, cost,
or bandwidth of the devices - wired, wireless, processor -
but by the natural limitations of the mind to concentrate
on the act of communications with another mind.

So THEN groups will begin to function very differently.

My goal, as Howard may recall, 23 years ago, was, and still is,
to connect up all 6 billion minds on this planet to each other.
We have the technology, can afford the scale.

Will that be good? How the hell would I know. It would be,
in human organizational terms, DIFFERENT, from all that went
before.

I think its an experiment worth trying.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#14 of 82: Dave Hughes (dave) Thu 21 Nov 2002 (11:26 PM)

Howard, in #11 above, notes "Dave Hughes has been selling the Welsh
parliament on a scheme to blanket the entire county with WiFi access"

Not exactly. I started by showing Welsh people in local Pubs how
they could connect up themselves broadband to the Internet,
wirelessly, from every farmhouse. The word spread - from the bottom
up. Welsh BBC (SC4) came to film me in Colorado. The word spread
further. Always built on the boast I made in a tiny pub on New Years
Eve 1997 in a tiny pub, in a tiny village (Cymduad) one pub, one
chapel, one inn that 'I could connect up every farmhouse in Wales
to the Internet, broadband, bypassing hated British Telecom, cheaply,
by turning every Welsh pub into a wireless ISP.'

After the Welsh National Assembly (their parliament) heard British
Telecom tell the English Parliment, that unless the government
subsidized them with millions of pounds, there was no way theu
could bring broadband to rural England (including Wales, of course)
until 2022. So the Welsh National Assembly, in effect said "To hell
with that. Where is that crazy American"

So they paid for me to come over there, make 12 presentations in 5
days, with dinners, before government, geeks, university aundiences,
civic leaders, south to north. And do a 'model' valley wirelessly.

And the PEOPLE demanded that the Assembly get them wireless. I only
had to convince the 2d Minister one on one that I knew what I was
talking about - technologically, economically, regulatorily (British
and European Union Radiocomms) - AND CULTURALLY, before he popped
for 100 million pounds for Broadband for Wales, with a big component
of linked satellite-wireless, and a few bones thrown to BT for ADSL.

I guess I organized a smart mob. I intentionally worked from the
bottom up, not top down. And I drew on all my limited, but historical,
knowledge of Welsh culture, derived from my desultory survery of
its history through the 600 years I can trace my ancestory, (as much,
since 1996 via the soc.culture.wales newsgroup as any other way.

So I said 'You Welsh like your 'communities.' And you like to do things
by 'councils.' So what is the old Welsh word for 'community?' F-r-o
fro. And how many communities are there with a radius of no more than
3 miles (a nice wireless distance). 600, they calculated.

'Good, I said. We shall have e-Fro's. 600 e-fros, each one organized
into a non-profit e-fro Council, which shall own the server, the
base radio, and be legally responsible for the upstream link. And
the SERVER at the center of each community, shall reflect the unique
culture (in Welsh and English or whatever) of THAT one e-fro community.

And you can then relate to each other, wirelessly, across the community
go out to the Internet, and grow on your server what you want the
rest of the world to see and know a about you. And sell or give to
the world what you have, or are. Your music, your stories, your
bardic traditions, your writings, your history, your castles, your
sheep, your nurse's shawls, and slate wall hangings. And your
Welsh language.

Well, it appears to have hit a deep nerve midst the Welsh people.
For I started with their culture, their being, and only used wireless
and technology to express it, to make it valuable to others.

Although I must admit here, that even though I am 4th generation
American, from 13 generations of Welsh on my grandfathers side (Dafydd
ap Hugh, 1585), and about 17 generations on my grandmothers side
(Owen Tudor, 1485) I share with them the feeling of being oppressed
by the haughty English. So with malice aforthought am seeing whether
'Electronic Wales' can become independent of England. So smart
mobbery may turn out to be a bit more than that in the long run.

(You can see the e-fro formal program at www.e-fro.cd, text, stills,
and videos on a couple of my speeches.)

So, Howard, a slight course correction to my electronic activism in
Wales. I am only doing what the Welsh people say they want to do -
get connected, become prosperous, retain their culture.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#15 of 82: virtual community or butter? (bumbaugh) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (08:09 AM)

Dave, thanks for joining us! Great recap of the history of technology.

Dewayne Hendricks gave a talk at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy,
called, "Are the Tools the Rules? The Future of the Digital Commons,"
on wireless spread spectrum and cognitive radios. We talked about it in
inkwell.vue topic 146, "On the Scene: CFP 2002"
http://engaged.well.com/engaged.cgi?c=inkwell.vue&f=0&t=146&q=101-113

One thing that's gone on, putting together Howard's post and Dave's
second one, is that governments have treated spectrum as a scarce
resource. But it doesn't have to be, right? Or not so scarce, at any
rate. Which means that the current situation of consolidation of power
over telecommunications in the hands of the few is historical artifact
rather than law of nature.

We're envisioning truly democratic -- even populist -- telecom policy
here.

But that threatens entrenched Powers That Be. And as a commons brings
with it a lot of problems about coordination and collective action. To
unbelievably mind-boggling extent if we're looking at this as a truly
global phenomenon by the end of the decade.

So, I find myself looking for examples that might show how we
coordinate activities using these means.

How, for example, are rules set for the Welsh e-Fro councils and how
are the councils coordinated? Do they translate cross-culturally?

How does a social network like eBay or Slashdot (or the Well)
facilitate cooperation and distributed collective action? What can
other networks learn from them?

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#16 of 82: Dave Hughes (dave) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (08:39 AM)

I have to be gone most of the day, so won't check back here until
evening.

I suppose, in sum, I have always tried to fit Technolgy to Cultures,
and not Cultures to Technology.

Knowing full well that the spread of technologies, such as grass roots,
powerful, but affordable wireless communications devices, will itself
'change' over time, cultures. Whether for good or ill remains to be
seen. One of my sons reminds me of the Tower of Babble. Another of
the Time Sinks. Another of the Coursening of Discourse, online -
the flaming, the vulgarity.

And sometimes I wonder whether I *really* want to know what's in
other's minds. Often a very ugly scene. That perhaps I, like lots
of people, would prefer the 'myths' of others 'communicated' by
their carefully groomed dress, speech, appearance, manners. The
historical way humans have evaluated each other.

And there is another, recent, phenomonon. Noted by Alvin Toffler
in Future Shock a good 30 years ago. Accelerating change. Which
technology merely speeds up. And creates even more seperation
even within age groupings from otherwise cohesive local communities.

Which permits individuals to 'live' physically, on one place, and
interrelate on a face to face basis with others locally, while
'living' in their minds, thanks to interactive telecom, with one
or more physically distant, and even totally scattered, 'groups.'
Mobs?

Is that an absolute good? Or does the human psyche 'need' the
reinforcing attributes of 'place?'

I have been online a long time. 22 years at least, every day to
one extent or another. I have read (give or take 10%) over
500 million words online. And written nearly 30 million words
online (a reporter having trouble understanding me, once helped
me work out the numbers). I've been in many 'virtual gatherings'
all over the world.

But I also spent 10 years bringing a run down old Victorian brick
neighborhood back from the dead, and my very high tech offices
with all my advanced wireless devices, is in a brick building
in my small-scale (3 blocks long) Old Colorado City neighborhood.
Which has fostered, as I thought it would, a 'high tech, high touch'
place, which balms my soul while my mind has to starwars itself
across cold space with ultra-modern design (ergonomically) tools.

And my small company, which is in one of those buildings, and has
been for 18 years - same leased space - is a virtual company.
Nobody is IN the office daily, even though I live only 2 short
blocks from it. Our staff is scattered from Dallas to Richmond.

So I am not one to embrace, willy nilly, the Great Promises
of ubiquitous, global, low cost or even free, wireless aided
connectivity. Without putting it all in the context of human
culture and psychic needs - which have not been erased by
technological tools. Evolutionarily, eventually? Maybe. But
802.11b - 11mbps to 802.11a - 56mbps took less time than it
took my fingernails to grow to where I needed to clip them.

And every smart mob may be light years from the next one,
in terms of personal, group, human, social, ethical, legal,
political, values.

Gotta stop now and walk to my office. A rare thing, as I work
best right here at T-1 speed TO and THROUGH my office,
wirelessly, 902-928mhz (not 802.11b, which wouldn't punch
through the trees and brick building between my home and my
office).

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#17 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (09:40 AM)

Economists have told me that eBay is a market that shouldn't exist because
the buyers and sellers, separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, who
have never met and may never meet and might never engage in another
transaction, each take the risk that the first mover will get stiffed --
the person who sends the check won't get the merchandise (or it will prove
to be less valuable than the seller claimed, or in worse condition) or the
person who sends the goods won't get paid. A classic Prisoner's Dilemma,
and an example of a collective action dilemma (rational self interest can
lead to collective disaster). A very simple reputation system on eBay
enables a multibillion dollar market to exist where none had -- or could
-- exist before. There are ways to game eBay's reputation system, and ways
to guard against gaming -- another classic arms race.

Slashdot's moderation and metamoderation system is another reputation
system that attempts to solve a problem inherent in online discourse --
vandals, trolls, and idiots can drive down the signal to noise ratio,
discourage people who have something valuable to say, and diminish the
value of the forum. Without compromising the freedom of any moron with a
modem to spew, Slashdot makes it possible to filter out the noise. Again,
the system is far from perfect, and while it makes it possible to tune out
the noise, it doesn't necessarily raise the level of the discourse, it
does balance freedom of speech versus the limited attention of
discriminating readers.

Will reputation systems evolve? Can they be applied to mobile, peer to
peer communications and transaction systems? I devote a chapter to the
question.

BTW, there are a lot of resources at -- I've
posted the bibliography, searchable by keyword and by chapter, and blogged
references are archived by category. If you are interested in the state of
reputation systems, you can start with the references there.

Wellite Fen LaBalme has been working for years to develop open-source
reputation systems: Enchancing the Internet with Reputations, for example:

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#18 of 82: virtual community or butter? (bumbaugh) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (10:25 AM)

The focus on reputation systems is really important. One of the things that
Axelrod's work showed was that iterative games are significantly different
from one-off games. Various ugly strategies might be successful in single-
round games but fail terribly when the game is repeated.

eBay, /., and the Well take various approaches to making participants
identifiable from one encounter to the next, but most transactions at ebay,
say, don't depend on any ongoing relationship between the parties.
Reputation systems kind of consolidate series of transactions between
disparate parties into a metric that does the work of iteration in Axelrod's
games. So, even if I don't expect to do a deal with you again, I still have
to deal with the consequences of doing you wrong.

The eBay and Slashdot reputation systems are both top down -- they're
features of the code developed centrally. Are there bottom-up reputation
systems we should pay attention to? How are they different?

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#19 of 82: Christian Crumlish (xian) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (10:26 AM)

just an etymological aside: isn't the word mob itself derived from
"mobile" or its Latin cognate, denoting a moving crowd of people?

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#20 of 82: virtual community or butter? (bumbaugh) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (10:31 AM)

Howdy, ! welcome to the party.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#21 of 82: Christian Crumlish (xian) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (10:41 AM)

happy to be here! i think i have my own inkwell thingy starting today
but i don't see it yet, and this is as copasetic a place to hang out on
the Well right now as i can imagine.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#22 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (12:10 PM)

I didn't know that, Christian! I appreciate the opportunity to learn.
Thanks.

Some interesting preliminary work has been done on distributed reputation
systems by a group at the University of Oregon in Eugene: Disseminating
Trust Information in Wearable Communities

and there's more in the way of bibliographic citations at:

This whole issue is a critical uncertainty: Moore's Law, Metcalfe's Law,
and Reed's Law give me confidence that we will see very large numbers of
computationally powerful, mobile, wirelessly-linked devices over the next
ten years. It is less clear to me that reputation systems will evolve to
become a useful kind of "glue" that will enable the people who carry and
use these devices to assemble carpools, marketplaces, and other social
networks. Even though it's early, and the sources I've cited indicate that
economists and computer scientists are actively studying online reputation
systems, I see at least one problem: It's easier to get a bad rep --
fairly or unfairly -- than to redeem that bad reputation. Ask anyone whose
credit rating has been dinged through identity theft or error. And where
is the possibility of redemption -- a formerly bad actor reforms? Clearly,
these questions must involve both social and technical disciplines.

I've tried to make the book and blog a good resource for others in
different disciplines who are interested in pursuing these questions, and
who need to be aware of what others are doing. Smart mob theory, but its
nature, must be interdisciplinary.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#23 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (12:16 PM)

Another important aspect of reputation systems is that truly useful and
widescale systems are going to have to use some kind of implicit metric:
only geeks tweak preferences. However, as Marc Smith has shown with
Netscan , it is possible to do a
lot with implicit measures. As Smith says: "Don't watch what people say --
watch what they do."

For example, Boeing has close to 80,000 employees in the Seattle area.
They pay the city a lot of money (as does Microsoft) for the wear and tear
on transportation systems that this headcount represents: there is an
incentive for ridesharing. A simple reputation system might make it
possible with technology that exists today (mobile, location-aware
devices) to say to your telephone: "I am leaving my house right now and
driving to my office. Who along my exact route is looking for a ride right
now -- and has a reputation for being trustworthy and reasonably
interesting to ride with?" A simple example: People whose riders tend to
ride with them once and once only are probably less valuable than people
whose riders repeat; conversely, riders who are offered repeat rides by
one or more drivers are probably more valuable than those who tend to ride
once with one or more drivers. This is a simple example of a simple
application that might make a big difference.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#24 of 82: virtual community or butter? (bumbaugh) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (12:22 PM)

You give a good example of a watch-what-people-do substitute for a
metric in 's approach to finding the auction items he wants.
I enjoyed that one.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#25 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (12:35 PM)

Interviewing Cory, and subsequently becoming addicted to bOINGbOING, was
one of the high points of the research phase. Wellites and
are definitely colorful characters, if not heroes, of the book.

Cory is epigrammatic in a way that book authors love: His description of
Napster's solution to the collective action dilemma is classic: "Sheep
that shit grass." The architecture of Napster, he pointed out, makes it
easy for people to provision the same resource they consume: While you are
searching other people's MP3 directories for music to plunder, the music
you have plundered is, by default, exposed to all the other Napster users
who are looking for music to plunder. This situation has been called by
Dan Bricklin (co-inventor of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet),
"the cornucopia of the commons."

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#26 of 82: Life in the big (doctorow) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (12:37 PM)

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#27 of 82: Christian Crumlish (xian) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (12:51 PM)

cory for president! (jerod pore for veep?)

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#28 of 82: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (01:12 PM)

If Cory was president, we wouldn't *need* veep. We'd have a prez who could be
in all places at once!

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#29 of 82: Martha Soukup (soukup) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (01:30 PM)

You're going to have to amend the Constitution to account for his age and
Canadianness.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#30 of 82: "Et toi" is French, and so you're a crack muffin. (madman) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (02:32 PM)

No, we'd just need to assimilate Canada.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#31 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (02:53 PM)

The Well: Land O Drift

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#32 of 82: Gail Williams (gail) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (03:14 PM)

This mob is too smart for itself!

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#33 of 82: virtual community or butter? (bumbaugh) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (03:33 PM)

Howard (or Cory or Dave or Gail or any of the rest of you), what
brings about thos cornucopia architectures, as opposed to ones that let
The Big Guy dole things out under conditions of artificial scarcity?
Obviously, part of this is political and part is technical, but how do
we encourage political processes and technological developments that
favor the one rather than 'tother?

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#34 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (03:51 PM)

That's a big question and maybe beyond me, but Phred recently turned me
onto a paper by Yochai Benkler, about the economics of open source, in
which he talked about situations in which peer-organized production
systems are more efficient than hierarchically-organized production
systems. Phred also gave me a book, "Ruling The Root," which I've just
started, which seems to get into the relative advantages of markets,
hierarchies, and networks. Perhaps it might be best to inquire about what
the right questions are before leaping at answers. I'll offer a couple,
and encourage others to offer others -- or provide answers, if you have
them:

1. What are the conditions necessary to provision a resource? For
example, copyright was originally intended to provide a temporary monopoly
on the profit from an invention or work of art -- as an incentive to
production.

2. What are the conditions necessary to prevent consumption from
depleting a resource?

3. What are the most effective conditions for producing a good?

There is a whole economy and ecology of public goods. I only dipped into
it. I'm continuing to read about these issues.

In regard to spectrum, it looks as if, in regard to question #3, that
treating more of the spectrum as a commons, and regulating broadcast
devices so they play nice with each other, could create efficiencies that
would lead to a multiplication of broadcasters. This seems an obvious
advantage. Why create an artificial scarcity of a resource that can lead
to innovation, education, and discourse?

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#35 of 82: excessively heterosexual (saiyuk) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (11:30 PM)

billy dee williams: land o calrissian.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#36 of 82: William H. Dailey (whdailey) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (11:43 PM)

Mr. Rheingold might be interested in the technology presented at:

http://www.cheniere.org

It offers the possibility of instant communication for one thing. A
starship could communicate in real time.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#37 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Sat 23 Nov 2002 (08:59 AM)

A smart mob is not necessarily a wise mob: The role of texting in the
Nigerian riots:

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#38 of 82: a man, a plan, and a parking ticket (clm) Sat 23 Nov 2002 (09:11 AM)

Yep. Timely example.

I'm interested in the trade-off between privacy and cooperation
that you mention in the book.

What is your current thinking about how the relationship between
these two might change as smart mob technologies evolve?

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#39 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Sat 23 Nov 2002 (09:48 AM)

Of course, many other forces -- like the zeal of US law enforcement and
intelligence agencies to prevent terrorism by tracking every breath of
every citizen -- are arrayed against privacy. And citizens who would like
legislators to offer minimal privacy protections -- for example, to
require financial institutions to offer opt-in instead of opt-out plans
for sharing intimate details of what we buy and when and where -- seem to
be outgunned by lobbyists. At least that has been the case in California.

Technological development on many fronts seems to be mounting an
unstoppable threat to what we now know as privacy. If you live in a major
urban center and get out much, your face is captured by 200 cameras on an
average day. Software for matching your face against databases of suspects
or dissidents is in its early stages, but who can doubt that it will
improve? The movie "Enemy of the State" seems already possible on both the
technical and political levels.

Maybe Scott Mcnealy was right: "Privacy? We have no privacy. Get over it."

I'm not optimistic about this aspect.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#40 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Sat 23 Nov 2002 (09:50 AM)

There's encryption. Citizens do have a (still, for the time being) legal
technical means of protecting the privacy of communications. But
collective action is required. If a few individuals use encryption, we
identify ourselves as potential suspects. We need millions to use
encryption. Are these going to be the same people who can't figure out how
to change the clock display on our VCRs?

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#41 of 82: a man, a plan, and a parking ticket (clm) Sat 23 Nov 2002 (10:44 AM)

I was just at a conference where, during a session on privacy,
someone in the audience suggested that there were over 70,000
cases of identity theft in the US last year. That seems like a
big number. (So maybe it wasn't really Scott who said that!)

I wonder if a serious loss of privacy might eventually generate
a counter force that might cause the pendulum to swing back again.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#42 of 82: Chris (cooljazz) Sat 23 Nov 2002 (10:48 AM)

Hi Howard. I'm looking forward to reading the book. At the risk of a
bit of drift, you mentioned economists "...economists,
mathematicians, political scientists have begun to converge on issues
of collective action, problems of commons, the evolution and
maintenance of cooperation...." and "...Economists have told me that
eBay is a market that shouldn't exist ..."

Since this topic started (and having at one time studied Economics)
the conversation here has inspired me to do a bit of my own research.
The recent Nobel Prize was awarded to an economist/psychologist pair
who are at the forefront of (imho) a "Scientific Revolution" more
commonly called Behavioral and Experimental Economics. I think much in
this field must be germane to your observations and study of Smart
Mobs.

The field involves the study of some of the most cherished
assumptions of economics "homo economicus" that rational selfish
creature presumed to be the decision maker throughout economics. One
of the award statements was "..for having integrated insights from
psychological research into economic science, especially concerning
human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty..."

