I am thrilled to have a long review of three “internet and society” books in the always-excellent Literary Review of Canada. It’s online at http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2013/09/hacking-society/.
Books covered are: Networked: The New Social Operating System by Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman; Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert, and Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman.
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. The ethical stances it takes were reiterated by Rebecca MacKinnon when she wrote about it last year in her influential book “The Consent of the Networked”. What’s interesting now is to read the report, read the ethical stances it takes regarding the provision of services by Western companies to authoritarian actions by national governments, and apply those lessons to Apache and the NSA. The parallels are, I hope, obvious.
The report concludes that “Western companies are playing a role in the national politics of many countries around the world. By making their software available to the regimes, they are potentially taking sides against citizens and activists who are prevented from accessing and disseminating content thanks in part to filtering software.” The authors complain that “companies appear to have done little to curb the use of their tools–if not offering them outright for that purpose–for government-level censorship. These companies seem not to have adopted policies and procedures to safeguard freedom of expression in the event that states rather than parents and schools use their tools, as their products are being openly used by several state-run ISPs to limit what citizens can and cannot access online.” The final sentence states that “Such companies must recognize the role their tools play in the international landscape and set forth policies that protect Internet users’ right to free expression–or at least put them on record about the role that they play.”
The technologies that the companies are providing are general purpose technologies: almost everyone would agree that internet filtering technologies have valid uses by parents and schools, for example. It’s not the technology itself that is offensive, at least to anyone who is not happy with the idea of kindergarten kids stumbling across violent pornographic images. It’s the relationship between the companies and their customers: the companies are providing a service, knowing the use to which it is going to be put. The report expects companies to think about the use of their tools and to take action to prevent them being used in ways that curb freedoms. It expects companies to limit the use of their tools.
The role of Apache as the host of the NSA-initiated Accumulo project is directly parallel to the role of western companies providing filtering software that is used by authoritarian regimes to curb freedom of speech. So, in the light of the OpenNet report, how would the continued hosting of Accumulo look?
Especially for people outside the USA, putting pressure on an international organization seems a useful way to go. If anyone is interested in taking this up, maybe we can put together a petition at least. Please contact me in the comments if you are interested.
Created: 2013-06-15 Sat 14:44
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.
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 that it has is due largely to Rob’s engagement. Faults and errors are, of course, my own.
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”, specifically the Hadoop File System, MapReduce (perhaps built on the Apache Accumulo project, which was created by the NSA and contributed to the Apache Foundation), and CloudBase.
These are just the most recent examples: the NSA holds Open Source industry Days, like this one last year; it developed the SELinux mechanisms for supporting access control security policies that has been integrated into the mainline Linux kernel since version 2.6. There’s a good chance that the NSA’s huge new data center in Bluffdale, Utah, which Appelbaum describes at the beginning of his talk, is running open source SELinux software on every computer.
And beyond the NSA, the new set of “Big Data” technologies associated with data acquisition and analysis has strong open source roots. These are the file systems, data storage systems and data-processing systems built to manage data sets that span so many disks that routine failure of servers is expected, and tolerance for such failure must be built into the system. While much of the initiative came from proprietary systems built at the web giants (Google File System, Google Big Table, Amazon Dynamo), the open source implementations of Hadoop File System, Hadoop Map Reduce, and databases such as MongoDB and Cassandra are becoming the industry norm. Surveillance is as much an open source phenomenon as a closed source one.
These are all well-known facts, but maybe they need to be restated. Let me be clear: I’m not reversing Appelbaum’s claim. There is a great deal of closed source software around the surveillance and internet control landscape as well. And (full disclaimer), my salary is paid by (but I do not speak for) a company that mainly makes its money off closed source software, so I’m not claiming a moral high ground here. But to trumpet free and open source software as an alternative to the surveillance systems it has helped to build is nothing but wishful thinking.
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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 over the cracks between these disparate interests.
