The themes of the conference centered around how the internet can be used to advance human freedom at a time of great uncertainty about the future. After Secretary Clinton’s Internet freedom speech last January, this has become a more participatory conversation, used to hammer out solutions with government actors, people who are interested in upholding human rights, those putting out the examples of their actions, and additional companies that have remained silent on the issues regarding the rights of their users.

The Chatham House Rule was enacted at the Conference, meaning that no one could be photographed or quoted without permission. I appreciate that Google made this simple but important gesture, given that many people were endangering their own lives to attend this conference and to be a part of these conversations. I’m often upset with the lack of caution taken when people take photos of friends who are dissidents in foreign countries. It’s frightening what a little social network analysis can reveal for interested authorities. And it’s a tool that is becoming less and less complicated and out of reach for some of the World’s most repressive regimes.

Google vs Facebook was a sight to be seen. Google has planted it’s feet firmly in the ground that information is a human right and they appear to be doing everything possible to lead by positive example. Facebook on the other is frequently beaten up by bloggers offended by their policies and more recently by mothers upset by their censorship.

Google’s approach to dealing with governments has been to respect the privacy and security of its users without offending the governments with which they operate. Tangibly, this has meant censoring locally where “necessary” without giving up the identity of it’s users, unlike groups like Yahoo! that have given information to Chinese authorities, which has led to subsequent arrests. Their goal is to refuse removing any information from the Internet but rather making it a 2-step process to get to when deemed inappropriate by a government. They might remove content from the local domain, say Google.th in Thailand, but users can still get to google.com in just 2 clicks, to get the content they desire. They’re decentralized in that way, and it’s working for them.

Facebook cannot employ this same “top level domain filter”.  Facebook users don’t have the ability see a different version of my profile, depending on what country from where they are viewing it. Instead, Facebook makes a “value judgment.” Having been to their offices, I believe that this means that a space of 500 million people is ruled by the values of sandal-wearing twenty-somethings in California. People with no accountability. The greatest audience outrage I’ve seen recently is the breast-feeding mothers campaign that launched in response to censorship caused by violating these “values”. Ironically, Sunil Abraham tweeted an outlandishly false statistic that in the USA 12,000 women are actually arrested for breast-feeding per year. This falsity became the most popular message to surround the ial2010 hashtag on Twitter. But the real issue is that Facebook hasn’t provided due process. Like when malls became places for free speech and arbiters of that speech, now Facebook is the intermediary. There is a need for procedure enabling people to appeal. One idea suggested was a community of governance for the site, where users can decide upon the values therein. A shocking proposal to make the site democratic, rather than the benevolent dictatorship it currently resembles.

It’ll be interesting to see how other sites deal with this issue, particularly ones with geopolitical implications like OpenStreetMap. Already there have been arguments over the the names of geographical locations, such as the area in Southwest Asia known most commonly as the “Persian Gulf”, which Iraqis refuse to call it, and over military areas in Russia. Will the site be blocked in certain countries and will they choose to alter content in order to ensure that the service is available to all users around the world, even of slightly modified?

Sami Ben Gharbia of Global Voices framed a lot of the discussion at the conference with his article “The Internet Freedom Fallacy and the Arab Digital Activism“. According to him, the US should never have gotten into the conversation about the Internet in the first place, because now it is a more dangerous place for the Arab bloggers that used to experience it as a free space devoid of political meaning. I take a firm stance that someone needs to defend those freedoms, and the more countries that stand to defend article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stipulating information as a human right, the better.

The themes and fears spoken about during the conference played out directly afterward. When I arrived to NYC, I got word that my friend and conference-mate Jiew was arrested upon her re-entry to Thailand. While Sami theorized that it was her attendance at the conference that led to the arrest, it was actually due to a two-year old charge under Les Majeste, for comments posted on the independent news website Prachatai, which she manages. Our team quickly launched a campaign to set her free by raising the money for her bail, and through outreach online, pressuring authorities to change their policy. The State Department stood back, Google offered help if necessary and her network of friends and colleagues were able to bail her out of jail within 24 hours of the arrest. Had it escalated further, and it will soon, as she’s scheduled to go to court in February, it’ll be curious to see how the different actors from the conference will help her cause. Already, EFF has issued a statement.

In the wake of the Haystack debacle (again, open source FTW) and the Wikileaks Afghan maps controversy, it’s important to be mindful of the fact that governments are starting to increasingly clamp down on the crucial tools that protect and preserve individual freedoms because they don’t have examples to the contrary to work with. I’m still hoping that Handheld Human Rights can serve as this tool, showing that circumvention and security tools are helping people and governments based on the UDHR alike. The national security conversation at the conference framed where these future discussions are going to go.