In a sense Behavioral Economics studies how individuals are making
decisions, (based on emotions and whatever else governs and motivates
individual) especially when the decisions aren't "rational". (And
there are actual experiments as well).

Issues that you mention above "ride sharing" <#24> and "public goods"
have been studied and desribed with the seemingly tongue in cheek
title of "Anomalies". Anomalies - means only that there is a
phenomenon which can't be accounted for by the "assumptions of
rationality".

The experiments try to determine why people actually cooperate (when
the "rational behavior" would be to follow ones "self interest" or
"defect" from the public interest)

I assume its only a matter of time before the "natural experiment"
implied by the smart mobs use of commmunications devices is studied
more formally - if I find something sooon on that I'll let you know.
(I'm sure there's a dissertation on the topic waiting out there for
someone :) )

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#43 of 82: Life in the big (doctorow) Sat 23 Nov 2002 (12:05 PM)

166: "Privacy? We have no privacy. Get over it."

That's a tad techno-deterministic for me. If we live in a civil society, we
can make laws that govern how and where we may be surveilled.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#44 of 82: Gail Williams (gail) Sat 23 Nov 2002 (12:41 PM)

That touches on a deeper question for me. The word "mob" implies something
other than civil society. Is it possible to create technology that could
make civil society impossible? Do we collectively want civil society,
expecially when we are able to act without planning and reality-checking?

Over in the WELL's town square, the conference, an observant user
posted that he had heard a report on NPR that the Nigerian Miss World riots
were orchestrated by instant messages ordered by Islamic leaders.

I did a quick search on Google News and found a newer instance: The
newspaper that published the blasphemy is now threatened with a boycott
organized in part by text messages to mobile phones.

> Meanwhile, all attention is now focused on the outcome of today's Friday
> sermon by major Islamic scholars in Kano. Already, anti-ThisDay messages
> are being flashed through the GSM message network. Part of the messages
> sent by various unpublished numbers reads "boycott ThisDay. Don't buy,
> and don't advertise if you love Allah and Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)."

http://allafrica.com/stories/200211220171.html

This is not pure anarchic group think, but something which sounds more
like mob with a capital M, with powerful leadership.

I guess it's debatable whether it is an attempt to make society even more
civil, according to one set of values, but it is an eye-opener.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#45 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Sat 23 Nov 2002 (01:10 PM)

Thanks, Chris. From what I understand of the Nobel-winning economist's
ideas, one key factor is that people tend to overestimate risk when making
decisions. In regard to cooperation, a couple of the factors that tend to
override cold rational decision-making are reputation (I cite some
interesting work on "costly signalling") and...well, actually, I think
reputation is the main one. In costly signalling, humans and other
creatures expend energy and take risks that are not rational if they can
signal that they are good candidates for trading partners or mates --
reputation.

Cory, the problem in California, which I somewhat cynically extrapolate,
is that most polls indicate that people would like a law that simply
requires our banks to ask us to opt in before they tell thousands of their
sister institutions how much liquor, cholesterol, condoms, and Prozac we
buy. However, as you probably know, the California legislature has failed
three times to pass such a law. Civil society is diffuse and not
well-funded; lobbyists are concentrated on their special issues, and have
lots of what legislators want -- money to buy TV ads. I don't know the
solution in terms of politics. It seems that technical solutions might be
better, but as I said, the problem is getting a sufficient number of
people to be aware of the solutions, and to use them. Do you encrypt all
your communications and pass out your public key? I don't, because I had
some problems getting PGP to work with Mac and Eudora a few years ago --
problems that are probably a result of my technical deficiency. And
compared to most citizens, I'm an arch-geek.

Gail, the Nigerian mob is the one I pointed to on the Smartmobs blog this
morning, and I think I posted a link above. In the opening pages of the
book, I made it clear that technologies of cooperation can help criminals
and terrorists as well as others. Wasn't that true of the printing press
and the telephone?

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#46 of 82: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Sat 23 Nov 2002 (01:47 PM)

Howard, is the Benkler essay you mentioned called "Coases Penguin, or, Linux
and the Nature of the Firm"? Just want to be sure I've got the right one.

http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.PDF

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#47 of 82: Marla Hammond (marlah) Sat 23 Nov 2002 (01:47 PM)

Hello all - catching up on the topic.

In some of these cases, I think we have to ask: Would this event have
happened even without the new technology that was involved?

The American Revolution was organized with Minute Men who relayed
messages as quickly as possible in the time they lived. "One if by land
. Two if by sea." was a powerful and fast low tech message delivery.
The social conditions of the times caused the people to find the most
effective way possible to communicate.

On the flip side, would the American Revolution have had a different
outcome if both sides could send instant text messages across the
ocean?

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#48 of 82: Gail Williams (gail) Sat 23 Nov 2002 (02:30 PM)

I missed that pointer in <37> above, Howard.

I'm asking something rather different than "can't bad guys use this," I
think. It may be unanswerable, but I'm wondering if some delay and latency
in forming mass consensus is an advantage to societies. I know there is no
clear answer, but I tend to be pro-async and some of the things I like about
not having to be simultaneous in a small group may be true about larger
groups too. Perhaps time will tell.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#49 of 82: David Gans (tnf) Sat 23 Nov 2002 (02:37 PM)

Anyone reading this who isn't a WELL member can contribute a question or com-
ment by sending email to inkwell-hosts@well.com

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#50 of 82: a man, a plan, and a parking ticket (clm) Sat 23 Nov 2002 (03:04 PM)

> not having to be simultaneous in a small group

That reminds me of another interesting part of the book: how
texting may lead to a more flexible sense of time.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#51 of 82: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Sat 23 Nov 2002 (03:17 PM)

Gail -- absolutely, when it comes to political decision-making, time for
deliberation makes for better decisions. That's why I think some proposals
for "instant electronic democracy" by enabling citizens to vote on issues
in real-time are recipes for disaster. We already see that instant polling
enables politicians to tailor their messages to the local audiences on a
day by day basis. And as we've seen from Nigeria, not all popular
demonstrations are non-violent or necessarily democratic.

However -- I keep stressing this -- I think we need to see collective
action in a broader and longer-term context than flash-crowds and mobs.
Science, money, democratic nation-states, stock markets, the web, eBay --
these are all examples of institutions that started grow only when certain
thresholds were lowered -- in terms of trust, breadth and speed of
communication, affordability of communication, and other factors.

Jon -- yes, that's the Benkler essay that Phred pointed out.

inkwell.vue 166: Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
#52 of 82: Dave Hughes (dave) Sat 23 Nov 2002 (06:38 PM)

Be careful of your terms, Howard. Electronic democracy is NOT, to be,
just the act of voting. From the git go, after I set up the Rogers Bar
BBS in Colorado Springs in 1980, in the place where democratic union
politics had always been discussed in the Republican town, I conceived
it to be a place where anyone could come on line and DISCUSS, and
DEBATE the issues, and then act as they would, individually - vote,
lobby, organize, whatever.

For to me the American political process consisted of at least three
phases - getting or distributing information, discussing and/or debating
the issues, then voting, individually.

What I felt had diminished greatly in America was the 'discussion/debate'
(outside the narrow circle of ones acquaintences) part where (1)
individuals by discussing, have to think, and by listening (reading)
what everyone else has to say, make up ones own mind (2) become even
more informed on the facts, as others bring in facts not disemminated
by media.

As one 'student' of mine (publisher of a newspaper) said "Its the
New England Town Hall over an Electronic Back Fence in Colorado"

For it (the BBS) obviously had several advantages over the 'traditional'
political processes. (1) it was convenient to the individual to come
into the discussion, just as all you do here, asynchrously, at YOUR
time schedule not the schedule of announced, face to face meetings or
debate (2) it is in the written, not oral, form - with operates at
a higher level of cognition than verbal jousting, speaking, listening
(and forgetting) (3) EVERYONE can have their say, which never can
happen in any but the smallest f-t-f meetings. AND since people can
read 10 times faster than other people can type, and at least 3 times
faster than other people can talk, there is more 'discussion' per hour
online than f-t-f. All there has to be is a light handed moderator
(the most overlooked requirement in every online discussion I have
ever been in - including on the Well - to keep order, keep the
discussion shaped to the general purpose of the online meeting, to
prevent one 'personality' from dominating everything, and even ask
questions or stimulate discussion on related topics. Freeform
discussions without moderation are usually failures, or do such
topic drift that nothing comes out of it. (4) THROUGH the discussion
it is easier for many individuals to make up their own minds. (5)
the obvious disadvantages of media - one way, often slanted, very
selective, and most recently dominated by those with the greatest
war chest, is finessed. Bypassed.

I could go on. There are many more aspects to this. The 'communications'
commons, wireless or wired, can support this kind of process. Which
can and will give rise

Now there's "privacy control" software that claims it can capture every click, email, and chat thread by those cheating husbands and wifes pretending to work late on the computer all of the time. (C'mon now. We all know what they're really up to.)

Now all we need is an influx of marriage counselors to deal with the severe situations that will undoubtedly be caused by snooping wives and husbands screwing things up on their spouses' computers while trying to install and use this crap. "You deleted my last two weeks of work because....why?"

What was even creepier is was the spam they sent me -- which I clicked on unknowingly because it looked like a privacy-related domain: http://www.us-privacy.org.

This kind of product also reinforces the backwards concept that by invading someone elses privacy, you are somehow protecting or "controlling" your own privacy. (Or in this case, your family's "security.")

Here is the text of the ad when the link inevitably goes bad (it was sent to me via spam):

http://www.us-privacy.org/index.htm

IS YOUR SPOUSE CHEATING ONLINE?

Find Out Who They Are Chatting/Emailing With All Those Hours!!!

Protect your family on the Internet
Make sure they are being safe on the Internet with Privacy-Control Monitoring Software.
Privacy-Control will hide on your computer and secretly record all instant messages, chat, email, web sites and more! Once you install it, it becomes completely invisible. Then, after the computer is used, you just enter a secret key-sequence, and you can see everything that happened!

Why wonder what is going on...? Let Privacy Control make internet safe for your family.

* Records BOTH SIDES of chat, instant messages and email.
* Records INCOMING and OUTGOING Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL and more.
* Works in total secrecy.... cannot be bypassed or detected by user. Will not slow down the computer

With Privacy-Control you can record:

* AOL Instant Messenger
* MSN Messenger
* All web sites visited
* All keystrokes type

* Web based email
* Compuserve
* AOL mail, version 5, 6 and 7

Privacy Control will NOT show up anywhere in the START menu, there will be no icons for it, and it won't even show up in the CTRL-ALT-DELETE menu. Only you can access it with a special key sequence/password.

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You can also opt out by mail; Please send your request to:

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Or by Phone (213) 216 8305

By David Mertz, Ph.D., for IBM DeveloperWorks:
Six approaches to eliminating unwanted e-mail
(Thanks, Cory.)

For purposes of my testing, I developed two collections of messages: spam and legitimate. Both collections were taken from mail I actually received in the last couple of months, but I added a significant subset of messages up to several years old to broaden the test. I cannot know exactly what will be contained in next month's e-mails, but the past provides the best clue to what the future holds. That sounds cryptic, but all I mean is that I do not want to limit the patterns to a few words, phrases, regular expressions, etc. that might characterize the very latest e-mails but fail to generalize to the two types.

In addition to the collections of e-mail, I developed training message sets for those tools that "learn" about spam and non-spam messages. The training sets are both larger and partially disjoint from the testing collections. The testing collections consist of slightly fewer than 2000 spam messages, and about the same number of good messages. The training sets are about twice as large.

A general comment on testing is worth emphasizing. False negatives in spam filters just mean that some unwanted messages make it to your inbox. Not a good thing, but not horrible in itself. False positives are cases where legitimate messages are misidentified as spam. This can potentially be very bad, as some legitimate messages are important, even urgent, in nature, and even those that are merely conversational are ones we do not want to lose. Most filtering software allows you to save rejected messages in temporary folders pending review -- but if you need to review a folder full of spam, the usefulness of the software is thereby reduced.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-spamf.html

IBM developerWorks : Linux | Open source projects : Linux articles | Open source projects articles developerWorks
Spam filtering techniques
79KB e-mail it!
Contents:
Hiding contact information
Looking at filtering software
1. Basic structured text filters
2. Whitelist/verification filters
3. Distributed adaptive blacklists
4. Rule-based rankings
5. Bayesian word distribution filters
6. Bayesian trigram filters
Summary
Resources
About the author

Six approaches to eliminating unwanted e-mail

David Mertz, Ph.D. (mertz@gnosis.cx)
Analyzer, Gnosis Software, Inc.
September 2002
The problem of unsolicited e-mail has been increasing for years, but help has arrived. In this article, David discusses and compares several broad approaches to the automatic elimination of unwanted e-mail while introducing and testing some popular tools that follow these approaches.

Unethical e-mail senders bear little or no cost for mass distribution of messages, yet normal e-mail users are forced to spend time and effort purging fraudulent and otherwise unwanted mail from their mailboxes. In this article, I describe ways that computer code can help eliminate unsolicited commercial e-mail, viruses, trojans, and worms, as well as frauds perpetrated electronically and other undesired and troublesome e-mail. In some sense, the final and best solution for eliminating spam will probably take place on a legal level. In the meantime, however, you can do some things from a code perspective that can serve as an interim solution to the problem, until (if ever) the laws begin to evolve at the same rate as public frustration.

Considering matters technically -- but also with common sense -- what is generally called "spam" is somewhat broader than the category "unsolicited commercial e-mail"; spam encompasses all the e-mail that we do not want and that is only very loosely directed at us. Such messages are not always commercial per se, and some push the limits of what it means to be solicited. For example, we do not want to get viruses (even from our unwary friends); nor do we generally want chain letters, even if they don't ask for money; nor proselytizing messages from strangers; nor outright attempts to defraud us. In any case, it is usually unambiguous whether a message is spam, and many, many people get the same such e-mails.

The problem with spam is that it tends to swamp desirable e-mail. In my own experience, a few years ago I occasionally received an inappropriate message, perhaps one or two each day. Every day of this month, in contrast, I received many times more spams than I did legitimate correspondences. On average, I probably get 10 spams for every appropriate e-mail. In some ways I am unusual -- as a public writer, I maintain a widely published e-mail address; moreover, I both welcome and receive frequent correspondence from strangers related to my published writing and to my software libraries. Unfortunately, a letter from a stranger -- with who-knows-which e-mail application, OS, native natural language, and so on, is not immediately obvious in its purpose; and spammers try to slip their messages underneath such ambiguities. My seconds are valuable to me, especially when they are claimed many times during every hour of a day.

Hiding contact information
For some e-mail users, a reasonable, sufficient, and very simple approach to avoiding spam is simply to guard e-mail addresses closely. For these people, an e-mail address is something to be revealed only to selected, trusted parties. As extra precautions, an e-mail address can be chosen to avoid easily guessed names and dictionary words, and addresses can be disguised when posting to public areas. We have all seen e-mail addresses cutely encoded in forms like "" or "echo zregm@tabfvf.pk | tr A-Za-z N-ZA-Mn-za-m".

In addition to hiding addresses, a secretive e-mailer often uses one or more of the free e-mail services for "throwaway" addresses. If you need to transact e-mail with a semi-trusted party, a temporary address can be used for a few days, then abandoned along with any spam it might thereafter accumulate. The real "confidantes only" address is kept protected.

In my informal survey of discussions of spam on Web-boards, mailing lists, the Usenet, and so on, I've found that a category of e-mail users gains sufficient protection from these basic precautions.

For me, however -- and for many other people -- these approaches are simply not possible. I have a publicly available e-mail address, and have good reasons why it needs to remain so. I do utilize a variety of addresses within the domain I control to detect the source of spam leaks; but the unfortunate truth is that most spammers get my e-mail address the same way my legitimate correspondents do: from the listing at the top of articles like this, and other public disclosures of my address.

Looking at filtering software
This article looks at filtering software from a particular perspective. I want to know how well different approaches work in correctly identifying spam as spam and desirable messages as legitimate. For purposes of answering this question, I am not particularly interested in the details of configuring filter applications to work with various Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs). There is certainly a great deal of arcana surrounding the best configuration of MTAs such as Sendmail, QMail, Procmail, Fetchmail, and others. Further, many e-mail clients have their own filtering options and plug-in APIs. Fortunately, most of the filters I look at come with pretty good documentation covering how to configure them with various MTAs.

For purposes of my testing, I developed two collections of messages: spam and legitimate. Both collections were taken from mail I actually received in the last couple of months, but I added a significant subset of messages up to several years old to broaden the test. I cannot know exactly what will be contained in next month's e-mails, but the past provides the best clue to what the future holds. That sounds cryptic, but all I mean is that I do not want to limit the patterns to a few words, phrases, regular expressions, etc. that might characterize the very latest e-mails but fail to generalize to the two types.

In addition to the collections of e-mail, I developed training message sets for those tools that "learn" about spam and non-spam messages. The training sets are both larger and partially disjoint from the testing collections. The testing collections consist of slightly fewer than 2000 spam messages, and about the same number of good messages. The training sets are about twice as large.

A general comment on testing is worth emphasizing. False negatives in spam filters just mean that some unwanted messages make it to your inbox. Not a good thing, but not horrible in itself. False positives are cases where legitimate messages are misidentified as spam. This can potentially be very bad, as some legitimate messages are important, even urgent, in nature, and even those that are merely conversational are ones we do not want to lose. Most filtering software allows you to save rejected messages in temporary folders pending review -- but if you need to review a folder full of spam, the usefulness of the software is thereby reduced.

1. Basic structured text filters
The e-mail client I use has the capability to sort incoming e-mail based on simple strings found in specific header fields, the header in general, and/or in the body. Its capability is very simple and does not even include regular expression matching. Almost all e-mail clients have this much filtering capability.

Over the last few months, I have developed a fairly small number of text filters. These few simple filters correctly catch about 80% of the spam I receive. Unfortunately, they also have a relatively high false positive rate -- enough that I need to manually examine some of the spam folders from time to time. (I sort probable spam into several different folders, and I save them all to develop message corpora.) Although exact details will differ among users, a general pattern will be useful to most readers:

* Set 1: A few people or mailing lists do funny things with their headers that get them flagged on other rules. I catch something in the header (usually the From:) and whitelist it (either to INBOX or somewhere else).

* Set 2: In no particular order, I run the following spam filters:
o Identify a specific bad sender.
o Look for "<>" as the From: header.
o Look for "@<" in the header (lots of spam has this for some reason).
o Look for "Content-Type: audio". Nothing I want has this, only virii (your mileage may vary).
o Look for "euc-kr" and "ks_c_5601-1987" in the headers. I can't read that language, but for some reason I get a huge volume of Korean spam (of course, for an actual Korean reader, this isn't a good rule).

* Set 3: Store messages to known legitimate addresses. I have several such rules, but they all just match a literal To: field.

* Set 4: Look for messages that have a legit address in the header, but that weren't caught by the previous To: filters. I find that when I am only in the Bcc: field, it's almost always an unsolicited mailing to a list of alphabetically sequential addresses (mertz1@..., mertz37@..., etc).

* Set 5: Anything left at this point is probably spam (it probably has forged headers to avoid identification of the sender).

2. Whitelist/verification filters
A fairly aggressive technique for spam filtering is what I would call the "whitelist plus automated verification" approach. There are several tools that implement a whitelist with verification: TDMA is a popular multi-platform open source tool; ChoiceMail is a commercial tool for Windows; most others seem more preliminary. (See Resources later in this article for links.)

A whitelist filter connects to an MTA and passes mail only from explicitly approved recipients on to the inbox. Other messages generate a special challenge response to the sender. The whitelist filter's response contains some kind of unique code that identifies the original message, such as a hash or sequential ID. This challenge message contains instructions for the sender to reply in order to be added to the whitelist (the response message must contain the code generated by the whitelist filter). Almost all spam messages contain forged return address information, so the challenge usually does not even arrive anywhere; but even those spammers who provide usable return addresses are unlikely to respond to a challenge. When a legitimate sender answers a challenge, her/his address is added to the whitelist so that any future messages from the same address are passed through automatically.

