This was not a normal psychotherapy session. During his 12-hour experience, designed to help stop his destructive drinking habit, King sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the photo of his son that he’d brought. Suddenly, the child became alive in the picture, which initially frightened him. Then King noticed that a lick of his son’s hair was out of place, so he stroked the photo, putting the errant strands back in place. His fear vanished. Later, Unger held out a small vase with a single red rose. King looked at the flower, which seemed to be opening and closing, as though it were breathing. At one point, Unger asked him whether he’d like to go out to a bar and have a few drinks. King didn’t say anything but was shocked when the rose suddenly turned black and dropped dead before his eyes. He never picked up another drink.

Arthur King was one of thousands of research subjects who were given LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline as therapeutic tools in the 1950s and 1960s, often with government support and with promising results. But by the time King was enjoying his sobriety, the backlash against psychedelic testing had already begun. By the mid-1970s, the legal exploration of the therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs was over.

This research is only now gathering momentum again in a new wave of U.S. clinical trials into other drugs with psychedelic properties. In recent years, university administrators, government regulatory agencies, and private donors have begun giving the stamp of approval and the money needed for new and expanding research into the use of MDMA, also known as ecstasy, and psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. In 2017, for instance, the Heffter Research Institute and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, two organizations leading the psychedelic psychotherapy revolution, will begin a final round of government-approved clinical trials in which hundreds of new patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and severe anxiety will undergo therapy sessions fueled by MDMA and psilocybin. Now, as we enter into a new age of experimentation, it’s worth looking back at the route that got us here.

LSD’s effects were discovered in 1943 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who accidentally dosed himself and was amazed by the powerful psychoactive effects of a drug he had labeled LSD-25. Hofmann had been working with ergot, a rye fungus, hoping to develop a new and improved cardiovascular stimulant. His employer, Sandoz Laboratories, soon made the drug available to doctors and researchers, advertising it as a tool to better understand psychosis and to possibly help patients in psychotherapy. The first wave of American psychedelic drug research—secretly funded by the CIA and the U.S. Army—began in Boston in 1949. By 1951, U.S. intelligence reports revealed that the Soviets had purchased 50 million doses of LSD from Sandoz. That discovery kicked off a decade of bizarre and sometimes horrific U.S.-sponsored research into the use of psychedelics as chemical weapons. There were tests to see whether LSD could be used as a truth serum or possibly be sprayed on enemy troops as a kind of weapon of mass distraction.

Meanwhile, brain scientists and psychotherapists were conducting more socially beneficial experiments in laboratories and medical offices around the world. Through the 1950s and 1960s, more than 1,000 research papers were written about LSD, psilocybin, and other psychedelic drugs. Some 40,000 subjects were given these mind-expanding agents, and great progress was made in the understanding of how they might help people suffering from depression, alcoholism, and the psychospiritual distress that often comes with the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness.

Researchers in Canada and the U.S. showed that psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy could be more effective in treating alcoholism than existing treatments, including the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. In the late 1950s and 1960s, even AA co-founder Bill Wilson advocated the cautious use of LSD, experimenting on himself and a small circle of friends. Theologians and psychologists studied how psychedelic drugs could inspire creativity and evoke life-changing mystical experiences in healthy volunteers.

On the East Coast, a Harvard University researcher dosed seminary students with psilocybin to show that the active ingredient in magic mushrooms could inspire an authentic religious experience. On the West Coast, the International Foundation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, California, did research indicating that LSD could be used to improve cognitive functioning and problem solving.

By 1963, however, these drugs had escaped from the carefully controlled domain of the researcher’s laboratory and psychotherapist’s office. Millions of baby boomers were coming of age and starting to experiment on their own with LSD, magic mushrooms, peyote, and other hallucinogens. A charismatic Harvard University psychologist named Timothy Leary reinvented himself as the “high priest” of the psychedelic counterculture. In California, a promising novelist named Ken Kesey gathered a Dionysian troupe of Merry Pranksters and put on a series of huge parties called acid tests, where revelers dosed themselves and danced to a new band called the Grateful Dead.

By the end of the decade, LSD and other psychedelic drugs, along with marijuana, were linked in the public imagination with the 1960s counterculture, the antiwar movement, the crusade for sexual liberation, and the rising popularity of Eastern mysticism, yoga, and meditation. It was the decade of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. President Richard Nixon called Timothy Leary “the most dangerous man in America.” His administration’s crackdown on psychoactive drugs became part of a broader political reaction against the liberation movements on the 1960s. Leary’s mantra of “turn on, tune in, drop out” was seen as a direct threat to the corporate establishment and the consumerist, materialist mindset.

In the 1970s news of the destructive, sinister research conducted in secret by the Army and the CIA began to get out. Back then, one of my first major stories as a young San Francisco journalist detailed how one of these tests, dubbed Operation Third Chance, destroyed the life of a U.S. solider who was falsely accused by being a spy, given massive doses of LSD, and “interrogated in a hostile environment.” Back in 1953, one Army scientist who specialized in biological warfare, Frank Olson, killed himself (or according to some conspiracy theorists, was murdered) following a psychotic incident that may have been exacerbated by LSD.