Unfortunately, it looks to me increasingly as if the language of transparency, the language of non-commercial civic engagement, and the romantic language of rebellion are being used to provide an exciting and appealing facade for an agenda that has nothing to do with transparency, nothing to do with civic participation, and a lot to do with traditional power politics and profit making.
It’s time to get out from under the umbrella and to acknowledge that we are in different camps with different goals. And to do that we need to get rid of the idea that “openness” is an unalloyed virtue.
Here are two examples of how openness is being misused.
The first is about openness and transparency, and it’s from Canada where I live and of which I am a citizen. The Government of Canada has an active open data program. It’s a member of the Open Government Partnership, now chaired by Francis Maude; if you look in Capgemini’s recent white paper on The Open Data Economy you’ll see Canada together with the UK, the USA, France, and Australia as one of the government trendsetters. Last October Jonathan Rosenberg of Google posted an article on the company web site titled “The Future is Open“, in which he wrote:
Claims to governmental transparency are one thing – moves like the one Canada made recently, with its formal Open Government Declaration, are another. The document recognises that open is an active state, not a passive one – it’s not just that data should be free to citizens whenever possible, but that an active ‘culture of engagement’ should be the goal of such measures.
So three cheers for open government Canada? Of course, that’s only one side of the story. Here’s a list of other events in Canada around openness and transparency.
If there’s a message here, it’s just that openness cannot be measured in bytes. And if someone is measuring it in bytes, then you have to wonder what the motives are. So the CapGemini report (above) looks at the Open Data Economy simply by comparing the open data portals that each nation has produced. This is datawashing.
A brief second story. If you look at what kind of new economic possibilities are being promoted by open data, CapGemini highlights Zillow, a Real Estate Advertising network based in California, which uses open tax data, county records, and home-for-sale listings. If there is one industry who has proved able to use the language of openness and disruption to great effect, it’s the Silicon Valley venture capital industry. But whereas when Linus Torvalds started Linux “openness” was a tool for individuals to build something to compete with large enterprises, now “openness” is a tool for large enterprises with a lot of funding to hammer smaller non-profit groups. We hear the language of openness and disruption coming in education, where Coursera and Udacity can go to Davos and paint themselves as radicals, to Uber and AirBnB, whosee millionaires claim to be part of a “sharing economy” disrupting nightmare overlords like the Bed & Breakfast industry or the taxi cartels. We are seeing the emergence of a winner-take-all economy in which small organizations and small businesses are severely handicapped against those with capital behind them. All in the name of openness.
If we see civic participation as an end in itself, which I do, then we need to treat civic computing like a cultural activity. That means we need to build some barriers to protect civic-scale groups from large companies who have advantages of scale, and who can deliver “efficiency” but not participation. Tony Ageh of the BBC, speaking at this conference, describes a vision of public domain data as a “commons” but I think he gets it wrong. A commons is not a free-for-all, where anyone can come and take anything they want. A commons suggests a group of people who all have an interest in maintaining and cultivating a shared resource, and that suggests limits to access from outside. There is room for a number of models of providing mixed access to data, from non-commercial licenses, to closed partnerships between cities and citizen groups, to non-standard formats for sharing that reflect the quirks of individual cities and groups. Each of these seems to break the idea of “openness” in one way or another, but we should be prepared to do so. Openness in and of itself is not enough to hold together a worthwhile coalition and it’s time to get over it.
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 analyze and quantify their existence, from toothbrushing to reading to fecal contents. These “datasexuals” now have a social movement, of a sort, which they call the “Quantified Self” movement. It would be easy to dismiss the Quantified Selfers as harmless eccentrics if they did not have a significant presence among the opinion shapers and leading lights of Silicon Valley, and if the mindset they embody was not clearly present, if in moderated form, in the wider digital world, and if the assumptions and goals were not oozing out over the rest of us. From quantifying oneself in a private context it is a short step to the presentation of self through these numbers, and the use of them as a basis for optimization and refinement. So Morozov cites Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, who says that self tracking is a way to “acknowledge that you have bugs, that there’s new development to do on yourself” (237) so that we can algorithmically measure, tweak, and refine ourselves and our self-presentation to the world.