Although I have not used any of these tools more than experimentally myself, I would expect whitelist/verification filters to be very nearly 100% effective in blocking spam messages. It is conceivable that spammers will start adding challenge responses to their systems, but this could be countered by making challenges slightly more sophisticated (for example, by requiring small human modification to a code). Spammers who respond, moreover, make themselves more easily traceable for people seeking legal remedies against them.

The problem with whitelist/verification filters is the extra burden they place on legitimate senders. Inasmuch as some correspondents may fail to respond to challenges -- for any reason -- this makes for a type of false positive. In the best case, a slight extra effort is required for legitimate senders. But senders who have unreliable ISPs, picky firewalls, multiple e-mail addresses, non-native understanding of English (or whatever language the challenge is written in), or who simply overlook or cannot be bothered with challenges, may not have their legitimate messages delivered. Moreover, sometimes legitimate "correspondents" are not people at all, but automated response systems with no capability of challenge response. Whitelist/verification filters are likely to require extra efforts to deal with mailing-list signups, online purchases, Web site registrations, and other "robot correspondences".

3. Distributed adaptive blacklists
Spam is almost by definition delivered to a large number of recipients. And as a matter of practice, there is little if any customization of spam messages to individual recipients. Each recipient of a spam, however, in the absence of prior filtering, must press his own "Delete" button to get rid of the message. Distributed blacklist filters let one user's Delete button warn millions of other users as to the spamminess of the message.

Tools such as Razor and Pyzor (see Resources) operate around servers that store digests of known spams. When a message is received by an MTA, a distributed blacklist filter is called to determine whether the message is a known spam. These tools use clever statistical techniques for creating digests, so that spams with minor or automated mutations (or just different headers resulting from transport routes) do not prevent recognition of message identity. In addition, maintainers of distributed blacklist servers frequently create "honey-pot" addresses specifically for the purpose of attracting spam (but never for any legitimate correspondences). In my testing, I found zero false positive spam categorizations by Pyzor. I would not expect any to occur using other similar tools, such as Razor.

There is some common sense to this. Even those ill-intentioned enough to taint legitimate messages would not have samples of my good messages to report to the servers -- it is generally only the spam messages that are widely distributed. It is conceivable that a widely sent, but legitimate message such as the developerWorks newsletter could be misreported, but the maintainers of distributed blacklist servers would almost certainly detect this and quickly correct such problems.

As the summary table below shows, however, false negatives are far more common using distributed blacklists than with any of the other techniques I tested. The authors of Pyzor recommend using the tool in conjunction with other techniques rather than as a single line of defense. While this seems reasonable, it is not clear that such combined filtering will actually produce many more spam identifications than the other techniques by themselves.

In addition, since distributed blacklists require talking to a server to perform verification, Pyzor performed far more slowly against my test corpora than did any other techniques. For testing a trickle of messages, this is no big deal, but for a high-volume ISP, it could be a problem. I also found that I experienced a couple of network timeouts for each thousand queries, so my results have a handful of "errors" in place of "spam" or "good" identifications.

4. Rule-based rankings
The most popular tool for rule-based spam filtering, by a good margin, is SpamAssassin. There are other tools, but they are not as widely used or actively maintained. SpamAssassin (and similar tools) evaluate a large number of patterns -- mostly regular expressions -- against a candidate message. Some matched patterns add to a message score, while others subtract from it. If a message's score exceeds a certain threshold, it is filtered as spam; otherwise it is considered legitimate.

Some ranking rules are fairly constant over time -- forged headers and auto-executing JavaScript, for example, almost timelessly mark spam. Other rules need to be updated as the products and scams advanced by spammers evolve. Herbal Viagra and heirs of African dictators might be the rage today, but tomorrow they might be edged out by some brand new snake-oil drug or pornographic theme. As spam evolves, SpamAssassin must evolve to keep up with it.

The README for SpamAssassin makes some very strong claims:
In its most recent test, SpamAssassin differentiated between spam and non-spam mail correctly in 99.94% of cases. Since then, it's just been getting better and better!

My testing showed nowhere near this level of success. Against my corpora, SpamAssassin had about 0.3% false positives and a whopping 19% false negatives. In fairness, this only evaluated the rule-based filters, not the optional checks against distributed blacklists. Additionally, my spam corpus is not purely spam -- it also includes a large collection of what are probably virus attachments (I do not open them to check for sure, but I know they are not messages I authorized). SpamAssassin's FAQ disclaims responsibility for finding viruses; on the other hand, the below techniques do much better in finding them, so the disclaimer is not all that compelling.

SpamAssassin runs much quicker than distributed blacklists, which need to query network servers. But it also runs much slower than even non-optimized versions of the below statistical models (written in interpreted Python using naive data structures).

5. Bayesian word distribution filters
Paul Graham wrote a provocative essay in August 2002. In "A Plan for Spam" (see Resources later in this article), Graham suggested building Bayesian probability models of spam and non-spam words. Graham's essay, or any general text on statistics and probability, can provide more mathematical background than I will here.

The general idea is that some words occur more frequently in known spam, and other words occur more frequently in legitimate messages. Using well-known mathematics, it is possible to generate a "spam-indicative probability" for each word. Another simple mathematical formula can be used to determine the overall "spam probability" of a novel message based on the collection of words it contains.

Graham's idea has several noteworthy benefits:

1. It can generate a filter automatically from corpora of categorized messages rather than requiring human effort in rule development.
2. It can be customized to individual users' characteristic spam and legitimate messages.
3. It can be implemented in a very small number of lines of code.
4. It works surprisingly well.

At first blush, it would be reasonable to suppose that a set of hand-tuned and laboriously developed rules like those in SpamAssassin would predict spam more accurately than a scattershot automated approach. It turns out that this supposition is dead wrong. A statistical model basically just works better than a rule-based approach. As a side benefit, a Graham-style Bayesian filter is also simpler and faster than SpamAssassin.

Within days -- perhaps hours -- of Graham's article being published, many people simultaneously started working on implementing the system. For purposes of my testing, I used a Python implementation created by a correspondent of mine named John Barham. I thank him for providing his implementation. However, the mathematics are simple enough that every other implementation is largely equivalent.

There are some issues of data structures and storage techniques that will effect operating speed of different tools. But the actual predictive accuracy depends on very few factors -- the main significant factor is probably the word-lexing technique used, and this matters mostly for eliminating spurious random strings. Barham's implementation simply looks for relatively short, disjoint sequences of characters in a small set (alphanumeric plus a few others).

6. Bayesian trigram filters
Bayesian techniques built on a word model work rather well. One disadvantage of the word model is that the number of "words" in e-mail is virtually unbounded. This fact may be counterintuitive -- it seems reasonable to suppose that you would reach an asymptote once almost all the English words had been included. From my prior research into full text indexing, I know that this is simply not true; the number of "word-like" character sequences possible is nearly unlimited, and new text keeps producing new sequences. This fact is particularly true of e-mails, which contain random strings in Message-IDs, content separators, UU and base64 encodings, and so on. There are various ways to throw out words from the model (the easiest is just to discard the sufficiently infrequent ones).

I decided to look into how well a much more starkly limited model space would work for a Bayesian spam filter. Specifically, I decided to use trigrams for my probability model rather than "words". This idea was not invented whole cloth, of course; there is a variety of research into language recognition/differentiation, cryptographic unicity distances of English, pattern frequencies, and related areas, that strongly suggest trigrams are a good unit.

There were several decisions I made along the way. The biggest choice was deciding what a trigram is. While this is somewhat simpler than identifying a "word", the completely naive approach of looking at every (overlapping) sequence of three bytes is non-optimal. In particular, considering high-bit characters -- although occurring relatively frequently in multi-byte character sets (in other words, CJK) -- forces a much bigger trigram space on us than does looking only at the ASCII range. Limiting the trigram space even further than to low-bit characters produces a smaller space, but not better overall results.

For my trigram analysis, I utilized only the most highly differentiating trigrams as message categorizers. But I arrived at the chosen numbers of "spam" and "good" trigrams only by trial and error. I also picked the cutoff probability for spam rather arbitrarily: I made an interesting discovery that no message in the "good" corpus was assigned a spam probability above .0071 other than two false positives in the .99 range. Lowering my cutoff from an initial 0.9 to 0.1, however, allowed me to catch a few more message in the "spam" corpus. For purposes of speed, I select no more than 100 "interesting" trigrams from each candidate message -- changing that 100 to something else can produce slight variations in the results (but not in an obvious direction).

Summary
Given the testing methodology described earlier, let's look at the concrete testing results. While I do not present any quantitative data on speed, the chart is arranged in order of speed, from fastest to slowest. Trigrams are fast, Pyzor (network lookup) is slow. In evaluating techniques, as I stated, I consider false positives very bad, and false negatives only slightly bad. The quantities in each cell represent the number of correctly identified messages vs. incorrectly identified messages for each technique tested against each body of e-mail, good and spam.

Table 1. Quantitative accuracy of spam filtering techniques
Technique Good corpus
(correctly identified vs. incorrectly identified) Spam corpus
(correctly identified vs. incorrectly identified)
"The Truth" 1851 vs. 0 1916 vs. 0
Trigram model 1849 vs. 2 1774 vs. 142
Word model 1847 vs. 4 1819 vs. 97
SpamAssassin 1846 vs. 5 1558 vs. 358
Pyzor 1847 vs. 0 (4 err) 943 vs. 971 (2 err)

Resources

* The TDMA home page provides more information about the Tagged Message Delivery Agent.

* You can get more information about ChoiceMail from DigitalPortal Software.

* Pyzor is a Python-based distributed spam catalog/filter.

* Vipul's Razor is a very popular distributed spam catalog/filter. Razor is optionally called by a number of other filter tools, such as SpamAssassin.

* Read Paul Graham's essay "A Plan for Spam."

* Eric Raymond has created a fast implementation of Paul Graham's idea under the name "bogofilter." In addition to using some efficient data representation and storage strategies, bogofilter tries to be smart about identifying what makes a meaningful word.

* My own trigram-based categorization tools are still at an early alpha or prototype level. However, you are welcome to use them as a basis for development. They are public domain, like all the tools I write for developerWorks articles.

* Lawrence Lessig has written a number of books and articles that insightfully contrast what he metonymically calls "west-coast code" and "east-coast code," in other words, the laws passed in Washington D.C. (and elsewhere) versus the software written in Silicon Valley (and elsewhere). I've written a short review of Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. See Lessig's Web site for more to think about.

* Find more Linux articles in the developerWorks Linux zone.

About the author
author David Mertz dislikes spam. He wishes to thank Andrew Blais for assistance in this article's testing, as well as for listening to David's peculiar fascination with trigrams and their distributions. David may be reached at mertz@gnosis.cx; his life pored over at http://gnosis.cx/publish/. Suggestions and recommendations on this, past, or future articles are welcome.

My new interview with Doc Searls has just been published on the Creative Commons website, along with information about the upcoming December 16th launch!

Doc Searls: Featured Commoner

I think we need to develop a new vernacular understanding of what licensing is. . . . I mean there have always been tacit agreements about what we can and can't do with stuff -- agreements we've understood intuitively. Now we need to be much more explicit, because the range of actions that can be taken with our public works is not only much larger, but often committed in digital form, which allows us to be much more specific about the agreements involved...

... I believe there is a crying need for a public conversation about the licensing of artistic works, and for our vocabulary to have the richest and most specific possible bases. That's why the work Creative Commons does is so important and welcome by attempting to scaffold a new set of commons-native relationships between creators and customers.

I've uploaded my video footage from the Anti-war in Iraq/Anti-Feinstein protest in San Francisco Monday, November 18, 2002.

As always with my news video footage, everything is Dedicated to the Public Domain.

Lisa Rein's Movies and Pictures From the November 18, 2002 Anti-war/ Anti-Feinstein Protest in San Francisco

I'm working on a better interface and a comprehensive index so folks won't get lost in the quagmire of my rapidly-expanding library of video footage.

I'll also have some technical notes up soon to help explain how to install the software required to get the movies to run on various platforms for you non-uber techie folks.

I also still need to re-encode everything as MPEGs capable of running on unix-based operating systems.

I'll be writing more about the process of converting these documents soon so that more of you can start making your own relevant legal documents more web accessible.

For the time being, suffice to say that I expect to be converting a ton of legal documents from this day forward -- in order to make the information they contain more accessible to the consumers that need to know about it.

I've created two different kinds of HTML version: one preserving the "navigation" of the PDF file and one in a single HTML "plain" file for printing, but with the page numbers clearly marked and consistent with the page numbers of the PDF versions.

Microsoft Anti-Trust Case: Final Documents Converted to Web-friendly formats

Faster, better, cheaper anti-matter is on the horizon. (Thank heavens!)

The Leonid Meteor Shower is tonight/early tomorrow am. NASA has released some Palm Pilot software to help you keep track.

Get as far away from the city lights as you can and enjoy the show!

In the "go stand in the corner and hit yourself until you understand what you did wrong" department, the producer of Star Wars decides to makes an ass of himself by comparing movie piracy to terrorism.

I wonder how much money he'll make from P2P networks, once he stops trying to fight them and realizes what a potential cash cow they are.
(via BoingBoing)

The public is growing increasingly concerned John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness project.

Here's a new website with lots of helpful links on the subject.

The Washington Post and NY Times have warned us all about the implications.

The ACLU has a letter writing campaign:

In the last several days, media reports have revealed that a little-known Defense Department office is developing a computer system that threatens to turn us all into "suspects" and would provide the government with the ability to snoop into all aspects of our private lives without a search warrant or proof of criminal wrongdoing.

This program is being created in the Pentagon by a new Office of Information Awareness, which has been charged with creating a system it is calling "Total Information Awareness:" effectively a computer program that will provide government officials with immediate access to information about everything from our phone calls to Internet mail, from our financial records to the history of what we buy online or in our local pharmacy, from every trip we book to all of our academic and medical records.

Leading this initiative is John Poindexter, the former Reagan era National Security Adviser who famously said that it was his duty to withhold information from Congress. In his new post as Head of the Office of Information Awareness, Poindexter has been quietly promoting the idea of creating "a virtual centralized database" that would have the "data-mining" power to pry into the most minute and intimate details of our private lives.

I ran into a Graduate Film student from San Francisco State that is looking for two actors for his final film. They need to be 25-30 and hopefully kind of quirky looking (but it doesn't sound like he's going to be too picky about looks, if you can act.)

The dates you would need to be available for shooting are: December 14-15 and 20-22, 2002.

Contact Ari at: Logari@aol.com right this very moment if you're interested. This could be your big chance! (The SF State Film Finals Screening will be seen by a lot of producers and directors -- even a lot of people come up from L.A. to check them out.)

Tell him Lisa sent you :-)

Good luck!

Time 8:30 am - On my way to "some kind of protest" going on at 555 Market Street.

I happen to have had the TV on the local news this morning, and it was treating some "protest" event as more of a traffic nuisance than anything. The news broadcast did, however, have time to show coverage of a dismal little anti-homosexual rally that took place at some church last night, which made me feel like taking a whack at covering whatever was going on in the financial district. (I was curious what wasn't being reported on. Why would they show a taped rally from the night before instead of a live one as it was happening?)

Two more stops till Montgomery Street. I have absolutely no idea what to expect...

____ 30 minutes pass____

Wow! That hunch really paid off. It turns out that it was an anti-war/anti-Feinstein march and rally protesting what the protesters were claiming was that Diane Feinstein was directly profiting from Iraq-War defense contracts. (I haven't had time to investigate and attempt to confirm these allegations one way or the other yet.) (Actually, what they were saying is that Diane accepted campaign contributions from the, in their view, questionable, McKesson Corp. I have since confirmed the connection between Feinstein and McKesson. The company contributed $6,750 to her last year, according to open secrets.org.)

A guy with a speakerphone explained that there were 20 people having a sit-in upstairs in the building at Feinstein headquarters.

The Cops were generally cool at the beginning -- really cool in fact (as the pictures I post soon will demonstrate), but when the crowd started to congregate in front of the McKesson building, they soon threatened to arrest anyone touching the front doors. It looked like things were about to be uncool for a minute, definitely. One cop singled out one of the protesters, and said he wanted to talk to him privately. The guy quickly walked over to me and asked me if I would mind taping their conversation. I just nodded and kept filming.

I'm going over to use my buddies' editing in about an hour to compress my footage and edit it into a few digestible chunks. Maybe the popular media will see fit to report on the event...

I'll be uploading my footage soon!

Bit Chat: Michael Moore
The controversial filmmaker crusades to save the Internet from corporate control.
By Dave Roos for Tech TV.
(Thanks, Cory!)

One of Moore's greatest fears is that the Internet will come under the same corporate onslaught as FM radio. It's hard for many of us to imagine, but FM radio used to be a lot like the Web. It was open, inexpensive, and independent. The music was all that mattered.

"Then they sucked the life right out of it," Moore growls, referring of course to the corporate interests that bought out the FM frequency in the 1970s. The result is mind-numbing musical homogeneity. "It doesn't matter where you go today," Moore laments. "The FM station in St. Louis sounds like the FM station in Tampa."

The same fate could await the Web. "Sooner or later," Moore warns, "the forces of capitalism are going to say, 'Wait a minute, this should only be about making money. If it's not making us money, it shouldn't be on the Internet.' We have to prevent that from happening."

Webzine has posted Michael Moore's Keynote from last summer in NY City as a stream or a downloadable MP3 file (Please mirror this file -- Note: I have already done so here.)

Michael Moore gave a keynote speech on July 21, 2001 for Webzine 2001 in New York City. He spoke about the Internet as a revolutionary medium that can empower the little guy, how the Internet helped TV Nation win another season, a powerful scene from Bowling for Columbine, a dirty little chat with Bill Clinton at a porto-potty and a few inspirational stories to motivate YOU to get out there and do something.

Michael Moore speech - 1hr 26mins, 128k MP3 stream
Downloadable MP3 - 80MB MP3 file. Please download and mirror this.

So I'm going over the government's ANALYSIS FOR THE HOMELAND SECURITY ACT OF 2002, and I'm not sure if there's a particular part of it I'd amend exactly that would make it OK.

Figured I'd start out with:

TITLE II — INFORMATION ANALYSIS AND INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTION

http://www.whitehouse.gov/deptofhomeland/analysis/title2.html:

Sec. 201. Under Secretary for Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection.
Sec. 202. Functions transferred.
Sec. 203. Access to information.
Sec. 204. Information voluntarily provided.

Here's the actual text of bill, Sections 201-204:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/deptofhomeland/bill/title2.html#201

But the main "threat" doesn't seem to be one that can be amended easily. Namely that this "Secretary for Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection" (presumably John Poindexter) will be taking over:

"the functions, personnel, assets, and liabilities of the following entities-...

(1) the National Infrastructure Protection Center of the FBI...
(2) National Communications System of the Department of Defense...
(3) the Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office of the Department of Commerce...
(4) the Computer Security Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)...
(5) the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center of the Department of Energy..
(6) the Federal Computer Incident Response Center of the General Services Administration..."

Notes I forgot to upload from November 6, 2002:

I had no idea until this afternoon that an aquaintance of mine was a poll volunteer for every election. I, of course, wish that I had known that before yesterday's election, so I could have asked him about the process ahead of time. (Or, for that matter, I wished I'd have asked the volunteers at my polling precinct more questions about everything, in retrospect.)

He said that everything went pretty smoothly at his station yesterday. They didn't run out of ballots or anything like that . He did, however, "have to keep telling the other volunteers to stop sending people away."

He said that it was his understanding that, even if your name is not on the list, that they are supposed to give you a "provisional" ballot and let you vote and include an explanation of the circumstances. When the people that count the votes get the ballot, they can look you up in the database, and if they can verify that you are currently registered in the database, your vote will count.

The number one question I am asked on a regular basis from people is what to do if they move and didn't re-register at their new address. Just yesterday I told a lady in a coffee shop that I didn't know what to do in that situation and that she "might be out of luck." It seems like this is believed to be the case by most of the General Public -- although I am going to need to find out for sure.

Well my poll volunteer acquaintance (who asked that his name be witheld because he was worried about getting into trouble if he was wrong about any of this) believes that this is not the case. That you can vote with a provisional ballot and they can look you up in the database, if you were registered previously, and just changed addresses, you should still be registered.

