This post follows on from my previous one, which has the background and links. In brief, the Apache Foundation is hosting the Accumulo project. Accumulo is software created by the NSA and handed to Apache, and it is at the heart of the NSA’s surveillance technology stack. Now that we know about the use of the technology, Apache has the opportunity to distance itself from the NSA surveillance scandal, and should do so.

How should we think about the role of Apache in the NSA surveillance scandal? Perhaps a good place to look is the work of respected open internet advocates like the OpenNet Initiative. So let’s do that.

A couple of years ago Helmin Noman and Jillian York of the OpenNet Initiative published a bulletin called West Censoring East: The Use of Western Technologies by Middle East Censors, 2010-2011. The bulletin documented network filtering of the internet by national governments, and “the use of American- and Canadian-made software for the purpose of government-level filtering in the Middle East and North Africa”. The goal of the report was to inform a “genuine discussion of the ethics and practice of providing national censorship technology and services”. Just to be clear, and for what little it is worth, the report seems admirable to me. … Continue reading

The Apache Foundation hosts the Apache Accumulo project, which is a data storage and retrieval system for big data created by the NSA in 2008 and submitted to Apache in 2011. Derrick Harris at GigaOm describes Accumulo as “The technological linchpin to everything the NSA is doing from a data-analysis perspective”; it is probably part of the BoundlessInformant open source stack (see this presentation [PDF]) that stores and analyzes the Verizon FISA data.

The Apache Foundation “provides support for the Apache community of open-source software projects, which provide software products for the public good.” It looks to me like Accumulo is outside that mandate.

The Apache Foundation may, because of its membership, be more open to pressure than other organizations involved in the NSA’s big data effort. Are there grounds for a campaign to pressure Apache into removing Accumulo from its list of projects?

There may also be questions about more general-purpose projects that complement Accumulo, like Apache Hadoop, Apache Zookeeper, and Apache Thrift, but these were not designed so specifically for the NSA’s data handling needs as Accumulo.

Meanwhile, of course, stopwatching.us.

Update June 15: Follow-up post, yes it should.

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I am thrilled to have an essay at The New Inquiry, a great publication that usually features really provocative writing from people who are half my age and twice as well-read.

The essay is called Open Wide and is about the difficult relationship between commons and private capital, particularly digital commons. It was inspired by David Harvey’s 2012 book of essays Rebel Cities; Harvey doesn’t talk about digital commons at all, but he has a lot of enlightening things to say about urban commons. While he sees commons as “spaces of hope for the construction of… a vibrant anti-commodification politics”, Harvey is far more hard-headed than most about the challenges that face commons-based production and about the effects that private capital can have on commons. Much of what he had to say has clear implications for the world of digital production, where leading thinkers have systematically ignored the issues Harvey raises.

The New Inquiry publishes challenging and difficult pieces, and this is not a particularly easy read: an attempt to be theoretical and literary at the same time. I owe a particular debt to Rob Horning, whose editing made a huge difference: any bite and focus … Continue reading

There is much that is moving and challenging in Jacob Appelbaum’s 29C3 keynote from December 2012, about the surveillance state, and Appelbaum has earned the right to be listened to from his work on the Tor Project. But…

At several places Appelbaum asserts that creating free software is a way of acting against institutions such as the NSA, and a way of building a better world. So at 12’01”: “It is possible to make a living making free software for freedom, instead of closed source proprietary malware for cops”, and at 40’50”: “everyone that’s worked on free software and open source software… these are things we should try to focus on… When we build free and open source software… we are enabling people to be free in ways that they were not. Literally, people who write free software are granting liberties.”

The picture of hackers versus spooks, positioning free and open source software as an alternative to the surveillance technologies of the NSA, just doesn’t hold up. Appelbaum must know that the NSA has a long history of engagement with open-source software, so “closed source proprietary malware for cops” mischaracterizes the technology of surveillance. The NSA Boundless Informant data-mining tool proclaims that it “leverages FOSS technology”, … Continue reading

I’m really looking forward to being part of FutureEverything in Manchester next week, where I’ll be a panellist at Open Data Manchester on Tuesday and at Policies and Politics of Open Data on Thursday. Each event starts with five-minute lead-ins from the panel members. Some of the panellists are real experts who know more than I do about open data, but “in for a penny, in for a pound”: so on Tuesday I’ll use my five minutes to argue against standards (and especially universal standards), and on Thursday I’ll argue that openness is an idea that has outlived its usefulness.

Here are notes for Thursday’s opening remarks, which will be familiar to regular readers. I think I’ll have to cut them down a bit for time.

We all know that the ideas and actions around “Open Government Data” have created a very wide umbrella that covers many different agendas. It covers civil liberties campaigners, civic activists, startups, politicians from across the political spectrum, and major international corporations. And we all know that those agendas and groups are a bit uncomfortable being in such close proximity. But like “freedom”, “openness” is something that everyone can agree on, and it’s served to paper … Continue reading

Everybody loves Jane Jacobs.

I love Jane Jacobs. “Austrian” economists with whom I disagree, like Alex Tabarrok, love Jane Jacobs. You probably love Jane Jacobs. Steven Johnson says he loves Jane Jacobs in his recent book Future Perfect  — but so does Evgeny Morozov at the beginning of To Save Everything, Click Here, and Morozov is arguing against Johnson. Someone has to be getting Jane Jacobs wrong. Much of this essay is an attempt to see why Morozov gets Jacobs right, while Johnson and others are missing something important.

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From 2005 to 2007, Evgeny Morozov tells us, he thought that digital technology might be a way to rid the world of autocratic regimes. His disillusionment was channelled into his influential first book, The Net Delusion, a full-on attack on “the sheer callousness and utopianism” of the “Internet Freedom” project (p 354).

This time around, Morozov’s target is much broader, but still centred in the world of digital technologies, and particularly the Internet. He takes aim at the ideologies that have grown up around the Internet, and their many manifestations.

Chapter 7 is typical of the book. Here is a collection of people who record and track their everyday lives online, and then … Continue reading

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Facebook as a “free space”
• Connecting Identity to Rational Choice?
• Identity Cascades
• Free Spaces and Screening
• Institutions and Challenges
• Conclusions

Introduction

Finishing up what I said I’d finish a couple of months ago, this is a shorter version of a paper on “Identity, Institutions, and Uprisings” with less mathematics, no references (see the link above) and more opinionating. Also, a longer version of what I’m going to say at Theorizing the Web 2013 in a few days.

There is a theoretical side to the “Facebook Revolution” debate about the role of digital technologies in the 2011 “Arab Spring” uprisings, and it boils down to two ways of looking at things: the micro and the macro. On the one hand, we have the rational choice, agent-based approach and on the other we have more traditional sociological approaches based on larger-scale social structures.

If you look at some of the key characteristics of the uprisings, it looks like a win for the micro side.

Theories, and North African uprisings. Event Micro Macro Sudden uprising (cascade) Y N Lack of strong opposition movement Y N Network technologies Y N Score 3 0

The single most … Continue reading