From here it is just one more short step to the buying and selling of our personal data: to insurers in return for lower premiums, to advertisers in return for better deals. Our personal data becomes a new “asset class” and executives respond by “trying to shift the focus [of debate] from purely privacy to what we call property rights” (235). New social pressures emerge as the digitizers follow their path of bits, algorithms and markets (career counsellors now routinely recommend that building a strong presence on LinkedIn is a route to a better job), and we can replace debates about privacy with reassurances about personal choice. “Privacy is mostly an illusion, but you’ll have as much of it as you want to pay for” says Kevin Kelly (236). New companies emerge to optimize our self-presentation on the web (reputation.com), new norms emerge as “If you’re going out with someone, and they don’t have a Facebook profile, you should be suspicious” (Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, quoted on p. 239). Why would you not share your real-time blood alcohol levels with your employer if you don’t have anything to hide? (240).
The impact of the digital on our lives is such that, while the social consequences of self-tracking seem immense, they are just one thread among many of the digital revolution. In separate chapters, Morozov investigates new developments in policing, arts and culture, politics, government, social engineering, civic life, health, the workplace, and the increasingly designed, architected environments in which we live. There is no aspect of life that isn’t ready to be tweaked, nudged, hacked and filtered into optimal performance.
How to respond to such a flood of changes? One is tempted to define oneself by an attitude to digital technologies themselves: to be unequivocally pro- or anti-technology. But to reject or to accept technology wholesale has no future: wholesale rejection entails rejection, not just of integrated circuits, but of the people connected by them: shaping the use of technology lies not in the realm of individual choice, but of social choice. Wholesale acceptance seems fatalistic – abandoning the possibility of having any say in the forces shaping the societies in which we live.
Morozov undertakes two projects, one successfully and one less so. The first is to provide a framework in which to think about the new inventions that are being sold to us, and the patterns of thought behind them. Morozov identifies a twin-tracked ideology behind the inventions and inventiveness of the digital world. One track is “Internet-centrism” – the practice of “taking a model of how the Internet works and applying it to other endeavours”. Writers have imbued the Internet with “a way of working”; it has a “grain” to which we must adapt; it has a culture, a “way it is meant to be used”, and it comes with a mythology in which iTunes and Wikipedia become models to think about the future of politics, and Zynga is a model for civic engagement (15). The second track is “solutionism”: the recasting of social situations as problems with definite solutions; processes to be optimized (23).
Morozov does a fine job of articulating Internet-centrism and solutionism as two facets of a single Silicon Valley ideology, whose followers include the Valley’s software industry leaders, venture capitalists, conferences and “thought leaders”, as an evolution of the “Cyberselfish” ideology identified a decade ago by Paulina Borsook. The common assumptions, shared biases, and individualistic predilictions give a cohesiveness and homogeneity to the new ideas and inventions, actively constructing and shaping the digital environment from which they claim to draw their inspiration. The insistence on “disrupting” our social and environmental lives; the idea that the solutions inspired by and enabled by the Internet mark a clean break from historical patterns, a never-before-seen opportunity – these mean that the only lessons to learn from history are those of previous technological disruptions. The view of society as an institution-free network of autonomous individuals practicing free exchange makes the social sciences, with the exception of economics, irrelevant. What’s left is engineering, neuroscience, an understanding of incentives (in the narrowly utilitarian sense): just right for those whose intellectual predispositions are to algorithms, design, and data structures. Morozov argues that these orthodoxies have had “a corrosive effect on public discourse and on reform projects” (16) and it’s difficult to argue otherwise.
