Consilience

#quickpost

I’ve been mulling around the idea of more wide-spread crytographic use. One thing that I see as sorely lacking in current popular/professional culture is verifiable electronic signatures. The Adobe stuff seems wrong to me every time I use it as an end user (read: see it on some pdf; I’ve never actually generated a signature with it).

But verifiable electronic signatures is something us geeks figured out a long time ago! So simple, really. Just get all those law firms and law schools to teach their lawyers and paralegals how to use GPG and BAM! a gigantic WOT for law system users. And then, businesses would start adopting it (since their lawyers use it) and then… and then….

But, it appears to me that lawyers don’t actually care about verifiable electronic(ly communicated) signatures. The recent court cases involving Prenda Law (copyright troll) are proof of that. It all comes down to some argument in a court room with a bunch of he said/she said. I think they must like it this way.

Does anyone reading this know of a lawyer (or someone represented by a lawyer) who has used GPG to sign a document and had that document used in the court of law?

So, that’s all to say that lawyers won’t be the way to getting more widespread use of crytographically secure digital signatures, even though they’re a great use case for them.

Today I broke up my first playground bully fight as a dad. It involved blood (the bully drew blood on two others; mouth punches). They were probably around the age of 9.

I could have, and should have, stopped it before blood was drawn, but I didn’t know it was real and I dislike being “that dad” who checks in on kids who end up to be truthfully just playing; maybe I’ll have to be that guy more often now.

I will go to sleep tonight running through all the different potential scenarios and how I should have handled it; kicking myself.

It all brought back the horrible memories of being on the receiving end of that stuff. It’s also why I join TaeKwonDo at the age of 8 when I lived in Texas and became a 1st degree black belt in 2 years. But it’s also why, when I moved to Missouri and joined a much more fighting-oriented club that I quit (the teacher was a female kickboxer who routinely fought in male tournaments).

I like sparring, but I hate fighting.

As Carrie and I were putting Rowan down to sleep 30 minutes later (we were at the playground for a nice after dinner excursion) we talked about what happened, how it was affecting us, and then, generally, the culture of hate we live in.

I don’t know the root causes and I have no cures, but we all really sincerely terribly positively do need to work on reducing the hate around us. Without us all working on it, it won’t happen.

Oh Petey, it’s ok, grown ups sometimes disagree with what each other are doing. It doesn’t mean we don’t love you anymore, just, I don’t get along with Canonical.

Canonical and I had a long, wonderful relationship. They brought a lot of wonderfully smart and committed individuals in, paid them great, and let them build really awesome free software. We all loved Canonical back then. They were the best sugar daddy anyone could want.

I loved them so much I did a ton of boring work, even! I triaged over 1000 bugs! For free! Granted, I did most of it when I was in grad school with nothing better to do (I was procrastinating when writing papers). But, it was great because I loved the community that was around me and supporting me. Brian Murray was especially awesome. Along with persia and many others I can’t remember right now. Pete, the people who were active back in 2007 were so amazingly helpful, caring, and committed. We all worked together so well because we all saw each other as equals.

I believed in Canonical so much, and the community they were creating, to be an evangelist for them. I was a believer! I preached the good word. I swallowed it myself hook, line, and sinker.

But, in any relationship, Petey, the people must be equals if it is to last.

Canonical started making the relationship unequal, though. They have their reasons, and they make sense to them. But they are hurtful to me and I can’t be true to myself and live under them at the same time.

They started to treat non-Canonical developers as free labor and wouldn’t even let them use the software in the same way Canonical does. Then Canonical started keeping more secrets. Sure, we all have secrets, and Canonical has probably been lying to me for a while, but lately they have become much more overt about it, making me look like an abused partner in public, instead of just being one in private.

And that’s really the point, Petey, Canonical started out awesome like most partners do. But they were hiding their true selves. They had the best intentions, probably, like most partners do. They think they can be better, they think they can treat their partners with respect and love, and they do for a while. But it is hard for them. Their true side starts to show itself in those heated moments when you wonder what is really going through their head. Then it gets to be too much and too often.

You just can’t take it anymore.

And that’s why I’m ending my relationship with Canonical.

Remember Petey, it’s not your fault, and I still love you. It’s something between Canonical and me.

Do you want a warm glass of milk and cookies?

It’s official. I’ve signed the paperwork. I’ve told everyone at CC.