The crackdown on both recreational and therapeutic use of psychedelics was not simply a political reaction. It was part of a broader re-examination of the loose standards applied to all kinds of drug research in the 1950s and early 1960s. Today, there is a greater appreciation for the rights of patients and research subjects to be fully informed of the potential dangers and side effects of these compounds. LSD was and is an unpredictable tool when used carelessly—a fact that was discovered by both CIA operatives and counterculture crusaders.

These consciousness-raising substances are finally coming out of the drug culture and into the mainstream laboratories of universities and medical centers. Researchers are building on the findings from the first wave of research. Today, scientists and therapists are more cautious in their screening of patients and the use of double-blind, placebo-controlled research to try to separate the effects of the psychedelic experience from other therapies patients get. More emphasis is placed on follow-up work to integrate the insights from psychedelic drugs into one’s everyday life.

Over the last several years, I’ve interviewed scientists, therapists, and patients involved in this new wave of research into psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. There was Nigel, a U.S. Marine and MDMA patient who’d struggled with psychological demons since returning from the war in Iraq; Carroll, a hardcore drunk who got her life back following treatment with psilocybin; and Richard, a cancer patient who was treated for depression at Johns Hopkins.

Their stories illustrate how the powerful mind-altering effects of these drugs—along with the gentle guidance of trained therapists—can lead to real psychological healing, often accompanied by experiences of oneness, awe, and wonder that are traditionally associated with dreams or religious excitation. Exactly how these substances work remains a mystery, but to my unscientific mind, it has something to do with the loosening of the ego and the opening of the heart.

What’s happening in many of these experimental circles is the coming together of psychology and spirituality. Even the self-proclaimed secularists in the psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy movement employ rituals that draw from Native American shamanism and the sacramental rites of the Roman Catholic Church. Atheists pound on drums and ring Tibetan Buddhist bells. Medical doctors with priestly decorum present MDMA and psilocybin pills to patients in special chalices.

Advocates of both the therapeutic and the spiritual use of psychedelics are already celebrating the start of the “post-prohibition era.” That party may be a bit premature, but the government crackdown in the 1970s and 1980s on scientific research and personal use of psychedelic drugs has certainly declined. Marijuana may be the model for changing attitudes and public policies about LSD, magic mushrooms, ecstasy, and other psychedelic drugs.

But much will depend on how all this will play out in the administration of President-elect Donald Trump. It’s not hard to see how the psychedelic research could, once again, be slowed by a renewed “war on drugs” by such hard-liners as Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the man Trump wants to serve as the attorney general. On the other hand, decisions about the medical use of these compounds by the Food and Drug Administration are supposed to be based on science, not politics, and the Veterans Administration is desperately seeking new treatments for returning soldiers suffering from PTSD.

For Arthur King, the positive effects of LSD-assisted therapy are undeniable. King, whose story was first told in a 1966 television documentary produced by CBS News, was tracked down decades later by filmmaker Dennis McDougal. In 2009, Arthur was still sober and married to the same woman who helped him through his battles with the bottle. King was asked to look back and assess the long-term impact of psychedelic psychotherapy. He didn’t mince words.

“It saved my life,” he said.

The post Long Before It Was Groovy, LSD Was a Medicine and a Weapon appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We may not have to wait long. It looks increasingly possible that our search for signs of simpler forms of life in the universe could bear fruit in the next few decades. The discovery of even microbial alien life would be profound, would tell us that life on our planet is not such a fluke, that perhaps intelligent aliens may yet lurk in one of the star systems in our corner of the galaxy.

The search for life in the universe is the central question of the field of astrobiology and drives much of NASA’s science. As an astrophysicist and astrobiologist, this search is the impetus behind my research, too. NASA is actively seeking life beyond Earth on two fronts: around exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars) and within our solar system. Missions like Kepler, the James Webb Space Telescope, and their successors will find Earth-like exoplanets, measure the infrared wavelengths of starlight blocked by these exoplanets’ atmospheres, and possibly detect the presence of gases like oxygen and methane that could indicate life. (The oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere arises from photosynthesis, and the methane from anaerobic bacteria.)

I lead a NASA-funded research team at Arizona State University focused on understanding geochemical cycles on newly discovered exoplanets, ranking them for follow-up observations based on whether oxygen and methane actually would indicate life. (Disclosure: ASU is a partner with Slate and New America in Future Tense.) Simultaneously, robotic exploration of Mars may reveal fossilized algal mats or even present-day bacteria. Jupiter’s ice-covered moon Europa has a subsurface ocean believed capable of supporting life. Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA, speculated in 2015 that we may find definitive evidence of alien life in the next 20 to 30 years.

Science may reveal the presence of alien life in the next few decades, but it cannot predict how we will react to the news. Fortunately, movies let us imagine the aftermath. Granted, most films deal with intelligent alien life and their motives. In the standard tropes, aliens show up to abduct us (Communion, Fire in the Sky), threaten us with extinction if we don’t change our ways (The Day the Earth Stood Still), or simply blow us up for fun (Predator) or profit (War of the Worlds, Independence Day). Some movies examine human society using aliens as proxies for the underrepresented (Alien Nation, District 9). But Arrival, based on the short story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, is unique in its use of aliens as a mirror held up to humanity. Most of the story is not about the heptapods and what they do; it’s about our reactions to their existence and our reactions to each other.