Morozov’s approach to unpicking the hidden assumptions of solutionism, and the unpalatable consequences of its application, is impressive but less successful. In order to avoid a blanket technopessimism he makes two moves. The first is to adopt a broadly social constructionist approach to the world of digital technologies. The Internet does not shape us, it is shaped by the society in which it is growing. He is with Raymond Williams, against Marshall McLuhan. His stance here is blunt: he refuses to see “the Internet” as an agent of change, for good or bad. “The Internet” is not a cause; it does not explain things, it is the thing that needs to be explained. Chapter 2 is titled The Internet Tells Us Nothing (Because It Doesn’t Actually Exist).
The second, more surprising move, is to adopt a critique that was first described in a pejorative sense by Albert Hirschmann. “In his influential book The Rhetoric of Reaction, Hirschmann argued that all progressive reforms usually attract conservative criticisms that build on one of the following three themes: perversity (whereby the proposed intervention only worsens the problem at hand), futility (whereby the intervention yields no results whatsoever), and jeopardy (whereby the intervention threatens to undermine some previous, hard-earned accomplishment)” (6). Morozov does not see himself as a conservative, but instead places himself in the tradition of other thinkers who have stood against programs of organized efficiency; “Jane Jacobs attacks on the arrogance of urban planning, Michael Oakeshott’s rebellion against rationalists in all walks of human existence, Hans Jonas’s impatience with the cold comfort of cybernetics; and, more recently, James Scott’s concern with how states have forced what he calls ‘legibility’ on their subjects” (7). The list is an interesting one because, as I mentioned at the beginning, it features the same cast of characters that the solutionists — those whom Morozov opposes so implacably — routinely invoke as their own inspirations.
The Hirschmann framework provides Morozov with a recipe for how to think about the many solutionist initiatives he tackles, and many of the passages in the book have a similar structure. Let’s return to self-tracking for a moment. Morozov’s first line of critique is Hirschmann’s “jeopardy”: he invokes the ‘technostructuralists’ to ask not just what individual choices self-tracking offers, but to ask how it changes the environment we inhabit. A decision not to share becomes a tacit acknowledgement that you have something to hide. The danger is that “if you are well and well-off, self-monitoring will only make things better for you. If you are none of these things, the personal prospectus could make your life much more difficult, with higher insurance premiums, fewer discounts, and limited employment prospects” (240). It erodes privacy, the ability to make a clean start, and erodes risk-taking behaviour given the consequences of failure. A second line of critique is to ask what, as our quantifiable aspects become the focus of attention, is missing in the quantified portrait that emerges: what intangible aspects of ourselves become invisible. Do these numbers, he asks, miss meaning? Where do ethics and aesthetics go to in a world of numbers? Morozov surveys the centuries-old debates over the virtues and perils of quantification. Here the critique stumbles, as Morozov rolls out thinker after thinker in a parade of reasons to doubt the benefits of quantification. From Nietzsche to Nussbaum, from nutritionism (the quantification of food) to water-metering and the evolution of clothes-washing norms, to the benefits of friction and dissonance in our everyday lives, there is no doubt he covers an impressive amount of ground, but the argument is scattershot; disjoint. The end result is an erudite and widely-sourced list of the ways in which technologies may lead to bad outcomes – but it is still a list, and it lacks the force of a strong central thesis behind it.
The other chapters follow a similar pattern: the perversity, futility, and jeopardy of solutionist agendas show a breadth of investigation that should shame many of his more populist opponents, and provide valuable contexts in which to think about technological programmes. In particular, his insistence on seeking out historical precedents for today’s arguments is a welcome change from the language of “rupture” that many solutionists prefer.
If there is a unified point of view behind the critique, it can be traced back to the “anti-solutionists” with whom Morozov identifies. Like Morozov and like Steven Johnson, I’m a big admirer of Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, and James Scott’s Seeing Like a State: which makes me wonder how can they end up in such different camps. The fault, you will not be surprised to hear, belongs with the solutionists.