RE: ID -- It was his understanding that they are NOT supposed to require ID for anyone whose name is on the list. ID was requested as a means of providing a current address for the people who hadn't re-registered under the new address. If the people didn't have ID, they could provide two pieces of mail to show they had received mail at the address they claimed to reside at.

Even if the person cannot provide any of these things, it was his's understanding that you have to let people vote. You can't turn anyone away.

This all just reminds me that I need to register to be a poll worker, so I can understand more about how everything works.

CANESI (Canadian Network to End Sanctions On Iraq) has organized a number of rally's for this weekend in 14 cities across Canada: Halifax/Dartmouth, Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa, Midlland, Toronto, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Penticton, Grand Forks, Vancouver and Victoria.

Note: Pay close attention to the dates listed for each city, because some are happening on Saturday, November 16 and others on Sunday, November 17th. (Thanks, Cory.)

Big bleep on the Reinstein Radar today: Danger Will Robinson! Danger!

Poindexter...Poindexter...I knew that name sounded familiar as I've been reading through this last week's frightening headlines about the "Total Information Awareness" project and the guy spearheading the whole thing: John "Iran Contra" Poindexter -- The token "bad guy" who took the fall in the Iran-Contra trial so everybody else involved in the scandal could get off (like President Reagan and Ollie North). I'd forgotten that an appeals court had overturned Poindexter's conviction shortly afterward. (Meaning it was time to go back to working for the Bush's apparently!)

These days, Poindexter is making a name for himself as the head of the DARPA's "Information Awareness Office" -- and if the Homeland Security Act passes through the Senate next week without any amendments, he will be the central point of control for all of your commercially-obtained once-considered private information. We're talking government intrusion on your privacy in its purest Orwellian-style form. And what security will we get in return? They're going to have to get back to us on that one...

You Are a Suspect
By William Safire for the NY Times.

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you — passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance — and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.

Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the Naval Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in Nicaragua.

A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for his testimony. He famously asserted, "The buck stops here," arguing that the White House staff, and not the president, was responsible for fateful decisions that might prove embarrassing.

This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan even more scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the "Information Awareness Office" in the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which spawned the Internet and stealth aircraft technology. Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting the "data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private act of every American.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html?ex=1037854800&en=3778829e1bec3dc2&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

The New York Times The New York Times Opinion November 14, 2002

You Are a Suspect
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

WASHINGTON — If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you — passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance — and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.

Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the Naval Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in Nicaragua.

A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for his testimony. He famously asserted, "The buck stops here," arguing that the White House staff, and not the president, was responsible for fateful decisions that might prove embarrassing.

This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan even more scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the "Information Awareness Office" in the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which spawned the Internet and stealth aircraft technology. Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting the "data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private act of every American.

Even the hastily passed U.S.A. Patriot Act, which widened the scope of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and weakened 15 privacy laws, raised requirements for the government to report secret eavesdropping to Congress and the courts. But Poindexter's assault on individual privacy rides roughshod over such oversight.

He is determined to break down the wall between commercial snooping and secret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral dismisses such necessary differentiation as bureaucratic "stovepiping." And he has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans.

When George W. Bush was running for president, he stood foursquare in defense of each person's medical, financial and communications privacy. But Poindexter, whose contempt for the restraints of oversight drew the Reagan administration into its most serious blunder, is still operating on the presumption that on such a sweeping theft of privacy rights, the buck ends with him and not with the president.

This time, however, he has been seizing power in the open. In the past week John Markoff of The Times, followed by Robert O'Harrow of The Washington Post, have revealed the extent of Poindexter's operation, but editorialists have not grasped its undermining of the Freedom of Information Act.

Political awareness can overcome "Total Information Awareness," the combined force of commercial and government snooping. In a similar overreach, Attorney General Ashcroft tried his Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), but public outrage at the use of gossips and postal workers as snoops caused the House to shoot it down. The Senate should now do the same to this other exploitation of fear.

The Latin motto over Poindexter"s new Pentagon office reads "Scientia Est Potentia" — "knowledge is power." Exactly: the government's infinite knowledge about you is its power over you. "We're just as concerned as the next person with protecting privacy," this brilliant mind blandly assured The Post. A jury found he spoke falsely before.

E-mail: safire@nytimes.com

A bunch of Poll volunteers were either fired or forced to resigned because of problems they were having with the new machines. The corporate answer: recruit a whole crop of new volunteers (your employees), give them a bunch of training at the last minute, and give them the day off of work (I hope with pay) to go give it their best shot at helping the other hapless victims, I mean voters, to figure out what they themselves just learned.

I wonder what was wrong with the other batch of volunteers?

I need to volunteer as a poll worker so I can learn about this stuff first hand.
Volunteers help cover poll worker gaps

After the September primary dozens of poll workers at various polling locations either resigned or were fired because of the problems relating to operating the new machines. Two months later after the primary and dozens of volunteers helped close the gap left by those poll workers no longer associated with the 2002 election. The new poll workers, who were trained by the state, sacrificed work on Tuesday to make sure that the polls and election ran smoothly...

Two hundred-eighty seven volunteers from thirty-one corporate teams were involved in the program including tams from companies such as Stein Mart, Convergys, and Wachovia.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/2002-11-05/local_volunteers.asp

Volunteers help cover poll worker gaps

By First Coast News Staff

First Coast News streaming video 56k | High-Speed
(You will need Windows Media Player to view)

JACKSONVILLE, FL - Dozens of businesses in Duval County lent their workers to watch the polls and help people with questions during Tuesday's election. In addition the NAACP were also at the polls logging any complaints while the Partners in Democracy kept a close eye on the races.

After the September primary dozens of poll workers at various polling locations either resigned or were fired because of the problems relating to operating the new machines. Two months later after the primary and dozens of volunteers helped close the gap left by those poll workers no longer associated with the 2002 election. The new poll workers, who were trained by the state, sacrificed work on Tuesday to make sure that the polls and election ran smoothly.

Most voters didn't seem to mind the extra help although some thought getting rid of the other workers was unusual. Voter Elizabeth Cobb, for example, believed that, "it's a good thing that they are kind enough to do this but I don't think the other workers were given a fair chance because they were not trained well enough."

Each of the corporate volunteers took a four-hour training class to qualify as a poll volunteer. Two hundred-eighty seven volunteers from thirty-one corporate teams were involved in the program including tams from companies such as Stein Mart, Convergys, and Wachovia.
Updated:

Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans
By John Markoff for the NY Times.

As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant...

Admiral Poindexter quietly returned to the government in January to take charge of the Office of Information Awareness at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa. The office is responsible for developing new surveillance technologies in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

In order to deploy such a system, known as Total Information Awareness, new legislation would be needed, some of which has been proposed by the Bush administration in the Homeland Security Act that is now before Congress. That legislation would amend the Privacy Act of 1974, which was intended to limit what government agencies could do with private information.

The possibility that the system might be deployed domestically to let intelligence officials look into commercial transactions worries civil liberties proponents.

Here is the full text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/09/politics/09COMP.html?ex=1037509200&en=873ff5626a3c666e&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

The New York Times The New York Times Washington November 9, 2002

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INTELLIGENCE
Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans
By JOHN MARKOFF

The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe — including the United States.

As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant.
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Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.

Admiral Poindexter, who has described the plan in public documents and speeches but declined to be interviewed, has said that the government needs to "break down the stovepipes" that separate commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence agency analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.

"We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, generate information, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge, and create actionable options," he said in a speech in California earlier this year.

Admiral Poindexter quietly returned to the government in January to take charge of the Office of Information Awareness at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa. The office is responsible for developing new surveillance technologies in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

In order to deploy such a system, known as Total Information Awareness, new legislation would be needed, some of which has been proposed by the Bush administration in the Homeland Security Act that is now before Congress. That legislation would amend the Privacy Act of 1974, which was intended to limit what government agencies could do with private information.

The possibility that the system might be deployed domestically to let intelligence officials look into commercial transactions worries civil liberties proponents.

"This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington "The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the technology is Darpa and the agency is the F.B.I. The outcome is a system of national surveillance of the American public."

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has been briefed on the project by Admiral Poindexter and the two had a lunch to discuss it, according to a Pentagon spokesman.

"As part of our development process, we hope to coordinate with a variety of organizations, to include the law enforcement community," a Pentagon spokeswoman said.

An F.B.I. official, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, said the bureau had had preliminary discussions with the Pentagon about the project but that no final decision had been made about what information the F.B.I. might add to the system.

A spokesman for the White House Office of Homeland Security, Gordon Johndroe, said officials in the office were not familiar with the computer project and he declined to discuss concerns raised by the project's critics without knowing more about it.

He referred all questions to the Defense Department, where officials said they could not address civil liberties concerns because they too were not familiar enough with the project.

Some members of a panel of computer scientists and policy experts who were asked by the Pentagon to review the privacy implications this summer said terrorists might find ways to avoid detection and that the system might be easily abused.

"A lot of my colleagues are uncomfortable about this and worry about the potential uses that this technology might be put, if not by this administration then by a future one," said Barbara Simon, a computer scientist who is past president of the Association of Computing Machinery. "Once you've got it in place you can't control it."

Continued
1 | 2 | Next>>

(Page 2 of 2)

Other technology policy experts dispute that assessment and support Admiral Poindexter's position that linking of databases is necessary to track potential enemies operating inside the United States.

"They're conceptualizing the problem in the way we've suggested it needs to be understood," said Philip Zelikow, a historian who is executive director of the Markle Foundation task force on National Security in the Information Age. "They have a pretty good vision of the need to make the tradeoffs in favor of more sharing and openness."
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On Wednesday morning, the panel reported its findings to Dr. Tony Tether, the director of the defense research agency, urging development of technologies to protect privacy as well as surveillance, according to several people who attended the meeting.

If deployed, civil libertarians argue, the computer system would rapidly bring a surveillance state. They assert that potential terrorists would soon learn how to avoid detection in any case.

The new system will rely on a set of computer-based pattern recognition techniques known as "data mining," a set of statistical techniques used by scientists as well as by marketers searching for potential customers.

The system would permit a team of intelligence analysts to gather and view information from databases, pursue links between individuals and groups, respond to automatic alerts, and share information efficiently, all from their individual computers.

The project calls for the development of a prototype based on test data that would be deployed at the Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir, Va. Officials would not say when the system would be put into operation.

The system is one of a number of projects now under way inside the government to lash together both commercial and government data to hunt for patterns of terrorist activities.

"What we are doing is developing technologies and a prototype system to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists, and decipher their plans, and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully pre-empt and defeat terrorist acts," said Jan Walker, the spokeswoman for the defense research agency.

Before taking the position at the Pentagon, Admiral Poindexter, who was convicted in 1990 for his role in the Iran-contra affair, had worked as a contractor on one of the projects he now controls. Admiral Poindexter's conviction was reversed in 1991 by a federal appeals court because he had been granted immunity for his testimony before Congress about the case.

I sent a small donation to truthout today, and it reminded me that I hadn't donated to the EFF for a while, so I paypal'd them an equally small amount.

I know that these are tough times for everyone (me included!), but please do the same, if you can swing it.

If we all contributed just a little bit each, we could really make a huge difference!

Thanks!

Our country's Vice President is still making money from companies he supposedly doesn't have any financial interest in anymore (Halliburton and its subsidiaries -- which he claimed income from on his 2001 Tax Return).

Let me say that again: The Vice President is personally profiting from the War On Terrorism.

Who knows how much he plans to make directly from defense contracts for the War On Iraq?

Conflict Of Interest For Vice President?
By David Lazarus for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Let's say there's a businessman -- in China, for example -- with stellar public-sector connections. He wins billions of dollars in government contracts for his company. Let's say this businessman becomes a high-ranking government official himself. And let's say the government begins throwing its enemies into prison without trials or access to attorneys.

Would anyone be surprised if the official's former company wins the contract for building all those new prison cells? Probably not. We'd just assume that's how things work in a place like Beijing. Only this isn't a hypothetical situation, and it's not really about China. We're actually talking about the U.S. government and an American company. And the official in question is none other than Vice President Dick Cheney...

...Cheney, of course, previously served as chief executive officer of Halliburton, the Dallas oil-services giant. Less well-known is that Halliburton owns a subsidiary called Kellogg, Brown & Root, which is one of the Defense Department's leading contractors.

KBR, as the company's called, is profiting handsomely from America's war on terror. Among other things, it's responsible for feeding most of the troops at Bagram Air Base, the U.S. military's headquarters in Afghanistan.

KBR's contract to provide support services for the Army lasts 10 years and contains no limit on spending. It could end up being worth billions. KBR has a similar deal with the Navy.

In July, the government announced that KBR had been awarded a $9.7 million contract to build an additional 204-unit detention center at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where hundreds of "enemy combatants" have been held since January.

This is on top of $16 million received by KBR in February to get the Guantanamo prison facility off the ground, as well as another $7 million in April to expand the compound.

Most of the detainees have been denied any form of due process since being taken prisoner. This is slippery stuff. Cheney plays a central role in shaping Washington's response to the Sept. 11 attacks. A company he once ran benefits directly from the government's actions.

"You can't get a clearer example of conflict of interest," said Bill Allison, managing editor for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan government watchdog group in Washington, DC. "It's a troubling phenomenon, to say the least."

...Cheney retired from Halliburton in August 2000. He received $4.3 million in deferred compensation that year, plus $806,332 in salary. He subsequently sold more than $40 million in stock options. Even though he's no longer in Halliburton's executive suite, Cheney reported on his 2001 tax return that he received nearly $1.6 million in deferred compensation from the company last year.

Cheney is still receiving deferred compensation from Halliburton, but neither the company nor the White House would specify how large his payment will be this year or how long the payments will continue. This is cash that he's already earned. Yet it's also cash that Halliburton is accruing in part from its activities in Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan.

"He's receiving money from the government and money from a private-sector company with government contracts," said Allison. "Whose payroll is he on?" The answer: Both of them. And that couldn't be right.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/11/03/BU231196.DTL

Conflict Of Interest For Vice President?
By David Lazarus
San Francisco Chronicle

Sunday, 3 November, 2002

Let's say there's a businessman -- in China, for example -- with stellar public-sector connections. He wins billions of dollars in government contracts for his company. Let's say this businessman becomes a high-ranking government official himself. And let's say the government begins throwing its enemies into prison without trials or access to attorneys.

Would anyone be surprised if the official's former company wins the contract for building all those new prison cells? Probably not. We'd just assume that's how things work in a place like Beijing. Only this isn't a hypothetical situation, and it's not really about China. We're actually talking about the U.S. government and an American company. And the official in question is none other than Vice President Dick Cheney.

Cheney, of course, previously served as chief executive officer of Halliburton, the Dallas oil-services giant. Less well-known is that Halliburton owns a subsidiary called Kellogg, Brown & Root, which is one of the Defense Department's leading contractors.

KBR, as the company's called, is profiting handsomely from America's war on terror. Among other things, it's responsible for feeding most of the troops at Bagram Air Base, the U.S. military's headquarters in Afghanistan.

KBR's contract to provide support services for the Army lasts 10 years and contains no limit on spending. It could end up being worth billions. KBR has a similar deal with the Navy.

In July, the government announced that KBR had been awarded a $9.7 million contract to build an additional 204-unit detention center at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where hundreds of "enemy combatants" have been held since January.

This is on top of $16 million received by KBR in February to get the Guantanamo prison facility off the ground, as well as another $7 million in April to expand the compound.

Most of the detainees have been denied any form of due process since being taken prisoner. This is slippery stuff. Cheney plays a central role in shaping Washington's response to the Sept. 11 attacks. A company he once ran benefits directly from the government's actions.

"You can't get a clearer example of conflict of interest," said Bill Allison, managing editor for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan government watchdog group in Washington, DC. "It's a troubling phenomenon, to say the least."

That's not how Halliburton sees it. The company says Cheney currently plays no role whatsoever in any business dealings between Halliburton and the government. As for the $3.8 billion in government contracts and loans received by the company during Cheney's tenure as CEO, from 1995 to 2000, Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall stressed that Cheney steered clear of all defense matters. "He didn't want the appearance of being influential over any contracts awarded to KBR," she said.

Allison at the Center for Public Integrity all but laughed off this claim. "It's beyond belief that the CEO is not involved in all aspects of the company's business," he said. Indeed, it does seem a stretch to think that a former U.S. defense secretary, with a Rolodex stuffed full of Pentagon contacts, would have nothing to do with his company's lucrative defense business.

In any case, KBR did quite well under Cheney's watch. The company's defense contracts during the period ranged from $10 million for removal of hazardous waste at military bases and $5 million for maintenance of Florida missile facilities to $470 million for supporting U.S. forces in Bosnia and Croatia.

Moreover, documents uncovered by the Center for Public Integrity show that Halliburton received $1.5 billion in government loans and loan guarantees during the five years Cheney was CEO. That compares with just $100 million during the previous five years.

And the government contracts keep rolling in. Last year, for example, KBR was one of a number of defense-industry heavyweights handed a $5 billion government contract to dispose of outmoded weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union.

In March, KBR received an almost $47 million contract to provide support services at the Naval Air Facility in El Centro (Imperial County), not far from the Mexican border.

And in August, a team of companies led by KBR received a $725 million, five- year contract to provide maintenance services at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the country's premiere nuclear weapons lab.

Cheney retired from Halliburton in August 2000. He received $4.3 million in deferred compensation that year, plus $806,332 in salary. He subsequently sold more than $40 million in stock options. Even though he's no longer in Halliburton's executive suite, Cheney reported on his 2001 tax return that he received nearly $1.6 million in deferred compensation from the company last year.

Cheney is still receiving deferred compensation from Halliburton, but neither the company nor the White House would specify how large his payment will be this year or how long the payments will continue. This is cash that he's already earned. Yet it's also cash that Halliburton is accruing in part from its activities in Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan.

"He's receiving money from the government and money from a private-sector company with government contracts," said Allison. "Whose payroll is he on?" The answer: Both of them. And that couldn't be right.

Here's a great article by Sarah Lai Stirland for the Seattle Times that explains the truth about the amazing consumer benefits of wireless and the fallacy of spectrum scarcity:
Open-spectrum advocates say it will boost technology
(via BoingBoing)

The core of this idea is the belief that, if the rules are tweaked the right way, technology companies in the next five years will have brought to market the equipment that will make the notion of electromagnetic-spectrum scarcity, a fundamental issue of telecom economics, seem quaint.

Equipment makers would create devices that would intelligently navigate through the congested airwaves — the so-called spectrum — to avoid virtual traffic jams and allow everyone from broadcasters to kids with handheld devices to use the spectrum. Consumers and tinkerers could come up with their own ideas for new applications that would run on these devices, much as they have on the Internet. In turn, the growing number of applications and tools would drive equipment demand, fostering growth of this wireless version of the Internet.

Several chip-making companies are developing products that would power this sort of equipment. They expect to see the first products on the market in the next couple of years.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/134564261_btspectrum28.html

Open-spectrum advocates say it will boost technology

By Sarah Lai Stirland
Special to The Seattle Times

WorldCom is bankrupt. AT&T is dismantling itself. And numerous telecommunications start-ups poised to compete in the broadband revolution are dead.

In light of telecom's death spiral, the prognosis for endless bandwidth and ubiquitous networked computing looks dire.

But a growing group of lawyers, engineers and telecommunications analysts believes that it has the solution needed to finance, develop and ultimately restore the broadband vision: The solution lies with you, the consumer. All we need is a little help from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The core of this idea is the belief that, if the rules are tweaked the right way, technology companies in the next five years will have brought to market the equipment that will make the notion of electromagnetic-spectrum scarcity, a fundamental issue of telecom economics, seem quaint.

Equipment makers would create devices that would intelligently navigate through the congested airwaves — the so-called spectrum — to avoid virtual traffic jams and allow everyone from broadcasters to kids with handheld devices to use the spectrum. Consumers and tinkerers could come up with their own ideas for new applications that would run on these devices, much as they have on the Internet. In turn, the growing number of applications and tools would drive equipment demand, fostering growth of this wireless version of the Internet.

Several chip-making companies are developing products that would power this sort of equipment. They expect to see the first products on the market in the next couple of years.