The aliens in Arrival show up on Earth with a mission to give humanity a technology of sorts. Is it a tool? A weapon? Scientist/linguist Louise Banks, played expertly by Amy Adams, has to figure this out as part of what is, at first, an international collaboration. Through logic, insight, creativity, and experimentation—in other words, the scientific method—she deciphers the heptapods’ language and secrets. As she does, the rest of the world reacts strongly to the new knowledge and who should learn it. Some of the resistance is to the aliens, and such paranoia is not difficult to understand in light of real-life statements by Stephen Hawking, who warns us that if aliens call we should be “wary of answering.”

But in the film, the strongest distrust is reserved for other humans. Military leaders suspect the aliens mean to divide and conquer us, and in a self-fulfilling prophecy the international collaboration falls apart, leaving humanity on the brink of global conflict.

It is remarkable how little the story is about the heptapods and how much it is about us. The heptapods do not instigate action, they do not react violently, and they literally rise above the conflict. The most pertinent fact about them is not that they are intelligent but that they exist. Even the technology they offer is morally neutral. Like any new knowledge, it is neither tool nor weapon—just information. The heptapods represent science, and Arrival shows us that humanity will react to alien life the way it reacts to other scientific discoveries.

Humans have a strong instinct to remain unperturbed by new information, and most discoveries that scientists consider fundamental and profound do not challenge that habit. Society has not changed because we know of the Higgs boson, or dark energy, or superconductivity. Evidence of even microbial alien life would be the crowning achievement of any scientific career. Whoever finds it would join Newton, Einstein, Watson, and Crick in the scientific pantheon. But scientific celebrity wouldn’t automatically make it matter to the public.

Sometimes, though, science produces new findings so profound we can’t ignore them. We can’t stop talking about them, because they make us reconsider who we think we are. Nicolaus Copernicus figured out in 1543 that the Earth orbits the sun, but even now there are websites arguing we on Earth are at the special place at the center of the universe. Clair Patterson figured out in 1956 how to use radioactivity to measure the ages of rocks and determined the Earth is 4.54 billion years old.

Sixty years later, a creationist has built a theme park to convince you the Earth is one-millionth as old and that the universe has existed entirely in that short, special interval of time that people have recorded their history. And we seem to have an endless capacity for reaction to Charles Darwin’s discovery of natural selection and evolution, which he published in On the Origin of Species in 1859. From the 1925 Scopes trial to disputes over textbook selections by the Texas State Board of Education, it is clear we are still processing this scientific discovery.

Humans have a strong instinct to ignore scientific findings, until those discoveries challenge the stories we tell each other about ourselves. And finding life—even simple, microbial life—outside of Earth would very much alter how we think about ourselves. It would imply that we are not alone, and it would call into question how special we think we are. Probably not just the larger meaning, but the very fact of the discovery would be debated on websites, and at theme parks, and in textbooks for many decades. Because the discovery of alien life would force us to examine who we think we are.

The post <i>Arrival</i>’s Aliens Reflect How We Treat One Another appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But what happens when software is responsible for a wrongful arrest or detention?

On Aug. 1, 2016, Alameda County, California, replaced its ’70s-era case management system with new software, Tyler Technologies’ Odyssey Case Manager. This wasn’t a radical decision: Most counties around the country use some kind of software to process information about the people in their courts. When a judge issues or recalls an arrest warrant, when a defendant posts bail—all of this is data that the courts and the police rely upon to make decisions about whom to detain, arrest, or release.

But since the software was rolled out in this Northern California county, the public defender’s office has learned of dozens of cases in which people have been wrongfully arrested, detained in jail when they should have been released, or erroneously told to register as sex offenders. For example, in September four police officers showed up at the home of a 24-year-old man in Fremont to arrest him. An arrest warrant had previously been issued for his failure to appear in court on a drug possession charge but it had been dismissed. Yet the warrant mistakenly remained active in the court’s new Odyssey system, so the man was arrested. There have been so many reported errors—on a “semi-daily basis,” according to the East Bay Times—that the Office of the Alameda County Public Defender has filed hundreds of identical motions asking the court to keep accurate records. Similar problems have been reported in some of the other 25 counties in the state with Odyssey contracts, prompting the creation of a “California Tyler User Group” for court staff. Alameda County itself has decided not to use Odyssey for its family, probate, or civil matters.

No one seems to yet understand the source of the errors behind Odyssey’s case management software. For the moment, many of the mistakes appear to result from a user interface for court employees that is far more complicated than the previous system. The software manufacturer, Tyler Technologies, has had little comment. Yet this 2016 problem reflects concerns by the Supreme Court from more than 20 years ago.

In 1991, a police officer arrested Issac Evans after an identification check during a traffic stop turned up an outstanding arrest warrant. The arrest allowed the officer to search Evans’ car, which turned up a bag of marijuana and a subsequent drug possession charge.

But the outstanding arrest warrant wasn’t valid—it had already been rescinded by the judge who originally issued it for several traffic violations. In such cases, the court clerk was supposed to have called the sheriff’s clerk, who would then remove the active warrant from the sheriff’s computer database. Had the procedure been followed in Evans’ case, it’s quite likely the marijuana would not have been found because no warrant would have justified his arrest.

