Events: June 2008 Archives

Up early this morning to get into town in time for the 8a.m. plenary talk by Bill Moyers. Moyers has spoken at all four NCMRs to date, hosts a rocking show on PBS and spoke eloquently today about the abdication of responsibility by the dominant media over the last 8 years plus. Some great quotes: “the 4th estate has become a 5th column against democracy”; “capitalism breeds destruction unless tempered by an intuition of equality.” See this twitter update by kaeti - I totally agree.

Panel 1 - Precious Places, Public Platforms: Strategic Uses of Community Technology

This panel was filled with long-term activists, most of whom have been working in public access television for many years. Technologically it feels like a bit of throwback but as one person concluded - Web2.0 may be an answer to a lot of problems but we can’t forget to ask what is the question we are trying to answer. For the people in this room it was all about getting the stories of people out to the masses.

Louis Massiah started off by describing his work with the Scribe video center in Philadelphia and their project “Precious Places.” They have spent the last 4 years working with local filmmakers, scholars, and community members to create over 40 documentaries about neighborhoods in Philadelphia. He shared with us a portion of the prototype documentary about Francisville which was a really profoundly moving story of 1960s gang members being transformed into community activists. My favorite quote - “You could buy denim here [on main street] that would stay blue for 6 months.”

Peggy Berryhill of the Native Public Media provided another great quote “our lives are so labeled [1st generation urban Indian]…our lives are filled with anthropologists.” She reiterated the need for pride of place and community. Her group is working with 30+ native radio stations across the United States to build an infrastructure for Native American radio.

Lauren-Glenn Davitian from Vermont CCTV talked about the success that Vermont has had with public access television. There are 43 access channels in a state with only 600,000 people. Burlington, VT is building its own fiber optic network because the existing infrastructure monopolies, cable and telephone, can’t be trusted to protect the public interest or provide access to the public airwaves. We were lucky to get as much public access TV as we did in the 1970s and 1980s because cable companies are becoming much more stingy over time.

A bunch of cool community project were mentioned during the Q&A. KTNN, native american radio in Arizon, Thurston television center in Washington state, WOJB radio in Wisconsin, People TV from Atlanta, Deep Dish Network Waves of Change.

Panel 2 - Privacy in the Age of AT&T, Google, and the NSA

I thought this panel was going to focus on violations of information privacy by private companies but it ended up being more of a cross between private and governmental invasions of privacy. The central topic was the NSA wiretapping scandal and the complicity of telecom companies.

Lillie Coney from EPIC started out by describing some of the long history of surveillance cooperation between government and private industry, from communication intercepts during the Civil War, to Western Unions intercepting telegrams during WW2 and the Cold War, to the present day. It starts with a declaration of war and a climate of fear that ends up with a general walking into a CEOs office and demanding access to data “for the national interest.”

Tim Jones from EFF talked about their work on the NSA story and the facts they uncovered: domestic surveillance happened, it was a dragnet not a targeted search, and there were 15-20 telecom centers throughout the US that were turned into NSA branch offices. The FISA law was created to protect us because we’ve been down the surveillance road before - COINTELPRO, Church Committee, Project Shamrock at the NSA, Project Chaos at the CIA.

Marcy from Firedoglake described their research efforts surrounding the NSA wiretapping and the three prong strategy of research, education, and mobilization that led to some of the successes we’ve had to date preventing telecom immunity from passing.

Tim Sparapani from the ACLU brought the discussion back to what I thought it would be from the beginning by talking about the commercial data brokers who are creating a privatized dossier system by harvesting public and commercial data. I especially liked the strange loop that occurs as large data aggregators buy public information, like birth and death records, combine it private information about purchasing patterns and internet histories, and then sell that information back to public law enforcement at the state and federal levels. So we pay our taxes to collect this information twice, once as a public good and then again as a private aggregation. It’s another form of data enclosure. It has led to the creation of quasigovernmental companies who get the lucrative federal communications contracts and then give up private data when asked.

Bob Edgar from Common Cause sprinkled a bunch of quotations into his moderation but this one by Martin Luther King, Jr. was my favorite. He used part of this but the whole was too beautiful for me to pass up. The complete speech is here.

Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood — it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

I think all of this needs to go into an Openness Manifesto of some kind. Everywhere I turn I’m seeing open courseware, open education, open access, open source, open data, open Congress, open information, public access and more.

I went down to the Minneapolis Convention Center for day 1 of the National Conference on Media reform this afternoon. I skipped the Larry Lessig morning plenary and arrived at about 1 p.m. I wandered through the displays in the ballroom, ate half an over-priced burrito and then headed for the first afternoon panel session.

Panel 1 - Free Speech in the 21st Century

Josh Wolf kicked things off with his account of being imprisoned for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury in 2006. Naturally he concluded his talk with a call to support a federal shield law protecting people who do journalism, not just people who are employed as journalists.

C. Edwin Baker made some short comments about First Amendment legal theory. The First Amendment only protects us from government interference with speech. If a corporation seeks to curtail free speech then you’re legally out of luck. Corporations also argue that the first amendment protects them from coercive legislation that might regulate their right to merge, etc. There are two clauses in the First Amendment: one protecting individual speech, the other protecting the institutions of the press.

Caroline Fredrickson spoke about the ACLU free speech campaigns. I was intrigued by the case of the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act that is being promoted by Joe Lieberman. The bill attempts to prevent radical Muslim extremists from spreading their message in America. YouTube was asked to remove some videos as a result of this effort. Videos that violated the community terms of service were removed but others were not.

I was tempted to ask about the intersection/overlap between free speech and website terms of service. What is the case law on this issue? How easily can a website remove content that it deems inappropriate? Would this ever become a first amendment issue? If there are any constitutional lawyers who read this please feel free to leave a comment.

Panel 2 - Legislation 2.0: Self-Governance and Policy on the Open Internet

This panel was even better. Right in my personal bailiwick: open-government and all other open knowledge endeavors.

Micha Sifry kicked things off with a short movie showing a nifty use of Google Earth to display congressional earmarks for the defense industry. This was just the beginning of the cool stuff the Sunlight Foundation is doing.

Andre Banks began by describing his project Color of Change which was formed after Katrina to improve the presence of the progressive black population in government. He described the case of the Jena 6 as the perfect storm for online activism. From there Color of Change has made great strides to intervene in the criminal justice system on behalf of the black population.

Matt Stoller went next and talked about a blogging project that took place a year or two ago. Senator Dick Durbin agreed to participate in an online forum around a bill under consideration in Congress. I forget the topic of the bill but the upshot was that new internet tools could penetrate the conversation in Washington D.C. with enough work and persistence.

Russell Newman, a former staffer for Senator Durbin, recounted his experience with the public conversation about the bill from inside the sausage factory. He concluded by emphasizing the banality of policy making: it really is all about access, and a common sense evaluation of legitimacy.

Micha Sifry mentioned a few other projects of interest including qik for streaming video from a cell phone and Open Congress for tracking bills before Congress.

In the Q&A I asked about the sustainability of a project like Open Congress and the transfer of tools like it to the local level. The software that runs Open Congress is open source so it’s available for people to setup on a state or local level. I smell yet another potential project. Long-term sustainability is still up in the air.

One of the most interesting questions from the audience was about dividing resources between old and new institutions. Sifry responded that he would give most of the funding to new institutions. Liberals need to be more adventurous and stop giving to institutions because of sentimentality or past achievements. Others on the panel disagreed and discussion ensued.

One-on-one brainstorming

Instead of going to the Minnesota caucus I met with James O. in an ad-hoc session to discuss his ideas about communicating liberal ideas to the mainstream. He was full of very interesting proposals and thoughts, ranging from recasting the Superman story, creating a new form of found political poetry based on haiku, starting a new political party, and forming a new 24/7 news channel. It was a fun and interesting conversation. I showed him a couple of social software tools like delicious and Twitter. I wish him the best of luck.

Two ideas I really liked were doing a children’s book based on Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins. I replied that it would be great to make it into a stop motion animated video. I encouraged James to think more about cultural peer production as a method to get his ideas into the world. Perhaps we will work on it together.