The group wants the FCC to significantly modify and limit the way it uses auctions to allocate spectrum, while encouraging the spectrum's current occupants to share. The current auctions give winning bidders exclusive rights to portions of the spectrum.

In an ideal world, the FCC would treat the airwaves like a highway system nobody owns and enforce rules governing how people use its lanes without crashing into each other, the group says. And in cases where this isn't possible, the FCC would allow people to drive across other people's "property" as long as they keep a low profile and don't do any damage.

Given this freedom, inventors and entrepreneurs would invent new vehicles and new ways of using the highway, the thinking goes. Consumers would finance the development of the airwaves by buying the devices that suit them best and abiding by the rules of the road that prevent nasty accidents.

But to make this vision a reality, the devices need a slice of the spectrum that would form a virtual park or an airwaves commons where equipment makers and others could experiment. In addition, common protocols — industry standards that allow devices to understand each others' communications — and rules are needed to prevent accidents and to make sure everyone gets a fair shake.

Users also would need to adopt a common understanding of rights and responsibilities to quell potential disputes, prevent potential damage from airwave interference and minimize opportunities for litigation.

Outlining the vision

Discussions within a group calling itself the Open Spectrum Ad Hoc Consortium have resulted in a number of detailed outlines of this vision and how it would work. Among its members are such influential luminaries as New York University School of Law professor Yochai Benkler, Internet law visionary Larry Lessig and the Internet pioneer David Reed.

"To take advantage of the fantastic potential of open spectrum, we must change our spectrum policies. With few exceptions, existing laws and regulations are rooted in historical anachronisms," writes Kevin Werbach, a technology consultant and a member of the group, in a policy paper published recently.

Hundreds of other stakeholders have filed comments with the FCC on the issue of spectrum management, an issue the commission is rethinking. In June, FCC Chairman Michael Powell created a task force to examine the issue, and it is scheduled to release a report with recommendations this week.

But the open-spectrum advocates have found a powerful ally in Microsoft, which has launched a full-fledged lobbying effort in Washington, D.C., to promote the idea.

In a July letter to the FCC, Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Craig Mundie outlined a rationale for developing wireless broadband networks that sounded remarkably like the one the open-spectrum consortium espouses.

"Such networks can develop in unlicensed spectrum — using technologies, network architectures and financing models that are different than those used by existing networks," he wrote. "One of the most important and often overlooked consequences of the creation of unlicensed bands was the tapping of an entirely new source of capital to build networks: the financial resources of the users themselves."

Microsoft has hired the Washington, D.C.- based law firm of Harris Wiltshire & Grannis to lobby Congress and government agencies. In addition, Pierre De Vries, Microsoft's director of advanced product development, has been involved in explaining the company's viewpoint on the issue in workshops at the FCC this summer.

While the fast-growing Wi-Fi technology — which connects computers to the Internet through high-speed wireless networks — has developed in the unlicensed portion of the spectrum, De Vries also sees the need for the FCC to establish rules and enforce etiquette in this band.

"There are an increasing number of stories where people in an apartment, for example, build a data network and a neighbor buys a baby monitor or a cordless phone, which works in the same piece of spectrum, but without taking into account that there are other radios in the spectrum," he said.

"So when the cordless phone is in use, the data network doesn't work very well."

Just a utopia?

As popular as the idea of a spectrum commons is in some circles, others write it off as an engineer's utopia. Still others have called for a more market-oriented approach, but they disagree when defining a market approach.

Gerald Faulhaber and David Farber, professors at the University of Pennsylvania, advocate a "big-bang" approach in which the FCC would hold a single auction for all of the available spectrum and then allow secondary trading of those rights.

NYU's Benkler, among others, cautions against this approach. He warns that giving people permanent property rights could put the FCC in a regulatory straitjacket that would prevent it from backing away from failed policy experiments.

Meanwhile, the FCC has moved cautiously in the past year to change its regulations to allow for the development of new technologies, such as ultrawideband and software-defined radios.

Sony, Microsoft and other companies are interested in ultrawideband for its ability to help consumers zap bandwidth-greedy content such as video around gadgets in the home.

But any move by the FCC faces a thicket of political opposition and criticism from companies holding licenses, as well as other spectrum occupants.

They worry that new applications could interfere with their existing uses of the spectrum.

"Every time the FCC tries to move forward on policy, the current stakeholders have a lot to lose if the system changes, so that slows things down," says Stagg Newman, a former FCC chief technologist, now a senior telecommunications expert at McKinsey in Washington, D.C.

While many in the community laud the vision of the open-spectrum revolutionaries, they also believe it's something that won't be implemented soon.

"If we were starting with a clean slate and clean spectrum, with no historical baggage, sure we would go build things that way, but the challenge facing us is how do we get from here to there?" says Vanu Bose, founder of Vanu, a Boston-based software-defined radio start-up.

Nevertheless, during the spectrum-policy workshops this summer, FCC Chairman Powell and Commissioner Michael Copps supported spectrum sharing, unlicensed bands and urgent reform. While acknowledging the likely political obstacles, Powell noted that Wi-Fi's explosion in popularity has significantly changed the political equation.

"Wireless is not a foreign thing to consumers," he said.

"It's becoming an indispensable thing to the average consumer and that changes minds and that changes policy. I think that's really, really important."

Sarah Lai Stirland writes frequently about public policy and technology. She can be reached at sarah@sarahstirland.com.

Turns out that the Shrub's "No Child Left Behind Act" is actually the "All Childrens' Private Information Is Ours For The Taking Or We'll Cut Your Federal Funding" Act.

Parents and Students: you have the right to withhold your records! Exercise it!

Here's more information in a Mother Jones article by David Goodman:
No Child Unrecruited

But when Shea-Keneally insisted on an explanation, she was in for an even bigger surprise: The recruiters cited the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush's sweeping new education law passed earlier this year. There, buried deep within the law's 670 pages, is a provision requiring public secondary schools to provide military recruiters not only with access to facilities, but also with contact information for every student -- or face a cutoff of all federal aid.

"I was very surprised the requirement was attached to an education law," says Shea-Keneally. "I did not see the link."

The military complained this year that up to 15 percent of the nation's high schools are "problem schools" for recruiters. In 1999, the Pentagon says, recruiters were denied access to 19,228 schools. Rep. David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana who sponsored the new recruitment requirement, says such schools "demonstrated an anti-military attitude that I thought was offensive."

...The new law does give students the right to withhold their records. But school officials are given wide leeway in how to implement the law, and some are simply handing over student directories to recruiters without informing anyone -- leaving students without any say in the matter.

"I think the privacy implications of this law are profound," says Jill Wynns, president of the San Francisco Board of Education. "For the federal government to ignore or discount the concerns of the privacy rights of millions of high school students is not a good thing, and it's something we should be concerned about."

Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.motherjones.com/cgi-bin/print_article.pl?url=http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2002/45/ma_153_01.html

No Child Unrecruited
Should the military be given the names of every high school student in America?

David Goodman
November/December 2002

But when Shea-Keneally insisted on an explanation, she was in for an even bigger surprise: The recruiters cited the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush's sweeping new education law passed earlier this year. There, buried deep within the law's 670 pages, is a provision requiring public secondary schools to provide military recruiters not only with access to facilities, but also with contact information for every student -- or face a cutoff of all federal aid.

"I was very surprised the requirement was attached to an education law," says Shea-Keneally. "I did not see the link."

The military complained this year that up to 15 percent of the nation's high schools are "problem schools" for recruiters. In 1999, the Pentagon says, recruiters were denied access to 19,228 schools. Rep. David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana who sponsored the new recruitment requirement, says such schools "demonstrated an anti-military attitude that I thought was offensive."

To many educators, however, requiring the release of personal information intrudes on the rights of students. "We feel it is a clear departure from the letter and the spirit of the current student privacy laws," says Bruce Hunter, chief lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators. Until now, schools could share student information only with other educational institutions. "Now other people will want our lists," says Hunter. "It's a slippery slope. I don't want student directories sent to Verizon either, just because they claim that all kids need a cell phone to be safe."

The new law does give students the right to withhold their records. But school officials are given wide leeway in how to implement the law, and some are simply handing over student directories to recruiters without informing anyone -- leaving students without any say in the matter.

"I think the privacy implications of this law are profound," says Jill Wynns, president of the San Francisco Board of Education. "For the federal government to ignore or discount the concerns of the privacy rights of millions of high school students is not a good thing, and it's something we should be concerned about."

Educators point out that the armed services have exceeded their recruitment goals for the past two years in a row, even without access to every school. The new law, they say, undercuts the authority of some local school districts, including San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, that have barred recruiters from schools on the grounds that the military discriminates against gays and lesbians. Officials in both cities now say they will grant recruiters access to their schools and to student information -- but they also plan to inform students of their right to withhold their records.

Some students are already choosing that option. According to Principal Shea-Keneally, 200 students at her school -- one-sixth of the student body -- have asked that their records be withheld.

As an online educator for UC Berkeley Extension Online, I have been particularly interested in the implications of the TEACH Act (Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization Act) that was signed into law by the Shrub on November 2, 2002.

Unfortunately, after reading a report by Kenneth D. Crews for the American Library Association on the subject, it would appear that the TEACH Act's provisions will only further complicate the entire distance learning situation more than anything else. The Act's provisions certainly don't do anything to simplify the process of determining if a particular use of a copyrighted work is allowable within a specific educational setting, which was its supposed intention.

I think the American Library Association's conclusion to its report says it better than anything else:

Conclusion
The TEACH Act is an opportunity, but it is also a responsibility. The new law is a benefit, but also a burden. Implementing the law and enjoying its benefits will be possible only with concerted action by many parties within the educational institution. Because of the numerous conditions, and the limitations on permitted activities, many uses of copyrighted works that may be desirable or essential for distance education may simply be barred under the terms of the TEACH Act. Educators should seek to implement the TEACH Act, but they should also be prepared for exploring alternatives when the new law does not yield a satisfactory result. Among those alternatives:

· Employing alternative methods for delivering materials to students, including the expansion of diverse library services, as noted above.

· Securing permission from the copyright owners for the use of materials beyond the limits of the law.

· Applying the law of fair use, which may allow uses beyond those detailed in the TEACH Act.

One objective of the TEACH Act is to offer a right of use with relative clarity and certainty. Like many other such specific provisions in the Copyright Act, the new statutory language is tightly limited. An ironic result is that fair use-with all of its uncertainty and flexibility-becomes of growing importance. Indeed, reports and studies leading to the drafting and passage of the new law have made clear that fair use continues to apply to the scanning, uploading, and transmission of copyrighted materials for distance education, even after enactment of the TEACH Act. A close examination of fair use is outside the scope of this particular paper, but fair use as applied to distance education will be the subject of further studies supported by the American Library Association.

...and there may be little or nothing we can do about it.

Dangerous Times Ahead After Election 2002
By John W. Dean for FindLaw.

Each of these leading news journals reports that the Bush Administration will soon make a effort to pack the federal courts with socially, economically and politically conservative judges. Worse, these judges will be the type who view positions on the judiciary as a prize opportunity to make their philosophy the law of the land...

...It has been known ever since the early months of the Bush-Cheney administration that the fact they do not even have a majority of public support is, in their view, irrelevant. They have the power, and that's all that counts...

...We are a divided nation. And when all of the minority parties are added into the equation, the Republicans - particularly the right-wing of the party - remain in the minority. Nevertheless, Bush's hard right core constituency wants more than anything else to pack the federal courts with those who share their thinking, and are willing to impose it through the court system.

These judges are the most inappropriate conceivable in these times: They are uniform in perspective and activist in imprinting that perspective on the law.

To keep his hard right constituency happy, Bush is scouring the legal community for conservative judicial appointees. I promise, you've seen nothing so far: Nominees to come will be, if anything, far more objectionable than those already considered.

Here is the text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20021108.html

DANGEROUS TIMES AHEAD AFTER ELECTION 2002:
Despite the Nation's Deep Divisions and Bush v. Gore, The President Plans On Filling The Courts With Right Wing Judges
By JOHN W. DEAN
----
Friday, Nov. 08, 2002

Election 2002 does not give the Bush-Cheney administration a mandate to load the federal judiciary with right wing judges. The voters, after all, had the economy and the war on their minds - not the federal courts. But if you doubt it's about to happen, just sit tight and wait.

The headlines and accompanying stories two days after the election tell the tale: The Los Angeles Times led with "Bush Gets Credit, Clout for Leading GOP Sweep." Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal proclaimed "GOP Sweep Gives A Boost to Bush - and Business." And The New York Times reported that "Victorious Republicans Preparing A Drive For Bush Agenda And Judgeship Nominees"

Each of these leading news journals reports that the Bush Administration will soon make a effort to pack the federal courts with socially, economically and politically conservative judges. Worse, these judges will be the type who view positions on the judiciary as a prize opportunity to make their philosophy the law of the land.

The Bush-Cheney White House believes it has been reborn. In truth, Election 2002 has only given the GOP technical control. But that is all this White House believes they need. So does much of the Republican news media.

The Administration Tried to Push Judges Without A Mandate Earlier, Too

It has been known ever since the early months of the Bush-Cheney administration that the fact they do not even have a majority of public support is, in their view, irrelevant. They have the power, and that's all that counts.

Recall that the Republicans lack a majority of popular support (Gore-Lieberman had a half-million vote plurality over Bush-Cheney), and were forced to gain control of the Senate by using Vice President Cheney's tie-breaking vote. Nevertheless, following the 2000 presidential election the Bush-Cheney presidency proceeded as if they had won office by acclamation.

The Bush-Cheney White House soon told the American Bar Association committee that has been assisting in the selection of federal judges since the Eisenhower administration to get lost. Without ABA assistance, the White House quickly rolled out its initial gaggle of conservative judicial nominees.

But before the Bush-Cheney team really got going, Vermont Republican Senator Jim Jeffords decided he had seen enough to make his decision. In late May 2001, he bolted from the GOP, declaring himself an Independent who was prepared to vote with the Democrats to give them control of the Senate.

With Democrats suddenly back in control of the Senate, the Bush-Cheney White House was forced to retreat, and to work with Congress to develop a legislative program. Yet they continued to send hard right judicial nominees to the Senate, simply stacking them on the Senate's doorstep for hoped-for confirmations.

September 11, 2001, of course, recast the Bush-Cheney presidency. Bush, the former prep-school cheerleader, climbed atop the rubble of the World Trade Center with a megaphone and found his voice. Meanwhile, Cheney, the closed-door politician and military aficionado, headed underground, clutching briefing books. There he perfected using his "hidden hand" to run the Bush-Cheney government.

For the Bush Administration, War Is A Political Strategy As Well

September 11th sent Bush's approval ratings into the stratosphere, with some polls giving him a ninety percent approval. Bush's Dick Morris, Karl Rove, had found political gold: George W. Bush - war president. Rove advised the president (and everyone else) to start talking war. They did, and it buried every other issue.

War presidents automatically win public approval. When Rove ran out of Taliban, he substituted Saddam Hussein. Bush's approval has remained at about sixty percent. Americans will be at war as long as Bush is in office - whether the war is against Iraq, or is the indefinite "war on terrorism."

Without war talk, the White House might have been stymied by a Senate controlled by Democrats, and Democrats threatening to take control of the House as well. Try to imagine a Bush Administration without September 11, and it will become clear how thoroughly war has taken over the agenda.

The November 2002 Election Was Not A Bush-Cheney Referendum

Rove also got his boss to take another low risk, high reward effort to get control of the Congress: Take the bully pulpit, and presidential road show, on the campaign trail. Try to transfer your own solid popularity to Republican candidates.

It worked. Bush raised a staggering $140 million for the midterm elections, and by barnstorming key races in the weeks before the election, he made a difference.

But what difference was it, exactly? The difference was that the Republicans now have technical control of Congress It was not that the Bush-Cheney presidency won a new mandate to replace the one the Administration lacked in the 2000 election. The public won't weigh in on the Presidency again until 2004 - and it did not view this intermediate election as a referendum on the Presidency.

Notwithstanding the spin to the contrary, the nation has not just held a plebiscite on the Bush-Cheney presidency. Polls show exactly the opposite.

The Polls Belie Any Claim of A Mandate for the Bush Administration

On November 4 of this year, the day before the election, the Gallup organization asked voters if their vote for a local candidate would (a) "be made in order to send a message you SUPPORT George W. Bush," (b) "be made in order to send a message that your OPPOSE George W. Bush," or (c) "will you NOT be sending a message about George W. Bush with your vote?"

Thirty-five percent were sending a message of support, and eighteen percent were sending a message of opposition. However, the bulk of the voters, forty-five percent, said they were not sending any message to Bush whatsoever.

With only a third of the voters sending a message of support, the 2002 midterm is hardily a national referendum on Bush. Interesting, even many of those voters who contribute to Bush's high popularity rating plainly had no intention of weighing in on him in this election; if they had, Gallup's number of voters sending a positive message on Bush would have been much higher.

A Nation Still Divided - But Judicial Nominees of A Single Philosophy

The margin of the 2002 midterm vote was so thin it says exactly the same thing to the nation that voters said in 2000. As Los Angeles Times political analyst Ron Brownstein notes: "However the final races sort out, it appears that the Republican advance Tuesday wasn't large enough to suggest that they have decisively broken out of the 50-50 divide that has defined American politics for the last half-decade."

We are a divided nation. And when all of the minority parties are added into the equation, the Republicans - particularly the right-wing of the party - remain in the minority. Nevertheless, Bush's hard right core constituency wants more than anything else to pack the federal courts with those who share their thinking, and are willing to impose it through the court system.

These judges are the most inappropriate conceivable in these times: They are uniform in perspective and activist in imprinting that perspective on the law.

To keep his hard right constituency happy, Bush is scouring the legal community for conservative judicial appointees. I promise, you've seen nothing so far: Nominees to come will be, if anything, far more objectionable than those already considered.

Unfortunately for everyone, this is a very dangerous, short-sighted political game.

The Dangers Of Majority Control, as Seen By Tocqueville and Madison

Alexis de Tocqueville, considered by many both on the right and the left to be a perceptive and wise a commentator on American democracy, long ago warned of the problems facing any majority. To make the point, he called it the tyranny of the majority.

"My greatest complaint against democratic government as organized in the United States," de Tocqueville writes in Democracy In America, ". . . is not the extreme freedom reigning there but the shortage of guarantees against tyranny." (Quotation from Mayer transl.)

The French political observer and thinker noted that when legislative, executive, and judicial branches think differently, tyranny is checked. Yet conservative Republicans currently seek to impose their philosophy by, in fact, controlling all branches: Not content to dominate the executive and legislative branches, they will make their bid for the judiciary, as well.

But when a majority can control all branches, de Tocqueville explained, there is a danger: "If ever freedom is lost in America, that will be due to the omnipotence of the majority driving the minority to desperation and forcing them to appeal to physical force."

This concern was not new to de Tocqueville; rather he drew from the thoughts of founder James Madison. Madison explained in Federalist No. 51 why a majority must be checked by the minority: "In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly said to reign as in a state of nature."

For this reason, the system was designed with checks and balances. Today, their remains but one possible check on Bush effort to pack the judiciary (or force other unacceptable programs through Congress). This last check is the Democrats' final chance to keep control of at least one branch.

Will Democrats Employ The Only Check On The Bush-Cheney Administration?

Before Senator Jeffords bolted and gave the Democrats control of the Senate, the Democrats showed great reluctance to use this last remaining check: the filibuster. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich surmised, reflecting on the return of Republican control, that Democrats simply can't keep saying "no." But now Democrats may have to learn to do just that.

Packing the judiciary is going to become a truly high-stakes game when one or more of the aging conservative Supreme Court justices step down. Never has that been more likely to happen than during the next year. It will occur long before the presidential race, so the argument can't be used that filling the high court must be left to the next president.

Meanwhile, there are presently sixteen conservative Bush judicial nominees awaiting confirmation. It is possible none of these nominees would ever have been approved. Yet now they are all, at least, going to be processed, and doubtless some, if not all, will be confirmed.

Bush aides have said that given the changed situation, the White House will resubmit the rejected nominations of Charles Pickering of Mississippi and Priscilla Owen of Texas. Both Pickering and Owen were earlier rejected for seats on the United States Court of Appeals by the then-Democratically-controlled Senate.

