Web and democracy – Dec 5

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Next Generation Democracy: What the Open Source Revolution Means for Power, Politics, and Change (book)
Jarod Duval, book website

Next Generation Democracy from Next Generation Democracy on Vimeo.

The challenges of the twenty-first century are of an unprecedented scale. Climate change, financial instability, the housing crisis, the need for health care–all of these are political issues that could be managed with ease if they were occurring on a much smaller scale. But with a huge global population and inextricable connections between the issues, our old tools for change look increasingly blunt. Many of the large bodies we once appointed to manage our common problems–including national governments–have begun to fail at critical moments.

But there is good news: We can use our vast size and complexity to our advantage.

Drawing on the lessons of open source technology, social change leader Jared Duval offers an inspiring call to action. Next Generation Democracy chronicles some of the watershed events, such as Hurricane Katrina, during which centralized leadership was not enough, and then tells the success stories of the leaders, both inside the government and out, who are finding effective, directly democratic ways to address our public challenges.
(December 2010)
Recommended by EB contributor Bill Henderson. The book was published in November, 2010. Book excerpt.

-BA

Cyber-Con
James Hark, London review of Books
On a balmy evening in April 2009 Barham Salih, then deputy prime minister of Iraq, sat in the garden of his Baghdad villa while a young internet entrepreneur called Jack Dorsey tried to persuade him that he needed to be on Twitter. Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, was in Baghdad at the invitation of the State Department. Over the previous three days, he and eight other Silicon Valley bigwigs, kitted out with helmets and flak jackets, had been bundled around Baghdad in an armoured convoy, meeting anyone there was to meet. They’d been introduced to the prime minister’s council of advisers, glad-handed the Iraqi Investment National Commission and spoken to a group of engineering students from Baghdad University; they’d even had time to fit in a visit to the Iraqi National Museum. Among them were several high-ranking engineers from Google, the founder of the community organising tool Meetup, a vice-president of the firm behind the blogging platform WordPress, and an executive from Blue State Digital, the internet strategy firm that had done a fair bit to help Obama to the presidency the previous November.

… The trip’s architect was a 27-year-old State Department wunderkind called Jared Cohen. He shepherded the techies around Baghdad and explained the thinking behind the whole venture at a video-link press conference with journalists back in Washington:

You know, historically, we’ve thought about new technology as a tool primarily for communication. But more and more, we’re looking at, how do we leverage new technology to support broader policy objectives, you know, whether it’s civic empowerment, whether it’s capacity building, whether it’s promotion of accountability and transparency, and so forth. So logically, in looking at these two concepts, we started reaching out to Silicon Valley, or the larger technology industry.

… Obama too seemed to warm to the internet as a tool for geo-politicking. In a speech to Chinese students in November, he answered a planted question about internet censorship (it was submitted via the US Embassy website and asked by the US ambassador): ‘I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can call their own government to account.’

… A week later Clinton spoke out even more strongly in defence of internet freedom and the role of the Obama administration in securing it. Seconding Obama’s warning to the Chinese, she argued that new tools and fresh policies were needed ‘to develop our capacity for what we call at the State Department 21st-century statecraft’; announced an initiative to help activists dodge internet surveillance; and urged American companies to take the lead in challenging foreign governments’ demands for censorship. ‘The freedom to connect,’ she said, ‘is like the freedom of assembly, only in cyberspace. It allows individuals to get online, come together, and hopefully co-operate.’

… This is popular stuff, enough to have turned the pair into mini-celebrities in the world of Twitter: Cohen has more than 300,000 followers. On 100 consecutive days earlier this year, he took the trouble to tweet reminders of the 100 most heinous days of the Rwandan genocide. In September Google announced that it had head-hunted him from the State Department to run its new geopolitical think-tank, Google Ideas. The revolt of the geeks has only just begun.
(2 December 2010)
Long essay / book review on the US government’s use of internet technology and social network to achieve foreign policy objectives. The quotes from Obama and Clinton about transparency are ironic, in light of the Wikileaks release of US diplomatic cables. -BA

The Shameful Attacks on Julian Assange
David Samuels, The Atlantic
Julian Assange and Pfc Bradley Manning have done a huge public service by making hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents available on Wikileaks — and, predictably, no one is grateful. Manning, a former army intelligence analyst in Iraq, faces up to 52 years in prison. He is currently being held in solitary confinement at a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where he is not allowed to see his parents or other outside visitors.

Assange, the organizing brain of Wikileaks, enjoys a higher degree of freedom living as a hunted man in England under the close surveillance of domestic and foreign intelligence agencies — but probably not for long. Not since President Richard Nixon directed his minions to go after Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan – “a vicious antiwar type,” an enraged Nixon called him on the Watergate tapes — has a working journalist and his source been subjected to the kind of official intimidation and threats that have been directed at Assange and Manning by high-ranking members of the Obama Administration.

… But the truly scandalous and shocking response to the Wikileaks documents has been that of other journalists, who make the Obama Administration sound like the ACLU.

… For his part, Assange has not been shy about expressing his contempt for the failure of traditional reporting to inform the public, and his belief in the utility of his own methods. “How is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined?” he told The Sydney Morning Herald. “It’s disgraceful.”

… The true importance of Wikileaks — and the key to understanding the motivations and behavior of its founder — lies not in the contents of the latest document dump but in the technology that made it possible, which has already shown itself to be a potent weapon to undermine official lies and defend human rights. Since 1997, Assange has devoted a great deal of his time to inventing encryption systems that make it possible for human rights workers and others to protect and upload sensitive data. The importance of Assange’s efforts to human rights workers in the field were recognized last year by Amnesty International, which gave him its Media Award for the Wikileaks investigation The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances, which documented the killing and disappearance of 500 young men in Kenya by the police, with the apparent connivance of the country’s political leadership.

… The result of this classification mania is the division of the public into two distinct groups: those who are privy to the actual conduct of American policy, but are forbidden to write or talk about it, and the uninformed public, which becomes easy prey for the official lies exposed in the Wikileaks documents:

… Wikileaks is a powerful new way for reporters and human rights advocates to leverage global information technology systems to break the heavy veil of government and corporate secrecy that is slowly suffocating the American press. The likely arrest of Assange in Britain on dubious Swedish sex crimes charges has nothing to do with the importance of the system he has built, and which the US government seems intent on destroying with tactics more appropriate to the Communist Party of China — pressuring Amazon to throw the site off their servers, and, one imagines by launching the powerful DDOS attacks that threatened to stop visitors from reading the pilfered cables.

In a memorandum entitled “Transparency and Open Government” addressed to the heads of Federal departments and agencies and posted on WhiteHouse.gov, President Obama instructed that “Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.” The Administration would be wise to heed his words — and to remember how badly the vindictive prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg ended for the Nixon Administration. And American reporters, Pulitzer Prizes and all, should be ashamed for joining in the outraged chorus that defends a burgeoning secret world whose existence is a threat to democracy.

David Samuels is a regular contributor to The Atlantic.
(5 December 2010)