One of the remarkable insights of computer scientists (and social scientists and natural scientists in the computer age) is an understanding of how great complexity and diversity can be generated by populations of simple agents following simple rules. Just as schools of fish and flocks of starlings create sweeping artistic displays by pursuing simple individual rules, so the rich tapestry of city life emerges from simple everyday interactions. The ideas of network theorists lend themselves to talk of self-organization, non-hierarchical structures, and informational cascades. Computer scientists take ideas such as the “Game of Life”, the stunning images of fractal shapes, and the rich behaviour of networks to illustrate how complexity arises from simplicity. From spin-glasses in magnets to the sorting and emergence of patterns revealed by Schelling and his intellectual descendants, simple “micromotives” give rise to surprising and intricate patterns of “macrobehaviour”. Such agent-based thinking seems at first to mesh perfectly with Jacobs’s closely observed studies of city life. She famously focused her piercing, analytical eye on the details of every day life in large cities, and used her observations to challenge and then triumph over the grand visions and arrogance of top-down city planners. It’s the bottom-up nature of her approach that inspires: the planners are trying to impose patterns on populations from above but they miss the relationship between the large and the small. It is tempting, then, to take the descriptions of Jacobs’s cities and encode them in algorithms: agent-based simulations of the effects of block size on pedestrian traffic patterns seem almost mandated, so obvious a next step do they seem from Jacobs’s chapter on the topic.
Yet this step, I increasingly believe, is a mistake. Solutionism is ultimately central planning by another name. The arrogance of the urban planner reappears as the arrogance of the agent-based modeller and the Internet entrepreneur: the plan is still monolithic, but now takes the shape of a network. As Steven Johnson says, when his “peer progressives” see a social problem, they design a peer network to solve it. But what has happened to the citizens in this network? They have been reduced to dumb followers of simple rules. The richness and complexity – all the interest, in fact – lies in the structure of the network. If the outcome isn’t what you want, well tweak the incentives, adjust the topology of the network, provide an additional option for the nodes (sorry, people) to choose from. For all its talk of bottom-up, decentralized thinking, the Internet-centric solutionists end up with an impoverished perspective of individual behaviour.
Just because complex and rich behaviours can arise from simple rules doesn’t mean that people are simple beings. Any theory that applies both to murmurations of starlings or spin-glasses of magnetic ions as well as to cities of humans is, almost by definition, missing the distinctive features of human societies. Complexity can arise from simplicity at the small scale, but macro-level complexity also arises from micro-level complexity. The subtle and ill-understood nature of our own needs and interactions will defeat the best efforts of solutionist planning, just has it has defeated those of central planning and of free markets.
In his final chapters, Morozov appeals to this particularist view of the world, in which each node of a network is different from others, and in which general solutions don’t exist. To discard the importance of the details of our daily interactions, as the solutionists inevitably do, is to inevitably provoke unexpected responses, unintentional side effects, and unanticipated breakdowns of the solutionist schemes. When Brian Chesky of AirBnB complains that there are 30,000 different cities in which he wants to operate, and that it’s just not practical to negotiate with each one, he is not designing a bottom-up solution, he is imposing a top-down network. He is demanding that cities become “legible” in James Scott’s terminology, to his overarching (and simplistic) algorithms.
To reach for an alternative vision, Morozov looks to artists who have engaged in “adversarial design” to illustrate the importance of acknowledging micro-level complexity. But to look to the artificiality of the arts is second-best here; there is enough variation and richness of detail in the normal everyday world to illustrate the importance of variation and local knowledge and unanticipated interactions.
But despite these minor complaints, “Click Here” is an admirable and significant achievement. It identifies and makes a valuable and intellectually adventurous assault on what is becoming an increasingly obvious problem: the appropriation of democratic and “bottom-up” visions by those who seek to impose their own top-down networks on the rest of us, and who reduce us to simplistic nodes in the process. This is a valuable book: now if only someone could make a TED Talk of it.
Written using Org version 7.6 with Emacs version 23.