The GOP is still far short of a 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority in favor of its nominations. Will Democrats use the filibuster to prevent Bush from packing the judiciary (and for other conservative initiatives)?

I don't know. I do know if they don't, we will have a tyranny of a technical majority, which is - in truth - a minority that has the reins of government in its hands.

Bill Moyers has writes about his experience as Press Secretary to Lyndon Johnson during the beginning of the Vietnam War and the inevitable cost of the War on Iraq to the innocents on both sides.

The Costs Of War

Our Secretary of Defense has a plaque on his desk that says, "Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords." I don't think so.

To launch an armada against Hussein's own hostages, a people who have not fired a shot at us in anger, seems a crude and poor alternative to shrewd, disciplined diplomacy.

Don't get me wrong. Vietnam didn't make me a dove; it made me read the Constitution. That's all. Government's first obligation is to defend its citizens. There's nothing in the Constitution that says it's permissible for a great nation to go hunting for Hussein by killing the people he holds hostage, his own people, who have no choice in the matter, who have done us no harm.

Unprovoked, the noble sport of war becomes the murder of the innocent.

Here is the full text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.pbs.org/now/commentary/moyers14.html

The Costs of War

By Bill Moyers

Iraq is not Vietnam, but war is war. Some of you will recall that I was Press Secretary to Lyndon Johnson during the escalation of war in Vietnam. Like the White House today, we didn't talk very much about what the war would cost. Not in the beginning. We weren't sure, and we didn't really want to know too soon, anyway.

If we had to tell Congress and the public the true cost of the war, we were afraid of what it would do to the rest of the budget — the money for education, poverty, Medicare. In time, we had to figure it out and come clean. It wasn't the price tag that hurt as much as it was the body bag. The dead were coming back in such numbers that LBJ began to grow morose, and sometimes took to bed with the covers pulled above his eyes, as if he could avoid the ghosts of young men marching around in his head. I thought of this the other day, when President Bush spoke of the loss of American lives in Iraq. He said, "I'm the one who will have to look the mothers in the eye."

LBJ said almost the same thing. No president can help but think of the mothers, widows, and orphans.

Mr. Bush is amassing a mighty American armada in the Middle East - incredible firepower. He has to know that even a clean war — a war fought with laser beams, long range missles, high flying bombers, and remote controls — can get down and dirty, especially for the other side.

We forget there are mothers on the other side. I've often wondered about the mothers of Vietnamese children like this one, burned by American napalm. Or Afghan mothers, whose children were smashed and broken by American bombs.

On the NBC Nightly News one evening I saw this exclusive report from Afghanistan — those little white lights are heat images of people on foot. They're about to be attacked.

That fellow running out in the open - were he and the people killed members of Al Qaeda, or just coming to worship?

We'll never know. But surely their mothers do. And there will be mothers like them in Iraq. Saddam won't mind - dead or alive; and we won't mind, either. The spoils of victory include amnesia.

Ah, the glories of war; the adrenaline that flows to men behind desks at the very thought of the armies that will march, the missiles that will fly, the ships that will sail, on their command.

Broward officials misplace 103,222 votes, but outcomes are unchanged
By Scott Wyman for the Sun-Sentinel.

Between 1 a.m. and 5 p.m. Wednesday, the elections office found it had left 103,222 votes out of the total ballots cast, including 34,136 votes for the governor's race -- even though the total announced at 1 a.m. was given as a 100 percent count...

... Some remained skeptical about what happened and raised the possibility that the county was double-counting votes. "It's another screw-up, and I'm not satisfied this is correct," Broward Republican leader George Lemieux said.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-cvote07nov07,0,1451394.story?coll=sfla%2Dhome%2Dheadlines

Broward officials misplace 103,222 votes, but outcomes are unchanged

By Scott Wyman
Staff writer
Posted November 7 2002

The polls opened on time and the new voting machines worked properly, but Broward County election officials couldn't get the results right in Tuesday's election.

Between 1 a.m. and 5 p.m. Wednesday, the elections office found it had left 103,222 votes out of the total ballots cast, including 34,136 votes for the governor's race -- even though the total announced at 1 a.m. was given as a 100 percent count.

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The additional votes didn't change the outcome of any race, although state Rep. Nan Rich, D-Weston, widened her lead in a tough re-election bid. Election officials miscalculated the turnout data and said they also botched the numbers by not including ballots cast by English-speaking early voters in the tallies.

The most significant impact of the missing votes was on the size of Broward's turnout. Initial results showed an extraordinarily low turnout of 34 percent, with 337,976 casting votes, but the revised numbers boosted turnout to 45 percent with 441,198 voting.

The erroneous numbers were sent to the state, given to the news media and posted on the elections office's Web site. County Judge Jay Spechler, chairman of the election canvassing board, said officials should be more cautious in the future in releasing unofficial results before they can be verified.

"I think there are some things that need to be audited before they're disseminated to the public," Spechler said.

Some remained skeptical about what happened and raised the possibility that the county was double-counting votes. "It's another screw-up, and I'm not satisfied this is correct," Broward Republican leader George Lemieux said.

Even with the change, the turnout was Broward's lowest for a gubernatorial election in at least three decades, and one of the worst in the state. Only DeSoto, Dixie and Levy counties, each rural counties with fewer than 20,000 registered voters, posted poorer turnouts.

Overall, Florida had one of the best turnouts in the nation because of the closely watched race between Gov. Jeb Bush and Tampa lawyer Bill McBride, with 53 percent of state voters casting ballots.

A range of reasons

Since 1970, Broward turnout for a gubernatorial election had dropped below 50 percent only twice. Turnout was 46 percent in 1998 and 49 percent in 1990.

Election observers differed on the reasons why so many of Broward's 978,000 voters stayed home.

Some argued McBride never fired up the Democratic strongholds in Broward. Others said people stayed away out of disgust with the county's election problems and its latest incarnation -- hours-long waits at early voting sites.

But all said only the county's hard-core voters participated in the election, people who would vote regardless of the strength of candidates, the weather or the long lines.

Jim Kane, editor of the Florida Voter newsletter, and Lance deHaven-Smith, a political science professor at Florida State University, said voter confidence in Broward's election process declined enough that news reports about long lines dissuaded many.

"This may be a case of fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me," deHaven-Smith said. "There was concern after the 2000 election that people may be turned off by the political process and that they would be convinced their vote wouldn't count. Then there was a strong turnout in the September primary, but more problems."

But news reports weren't the only reason people didn't vote. There were problems with voter registration information, confusion about polling places and mistakes from the early voting process.

No-show ballots

Gerald and Marie-Helene Loftus, who work at the U.S. Embassy in Luxembourg, asked for absentee ballots but never received them. It was the first time in 32 years Gerald Loftus hadn't voted.

Sailboat Bend residents Ronald and Sally Gonsalves searched for their polling place on Tuesday, but gave up when one had to go to work. They received two different registration cards in the mail directing them to different places and were repeatedly rerouted when they tried to vote.

Lauderhill residents Max and Evelyn Berkowitz couldn't vote because they tried to cast early ballots at the West Regional Courthouse in Plantation on Monday. They waited in line for three hours, signed in at the registration desk and left when they saw a second long line for the voting machines.

"They told us if we left we couldn't vote on Tuesday because we had already registered," said Max Berkowitz, 87. "Now we've lost our right to vote."

While changing no outcomes, Wednesday's additional votes altered results across the board.

Among the changes, McBride netted an extra 13,815 votes against Bush, Attorney General Bob Butterworth netted an extra 473 against state Rep. Jeff Atwater in a state Senate race and U.S. Rep. Clay Shaw netted an extra 935 against challenger Carol Roberts. McBride and Butterworth still lost, and Shaw widened his winning margin.

Mike Lindsey, an observer for the state Division of Elections, said the numbers that weren't reported in the initial total were never in danger of being lost.

He said that the election software system stores data in different areas and that the summary reports distributed Tuesday night and Wednesday morning were formatted incorrectly, omitting some of the figures.

The canvassing board will meet today to certify the results and submit them to the state.

Staff Writers Jeff Shields and Buddy Nevins contributed to this report.

Scott Wyman can be reached at swyman@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4511.

The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University published a report on Oct 22, 2002 that better explains the problem of disenfranchised voters.

(Note: It is correct to use either disfranchised and disenfranchised, in case you're curious.)
Democracy Spoiled: National, State, and Local Disparities in Disfranchisement Through Uncounted Ballots

# Spoilage Rates Are Most Prevalent In Counties With High Concentrations Of Minority Voters. Of the 100 counties with the highest spoilage rates, 67 have black populations above 12%. Of the top 100 counties with the lowest spoilage rates, the reverse is true - only 10 had sizeable black populations, while the population of 70 of the counties was over 75% white. There is also a strong correlation between uncounted ballots and black population; specifically, as the black population in a county increases, the uncounted ballot rate correspondingly increases.

# Various Factors Cause the Substantial Disparities in Ballot Spoilage Rates And Mere Technological Improvements Will Not Sufficiently Address These Problems. Evidence from various studies note that while improved voting technology reduces the percentage of discarded ballots across the board, these improvements still do not fully address the disparities between voting precincts, particularly between high-minority and low-minority districts. Indeed, despite popular belief, punch card machines had low ballot spoilage rates in many jurisdictions in 2000, refuting the notion that machine engineering is the critical issue.

A particularly inspired Florida poll worker hams it up for the camera



The picture suggests that all went well yesterday -- but this is actually the picture that goes with the previously blogged story below, which details some of the various situations in which things did not go smoothly at the polls.

I've been watching this on TV all morning -- news coverage saying there was no voting troubles, with headlines running across the bottom at the same time regarding all of the voting trouble that actually took place.

Polling USA: A glitch here, a gremlin there
No widespread problems reported as polls begin closing
No author given.

Power outages, ballot shortages and minor computer glitches were the bumps in an otherwise smooth election Tuesday.

Other jurisdictions reported some minor problems:

•In Pulaski County, Arkansas, home to Little Rock, the capital, Democrats were granted an injunction late Tuesday to keep the polls open until 10 p.m. ET, instead of 8:30 p.m. ET, because several polling places ran out of ballots. But the state's high court later voided that order and it was not clear what that might mean for the votes cast during that time span.

•A heavier-than-expected voter turnout in St. Louis, Missouri, caused a shortage of punch cards. More were being delivered to polling stations but the snafu was not expected to affect voting.

•In one district in Maryland, the lights went out around 6:30 p.m. ET. Voters and election workers used flashlights and candles to see the voting machines -- which still worked -- until the polls closed at 8 p.m.

•A computer glitch will delay vote counting in Tarrant County, Texas, home to Fort Worth. Gayle Hamilton, the assistant elections administrator for the county, said some 17,000 mail-in ballots from early voting and 250,000 Election Day ballots may be affected.

•A judge late Tuesday denied an injunction request by Democrats in New Mexico's Dona Ana County. They made the request after the party got calls beginning early in the morning from voters complaining that polls weren't open and judges weren't at the polling stations.

•In Georgia, the first state to implement computerized touch-screen voting in every precinct, voters reported few problems. "I am not techno, and this went along just very smooth," a voter named Shirley told CNN. "I made a mistake, had to go back, and I was very proud of myself."

•A judge in New Jersey ruled that mechanical problems in 74 machines in Camden County polling stations were not severe enough to warrant an extension of polling hours. Voters were forced to use to use paper ballots for a while. The judge's order ruled that all voting machines and provisional and emergency ballots be impounded in Cherry Hill until further notice.

•Mishaps weren't limited to the new, technologically advanced polling sites. Rep. Julia Carson, D-Indiana, was unable to cast a vote for herself because of a problem with the machine she was using. "The lever came down for my friends but it didn't come down for me," Carson said. Poll workers fixed the problem after Carson left. They tracked her down and had her come back to vote again.

•In Bloomington, Minnesota, a high turnout of voters used up all the available paper ballots for the hotly contested U.S. Senate race between Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Walter Mondale, but officials said no voters were turned away.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/11/05/elec02.voting.irregularities/index.html

Polling USA: A glitch here, a gremlin there
No widespread problems reported as polls begin closing

Wednesday, November 6, 2002 Posted: 12:36 AM EST (0536 GMT)
A Florida poll worker praises today's voting process at his Miami precinct.
A Florida poll worker praises today's voting process at his Miami precinct.
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(CNN) -- Power outages, ballot shortages and minor computer glitches were the bumps in an otherwise smooth election Tuesday.

Elections officials, some of whom had feared widespread equipment trouble, expressed relief, especially in Florida. The specter of the 2000 election -- marked by a protracted and unprecedented, post-election battle in the Sunshine State -- hung over this year's midterm races.

David Host, a spokesman for the Florida secretary of state, called the elections "an unqualified success."

Host said minor problems erupted with optical scanners at one precinct in Osceola County, one in Brevard, two in Orange and two in Duval, "but they were quickly remedied."

In Miami-Dade County, "a handful of voters" were forced to cast paper ballots for about three hours when all five machines at one polling place failed. A total of 80 paper ballots were cast.
Chad-free

No hanging, dimpled or pregnant chads marred the vote counting this year in Florida, but the state did experience new problems in the primary elections weeks ago, even after having spent $32 million on new voting equipment.

One 92-year-old woman in Miami even voted in her car, using a laptop computer that workers at the precinct brought out to her

Other jurisdictions reported some minor problems:

•In Pulaski County, Arkansas, home to Little Rock, the capital, Democrats were granted an injunction late Tuesday to keep the polls open until 10 p.m. ET, instead of 8:30 p.m. ET, because several polling places ran out of ballots. But the state's high court later voided that order and it was not clear what that might mean for the votes cast during that time span.

•A heavier-than-expected voter turnout in St. Louis, Missouri, caused a shortage of punch cards. More were being delivered to polling stations but the snafu was not expected to affect voting.

•In one district in Maryland, the lights went out around 6:30 p.m. ET. Voters and election workers used flashlights and candles to see the voting machines -- which still worked -- until the polls closed at 8 p.m.

•A computer glitch will delay vote counting in Tarrant County, Texas, home to Fort Worth. Gayle Hamilton, the assistant elections administrator for the county, said some 17,000 mail-in ballots from early voting and 250,000 Election Day ballots may be affected.

•A judge late Tuesday denied an injunction request by Democrats in New Mexico's Dona Ana County. They made the request after the party got calls beginning early in the morning from voters complaining that polls weren't open and judges weren't at the polling stations.

•In Georgia, the first state to implement computerized touch-screen voting in every precinct, voters reported few problems. "I am not techno, and this went along just very smooth," a voter named Shirley told CNN. "I made a mistake, had to go back, and I was very proud of myself."

•A judge in New Jersey ruled that mechanical problems in 74 machines in Camden County polling stations were not severe enough to warrant an extension of polling hours. Voters were forced to use to use paper ballots for a while. The judge's order ruled that all voting machines and provisional and emergency ballots be impounded in Cherry Hill until further notice.

•Mishaps weren't limited to the new, technologically advanced polling sites. Rep. Julia Carson, D-Indiana, was unable to cast a vote for herself because of a problem with the machine she was using. "The lever came down for my friends but it didn't come down for me," Carson said. Poll workers fixed the problem after Carson left. They tracked her down and had her come back to vote again.

•In Bloomington, Minnesota, a high turnout of voters used up all the available paper ballots for the hotly contested U.S. Senate race between Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Walter Mondale, but officials said no voters were turned away.

Electronic elections: What about security?
Voters put touch screens to the test
By Jeordan Legon for CNN.

People have jumped on the electronic voting bandwagon, thinking that will solve the problems," said Avi Rubin, a technology security expert and researcher at AT&T Labs in New Jersey. "But these systems are largely untested."

The problem, say critics, is that the software which runs the machines is proprietary, and therefore not open to public scrutiny. Without scientists being able to freely analyze the systems, election officials may be leaving themselves open to the possibility of hacking, vote tampering or incorrect calculations.

Here is the full text of the article:

http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/ptech/11/05/touch.screen/index.html

Electronic elections: What about security?
Voters put touch screens to the test

By Jeordan Legon
CNN
Tuesday, November 5, 2002 Posted: 10:02 AM EST (1502 GMT)
Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke casts her early ballot at a new touch-screen terminal.

(CNN) -- As Americans go to the polls today, a record number of counties -- almost one fifth by some estimates -- will be tallying the votes on electronic voting machines. But some experts worry that despite rigorous testing, the machines may not be as secure as their makers promise.

"People have jumped on the electronic voting bandwagon, thinking that will solve the problems," said Avi Rubin, a technology security expert and researcher at AT&T Labs in New Jersey. "But these systems are largely untested."

The problem, say critics, is that the software which runs the machines is proprietary, and therefore not open to public scrutiny. Without scientists being able to freely analyze the systems, election officials may be leaving themselves open to the possibility of hacking, vote tampering or incorrect calculations.

The companies that make the machines say they've built safeguards to protect against such problems. Engineers say they've encrypted and protected the data with digital signatures, the information is backed up at least twice as a safeguard against mechanical failures and any changes to votes are logged and tracked.

In addition, the voting software and hardware has to pass strict security standards imposed by the Federal Election Commission and the National Association of State Election Directors. Voters touch a screen to cast a ballot in many systems; others involve pushing buttons, much like automatic teller machines.

"Show me somebody who has gotten into our software," said Mark Beckstrand, a vice president at Sequoia Voting Systems, builder of voting machines used in Florida, Ohio, New Jersey and other states. "We haven't lost or misplaced or ever been accused of not having 100 percent accuracy."
'Going through our learning curves'

But the machines are relatively new technology. The touch screens became more popular in more precincts in 1996, when improved technology made them smaller and more dependable, said Doug Lewis, Executive Director of The Election Center in Houston, Texas.

The center, which represents the country's elections officials, oversees testing of the touch screens. In the 2000 election, about 10 percent of the county's voters used them, according to the center. This year, almost 18 percent will use them, Lewis said.

A different estimate by Election Data Services says 510 of the nation's counties (16 percent) will use electronic voting systems Tuesday.

Lewis said he's confident the new technology is more secure than paper voting, but that doesn't mean there won't be problems.

"The new machines are so new to us that we're going to do through our learning curves to see what the strengths and weaknesses are," he said.

"There is no such thing as a perfect system. If a human being can create it, then human beings can mark it or change it."
Avoiding the problems in Florida

Elections officials hope to avoid a repeat of the touch-screen machine malfunctions and lack of trained poll workers that forced some polling places in Florida to turn voters away during September's primaries.

Florida's experience with the machines prompted Santa Clara County, in the heart of California's Silicon Valley, to delay a pilot program that would have put the touch screens in 15 percent of the precincts.

But many other counties are pushing ahead with the touch screens. Much on the spending for machines is fueled by $3.9 billion Congress set aside for states to overhaul their voting systems in the next three years. But the need for the machines also is prompted by a federal law mandating that by 2006, at least one machine serve disabled voters in every precinct. The touch-screen machines are easier to adapt for blind voters because they can be outfitted with audio units.

Rubin believes some of that money would be well-spent on new, more robust systems that could be developed if the 20 or so electronic voting vendors are mandated to share data. By adopting "open source" standards, the software could be fortified against hackers and malfunctions, Rubin said.

"The philosophy of open source is that it's more likely to expose whatever problems there are," he said. "If you keep it closed, an attacker may find a vulnerability and you won't have the opportunity to detect it."

But manufacturers disagree, saying that making their code public will make their systems more prone to hacking. And the development of voting systems and meeting the rigorous government testing required is expensive. They argue patents help them recoup their cost.
The future of voting seems to be electronic

The stakes are high: billions of dollars in machine sales and restoring public confidence in the elections process. Lewis expects about 75 percent of voters to cast ballots electronically by 2010.

Although Britain and Switzerland are testing Web voting systems, security concerns of running an Internet election make the electronic voting machines the next viable alternative to hanging chads and hard-to-tabulate paper ballots.

"We're having to go through a tough transition," Lewis said. "For whole lot of people, there is a comfort level in having paper to go back to. It's difficult for someone to track this electronically, rather than on paper."