On February 19th I begin as Release Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation.

I can say a ton more about my time at CC; experiences, what I learned, who I worked with, all that. But instead of saying too much, and not enough, I’ll just say:

Looking forward to the future.

In my previous post in this series (Secrecy is power over others) I began the exploration on secrecy in today’s world. It was a very primitive exploration without much depth, admittedly. I ended it attempting to outline a few of the common excuses used for not sharing secrets.

I need to expand, clarify, and generally make my argument more coherent, but it serves its current purpose of beginning the discussion.

Now I want to discuss one of the concerns from the comments (thanks Matthew and Andrew). It boils down to accountability.

What do I mean by accountability? From the Wiktionary definition of accountable we have:

• Liable to be called on to render an account;
• Being answerable for.
• Being liable for.

Without accountability (universally), no wrong or unethical action could be brought to justice. Thus, I think we can safely assume and make it a priori that justice and accountability are good things.

I assert that justice should be universal and thus, by extension, accountability should be as well.

This has two sides for my secrecy post.

1. To be accountable others must have access to the evidence (incriminating or exonerating). This is much of the reasoning to justify my assertions that all corporate information (especially those things normally treated as secrets) should be shared publicly.

2. The flip side is that those who have access to others’ information (or secrets if you will) must be accountable for their actions with that information. This is precisely why the actions of the government (especially those actions involving the killing of people) needs to be shared and thus justified. If the people killing others are not held accountable, we get the slew of horrible examples I closed my secrecy post with.

I’ll expand #2 a little more.

My daily habits, movements, readings, and interactions with other people is routinely monitored by government agencies. However, those agencies are not directly accountable for the actions they take informed by that information. And they are ESPECIALLY not accountable to me. This is the problem. And I posit, if this part of the problem were addressed (with more information sharing, getting rid of government secrets) then I wouldn’t be as uneasy with sharing that information publicly. Of course, it isn’t only the government that does bad things; corporations, non-profits, and other people do as well. Everyone should be accountable to everyone. Period. Let me repeat that.

Everyone should be accountable to everyone.

If your actions adversely affect me, then you should be accountable (and make amends) to me.
If my actions adversely affect you, then I should be accountable (and make amends) to you.

“What about my personal information? Isn’t that going to be used against me?”

That’s the most common response/retort to the notion of a more transparent society; people (or corporations or governments) will misuse that information.

I agree. They will. And they do now. A lot. Everyday in fact.

Why are they able to misuse that information? First, they are the ones collecting the information, thus they are the ones in control of its sharing, not you (unless you take extensive actions like recording all of your own movements, fingerprints, id numbers, etc etc and sharing them in public). Because they, not you, are now in control of your data, they can do what they want with that data (they call it “theirs” by this point, since they collected it). You, at the same time, don’t really have many easy avenues to 1) verify the accuracy of their data on you or 2) fix wrong or illegally acquired data (think: credit report mistakes or FBI files with wrong information).

Why not? Because they are not accountable to you. There are laws in place to make sure that governments and corporations are not accountable to the citizens. It’s really simple, actually, but it is also insanely irresponsible as a society.

The first step to remedy this issue to make the government and corporations (and even other individuals) accountable to the people who they are collecting data about. We’ve only recently begun to understand this as an American (US of A) population; see: the FACT Act of 2003 for credit reports and the Freedom of Information Act (1966) for government information (both horribly late in the history of the US, beyond despicable for a country that proclaims to be the pinnacle of them all). We need more of these things. Or maybe just a blanket law:

if you record information about people, those very people must be able to review all related recorded information without delay and submit corrections where appropriate.

The obviously difficult part of this proposal is the “submit corrections” part; how does anyone verify the correction (or the previously wrong information)? (ok ok, it is all difficult, how do we ensure we know of everyone who is recording data before we can even begin to bring accountability into the picture?)

Summary in quasi-logic:

1. More transparency in life generally leads to more efficient and productive (thus less wasteful and hurtful) lives.
2. Corporations, government agencies, and individuals are scared of being more transparent for various reasons.
3. The vast majority of these reasons are superfluous.
4. The remaining can be addressed through universal accountability with justice.
5. Therefore, we should work toward a society with universal accountability and justice.

Addendum (8:50am PST): To be clear: I use ghostery, DoNotTrack, run a Tor relay and similar things because universal (or even partial) accountability has not addressed the concerns for which they were created.