A technologist helping to bring wikileaks legal protections in Iceland explained that “Iceland has no national security laws because it has no army.” It was broken down further, described as a “A cayman island for data centers” an analogy to the financial industry. “Like libel tourism in UK” noted one of the Conference’s panel hosts. A concern was raised that similar to tax-havens, there will still be international pressure on small countries by bigger ones to give up the protections they claim to uphold. Governments are certainly gong to be looking to that kind of “front door” method, while also exploring back-door techniques, getting companies like RIM to give law enforcement a special key to data.

Another attendee related these theories to the realities of his own work. He explained that there are not only ethical considerations, but also technical ones. Sharing information opens ones ability to get hacked. “Once a week I call a company and ask if they want their secret stuff back” on the internet, it’s not only opening data to those one thinks they are.

An outspoken citizen rights activist from Vietnam brought it down to the ground, arguing that national security used to silence people in countries like hers. However, this is not usually done within an international legal framework of “security” as outlined in the Johannesburg Principle. Countries can’t invoke national security without specifics that are enforced through UN mechanisms. A problem is that violations of these standards are addressed “eventually.” The panel host shot back, asking whether that is “good enough for the people of Afghanistan.”

Tor, no stranger to this conversation, especially as one of it’s employees can’t currently travel, complained that there isn’t yet a digital due process that is noticeable to citizens. Can they “knock on the door before entering”? Because currently we don’t do that with data. But at the same time, we currently rent, and give the landlord the ability to open the door.

The architecture and control of the Internet is still far away from most citizens and governments alike. In the corporate infrastructure of wires and bytes its obvious that we all have to play nice, but the solutions are still a long way off. Perhaps we need to look to the past and look into the development of deeds. In addition, right now, there is an exciting development, those looking at the governance of international waterways and other shared bodies to learn lessons for the shared network of the net. Or maybe netizens will rise and plant the flag of the Internet firmly at United Nations Plaza. First, the world will have to agree on the design.

But here in NYC, my task was to engage the kids in a conversation about what they’d like to see in the year 2020. Future Now is creating NYC’s Digital Storybook – a citywide youth  project about school, community, and  dreams. What better way to explore these themes than a mapping exercise  to literally add and remove items in their communities and on their streets.

Future Now Sponsors

Every 25 minutes, a different set of students filters through, listens to a short presentation and gets their hands on 3 computers, kindly supplied by us and Tekserve. Using a modified Ushahidi mapping tool with data overlayed from the NYC Data Mine, to give a real-life example of how opening government data can impact the lives of everyday New Yorkers and lead to a smarter city. In this case, I overlayed “Bike Racks” and “Low-Bridges”, as some of the only sets available in the Geo Data Catalog, but it proved effective. My example was built from bike racks, stating that in my vision of  the year 2020, gasoline would be expensive, the environment polluted, cars more scarce, and so encouraging the city to place a bike rack in front of my office would enable people to bike to work, making the city more peaceful, healthier and cleaner. Plus, if the government thought a bike rack existed where one didn’t, I could let them know about their error.

To make it personal, I then asked them what they would do if they knew how much money their school was getting compared to the neighboring school. Not only did that set off a flurry of ideas from the students, but the teachers got pretty excited as well. You can visit the website or see it embedded below to see their ideas. Of course their private information remains private.

Digital democracy has engaged with participatory collaborative learning around the world, and each context reveals new insights for culturally-specific programming. Our scavenger hunt model allows for a natural progression to the conversation and working in groups helps to ensnare the attention of more distractable youth.

“OMG kids are on Facebook!” is one of my favorite challenges. Two skateboarders had finished mapping the perfect place for a skatepark in their community ahead of the other students and got distracted, finding themselves wandering the internet. Instead of telling them to go back to our site, I told them that no other students had added a photo to their posting so could they find the best photo to go along with their post, to make it easier for a politician to see exactly what they had in mind. The hunt was on, and they indeed found a great photo, without another distraction. I keep reiterating that this is a key aspect to the model of 21st century education – information management. Can students find information that is going to add value to their post. Do they know whether it’s creative commons and how publicly it can be used. There are still many steps before getting to that point, but this is a start.

A few real problems did pop up. School in a park, Open Road Park to be exact, is beautiful, but makes it hard to work with too much tech. The one good projector was taken by the Google Team, which meant improvising on the fly. The bigger problem though, was spell-check. When students were entering in their main body of information, a line would show up automatically under misspelled words. Every time students would backtrack and try to figure out the right spelling. This happened so often that I estimate it took about twice the time to create each entry as it otherwise would have. In the places where there was no spell-check, like in the titles, the entries are littered with bad spelling.

Solar Flashlight & Kazoo

Our work confronts language problems head on, mainly working with visual media such as maps, photos, videos, etc that can allow people to connect beyond these barriers. It’s important to consider language barriers even with native English speakers as well. And in NYC, it’s even more complicated, with our students on Saturday being from places as varied as Tibet, Thailand, Congo, Madagascar and Brooklyn.