(Via BoingBoing)

Georgia's Electronic Voting, from a UI perspective

That having been said, it was a pleasure to use this system. I had no problems with the acutal use of the system: touch screen is a *great* choice, especially for handicapped & elderly users. Blind users pretty much can't use it... but I think that as time goes on, having a "audio" version of the ballot (with headphones) would be an excellent alternative. The choices were clearly marked, and I had no problem with the system. It included a review page, and the opportunity to go back and fix problems.

Everything was clearly marked: incumbents were clearly marked, as was party affiliation. Names were also clearly placed at a reasonable type-size. Font face was a standard Arial-Helvetica type, which was annoying but understandable. Choices were also clearly marked: the touch area for each button was fairly large, making it easy to hit. (Ever try and use those stupid punch card pages? The punch card tools are about as unwieldy as a needle and thread. Using a finger instead is wonderful).

Here is the entire article in case the link goes bad at:

http://www.plasticnoodle.com/archives/000061.html#000061

PlasticNoodle
The shiny version of my brain!

November 05, 2002
Georgia's Electronic Voting, from a UI perspective

CNN.com - Electronic elections: What about security? - Nov. 5, 2002

Let me go through a quick summary of the user experience for voting with the new Georgia touch-screen panels. This will ignore everything that you can think of in the way of security, just because that's a hot debate that I don't want to get into.

First, let me state: not everyone in Georgia is using these. Some places did opt to use the pull-lever voting machines for now. It's just most of the state.

When I went in to vote, my name, address, and voting information was still being taken by hand. I went through 5 poll workers to get everything I needed, including the usual drivers' license stuff. The major difference is that the retiree at the end of the line gave me a smart card, not a ballot.

I will say this: two years ago when I last voted, I accidentally messed up my ballot. Major pain; the poll worker had to cancel my ballot, re-issue me a ballot, and was very annoyed with me. So I was looking for resolutions to this problem, as well as a much better looking and easier to use experience.

The "ballot box", for lack of a better term, is an approximatly 8 inch by 10 inch LCD screen, placed the long way, and leaning at about a 45 degree angle. Beneath the box and to the right is a "card holder", which was at best a bad place. I'm 5'10", and I didn't see it until I stepped back for a second to find where the card went. On first impression I was expecting a swipe-card situation. But it's a smart card, with a chip inside of it: it writes your choices to the card, so it's got to hold onto it. Not the worst, but mentionable.

On finding the location for the card, I stuck it in... and got nothing for a few seconds. A sticker on the top read to stick it in until the green light goes on. The green light is beneath the card's slot - so you can't see it until it goes in. Icky. Place it on top so people can see it.

I read of reports where people were slipping it beneath the slot, in the space between the slot and the box. I didn't experience the problem... but the elderly woman next to me did have problems placing the card into the box. Couldn't lean over and watch to find out what the problem was, though: that's polling places for you.

The screen was a Windows-based GUI. Touch the box next to your choice, and a big X appeared next to it. Definitely easier to read than a ballot. Changing the choice was also easy: touch the choice or another choice, and it switched. I dislike the Windows-traditional GUI in this setup -- it's black text on gray background. It definitely needs to be white on black. I'd rather it had more pleasing buttons than the traditional Windows buttons, but it didn't affect the usability, just my sense of good taste.

The buttons were a traditional 3-column ballot list. I still think the traditional 3-column ballot list is a horrid format. Each column is seperated with a thick border, while each column is seperated by thick borders seperating contents, and thin lines seperating individual choices. Between contests there is also a space, so it's thick line, space, thick line between contests.

This, at best, is a poor explanation of the traditional ballot: suffice it to say, it's a poor design. As you can see in the (linked) image, it's three columns. What it doesn't show is the gray on gray (the images shows a blue background) and the fact that each group for voting is placed right below one another, about 6 contests per page. Emulating the 3-column ballot was probably not the best choice. It works -- but there's better ways to do it. A 2-column list might have been interesting, and a little less confusing. A Full-page setup, with choices either going down or across 3 at a time might have been a better choice. Multiple pages works, although it definitley isn't using the medium to it's advantage. I wish they had tried letting the page scroll, it might have worked a little better.

That having been said, it was a pleasure to use this system. I had no problems with the acutal use of the system: touch screen is a *great* choice, especially for handicapped & elderly users. Blind users pretty much can't use it... but I think that as time goes on, having a "audio" version of the ballot (with headphones) would be an excellent alternative. The choices were clearly marked, and I had no problem with the system. It included a review page, and the opportunity to go back and fix problems.

Everything was clearly marked: incumbents were clearly marked, as was party affiliation. Names were also clearly placed at a reasonable type-size. Font face was a standard Arial-Helvetica type, which was annoying but understandable. Choices were also clearly marked: the touch area for each button was fairly large, making it easy to hit. (Ever try and use those stupid punch card pages? The punch card tools are about as unwieldy as a needle and thread. Using a finger instead is wonderful).

Entering a write-in candidate is easy too - touch screen keyboard to allow you to type it in. Much easier than writing it, and it helps that the screen is at an angle; you can see it without having to put your wrists into a permanent arch. Standard QWERTY keyboard on a seperate screen, you just click on the write-in choice, and it moves you to that seperate screen.

One thing I did find poor about the interface was the final selection screen: it had problems with it's scrolling. it took me about 3 minutes to go from the top of the list to the bottom... which would be on a desktop PC a one-click move, as it's not a long page. That needs to be improved.

Another suggestion I would like to make goes toward improving the voting process overall: educating the people as to their choices. If you look at VoteSmart's web site, you'll find that many candidates refused to state their positions. That's right: a non-biased, non-party affiliated group couldn't get most candidate's positions. Your average person has little or no chance to hear the facts and form an opinion on a candidate. But, in linking information to the candidate's position -- all candidates, equally -- you might get a better educated electorate. Granted, it's probably not currently allowed in most or all states, but it's a thought. And it would help one of the most problematic issues with voting, voter education.

So, to sum up, it's a pretty neat system with some room for improvement -- but a definite good thing. Check it out at the Georgia Counts web site. They've got a demo to get a feel for it, and a ton of videos, which I haven't looked at.
Posted by doones at November 05, 2002 07:08 PM
Comments

whine whine whine...
Posted by: on November 6, 2002 10:22 AM

Cool - I posted a rant at 6:30 am, and I'm declared insane in less than 30 minutes.

Beautiful.

Someone's listening!

Success.

Anyone else out there?

According to this first election count (oh yeah, there will be recounts baby), Republicans have taken over the House and the Senate -- mostly by narrow margins.

This election should also be remembered for its thousands of disenfranchised voters -- in all states. As per usual.

We have a serious crisis going on in this country with our elections. I can't even believe this is happening in the United States of America.

Please everybody, insist on the recounts. The news keeps talking about "sweeping victories for the GOP", but when they show the percentages, some of them say "50% - 50%" with the Republican checked as the victor (often with no more than a 100 vote margin).

Remember that this is the same media that decided not to cover the 100,000+ people that marched on Oct 26 on both coasts.

It looks to me that none of these close victories can be taken at face value yet. There's too much at stake here. Let's investigate every one of them. If there's something fishy going on, it's going to take all of us paying very close attention, adding up the numbers, comparing the good notes we've all distributed to each other and coordinating together across all 50 states!

Let's get to the bottom of this guys, while the trail is still hot!

Please send any articles and information you have to me at lisarein@finetuning.com about this and I will post it here.

Here are some rough notes for those of you who are interested...

This is incomplete still but what I've figured out so far:

A-y

B-y

BB - money to fix Bart- yes

C- yes

D- yes

E-

F-

G-

H-

L- yes

M-No - looks like more spending on unneeded bureaucracy.

R-No

S - Medical Pot - Yes!

Governor - Gray Davis

46-yes

47-yes

48-yes

50-yes

52 yes -- voter registration!

Judges:

Marvin R. Baxter - no
http://www.appellate-counsellor.com/profiles/baxter.htm
see the list of bad decisions for yourself, including:
School administrators may detain minor students without reasonable suspicion
http://www.appellate-counsellor.com/newsletter/0109.htm#Randy_G

Kathryn M. Werdegar-no
appointed by Deukmejian (a horrible gov from years back)

James J. Marchiano - yes
Judge of the year Alameda/Contra Costa Trial Lawyers Association - 1990.

William J. Stein - No
also appt by the duke
http://www.appellate-counsellor.com/profiles/stein.htm

He authored this opinion:
Sporadic racial insults do not constitute unlawful harassment
(http://www.appellate-counsellor.com/newsletter/9811.htm#Etter)

Linda M. Gemello - yes
San Mateo Trial Lawyers Association lawyer of the year - 2000

Mark Simons- can't tell. abstaining

Gail Dekreon - seems ok
http://www.smartvoter.org/2002/11/05/ca/sf/vote/dekreon_g/endorse.html
http://gaildekreonforjudge.com/www/about.htm

After much research, I've decided that Proposition "O" is better than "N"...

If you have to vote yes on "N" (please don't), at least vote yes on "O" too to keep "N" in check...

So I've spent a fair amount of time researching Proposition N and Proposition O over the last month or so, and this is what I've decided:

NO on Proposition N: Prop N, the "Care not Cash" initiative, proposes to take General Assistance Recipients' $350 a month away in exchange for only $59 a month and "services."
It says nothing about exactly these "services" would be supplied in exchange for taking the money away. (Hey, I just found out today that the ACLU of Northern California has taken a stand against Prop N too...)

Yes on Proposition O: This proposition has no immediate effect on the current cash general assitance benefits. It leaves them alone and instead, requires the city to develop more low-income housing and drug and alcohol treatment programs.

Here's the language straight out of the PDF file:

(1) requires the City to develop 1,000 units of housing
for formerly homeless residents and 700 new drug and alcohol
treatment slots, and requires the Departments of Human Services
and Public Health to submit plans and budgets to reduce
wait-lists for housing and supportive services;

(2) establishes a baseline
appropriation for housing and related services;

(3) establishes a City policy that the
State should be responsible for all treatment and care for people with mental
disabilities; and,

Prop O also has language in it that would at least require some accountability regarding Prop N's "care" benefits that are provided in lieu of the usual "cash", should Prop N pass (currently Prop N is rather vague on what exactly the G.A. recipients would be receiving in exchange for the $300 a month that would be taken away froom them.)

Here's the language straight out of the same PDF file:

(4) limits any City program that provides in-kind services in lieu of cash to 180 days of shelter stay per recipient, with certain exceptions, including exceptions for homeless recipients of the County Adult Assistance Programs who have applications pending for the CalWORKS program or who are age sixty-five (65) or over;

(5) requires the provision of specified services to recipients of in-kind services in lieu
of cash; and,

(6) requires Controller certification regarding shelter and housing before
the implementation of a program of in-kind services to aid recipients.

This headline was going to be: "Anti-War Rally In Boston Gets Usual Lack of Media Coverage," but I didn't want to emphasize the negative...

Luckily, Steve Garfield has put together a movie of the event.

As is often the case,
Ryan Junell has sent out an email articulating
my sentiments exactly.

This time, it's about getting out there and VOTING TODAY!

Here's where you can
find your polling place in the San Francisco Bay Area

http://sunset.ci.sf.ca.us/pollup3.nsf/searchdata?openform

Here's where you can
read about state and local measures
in California
http://www.ci.sf.ca.us/election/guides/measures110502election.htm

------------------------------------------------------ AMBIVALENT SAN FRANCISCO DROPOUT -> VOTE NOVEMBER 5th! ------------------------------------------------------ if you are registered to vote, then dudes... you gotta get out and vote. don't slack. our activity is what makes san francisco such a special place to live. here are some voter stats in sf that I think are interesting. we have one of the highest registered voter populations in the country, though we are terrible at actually showing up to vote. I recall about a fourth of us actually showed up to vote in the last election. voting is one very powerful and specific way of seeing our values reflected in public policy. plus... it's fun!

so... find your polling place

http://www.ci.sf.ca.us/election
(and click on "Polling Place Lookup")

so... read about state/local measures

http://www.ci.sf.ca.us/election/guides/measures110502election.htm

------------------------------------------------------
San Francisco Registered Voter Stats - October 7, 2002
------------------------------------------------------
eligible 574,401
registered 441,654 (76.89%) !!!
democratic 244,309 (55.32%)
decl. to state 110,722 (25.07%)
republican 57,852 (13.10%)
green 13,095 (2.96%)
am. ind. 8,002 (1.81%)
libertarian 2,811 (0.64%)
natural law 1,044 (0.24%)
reform 1,046 (0.24%)
misc 2,773 (0.63%)

from
http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/ror_100702.htm

These tables are just an experiment I've been working on with my friend Jim Woolum over the last few months.

Each Senator/Congressperson's listing (Senators are on the top, and then in alphabetical order) includes:
Name, Party, District, Date First Elected, Date Up For Reelection and direct links to competitor in tomorrow's election, complete mailing addresses for both Legislative and District Offices, Voice Number, Fax Number, Email, and Major Funders.

California Reps.

New York Reps.

Please let me know if the information they contain is useful.
(lisarein@finetuning.com)

I also look forward to any general feedback regarding how they can be improved.

It is my goal to have tables like this for every state of the union. It's part of a larger project I'm working on that I can't talk about yet.
(Or I would have to kill me.)

A Hundred Thousand March -- Media Censors?

Which also includes a great reprint of John Perry Barlow's account of the day.
(Thanks, Kevin)

When we finally got up to Market Street around noon, the march had already launched toward the Civic Center. Market was dense with humanity as far as I could see in that direction. We counted several different cross-sections of the moving populace, and the parade seemed to be about 20 people across. Assuming that each phalanx of 20 moved though per second, this would be about 72,000 people per hour. The march continued unabated for at least 2 and a half hours. If our calculations are even a little accurate, this would be over a hundred fifty thousand people who had gathered to protest a war that has barely begun.

I remember the first anti-war protest I ever attended. It was in the fall of 1965 and it took place on Boston Commons. I'd be surprised if there were more than a hundred people there, though they included, as I recall, Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. It was not until after Kent State, five years later, that I saw anything like the assembly of protesters I witnessed yesterday.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2002/10/30/21821/475

A Hundred Thousand March -- Media Censors? (Politics)

By darkonc
Fri Nov 1st, 2002 at 07:36:00 AM EST
Freedom

A couple of days ago, I got an email. The email went to a political list I'm on. It said that on Oct. 26, between 50,000 and 150,000 people had marched in San Francisco to protest against plans for war against Iraq. That wasn't the story, though. The story was that the national news sources had all but ignored the protest.

Even stranger than that (it may be coincidence) I can't currently bring up any SF newspaper sites to verify this story. In any case, the email I recieved is below. Can people in SF verify that this event occured, and can people outside SF verify that they haven't heard about it?

100, 000 March in San Francisco. Media Fail to Notice.
From: "John Perry Barlow"

So I went down to the demonstration yesterday. Instead of getting my fair share of abuse - the San Francisco police were as non-confrontational as Muppets - I was ignored. Along with anywhere from 50,000 to 150,000 other people.

In spite of its being largest and most demographically diverse demonstration I've seen in a long career of dissent, the closest the Bay Area peace march came to being a national event was a mention on page 8 of the New York Times that thousands had also gathered in San Francisco.

Perhaps if it had turned violent... But probably not. As I said in my last blast, the best way to neutralize us is to pretend that we don't exist. The puzzling question to me is, why are the media going along with George II on this. What the hell is in it for them?

I mean, we know that the war sells papers. William Randolph Hearst, a pioneer in this regard, told his photographer in Cuba - where the battleship Maine had just exploded, providing the excuse for the Spanish-American War - "You get the pictures. I'll get the war."

But if all you're trying to do is to get and keep public attention, any popular fracas will suffice. I am certain that a lot of people bought the paper today to find out about yesterday's demonstrations. Why couldn't such a modest desire find its gratification? It's weird. I can think of no mechanism by which the White House could directly muzzle the press without someone getting the word out over the Internet. But something is making the media act as if opposition to this war is no big deal.

But from where I was marching, it looked like a big deal, and not simply because everything I'm involved with looks like a big deal to me. This was huge. Let me tell you a little about it, since apparently no one else is going to.

I've been on the road with Mountain Girl Garcia. We have been staying at her daughter Trixie's Julia Morgan house in Oakland and decided to take BART across the Bay rather than experience the agony of looking for a parking place in a city that doesn't have parking places even when nothing unusual is going on in town. When we got to the north Oakland BART station around 11:00, there was already a line for the ticket machines that snaked half an hour out into the parking lot. The train, when we finally got on it, was breathing room only. There was a line to get out of the station at the Embarcadero.

I'm not keen on being in line, but these experiences were not at all unpleasant. There was a lovely energy among the protesters, who seemed to be of all social sorts. It was not just the usual suspects. There were children, old people, men in suits, as well as people who will never wear a suit. A lot of tweedy academic types. Not so many with darker skins, I regret to say, but some. The only truly common element seemed to be a pleasant civilization.

And there were one hell of a lot of us.

When we finally got up to Market Street around noon, the march had already launched toward the Civic Center. Market was dense with humanity as far as I could see in that direction. We counted several different cross-sections of the moving populace, and the parade seemed to be about 20 people across. Assuming that each phalanx of 20 moved though per second, this would be about 72,000 people per hour. The march continued unabated for at least 2 and a half hours. If our calculations are even a little accurate, this would be over a hundred fifty thousand people who had gathered to protest a war that has barely begun.

I remember the first anti-war protest I ever attended. It was in the fall of 1965 and it took place on Boston Commons. I'd be surprised if there were more than a hundred people there, though they included, as I recall, Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. It was not until after Kent State, five years later, that I saw anything like the assembly of protesters I witnessed yesterday.

Furthermore, on that occasion, in May of '70, it seemed that just about everyone filling the Mall in DC looked pretty much like me. We were not The People. Not to say that scruffy, dope-smoking kids weren't well represented in yesterday's march. But they were certainly not the majority, even if you counted the scruffy, dope-smoking seniors like me. Mostly the marchers seemed like Just Plain Folks.

There were some great signs. Like "Impeach the Uber-Goober." Or "No Weapons of Mass Distraction." Or "If Tim McVeigh caused 911, would we bomb Michigan?" Or "Chez Panisse for Peace." Or "Stop The Bushit!" Or "Stay Glued to the TV, You Hysterical, Brainwashed Fool!" One showed a concerned looking whale with a thought balloon that said, "Save the Humans."

It seems important to me that this many Just Plain Folks could come to together on such short notice. It seems important that so many could gather in indignation without any violent or rude behavior. It seems important to me.

But it's not important to the media. Why?
________

So is this story true? If it's true, why hasn't this been in the national media? Like the original writer of this article, I can't see how a hundred thousand people demonstrating against the proposed war in Iraq shouldn't be national news.

If this is being supressed, what else is?

Times, NPR Change Their Take on DC Protests

Three days after its first report on the D.C. antiwar protests, readers of the New York Times were treated to a much different account of the same event. On October 30, the Times reported that the October 26 protests "drew 100,000 by police estimates and 200,000 by organizers', forming a two-mile wall of marchers around the White House. The turnout startled even organizers, who had taken out permits for 20,000 marchers."

This directly contradicted the Times' October 27 report, which noted that the "thousands" of demonstrators were "fewer people... than organizers had said they hoped for." The October 30 Times report also included much more information about similar protests around the country, and featured quotes from various antiwar activists...

...National Public Radio, another target of FAIR's action alert, has also offered a correction of its misleading coverage of the D.C. protest. The following message is now posted on NPR's website:

On Saturday, October 26, in a story on the protest in Washington, D.C. against a U.S. war with Iraq, we erroneously reported on All Things Considered that the size of the crowd was "fewer than 10,000." While Park Service employees gave no official estimate, it is clear that the crowd was substantially larger than that. On Sunday, October 27, we reported on Weekend Edition that the crowd estimated by protest organizers was 100,000. We apologize for the error.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.fair.org/activism/npr-nyt-update.html

FAIR Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting 112 W. 27th Street New York, NY 10001

ACTIVISM UPDATE:
Times, NPR Change Their Take on DC Protests

October 30, 2002

Three days after its first report on the D.C. antiwar protests, readers of the New York Times were treated to a much different account of the same event. On October 30, the Times reported that the October 26 protests "drew 100,000 by police estimates and 200,000 by organizers', forming a two-mile wall of marchers around the White House. The turnout startled even organizers, who had taken out permits for 20,000 marchers."

