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I’ve been following the Health Care debate since about the middle of the Democratic presidential primary, when all the candidates first announced their plans for how to change things if elected. In that almost two years, I’ve heard a lot about these things: the public option, town hall meetings, teabaggers, Stephen Hawkings, and endless coverage of the National government as if the whole thing were a sports competition about number of Red or Blue votes rather than an important public discussion.

What I didn’t know, until I watched the Daily Show from Feb, 11, 2010, is anything about Hawaii’s health care system, which apparently has achieved almost universal health care coverage via government mandate and has been using this system for the last 40 years. Until that minute I thought there was nothing in the debate that could surprise me anymore.

When Dog the Bounty Hunter, one of the Hawaiians interviewed on the Daily Show’s Hawaii coverage, has a better ability to express the need for health care than the politicians and media personalities whose job it has been to talk about it for the last 18 months, we need to start listening to different people.

I would suggest we start listening to each other.

Here’s the idea. Take $30 but, rather than giving it to a political group or non-profit, go to the store and buy a webcam. Set it up at your computer and record a video on why you care about health care. It can be 30 seconds, 60 seconds, or however long it takes to tell your story.

Public Voices

I’m lucky, my office really cares about making sure we have great health care coverage, but I still have a couple stories to tell about issues my coworkers are having with insurance right now. And then there are all the stories of my friends in their 20’s who are trapped in jobs they would otherwise leave for more rewarding work but can’t for fear of losing health insurance. I have almost as many of those stories as I have friends in their 20’s.

So I’m going to go get a webcam and record a couple minutes worth of video and post it online. Maybe we put the videos on YouTube and tag them “healthcarestories” or maybe one of those non-profits that care about health care will come forward and we can put them all there. Then we watch each other, listen to each other, and vote for the best videos. Find the ones that make you remember why you care.

If we want to influence the “public voices” in broadcast media, we could all throw in a couple dollars and buy some air time for the videos with the most votes. Or maybe that media is hopeless and we run some ads telling people where to come for the sane discussion, like throwing a lifeline to pull people back onto dry land.

Either way, if we can get a million of these video messages in a bottle together, a million people engaged in actually talking about health care rather than screaming about it, we can convince a lot of politicians that their interests lie in listening rather than talking for once.

Aaron Williamson, one of my friends and colleagues at the SFLC, put up a great piece yesterday running through the various panoptic services that google offers. It is well put and worth reading in full. Unfortunately, Aaron’s site requires registration in order to leave comments so I’m going to respond here instead and let Planet NYC’s feed pull together the discussion.

Aaron makes reference to a couple of points that are key, both in critiquing Google’s specific practices, and in picking up the discussion from last time.

The first, Paul Ohm’s piece “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization “, does the same thing to the field of information sharing that an expose that condoms don’t work at stopping STDs would do to the field of Sexual health medicine.

Professor Ohm documents the field of “Information reidentification”, and that field’s success in countering so called “anonymization” techniques used to remove the personally identifying bits of information (name, address, SSN, etc.) from things like your medical history or web search history before releasing that information to the public.

In a nutshell, “anonymization” is really just obfuscation; the data we are collecting about people is so rich and precise that we can take supposedly anonymous records and fill in all the missing information by fitting the record into all the rest of what we know. This should be a basic piece in discussions of our digital lives and public policy, but it has gotten almost no coverage since the initial publication.

The second point I want to talk about is that this is not about Google. This is not personal. It is not fueled by some thought-less hatred. We talk about Google and Facebook in these discussions, just as we talk about Apple in discussions of closed vs. free software, not because we have fanboyish love for a different team but because they are the most successful at popularizing practices we are concerned about.

This is a structural critique, just as arguing that banks shouldn’t be allowed to gamble with other people’s money is a structural critique. If you want to talk about whether particular organizations, whether that is Goldman Sachs or Facebook have been malfeasant, or behaved with a lack of respect for the interests of their customers, that is a different discussion.

I spent a year trying to write these posts around the theme of “Towards a Free Facebook” before realizing that the biggest problem with Facebook is how much they have popularized unsafe data systems. That’s what this is actually about.

Setting the stage

Privacy was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. I have spent the last year talking with people about privacy and reading about what it looks like in our new network-connected world and everyone agrees: privacy is dead and it was the birth of our information society that killed it.

At some point in the last 20 years computers spread far enough through society that they transformed how we live our lives. Not only could we telecommute and access unimaginable amounts of information through the air while sitting at a local coffee shop, but all the little bits of information we generate by going through our daily lives, all the little things that happen but we never write down, like what streets we walk down, what news articles we read, or what products we look at while in the store, all those little bits started getting recorded for the first time in history. When that happened, privacy died and we all became subjects for sociological study.

Whether it is Facebook trying to figure out your sexual orientation from the activity in your social network, online dating sites trying to map the decision matrix behind whether you will talk to, sleep with, or date particular people, or Google trying to burrow ever farther into your brain so they can better sell you things in the margins of all your daily activities, whatever the particulars, your information is out there and available for study.

Privacy died; everyone agrees about that. But that is where the agreement stops. What does it mean that more information is being recorded about you today than the Stazi were ever able to record about the citizens of East Germany? What does it mean that this information is being recorded by private companies and governments alike? Or that the pieces of information you manage not to share can increasingly be inferred by analyzing the mountain of information that everyone else around you has given over? How does all of this affect your right to a fair trial, or to organize politically, the confidentiality of your medical records, or your ability to receive goods and services as an equal member of society? There is no agreement about the answers to these questions, nor is there generally even discussion of them. Instead most discussions about digital privacy assume the only challenges we face in a networked society are financial fraud and junk mail.