My grandpa (Grandpa Jenks, mom’s dad) was an amazing guy.

Actually, I could just say:

My grandpa was the guy you think of who lived through the depression and World War 2. He built a house with hand tools. Was a farmer. Was a carpenter. And raised 3 kids with an equally amazing wife.

He was an amazing carpenter.

I have several pieces of furniture he made over the years including a bookshelf that is the sturdiest one you’ve ever used and a sitting chest with casters that used to be underneath the upstairs phone where my grandmother would chat with her friends and family.

Each of his granddaughters have a cedar hope chest. One of those big chests that sit at the bottom of a full-sized bed that hold all the special things in your life. They smell amazing and I’m still a little jealous that grandpa never made me one.

Until today.

My grandpa passed away a number of years ago; I was still in undergrad. When he died all the extended family came to the house to grieve, remember, and (sadly) go through his possessions. Of course my other male cousin and I (the only two male cousins) went to the garage to go through his tools.

At the time I was beginning to get an itch for woodworking (an itch I haven’t fully scratched yet) and my cousin was (and is) a bang up mechanic; so it was pretty easy to divvy up the tools.

My grandpa, of course, had a wooden tool chest for his woodworking tools. I call it a tool chest because of its size and weight, but apparently my grandpa called it a toolbox and carried it to the work site every day. Grandpa sure was a buff son of a gun. That’s what I got; this amazing wooden tool chest filled with a good number of woodworking tools (even the pencil bag my mom sewed for him), still in a great condition (sharp as all heck and oiled). Since I was still in school I didn’t have a place to keep it; it has spent the last near decade in my parents’ basement.

Now it made the long trip out to California in my parents’ RV and I couldn’t be happier. Take a look why.

The chest

My mom and the chest, for size comparison

Opened

With planes

The No. 6 plane

The amazing pencil bag my mom made for him that he used until the end

A still amazingly sharp chisel

Not all of the tools are pictured; many were taken out of the tool chest for easy loading and unloading (again, he was a buff son of a gun).

by Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Essay from the wonderful book The Wealth of the Commons: A world beyond market & state.

The argument isn’t complete in the article (thus also not in my excerpts) but it does appear there is a book-length work on the subject by this author (with another co-author).

Over the course of modernity, commons as societal institutions have increasingly been reified to being considered merely material objects. This is nothing less than a fundamentalist reinterpretation of the commons influenced by neoliberal thought. No longer do people perceive the purpose or the meaning of socially binding arrangements when it comes to commons, they mostly see only the object itself to which a societal convention refers. And where the material reality of the phenomena in question is immaterial and volatile – for example, the air the knowledge about a plant’s healing properties – they are reified by privatizing them and assigning them a monetary value – through the establishment of carbon emissions trading rights, for instance, or through the patenting of knowledge according to the WTO’s regime for intellectual property rights.

…

Economic, ecological and social crises are merging to form a single one, a crisis of civilization. In light of catastrophes that they have triggered, the values that characterize our current civilization are proving to be destructive. We need a paradigm shift worldwide: a shift away from egocentric consumerism, away from a society’s structural imperative to maximize growth, and away from our arrogance with respect to the living environment. We, the people of our epoch, need new (old) societal institutions that are bound to a new (old) relationship of humans and nature.

…

In keeping with the dominant understanding that the feasibility of any plan is dependent on funding, the question of money is often raised to quickly in discussions about the realization of alternatives to the growth-based economy.l Even if some projects to strengthen the commons cannot do without money, this does not alter the fact that the logic of money as we know it is a fundamental built-in error of current-day socialization.

…

The logic of money is that of a mathematical equation, an exchange of equivalents. Order is supposedly achieved through the objectivity (or tangible quality of an object) of an invisible hand, which is supposed to be superior to the disorder of diversity given by nature. In the present, this is proving to be completely wrong. The logic of money is not suitable as a moral foundation for civilization. (emphasis added)

Presented without commentary (other than my above emphasis) under fair use and/or the terms of the license of the original article (CC:BY-SA 3.0) just in case fair use wasn’t enough ;)

When will things like this, said by the ever awesome Carl Malamud, not be heresy?

“The standards [organizations] definitely need money, but when one looks at the million-dollar salaries these nonprofits pay their CEOs, some of the highest salaries in the nonprofit world, one can’t help but think that maybe they don’t need quite as much money as they get.”