This directly contradicted the Times' October 27 report, which noted that the "thousands" of demonstrators were "fewer people... than organizers had said they hoped for." The October 30 Times report also included much more information about similar protests around the country, and featured quotes from various antiwar activists.

The second Times story may have been a reaction to the overwhelming response to FAIR's October 28 Action Alert critical of the paper's downplaying of the protest. FAIR has received more than 1,100 copies of individual letters sent to the Times or to NPR, whose coverage was also cited in the action alert-- one of the largest volumes of mail ever generated by a FAIR action alert. The newspaper trade magazine Editor & Publisher (10/30/02) suggested that the October 30 piece was a "make-up article" that may have been written "in response to many organized protest letters sent to the Times since the paper's weak, and inaccurate, initial article about the march on Sunday."

The paper has not yet issued an editor's note or correction explaining the different reports, though senior editor Bill Borders sent an apologetic message to many of the people who wrote to the paper.

"I am sorry we disappointed you," he said. "Accurately measuring the size of a crowd of demonstrators is nearly impossible and often, as in this case, there are no reliable objective estimates." Borders defended the Times' overall coverage of the Iraq debate, and thanked activists for contacting the paper: "We appreciate your writing us and welcome your careful scrutiny. It helps us to do a better job."

National Public Radio, another target of FAIR's action alert, has also offered a correction of its misleading coverage of the D.C. protest. The following message is now posted on NPR's website:

On Saturday, October 26, in a story on the protest in Washington, D.C. against a U.S. war with Iraq, we erroneously reported on All Things Considered that the size of the crowd was "fewer than 10,000." While Park Service employees gave no official estimate, it is clear that the crowd was substantially larger than that. On Sunday, October 27, we reported on Weekend Edition that the crowd estimated by protest organizers was 100,000. We apologize for the error.

FAIR thanks all of the activists who wrote to the New York Times and NPR about their coverage of the D.C. protests. Those who did write or call might consider sending a follow-up note to the outlets to encourage serious, ongoing coverage of the growing antiwar movement.

To read the New York Times' new report on the protests, go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/30/national/30PROT.html
(Registration required)

To read the initial NPR story with the correction, go to: http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/transcripts/2002/oct/021026.brand.html

To read FAIR's October 28 action alert on protest coverage, go to:
http://www.fair.org/activism/npr-nyt-protests.html

NOTE: FAIR mistakenly referred to NPR's October 26 report as being part of the show Weekend Edition. That report actually aired on All Things Considered, while the report the following day aired on Weekend Edition.

What a funny headline. It leaves out the part about the NYT having most of the information wrong in its earlier articles on the subject.

Luckily the public wrote in over 1,000 letters to help clairfy the situation.
Rally in Washington Is Said to Invigorate the Antiwar Movement
By Kate Zernike.

Emboldened by a weekend antiwar protest in Washington that organizers called the biggest since the days of the Vietnam War, groups opposed to military action in Iraq said they were preparing a wave of new demonstrations across the country in the next few weeks.

The demonstration on Saturday in Washington drew 100,000 by police estimates and 200,000 by organizers', forming a two-mile wall of marchers around the White House. The turnout startled even organizers, who had taken out permits for 20,000 marchers. They expected 30 buses, and were surprised by about 650, coming from as far as Nebraska and Florida.

A companion demonstration in San Francisco attracted 42,000 protesters, city police there said, and smaller groups demonstrated in other cities, including about 800 in Austin, Tex., and 2,500 in Augusta, Me.

Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/30/national/30PROT.html

The New York Times The New York Times National October 30, 2002

DISSENT
Rally in Washington Is Said to Invigorate the Antiwar Movement
By KATE ZERNIKE

Emboldened by a weekend antiwar protest in Washington that organizers called the biggest since the days of the Vietnam War, groups opposed to military action in Iraq said they were preparing a wave of new demonstrations across the country in the next few weeks.

The demonstration on Saturday in Washington drew 100,000 by police estimates and 200,000 by organizers', forming a two-mile wall of marchers around the White House. The turnout startled even organizers, who had taken out permits for 20,000 marchers. They expected 30 buses, and were surprised by about 650, coming from as far as Nebraska and Florida.

A companion demonstration in San Francisco attracted 42,000 protesters, city police there said, and smaller groups demonstrated in other cities, including about 800 in Austin, Tex., and 2,500 in Augusta, Me.

"The rally was like a huge gust of wind into the sails of the antiwar movement," said Brian Becker, an organizer of the Washington protest. "Our goal was not simply to have a big demonstration, but to give the movement confidence that it could prevail. The massive turnout showed it's legitimate, and it's big."

Building on those demonstrations, a coalition of groups called International Answer — short for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism — is asking people to vote in a referendum called VoteNoWar.org, which organizers hope will serve as a countervote to the Congressional resolution in support of military action in Iraq.

The coalition, which has absorbed several smaller groups around the country, is also planning another protest on Jan. 18 and 19 in Washington, to coincide with the commemoration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday and the 12th-year anniversary of the Persian Gulf war. Organizers are also planning what they call a Grass Roots Peoples' Congress to publicize the results of the referendum.

Smaller groups that attended the demonstrations in San Francisco and Washington said they were planning their own protests back home. Protesters plan to march in New Orleans and Tampa, Fla., this weekend; in Charleston, S.C., in mid-November; and again in San Francisco on Nov. 22. A group in Louisiana is planning a peace walk between Baton Rouge and New Orleans at the end of November, and the National Council of Churches is discussing another rally in Washington for Nov. 24.

MoveOn.org is conducting an online petition drive, and has raised about $2 million for candidates, including the late Senator Paul Wellstone, who opposed a war in Iraq.

In California, college students are leading teach-ins against the war at high schools. Richard Becker, an organizer with Answer in San Francisco, said the group was setting up an emergency response plan to accommodate a mass protest — complete with sound systems, placards, the requisite permits and even portable toilets — on the day United States troops enter Iraq.

"There is not going to be one speech or one demonstration, after which everyone goes home," said Barbara Lubin, the founder of the Middle East Children's Organization in Berkeley, Calif. "This is a movement against war and it's building momentum."

Those who have been organizing and attending demonstrations for several months said the swelling size of the protests showed how much antiwar sentiment had increased as the threat of war intensified.

In San Francisco, a march on Sept. 6 drew 2,500 people, one two weeks later, 6,000, and one on Oct. 6, 10,000.

"People are very emboldened right now," said Mike Zmolek, an organizer with the National Network to Stop the War in Iraq. "We've been in a financial crunch since we started — suddenly people are sending checks out of nowhere."

Mr. Zmolek said his organization had attracted 100 new antiwar groups across the country in the last three months.

The march in Washington was planned by International Answer, with coordinators of local chapters working in more than two dozen cities around the country. It attracted homemakers as well as college students, seasoned activists and those who had never attended any kind of political rally before.

"It was beautiful," said Merrill Chapman, 35, who called herself "just a housewife" in Charleston, S.C. "I'm in a very conservative town, and I feel like the lone voice. Being in Washington energized me, by seeing I was not alone."

Ms. Chapman had never been to a protest before the demonstration in Washington, but got involved after organizing a group called Thinking People in Charleston. She is planning a rally for Nov. 16 in her city.

In Houston, Lois Wright, a 46-year-old saleswoman in a drapery workroom, said she felt compelled to take the two-day bus ride to Washington, because the Bush administration seemed "hellbent on going to war."

"It's O.K. to do stuff in Houston, but nobody gets to hear about it," she said. "I felt if we were right in their faces, they couldn't ignore us."

Polls show that about 50 percent of Americans support sending ground troops to Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Antiwar organizers acknowledge some public support for military action, but said that until now, the voices of those who do not support the policy have not been heard.

"I think the president has considerable support," Mr. Zmolek said, "but I think the nation is pretty divided on this."

Certainly, there is still debate. In Austin, the University of Texas student government passed a resolution on Oct. 22 opposing an attack, by a vote of 20 to 17. Some students seek to have that vote overturned, saying it does not reflect the sentiment of the campus's 50,000 students.

Salon gives you a teaser:
Florida: The Sequel

...Bush has been dogged by embarrassing family problems, by deep lingering resentment over the 2000 election fiasco -- and by Bill McBride, a cash-poor Democratic challenger who refuses to go away. A political novice, McBride will receive some high-profile help Saturday night when former President Bill Clinton arrives to campaign, just a day after President Bush barnstorms in Florida for his brother.

Jeb Bush is having to work hard and spend lavishly in the last few days of the campaign. He holds a modest lead in many polls, but McBride, the folksy Vietnam War hero, has kept the race close and, backed by the national Democratic Party, has rolled out a batch of tough new ads pounding the governor at the close of the campaign.

Here's the full text of the partial article in case the link goes bad:

http://salon.com/news/feature/2002/11/01/florida/index_np.html

Florida: The Sequel
Democrat Bill McBride is keeping the race for governor close, but the Bush brothers are going all-out to keep the Sunshine State in the family.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Eric Boehlert

printe-mail

Nov. 1, 2002 | His famous brother in the White House has been doing everything he can to help, showering Florida with all sorts of federal goodies over the last 18 months. And he has unrivaled riches in his war chest, enough to power a small national campaign. But the polls don't lie: For all his advantages, Jeb Bush finds himself in a Florida dogfight.

On paper, Jeb Bush should be the clear favorite to become the first Republican in the state ever reelected governor, adding another victory for the Bush family dynasty. But Bush has been dogged by embarrassing family problems, by deep lingering resentment over the 2000 election fiasco -- and by Bill McBride, a cash-poor Democratic challenger who refuses to go away. A political novice, McBride will receive some high-profile help Saturday night when former President Bill Clinton arrives to campaign, just a day after President Bush barnstorms in Florida for his brother.

Jeb Bush is having to work hard and spend lavishly in the last few days of the campaign. He holds a modest lead in many polls, but McBride, the folksy Vietnam War hero, has kept the race close and, backed by the national Democratic Party, has rolled out a batch of tough new ads pounding the governor at the close of the campaign.

Even many Republicans say it didn't have to be so close.

Giving the Draft the Shaft

Maureen Farrell connects the dots. And she did it way back in July.

To weigh which view is accurate, ask yourself: What kind of uproar would arise if reinstatement of the draft followed an ill-advised, illegal, and undeclared war that Pentagon officials and our allies have spoken out against? And even worse, how many mothers would stand for having their sons inducted when those declaring war stand to benefit from war? How will President Bush's ties to the Carlyle Group be received? Or Cheney's ties with military contractor, Kellogg, Brown and Root? And what about Army Secretary White's ties to Lockheed, Enron and scandal, in general?

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/02/07/30_draft.html

Giving the Draft the Shaft
July 30, 2002
By Maureen Farrell

These days, whether referring to a regime change in Iraq or another terrorist attack on America, government spokespeople are almost certain to repeat the mantra: "It's not a matter of if, but when."

Says who?

Even as fatalism spreads through the land, some of us believe America functions best as a democracy, and that "eternal vigilance" is still "the price of liberty." We write congressmen, senators and newspaper editors, knowing that when enough of us are mobilized, we can indeed, change the world. War in Iraq? Nukes in New York? It's not a matter of if, or when, but a matter of "how do we stop it?"

The same can be said of reinstating the draft.

This March, when asked about the possibility of the nation once again relying upon conscription, President Bush stated that "the country shouldn't expect there to be a draft." Yet Lewis C. Brodsky, director of public and congressional affairs with the Selective Service System, said that, "the nation must be prepared to conduct one."

When one looks at recent trends, it seems that the country is indeed becoming prepared.

As of May 2001, seven states followed Delaware's lead by enacting laws linking driver's license applications to Selective Service registration. Essentially they're saying, "Want to drive a car? Sign up for duty." By July 2002, 25 states, 2 territories and the District of Columbia adopted similar laws.

According to the Selective Service, boys in Oklahoma, Delaware, Arkansas, Utah, Georgia, Hawaii, Alabama, Florida, Colorado, Texas, Louisiana, Illinois, Ohio, South Dakota, Mississippi, Idaho, Virginia, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Maryland, Rhode Island, Missouri, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Virgin Islands are now required to sign up for selective service when they register for driver's licenses. New Yorkers will soon follow similar procedures, and North Carolina and Pennsylvania are halfway through the legislative process. Other states are considering following suit.

Some of our more progressive and populist leaders are against reinstating the draft, under any circumstance. On April 5, 2002, Representative Ron Paul, a Republican from Texas, issued a resolution opposing the reinstatement of the draft. Vietnam War veteran John McCain has also spoken out against conscription, while Senator Robert Byrd, one of two prescient senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, has warned that should the War on Terror take us to Iraq, we might face another Vietnam.

Arguments that conscription is unconstitutional are often countered with the example set forth in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution. Certainly, the words, 'We the people ... [shall] provide for the common defense'" could be construed as proof the framers had conscription in mind. Yet if one is going to invoke the Constitution to uphold the draft, one also has to remember that, according to the Constitution, only Congress can declare war - and the founders were well aware of the dangers presented by presidents acting as tyrants. Purists might also want to inquire as to whether it's Constitutional to hold citizens as "enemy combatants," or to violate International law by calling for "regime change."

In response to his state's new driver's license/selective service law, Virginia Govenor Mark Warner said, "In this time of war, we need to make sure that we have a full sign up Selective Service," while adding, "I think most boys would be proud to do it." Yet Republican pollster Frank Lutz recently discovered that a full 37% of college kids would evade the draft.

To weigh which view is accurate, ask yourself: What kind of uproar would arise if reinstatement of the draft followed an ill-advised, illegal, and undeclared war that Pentagon officials and our allies have spoken out against? And even worse, how many mothers would stand for having their sons inducted when those declaring war stand to benefit from war? How will President Bush's ties to the Carlyle Group be received? Or Cheney's ties with military contractor, Kellogg, Brown and Root? And what about Army Secretary White's ties to Lockheed, Enron and scandal, in general?

At the moment, this conscription conversation is mere speculation - just an exercise in "connecting the dots," based upon circumstantial evidence. The same can be said of concerns over Posse Comitatus or Operation TIPs, and fears that America might become a police state monitored by a red, white and blue-adorned Stasi. Could the tanks recently deployed out of Alabama for Homeland Security be used to keep dissidents in line? Could stated opposition to the War on Terror be enough to make the cable guy turn you in? Might Army civilian labor camps be used as modern-day interment camps? Who knows?

These question might stem from paranoia. And they may be silly and pointless. But they could also be an exercise in eternal vigilance. Our liberty depends upon our asking.

The Christian Science Monitor was nice enough to put together this Draft Refresher Course to help us all get ramped up on the logistics of sending an entire generation to their deaths:

A lottery based on birthdays determines the order in which registered men are called up by Selective Service. The first to be called, in a sequence determined by the lottery, will be men whose 20th birthday falls during that year, followed, if needed, by those aged 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25. 18-year-olds and those turning 19 would probably not be drafted...

...According to current plans, Selective Service must deliver the first inductees to the military within 193 days from the onset of a crisis.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.csmonitor.com/explainers/Draft.html

Questions and answers about...
The Draft

Overview:

While there have been no formal, public proposals for a reinstatement of the draft, the national campaign against terrorism has turned America's thoughts toward issues of military preparedness.

But according to Jeffrey Taliaferro, an assistant professor of history at Tufts University, "Any reinstitution of the draft would be extremely unlikely, even in the aftermath of [the Sept. 11] attacks."

"The primary opposition to a reinstatement of the draft would most likely come from the armed forces themselves. Reinstating the draft would require the military to divert additional resources (Non-Commissioned Officers, money, building materials, etc.) from frontline and reserve units. In any given pool of inductees, there would be a number of men who seek to avoid military service, but failed to obtain 'conscientious objector' status. In addition, there would likely be inductees of sub-par educational backgrounds."

1) What happens in a draft?

The following overview is taken from The Selective Service System's web page.

A. Congress and the president authorize a draft

A crisis occurs which requires more troops than the volunteer military can supply. Congress passes and the President signs legislation which starts a draft.

B. The lottery

A lottery based on birthdays determines the order in which registered men are called up by Selective Service. The first to be called, in a sequence determined by the lottery, will be men whose 20th birthday falls during that year, followed, if needed, by those aged 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25. 18-year-olds and those turning 19 would probably not be drafted.

C. All parts of selective service are activated

The Agency activates and orders its State Directors and Reserve Forces Officers to report for duty.

D. Physical, mental, and moral evaluation of registrants

Registrants with low lottery numbers are ordered to report for a physical, mental, and moral evaluation at a Military Entrance Processing Station to determine whether they are fit for military service. Once he is notified of the results of the evaluation, a registrant will be given 10 days to file a claim for exemption, postponement, or deferment.

E. Local and appeal boards activated and induction notices sent

Local and Appeal Boards will process registrant claims. Those who pass the military evaluation will receive induction orders. An inductee will have 10 days to report to a local Military Entrance Processing Station for induction.

F. First draftees are inducted

According to current plans, Selective Service must deliver the first inductees to the military within 193 days from the onset of a crisis.

2) Will gay men be screened out of the military by the draft?

Lew Brodsky, Director of Public & Congressional Affairs for the Selective Service System, says the main emphasis of the Selective Service's moral screening process is exploring a potential draftee's legal history, not preventing homosexual men from being inducted.

"The 'moral' portion of determining a man's suitability for military service is a police check to see if a prospective inductee has a felony record," says Brodsky.

Professor Taliaferro agrees: The draft's main emphasis isn't on screening out suspected gay men.

"Under the Defense Department's pathological personnel policy (a.k.a., Don't ask, Don't tell), recruiting officers are not allowed to ask would-be recruits about their sexual orientation," writes Taliaferro. "If the would-be recruit volunteers that information, however, he or she can be excluded from military service."

"I would imagine that if the draft were reinstated, the current exclusion policy would remain in effect. Whether local draft boards would uniformly comply with directives to screen out gays is a matter of speculation. This, of course, raises several additional problems and paradoxes:

"(1) Presumably, troop shortages would be the main rationale for reinstating the draft. If the armed forces are unable to main sufficient troop levels during the current national emergency, it would seem rather absurd (at least in the minds of most educated, middle-class or upper-middle-class Americans living outside of the deep South and the heartland) to systemically exclude young men from military service based upon sexual orientation. Opponents of the draft in both the House and the Senate would likely raise this issue in committee and floor debate on legislation to amend the Selective Service Act.

"(2) The systematic exclusion of any discrete group of young men from mandatory military service would undermine the Bush administration's rhetoric about American unity.

"(3) A sizable number of 18-26 year-old men would tell their local draft boards that they are gay in an effort to avoid induction."

Why aren't women required to register?

As it is currently written, Selective Service law refers to "male persons" in stating who must register and who would be drafted. A Supreme Court decision written in 1981 (Rostker v. Goldberg) held that registering only men did not violate the due process clause of the Constitution.

An extensive history of women and the draft is available on the Selective Service System's website.

Who serves on draft boards, and how many are there?

"There are about 2,000 Local and District Appeal Boards composed of 10,600 uncompensated civilian volunteers," says Brodsky. "Each board member is nominated by his/her state's governor and appointed by the Director of Selective Service on behalf of the president."

The goal is to have Board Members that makeup of the communities they would serve. Board Members are both men and women. They cannot be retired or active military, nor can they be serving in the National Guard or Reserve. Additionally, they cannot be judicial or law enforcement officials."

I'm creating text versions of these documents -- but it's a busy afternoon so they might not all be done till din-din time Saturday morning Sunday afternoon...
Here's a link to web-friendly versions of all of the PDF documents listed below.

Final Decree
(http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/Opinions/2002/Kotelly/FinalDecree.pdf)

Memorandum Opinion
(http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/Opinions/2002/Kotelly/Lit11-1.pdf)

Public Interest Order
(http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/Opinions/2002/Kotelly/PubIntOrd.pdf)

Opinion on the State Settlement
(http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/Opinions/2002/Kotelly/StateSettlement.pdf)

State Settlement Order
(http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/Opinions/2002/Kotelly/Statesord.pdf)