At the end of all the trainings with us World Up, Google, IDEO, friends we love, Toshiba, each student group was part of a performance. step, musical theatre, mapping, graffiti, gardening, accapella, and cheerleading. My favorite (I know I’m not supposed to say that), was the group showing off their solar panel creations. Their English wasn’t very good, as half were newly from Japan, but their tech was amazing. They hack solar panels into all sorts of things, whether a portable charger for the 3rd world, a flashlight, or a musical instrument that sounds like an electronic kazoo. “It’s very efficiency!” exclaimed one of the leaders of the project.

The diversity of skills, backgrounds and ideas reminds me how much I love this city. I just hope that we stop censoring it and start supporting more of these kinds of initiatives for a better future.

Thanks to the Department of Education and everyone who came together to make this possible, to Humanity in Action, Pioneers and Andrew Rasiej for the development of similar project connecting schools in Amsterdam and NYC called Open My City, to DJ Moni for letting us know about Future Now and to Jerri Chou for dropping the LES by to check us out.

See more pics on the NYC Department of Education’s Future Now Expo site.

Flowers left at Google headquarters in China

In August 2008, Digital Democracy conducted research with Burmese community groups operating in southern China, near the Burma/Myanmar border. While researching the use of communications technologies, one young Kachin man explained the difference between the Internet in China and Burma, stating, “To me the web in China is totally free.” Censored though the Chinese web may be, his statement helps us keep in mind the complex realities – and differing degrees – of modern communication tools.

This fall, Digital Democracy submitted testimony to US Congress at the US-Helsinki Commission briefing, “Twitter against Tyrants: New Media in Authoritarian Regimes.” In our statement, we stressed that repressive regimes thrive on the distortion of truth, and the need for better understanding of how communications technology is used on the ground by grassroots organizations. We emphasized the critical need for dialogue on security, new media literacy and the meaning of freedom of speech.

Just 24 hours after Google announced a shift in their China policy, a conversation of this nature is well under way. With their statement A new approach to China, the Fortune 500 company has openly described the difficulties of operating within the country, conforming to China’s censorship policy and facing cyberattacks on their users.

“We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech.”

We read Google’s statement as not just an update on attacks on its server, but an attempt to develop a more responsible approach to complex issues of freedom of information. From a company whose motto “don’t be evil” has often been met with cynicism (and serious privacy concerns) we applaud this beginning of a debate on freedom of information.

One concern we hope to closely monitor is what impact this decision will have on the end users in China. Our Congressional statement made four recommendations based on the idea that in the current information age, knowledge is power. However, as our Burmese colleague in southern China reminded us, even restricted information can play a valuable role. We hope to hear from friends and colleagues what effect Google’s decision has among Internet users in China. Amidst the uncertainty, we’re compelled to revisit our recommendations to the Helsinki Commission.

1. Security continues to be a priority and access to information can continue to happen anywhere in the world when accessed with knowledge of the right tools.
2. Local partners continue to have the best information about ICT realities on the ground in any particular country, and it is critical to connect and dialogue with them on their needs.
3. Tools should be developed and adapted to address changing circumstances.
4. Education is critical. Reducing barriers to freedom of information requires an evolving new media literacy.

Ultimately, we view Google’s move as a teachable moment in a global conversation about our individual, collective and corporate responsibility in supporting freedom of information. From Yahoo!s previous missteps handing information to Chinese authorities, to Facebook’s founder recently declaring that the age of privacy is over, Google’s step is an important one, and one we hope will raise the conversation of secure methods every internet user should employ. We are pleased to see that Gmail now defaults to encrypted access, an important protection. We hope other companies will consider similarly appropriate steps, and hope that more will contribute their thoughts to an honest and open dialogue about responsible ICT practice in the year 2010 and beyond. As we wrote,

“A lack of legal infrastructure prevents US corporations from protecting new media users in repressive regimes. Site owners are culpable for content in foreign states, even when data is physically housed on US soil in data farms, and legal frameworks have not yet been fully established for US companies to protect end-users.”

How momentous will Google’s decision be, ultimately? Will this moment be a turning point in the US, China, and our relations between both countries?  In China, the following meme is spreading quickly:

90后：今天我翻墙，看到一个国外网站叫Google的，妈的全是抄袭百度的。00后：翻墙是什么？ 10后：网站是什么？ 20后：国外是什么？

People born in 90s: Today I stepped out of the Great Firewall and saw a foreign website named Google. Shit, it is all but a copy of Baidu.
Born in 00s: What do you mean by stepping out of Great Firewall?
Born in 10s: What do you mean by website?
Born in 20s: What is ‘foreign’?