Just imagine a small town news reporter saying that on the 5 o’clock news. Or god forbid, someone on the national news.

When that is no longer heresy, I’ll be a tiny bit happier.

[Think of this post as something like a public draft, fittingly enough. I'm looking for feedback. Poke holes. Make it (or make me make it) better.]

Secrecy is power over others. Seems like a pretty obvious statement right? Obviously when you keep something a secret you are the one choosing whether someone else can know that thing. In some cases that isn’t a huge deal (eg: I didn’t tell anyone else that I ate the last two oranges just now) but in other cases it is a horrible act of malice (let your brain run wild for a second on this one).

Luckily, our society is starting to become more accustomed to not protecting everything as a secret. There are better places and worse places, but it seems to me that the anti-secret (or pro-knowledge) crowd is gaining support.

But it hasn’t always been that way, of course.

Not that long ago, it was common practice for cancer sufferers to not know they had cancer. Their doctors would know and sometimes part of their family would (eg: parents or kids, depending on which one was “vulnerable”), but they would die of cancer never knowing they had cancer. In fact, from a quick web search, it seems that is still not an uncommon thing in Japan. [edit: Thanks to Janne's comment regarding the extra information on Japanese cancer patients choices. Some actually preemptively say they would not wish to know.]

Not that long ago it was impossible for a citizen in the USA to request information about actions the government is taking. Now we have FOIA (which is still pretty limited and there are still far too many governmental secrets, I argue all of them).

What is behind all secrecy? The notion that one person/group can know something while another person/group is too dumb/smart/vulnerable/bad/good/whatever to know it.

One group is unilaterally creating a caste system. The other (non-knowers) have no agency in this choice and have no recourse other than begging the knowers. The knowers wield power over the non-knowers in many unfathomable ways, ways not yet even known when the knowers decided to create the non-knowers.

If you are a person in the group of non-knowers, it is easy for you to feel alone and as an outcast. Someone has decided that you, personally you, are not worthy of some bit of information, no matter how inconsequential it is (and the more inconsequential it is the worse the feeling). And when that information is about you, or your place in life, you are justified in feeling that you are worthless because you aren’t even worth as much as your own information.

Now, the question becomes, what do you as a knower or a person in a position who can delineate people as knowers vs non-knowers do? Do you share with everyone all you know or do you keep some things completely to yourself and other things somewhere in between (even through enforceable means such as NDAs, contracts/licenses, and the like)?

Does it matter depending on the information you possess? You will undoubtedly argue yes, of course it does. I did initially.

But should that be the answer?

Let’s start to dissect the usual excuses.

1.Just because something is normally treated as a secret doesn’t mean it should continue to be a secret. See the poor souls who died of cancer and at the same time completely confused and alone. “What we’ve always done” is never an acceptable excuse. Everything is open for reassessment.

2.Just because one group thinks the information can be misinterpreted by a “less informed” or “not as smart” person doesn’t mean it should continue as a secret. This is my biggest critique of the mentality I see in many researchers, even those who are pro “open”. They continue to sometimes be paternalistic and pretentious. This mentality should be corrected as early in a person’s life as possible.

2a.Some “open” licenses even codify this. The Open Government License from the UK says one must “ensure that you do not mislead others or misrepresent the Information or its source”. That sure is burdensome. Ensuring? I need to make sure that everyone who reads my work based on your data understands me correctly? As Mike Linksvayer has said about the OGL, it is quite problematic.

3.We are starting to see that business secrets are more costly than beneficial and this will only accelerate in the future due to the mode of production asymptotically approaching 100% digital. Thus, if this is the excuse, it should be justified (and not just in a anyway that is refuted before or after this bullet).

3a.Some research in this area is starting to come out from people such as Eric Von Hippel.

4. If your reputation as a person will be hurt by the information you tend to want it secret. This one is huge and complex. Defining the “you” the “others”, along with “reputation” and “hurt”, and lastly with a new word of “justified” are tough to do in a single bullet. I may expand this and do a full blog post on it later.

4a. Are you making the choice for a company? Is the information damning to you/the business because you are/the business is doing things that are illegal or unethical? Share it. Period. No questions asked. If you have the power to share that information and you don’t you are culpable (to the greater good). If you think my assertion here is wrong, tell me why any company should get away with actions which the rest of the world/country/state/county/whatever thinks is unacceptable? If you are a libertarian, isn’t knowledge the first requisite to being able to “choose with your money?”