Life without

Part of the reason we never discuss the more complicated structural and social issues involved with privacy is that we have poor instincts for these issues and they reliably lead us to poor conclusions. Consider this example.

In 2005 it became public that the US government had been collecting call records for almost everyone in the country. This caused some outrage. What it did not cause was the kind of outrage that occurred when it was made public in 1971 that the FBI had been following and profiling non-violent political organizers and public figures. Part of the reason for that is that times have changed and people’s expectations for government have changed with them, but part of it is because of how the information gathering was done. In the 1970’s the FBI had to actually follow people to find out where they were going, they had to actually infiltrate the political groups and sit in on their meetings to find out what was going on. In 2005, the NSA could plug directly into the phone company’s central line and get everyone’s records from afar.

Imagine if it had happened differently. What if, instead of going to the phone company the NSA had installed a device in your phone that records every key you press, the length of every call you make and who the call is with and then bundles that information back to a regional NSA building where it is collated with the records from identical devices in the phones of your friends, business partners, and loved ones. Imagine that rather than tapping a central fiber optic cable, the NSA conspired with each local wireless store to install these devices in all our phones, sell those phones to us, and bill us monthly for using the phones.

Can you imagine the headlines when people opened their phones and found listening devices inside, when they learned that the smiling salesperson that recommended them a new phone had installed the listening device in it first? It would have been a firestorm that cut across all segments of the political spectrum. Yet the information collected in this fictitious example is the same as was actually collected by the NSA, exactly the same.

Action at a distance

Information about us used to follow us very closely, physically. Someone knew what you were reading at the coffee shop only if they were standing behind you in the shop. Today the material you’re reading is stored on a website’s server somewhere else in the world and no one has to be standing behind you to tell what you’re reading there, everyone from the website operator, people selling ads on the website, the site’s ISP, the coffee shop’s wireless router, the coffee shop’s ISP, and, most likely, anyone else on the same wireless network, can tell that. But we don’t yet feel intruded upon by the distant watching of our activities. We’re still looking behind ourselves to see if anyone is watching.

This is a dangerous situation. The sense of feeling intruded upon is as important to our lives as social beings as the sense of pain is to our physical lives. Losing this important feedback mechanism has larger repercussions than whether you can make secure financial transactions, just as nakedness has more repercussions than being cold in the winter. Our biggest privacy problem at the moment is not a particular piece of software or changing social norm but that the technology has left behind the instincts we rely on for feeling the wind on our skins and knowing that we are exposed.

The few people with a better understanding of our current reality, the data aggregators, the service builders, spend all their time exploiting our failed instincts by selling us one-sided tools: practices and services that make our lives transparent to them without ever alerting us to how thoroughly we are being studied. We need to take a hard look at what society looks like when some people have that kind of power to strip away the outer layers of our lives. If we miss out on our chance to do so now, as we choose and shape the communication tools of tomorrow, we will end up more than just cold.

If it never occurred to you that how you interact with computers might impact your ability to get a fair trial or choose your political representatives, keep reading. In the next few posts we’ll look at those issues and some ideas for alternative tools to help us control our own communications without turning our lives into a currency for digital power brokers in the process.

Last Friday morning I sat down at my computer and tried to answer a simple question: whether I needed to move the car that day. On a normal Friday the answer would have been “Yes”, but last Friday there was a light coat of snow over the city that I hoped would bring a snow day from the street cleaning regulations. I ended up disappointed, not because the rules were in effect, they had been suspended hours before, but because the government sites hosting that information (DoT’s site and NYC’s 311 site) were not updated so I ended up with no better information at the end of my search than when I started.

Instead of putting snow day suspensions on the Department of Transportation’s official website, the DoT sent the announcement via twitter, an external, closed, data feed service, though admittedly one with many users. So, rather than using smart tools that could send out twitter feeds and update the official site as part of the same action, or using simple tools like the official website, which would let more capable tools like civx process the information into whatever formats you want, the DoT did the digital equivalent of announcing the news at church and assuming all the relevant people would be there.

Twitter is a closed community with membership and the technology of communication controlled by one company. What bothers me is not that the government went into that system to spread public information; I think we should spread public information wherever the public is, which is why in 2008 I advocated running “get out the vote” drives in World of Warcraft, an online video game much more closed off than twitter. What bothers me is that a single, closed, tool has taken the place of meaningful change in how government communicates with citizens.

Spreading time-sensitive information like parking rule suspension or weather-related school closings using a live feed is a great idea. We should do more information sharing like that but we shouldn’t be doing it only in closed communities and only using closed tools. We should not abandon the simple tools like department websites or the open tools like RSS in an attempt to follow users down whatever latest rabbit hole of closed communication tools it is that they’re using today. And if the tools our government has for publishing information aren’t as capable at distributing that information as twitter, then our government needs new tools, not just twitter accounts.

If you are curious about how I spend my time, as I know handfuls of people on earth are, here is today’s answer: Bkrpr Blog – Paperback testing begins in earnest.

The longer answer is that it is a device I’ve been working on since the summer to more easily convert my paper books into a digital form. I’ve had test hardware working for a number of months but things were going pretty slowly until James decided to build some image processing scripts to accompany the effort. Those scripts became a fully fledged python application around the end of the year, and we’ve since begun documenting the project in earnest.

The bkrpr wiki has all the relevant links, and a nice front page YouTube video of the device in use. Or a very poor YouTube video of the inside of my room, depending on how you look at it.

If you’re curious to check it out, take a look at the site, or grab the processed test pages online or in pdf.