Because his arrest was based on an invalid warrant, Evans’ Fourth Amendment rights had been violated. Normally, this would mean that the marijuana found as a result of the search would have been suppressed, under the exclusionary rule, which is intended to deter police misconduct. One exception to that rule, however, occurs when the police act in “good faith” on a legal decision that they believe to be correct, even if it later turns out to be wrong. In 1994, the Supreme Court decided in Arizona v. Evans that this exception applied to Evans’ case: The mistake was the fault of the court clerk, not of the arresting officer, who relied in good faith based on the invalid warrant.

Issac Evans lost because the Supreme Court was convinced that he fell victim to an isolated error. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, for example, suggested that the court might reach a different conclusion in a case where “the recordkeeping system itself” contained “no mechanism to ensure its accuracy over time” and “routinely” resulted in false arrests. Likewise, Justice David Souter stated that if a computer database had no way of “keeping the number of resulting false arrests within an acceptable minimum limit,” the exclusionary rule might apply. The software mistakes occurring in Alameda County appear to be more systematic than isolated.

So how do individual criminal defendants identify and challenge the “fruits of computerized error,” as Souter called them in Arizona v. Evans?

The answer is that we don’t have a very good answer. At some point in the future, the Supreme Court may decide to apply the exclusionary rule in a case where systemic software errors violate Fourth Amendment rights. The Alameda County Superior Court will hear the public defender office’s request to intervene in the software errors in January. In the meantime, software problems like those experienced in Alameda County have tangible, real-life consequences. Moreover, not every defendant who has fallen victim to these problems may discover that their issue is the result of a systemic software problem rather than an isolated bookkeeping snafu.

These problems will likely worsen as software increasingly becomes embedded in everything we do. Odyssey clearly has its flaws, but at least court employees can identify a problem like a recalled arrest warrant, even if it’s too late to stop a wrongful arrest. With other types of software, however, errors may be difficult to detect. Algorithms designed to help judges decide bail, or to help the police identify suspicious behavior, may be hard for nonexperts to understand, let alone critique. The private companies that design and sell these products may also be reluctant to share their proprietary information.

Part of the problem is a bad fit. Criminal cases are individual, but in the age of big data, problems and solutions have to be systematic. When there are few incentives to audit databases or check for software errors, mistaken arrests and detentions should be no surprise. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once stated that “electronic databases form the nervous system of contemporary criminal justice operations.” Today software, and increasingly sophisticated software, is part of that nervous system. Yet we fail to ensure the system’s health.

The post In California, Big Data Is Getting the Wrong People Arrested appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The CIA, in reporting on Russia’s intervention in the presidential election, determined that the RNC had been breached by Russian hackers during the election, but none of the information stolen from the party had been released, the New York Times reported. Following this report, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, soon to become White House chief of staff, insisted in two television interviews that “the RNC was not hacked.” He apparently based this analysis on the fact that the FBI had previously reviewed its systems as well as the evidence provided by the “hacking detection systems” that the RNC has in place.

Anyone who confidently, categorically denies that his organization’s computer systems have been breached is either flat-out lying or dangerously delusional. The best-case scenario is the former. If the RNC is, in fact, aware that there are vulnerabilities in its systems (as there undoubtedly are) and is paying attention to whatever evidence the CIA has provided of breaches, then Priebus’ statements could amount to a (perhaps misguided) PR strategy, intended to reassure the public and deter other would-be attackers. (As a general rule, though, boldly claiming that you have never been hacked and trumpeting your infallible “hacking detection systems” is perhaps not the best way to deter potential intruders.)

But if Priebus is telling the truth—if he really has such blind faith in the technical tools that the RNC uses to detect intrusions, and refuses to believe, despite any evidence to the contrary, that those tools could possibly be evaded or that any deeper investigation could reveal things that previous ones had missed—then that’s much worse news. To proudly announce to the world not only that your security monitoring tactics have failed to prevent intrusions detected by other parties but also that you absolutely will not, under any circumstances, ever second-guess or investigate further beyond those tactics is to be ludicrously ignorant of how fallible such tools are.

From a cybersecurity standpoint, the best thing to hope for in a person running a powerful organization—whether it’s a political party or the White House—is someone who will be constantly searching for evidence of breaches and intrusions, someone who understands that the failure to find that evidence is a sign of a weak defense posture, not an absence of adversaries. Blind faith in the protective powers of technical tools is never a good sign—nor is the philosophy that no breach has occurred unless the stolen information has surfaced somewhere else, conclusively confirming a theft.

Many data breaches—especially those directed at governments for the purposes of espionage—do not result in public revelations of stolen information. The only reasons to reveal that you have successfully stolen data are to sell that data, to publicly humiliate or hurt the victims by influencing public opinion, or to extract a ransom from the victims. Often, incidents of political and economic cyberespionage are not motivated by any of these reasons, and the perpetrators therefore sit on their stolen data, quietly using it for their own purposes or waiting until it becomes useful.

Obviously, it’s easier to deny breaches that have no public component and harder to prove definitively that they’ve occurred. But just because the data stolen from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management has not been sold or published online does not mean that breach did not occur, or that it doesn’t matter, or that we should not be thinking about what we can learn from it and how we can better protect government agencies’ networks.