4b. Are you making the choice for yourself? This one is where I will allow some leeway, until I can figure out a reason not to. Again, this one I’ll revisit in more detail later.

5. Money. This one is simple: why are you hiding your expenses? People feel like their finances are personal and private for reasons I can’t quite pin down. Jealousy (either direction)? Ashamed? Something else? Why is this? Why does it matter what my salary is? You can already infer much of it based on how a person lives (what the buy, what they don’t, etc). True, there are many that live below their means, but you can also infer that as well.

5a This is doubly so for ANY type of organization. I believe that the three main points of Open-book management are almost perfect. I only make one correction: “The company should share finances as well as critical data with all employees.” This means: everyone’s salary (especially the C-level types), where the money comes from (grants, products, services, and how much from where and for what), rent, utilities, everything. It’s easy, too. That document is already circulated among the C-level types and the board at least once a year. Just add it to archive.org and be done with it.

5a-continued I know of many non-profits that make their 990s and Financial Statements easily findable. In fact, many Free Software and related orgs’ documents are collated by Bradley Kuhn in this gitorious repository (https://gitorious.org/floss-foundations). And Carl Malamud has made this much easier by providing bulk access to all of the publicly available IRS documents for Tax Exempt Organizations (non-profits), ie: their 990s.

6. What’s your excuse? Please share (really).

Based on these refutations of the above excuses it is plainly clear that most, if not all, information should be freely available. Secrecy harms more than it protects.

Let’s think of all the ways that secrecy harms individuals and our society.

1. The countless deaths from secret drone attacks.

2. The countless deaths from secret wars perpetrated by democracies.

3. The countless deaths from secrets withheld by pharmaceutical companies.

4. The countless deaths from secrets withheld by car manufacturers.

… If those weren’t enough …

5. Unable to make quality non-profit donation decisions because we don’t know the organizations current financials and roadmap(s). I complain about this every year when donation time rolls around. This year a lot of non-profits were (minimally) hurt because I chose not to give to them, even after I did last year, because of a lack of information. In some small way, their own secrecy directly hurt them.

But, I don’t want to end on such an insignificant thought like me not donating $50 to the EFF this year. So instead, I’ll let you know that I’m not the only one thinking about this (Mike Linksvayer has alluded to this idea, while I was drafting this post, no less).

And now, let me ask you a question:

What secrets are you keeping and why?

We’re looking for a special person over at Creative Commons; someone to lead the tech team and also lead development of tools and products for the entire organization.

The announcement I wrote for the CC blog:

Paul Cutler / CC BY SA.

Creative Commons is looking for an experienced, innovative, and technically inclined individual to drive product development at CC. This individual will play a highly influential role in the future of Creative Commons as we look to the next 10 years.

For those that have been paying attention, this is indeed a re-imagination of the previous solicitation for a Chief Technology Officer. This role has expanded to be a more general direction setting position within CC vis-a-vis tools and products that will enable and sustain CC and its community.

Creative Commons started with a vision of leveraging the Internet to scale the sharing of our collective cultural, scientific, and educational output. To that end, there is an unimaginable number of freely licensed works to build upon, and to build services around, and 90% of the technical groundwork is laid (meaning, of course, there is still more than 90% of the way to go!). Now is an incredibly exciting time to lead the product and technology efforts of Creative Commons — be part of a great team, help communities yearning to share better and more effectively, and engage with developers around the world to help build a better future.

And it is an interesting place to work! Some unique aspects of the CC technical and product team:

• All software developed by CC is free software; see our source repositories and bug tracker;
• We have a small (two software engineers, one system administrator) technology team focused on maintaining and improving CC’s services (implemented using Python, CiviCRM, WordPress, MediaWiki, and other technologies); additionally technology suffuses all of our work, including when policy-oriented — the technology team and especially CTO are frequently called on to provide leadership on broad issues;
• See our CC Labs blog for occasional posts on the details of our technical work and thoughts on related happenings;
• Watch recordings of past CC technology summits;
• Read about the CC Rights Expression Language, a set of recommendations implemented across CC’s services and by many publishers.

We’re accepting resumes through October 12. See the job posting for details.