But to do that, you have to be willing to accept that some breaches are determined based on overwhelming evidence, absent any public announcement or confirmation by the perpetrators. Attackers often bypass technical defenses and protection mechanisms, and a slower, more in-depth investigation performed by more sophisticated analysts can reveal things an initial investigation may have missed; the fact that “evidence” of a hack hasn’t been found by the RNC is something to be concerned about, not something to brag about on national television. It’s the kind of thing you brag about when you want to advertise to adversaries not only how poor your network monitoring tools are but also how much false confidence you have placed in them. A government that refuses to accept or believe forensic evidence of data breaches is likely to be a very appealing—and very easy—target.

The post Just Because the RNC Says It Wasn’t Hacked Doesn’t Change Reality appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

However effective these interventions may be, they won’t arrest our slide into a post-truth discourse. And the more effective the measures, the more likely they will be to provoke the future President Trump, and a compliant Congress, to accuse Facebook of bias and make it pay. Instead of merely pursuing technical solutions, then, we need to be thinking about much more fundamental investments to improve information flows.

Fake news is as old as reporting. William Randolph Hearst used false stories to goad a reluctant President McKinley into war with the Spanish over Cuba. In a flattened world, anyone can now top Hearst for reach and velocity. A false tweet can become a campaign narrative if it confirms bias. There’s really no way to stop this, but let’s look at the dynamics that encourage fake news and other varieties of popular falsehoods. One, of course, is the echo chamber or filter bubble. People nest within like-minded social networks and then get social credit by amplifying their congruity. Bold statements (even if not true) effectively perform identity and score shares within the sealed chamber.

A second dynamic, one that gets far less attention, is the loss of authority of traditional journalistic institutions. While large national newspapers and digital native sites do good work, local newspapers have been hollowed out. Trickle-up journalism—which brings the local to the attention of national journalists—is not working. Local newspapers were decimated in the Obama years, hit by plummeting advertising, user migration to other platforms, and the rise of new intermediaries. Around 2010, think tanks, foundations, and federal agencies like the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission looked at the devastation, and most concluded that without massive investment in investigative reporting, especially at the state and local levels, democracy would suffer.

Without trickle-up journalism, the national media can easily slip into an elite obliviousness—as when they seemed to largely miss what was happening “out there” in the country during the 2016 campaign. National news organizations have long relied on their local affiliates and other local news organs to surface how it’s playing in Des Moines, Iowa. Journalist Alec MacGillis observed that “the media are all in Washington, D.C., and New York now thanks to the decline of local and metro papers. And the gaps between how those cities and the rest of the country are doing have gotten so much larger in recent years.”

When a community loses a strong local news presence, it misses out on more than just information. Especially in smaller communities, the local newspaper and sometimes local radio station supported a common civic life. More than anything else, perhaps, this 2016 election was about the hopelessness of neglected small towns, the failure of mediating institutions (including political parties and unions), and stifled local voices in an increasingly cosmopolitan world. Facebook and other digital platforms are not designed to promote civic connection, but rather communities of interest often unmoored from particular geographies. Nathan Heller writes in the New Yorker that as our informational space becomes “a personal bespoke, we [have] lost touch with the common ground, and the common language, that made meaningful public work possible.”

That common ground requires investment, even subsidy. For a long time, American information regulators—principally the FCC—supported local media through a policy called localism. When they licensed broadcasting stations in the 1930s (for radio) and 1950s (TV), the most efficient approach would have been to have hugely powerful transmitters that covered wide areas. But instead, they licensed less powerful stations to every community. That’s why today we have about 1,700 local TV stations and more than 15,000 radio stations. The idea was to encode Jeffersonian ideals of local control in the broadcast allocations. Other FCC localism policies imposed ownership controls and incentivized local content all with a view to root stations in their communities. Broadcast localism drew a straight line between local journalism, local voices, and self-government. Many of those policies fell by the wayside with deregulation, but the basic frequency allocation has remained, and localism persists in broadcasting as a way to foster local connection without dictating local content.

In the online world, where local media is flagging, there is no structural subsidy for local news or local voices. And there is no official regulator to give localism a leg up. But there is a de facto regulator. Whether or not Facebook can admit that it’s a media company, there is no doubt that it regulates information. Its algorithms and business practices determine who gets to claim scarce attention, who is bumped from the platform, and how information is packaged to get preferred placement. As an information regulator, free to write its own rules, Facebook should consider a localism policy for itself. Without bias and with minimal editorial effort, it could promote local news in its feeds in order to drive more traffic to struggling local outlets. (Presumably, only ones that survived the platform’s new truth filter.) It could also help local journalism to get more shares. Google has taken baby steps in this direction by tagging “local news sources” in search results. Elsewhere around the world, Facebook operates Free Basics as a mobile content suite. While critics claim that the suite traps users in a walled garden of Facebook’s choosing, the company boasts that it is curated especially to provide civic value. Curation is not necessary in the U.S., but there’s no reason the platform couldn’t promote civic value through the content it privileges.

More daringly, Facebook could just come out and subsidize local news outlets of various kinds. This could take the form of a larger advertising cut for the content providers or a fund, either as a philanthropic effort or a long-term investment in the information ecosystem that Facebook thinks its users want. (Mark Zuckerberg: “We know people want accurate information.”) Facebook has started to pay news partners to create video for Facebook Live. None of the top contracts are with a local outlet, for the obvious reason that the audience would be limited. Similarly, in the big distributed content deals like Facebook’s Instant Articles or Snapchat’s Discover, the featured players are all national. This is the kind of market failure that localism is designed to correct.

Beyond Facebook, foundations, commercial entities concerned about the loss of an information commons, and universities can all be part of an investment in local news and local media as a shared civic space. One of the benefits of localism as a strategy to improve information is that it combines conservative and progressive impulses. It is progressive—really liberal—in its commitment to truth and government accountability (not to mention locavore fashions). It is conservative, as that ideology has mutated in the most recent election, in its anti-global, even anti-national tendencies. And it is conservative in the older sense of the Catholic Subsidiary Principle: deference to the authority closest to the people.

Research shows that civic participation drops and corruption increases when local news dries up. One of the most powerful pieces of local accountability journalism in the past few years was the New Jersey Record’s relentless pursuit of the Bridgegate story. This year, that paper was bought by Gannett and lost a good chunk of its reporting staff in cost-saving layoffs. Facebook should invest in making sure it and other papers are able to find the next Bridgegate and then promote the stories when they do.

The post Facebook Could Fix Our Local News Problem appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And that’s by design.

One of the pillars of Kim Jong Un’s vise-grip on the lives of his people is propaganda: All news originates from the same government propaganda bureau, photographs and video of Kim are tightly coordinated, and there is absolutely no independent media. There’s no satellite TV, and there are no foreign newspapers. Radios are fixed so they receive only domestic broadcasts. Illegally modifying a radio to tune into stations from neighboring South Korea can land someone in jail. If widespread access were ever allowed, the internet would pose a massive threat to the regime.

But keeping it out completely would deprive the ruling regime of some important benefits. In a country that’s been hit by waves of sanctions, the internet can assist with international trade and communications. So in 2001, the government had a company called Sili Bank set up an email relay between Pyongyang and Shenyang, a border city in China. Messages were held in each city and exchanged in a batch once an hour at a cost of at least $1.50 per message. The line was upgraded to an always-on connection in 2006, but the system was still limited to email and restricted to official use by the government and major trading companies.

The first full-time, high-bandwidth internet connection started in 2010 when Star, a North Korean joint venture with Thailand’s Loxley Pacific, started offering service in Pyongyang to expats, the offices of foreign organizations, and some government officers and ministries.

Because access to the service itself is physically restricted, there are probably only a few tens of thousands of users at most. So the government doesn’t appear to bother devoting any resources to filtering or censorship. In fact, for a long time, visitors from China noted they could access sites like Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter with more ease in Pyongyang than they can in Beijing.

Since 2013, internet service has also been available to resident foreigners and visiting tourists through Koryolink, a national cellular operator that was launched in 2008 with Egypt’s Orascom Telecom. It has more than 2 million subscribers, but only foreigners get internet access. And it’s not cheap, either—it costs 10 euros for 50 megabytes of data. In contrast, $10 will buy 1 gigabyte of data on the T-Mobile network in the United States. Nevertheless, it has been valuable for North Korea watchers like me, as it has delivered some intriguing glimpses from tourists posting pictures as they travel. For instance, Jaka Parker, a worker at the Indonesian embassy, ran a popular Instagram account with photos from his daily life that included sights across Pyongyang and Friday prayers at the Iranian embassy’s mosque. Some foreigners have live-streamed from the city. But perhaps because of this, earlier this year Koryolink was forced to start censoring access to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and some South Korean news sites.

In recent years, internet access has also been extended to elite universities. Dedicated internet rooms have been set up at places like Kim Il Sung University, the country’s top seat of learning. When then–Google Chairman Eric Schmidt visited North Korea in 2013, he was shown students accessing Google at the university and quickly picked up on one reality of internet access for these elite citizens: surveillance. “It appeared supervised in that people were not able to use the internet without someone else watching them,” he wrote in a blog post at the time.

His daughter Sophie, who accompanied him on the trip, picked up on something else. “One problem: No one was actually doing anything. A few scrolled or clicked, but the rest just stared,” she wrote. “More disturbing: When our group walked in—a noisy bunch, with media in tow—not one of them looked up from their desks. Not a head turn, no eye contact, no reaction to stimuli. They might as well have been figurines.”

There is regular debate among analysts about how much reality any visitor to North Korea sees, but Sophie Schmidt’s observations seem to suggest the students were just going through the motions to impress their VIP visitors. It’s entirely possible in a country that is so closely controlled.

But, whatever the truth of that visit, a foreign lecturer who worked at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology says limits on internet access are real. “The graduate students have it, the undergrads don’t,” he told me in an interview in 2014. He also confirmed the physical monitoring of internet access. But despite the Koryolink mobile network censorship, blocking at the universities is still limited—because it’s not really necessary. North Koreans learn self-censorship from an early age. It’s key to survival, so few would ever dare attempt to sneak visits to websites that might get them in trouble. The stakes for their lives and those of their families are too high.

In place of the internet, the North Korean government is doing something that no other country has done: building a nationwide intranet that offers email and websites but is totally shut off from the rest of the world. It’s an audacious attempt to usher in some of the benefits of electronic communications while maintaining complete control on an entire population. It probably wouldn’t work anywhere else in the world, but the North Korean government keeps its people in such fear that few dare attempt dissent.

The network, called Kwangmyong, currently connects libraries, universities, and government departments and is slowly making its way into homes of better-off citizens. It houses a number of domestic websites, an online learning system, and email. The sites themselves aren’t much to get excited about: They belong to the national news service, universities, government IT service centers, and a handful of other official organizations. There’s also apparently a cooking site with recipes for Korean dishes.

One of the newest services is a video-on-demand system from state-run television. The “Manbang” service is accessed through a set-top box and provides live streams of four TV channels. It can also be used to access an on-demand library of recent TV programming and was recently featured in a program on state TV.

But it’s no Netflix. The output of state TV channels, like the rest of the media, is concentrated on the activities of Kim Jong-un, the ruling party, and the military. For the most part, either the movies are dramatic tales of bravery against the invading Japanese forces during World War II or American forces during the Korean War, or they’re dramas that idolize ordinary citizens who make sacrifices for the good of the ruling party or their love of Kim Jong-un. This summer, Korean Central Television broadcast the Rio de Janeiro Olympics—roughly 45 minutes each evening of competition, about three days late.

So North Korea’s internet hookup might not be bringing much information in to the country. But we are seeing a growing number of Pyongyang-based websites, accessible to the real internet, that send the country’s propaganda to the outside world. Surfing them provides a glimpse of the unrelenting information diet that North Koreans consume daily.

Top and center of most such sites is a section dealing with the activities of Kim Jong-un—a key piece of propaganda that is meant to show him working tirelessly for the good of the nation. Most of the rest of the news deals with political statements, stories of citizens doing good for the nation, scientific breakthroughs, and other items intended to give the impression of a nation moving forward. To a media-savvy foreign eye, it’s not very convincing. Take, for instance, the major site Naenara. It comes from the Foreign Language Publishing House, the government outfit responsible for translating and publishing propaganda books and magazines in several foreign languages, and is full of the propaganda that is fed nonstop to people inside the country.

Voice of Korea, the country’s international shortwave broadcaster, also puts online clips of its broadcasts every day. Other major sites include the state-run Korean Central News Agency, the Rodong Sinmun national daily newspaper (which includes PDFs of each edition), and Voice of Korea shortwave radio station.

But despite the growing range of options available, no electronic channel offers a truly secure means of communication. In a social system where people are hesitant to share dissenting political views with members of their own families, putting such thoughts in text messages or on the domestic web is unthinkable. So instead they rely on word of mouth—whispered conversations with their closest friends that could result in them being reported and sent to a prison camp. Or worse.

The post Why North Koreans Prefer Word of Mouth Over Email appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Back in 2005 and 2006, there was a series of scandals when U.S. tech firms colluded with internet censorship in China—Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google. In the most infamous case, Yahoo’s collaboration was said to have resulted in the imprisonment of a journalist, Shi Tao. China quickly became America’s Internet Enemy No. 1. Politicians threatened to create strong legislation to prevent American companies from helping foreign states spy on or censor their citizens. Instead, a self-regulatory model popped up, in which global tech firms in the U.S. and elsewhere pledged to protect internet freedom while—somehow—respecting other countries’ laws. Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, urged U.S. media companies to “take a proactive role in challenging foreign governments’ demands for censorship and surveillance.” The interests of American internet giants and of U.S. foreign policy had begun to intermingle.

When U.S. diplomats talk about the free and open internet—and they do, a lot—they mean an internet that is the same in every country, no matter who’s in power. No censorship and blocking, no keeping data local, no using the internet’s myriad technologies of surveillance and control to, well, spy on and control citizens. The opposite of a free and open internet is a series of national “intranets” that police content, intercept communications, and prop up failing states. But it’s hard to completely share America’s enthusiasm for the same internet everywhere, when that internet happens to be so utterly dominated by U.S. firms.

Along with its European and other allies, the U.S. sees the internet as an important vector for the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Although all U.N. member states nominally support human rights, the U.S. and its allies have overtly used “soft power” to press their case to open up more authoritarian countries. But the United States’ Internet Freedom agenda—which has existed since the early 2000s—comes packaged with America’s core values and economic interests. And while the internet spreads information and ideas and creates alternative communication platforms to government channels, it also makes it possible (and ever cheaper) for states to find, track, and record everyone and everything.

From 2010 to 2013 we experienced Peak Internet Optimism. In 2010, Hillary Clinton declared web freedom a key U.S. foreign policy objective. In speech after State Department speech, she argued that the internet must be allowed to—and also absolutely-no-question would—drive both political and economic liberalism around the world. And this wasn’t just rhetoric. The U.S. put serious money—$145 million to date—behind its global internet freedom agenda, supporting democracy activists in authoritarian regimes, including apparent allies like Bahrain, Egypt, and Vietnam. Remember all those breathless TV anchors extolling the Twitter revolutions and Facebook uprisings of the Arab Spring? How the internet was going to empower activists and citizen-journalists to fast-track creaking autocracies into youth-driven, market-friendly democracies? How the ideological battle of the 21st century was not between left and right but between open and closed societies?

We now know that social media was just a small part of a complicated situation that brought down or changed governments in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. (And also that few of these countries have yet to experience a happily ever after.) Although the State Department has toned down the clueless optimism and Silicon Valley-will-fix-politics message, it still preaches the virtues of the internet in allowing dissidents to communicate, organize, and, implicitly, overthrow nasty governments. That message has gone out loud and clear to America’s authoritarian rivals, and they don’t like what they hear.

Just as one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist, one country’s “soft power” is another’s weaponized values and existential threat. Because Americans see their values and interests as essentially benign, they completely miss how those abroad interpret what seem like harmless acts. (The Chinese and the Russians read Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, too, and they’re on to you.) Furthermore, much of the Chinese and Russian political class believe the West’s insistence on democracy and human rights is not merely distasteful and unnecessary, but a concerted way to weaken and destabilize them. As it is, Chinese Communist Party cadres are instructed by party bosses to be vigilant against “American efforts to overthrow the communist system through ‘peaceful evolution’—that is, the spread of Western ideas and culture.” Now imagine what the turbo-freedom of America’s global internet looks like to them.

Actually, you don’t have to imagine it. In 2011, two years after President Obama’s town hall meeting with future Chinese leaders in Shanghai, the state-run newspaper China People’s Daily editorialized about the United States’ deployment of shadow networks in authoritarian countries: “The US State Department has carefully framed its support of such projects as promoting free speech and human rights, but it is clear that the policy is aimed at destabilizing national governments.” It called Tor—software that helps people mask their location—“a weapon in a covert cyber war intended to maintain the US’ global dominance.”

As for Russia, its 2013 foreign policy doctrine complained about the “unlawful use of ‘soft power’ and human rights concepts to exert political pressure on sovereign states, interfere in their internal affairs, destabilize their political situation, manipulate public opinion, including under the pretext of financing cultural and human rights projects abroad.”

How could it all have gone so horribly wrong? Put aside, for a moment, the well-founded cynicism about Russia’s concern for human rights, and also the idea that U.S. ideals about the wider world are essentially benign or at least well-meaning. If you share neither U.S. interests nor its values, the American internet can indeed be a scary thing. I’m Irish and I’ve worked in internet policy since the late 1990s, including five years at ICANN. So I’m not exactly onside with President Putin when he describes the internet as a CIA project. But sometimes, when reading blithe U.S. statements about the internet, I find myself wondering, “Can’t you hear how you sound?”

Want to know how that feels? Let’s play the couples counseling game, “When you say …, I feel …”

When the U.S. says, “Breaking the internet into pieces gives you echo chambers instead of an innovative global marketplace of ideas,” China hears, “I don’t care about your fragile state, demographic time bomb, and ancient culture. I want you to be argumentative and disrespectful like me, so my companies can sell you more stuff.”

When the U.S. says, “We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas,” Russia hears “We want you to look and sound more like us, and if your crumbling petro-state succumbs to revolution as a result, so be it.”

When President Obama paraphrases the U.S. cybersecurity strategy at a town hall meeting in China as “the more freely information flows, the stronger societies become,” China thinks, “You’re a guest and that’s just rude.”

When the U.S. says, “We will work with partners in industry, academia, and NGOs to harness the power of connection technologies and apply them to our diplomatic goals,” Russia thinks, “We were so right to kick out those foreign NGOs.”

And when Hillary Clinton says, “A new information curtain is descending across much of the world. And beyond this partition, viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day,” you can imagine President Putin pausing as he manfully wrestles the Russian bear to ask, “She said what?”

And it’s not just the world’s other wannabe hegemons that Internet Freedom irritates.

When the U.S. says, “More government control is … disastrous for the internet as a whole, because it reduces the dynamism of the internet for everyone,” European countries may well think, “Making the global internet ‘dynamic’ enough for Google and Facebook’s business models is not exactly our No. 1 priority.” Now imagine your fundamental rights, like the right to privacy—hard and rightly won after state data abuses in World War II—are dismissed by your biggest ally as “a chokehold on the free flow of information, which stifles competition and disadvantages American entrepreneurs.”

Then there’s the fact that international internet governance debates are dominated by Americans. Under the guise of multistakeholderism, the huge U.S. delegation swaggers through meeting rooms and hallways, with dozens of corporate lawyers and business lobbyists and the occasional human rights activist. At U.N. meetings, the U.S. delegation is often bigger than the entire diplomatic staff of the poorest countries it deals with. What American diplomats see as effective advocacy appears to others as bull-headed arrogance and determination to make the world safe for Big Tech’s business model. The governments of developing countries are worried their shaky infrastructure can’t deal with spam or that the national telecoms company is losing money to YouTube and WhatsApp. But they just get a pat on the head and a lecture about globalization. No wonder they throw their votes China’s way and collude with technocrats who want to run the internet from behind closed government doors in Geneva.

Why does this matter? Because those of us working for a real free and open (and competitive and equal) internet are being undercut by all this guff about Freedom. In a post-Snowden world, not many of us think the U.S. wholeheartedly believes—let alone will live—its own ideals. The Russias and Chinas pretty much shrug their shoulders at the public exposure of well-understood U.S. hypocrisy. If they ran the internet, that’s precisely what they’d have done.

But the U.S. is losing legitimacy and influence on the global internet because it seems not to know or care how it appears to others in the middle ground—the governments that vote at the U.N., the countries making choices every day about what kind of internet they support.

Much of the bad feeling is inevitable and doesn’t really have an answer. The internet drives profound and very public change, and the people at the sharp end of change don’t have to like it, whether they’re the owner of a badly reviewed hotel or the secretary of the Communist Party of China. But when one country enjoys so much of the control and so many of the benefits, and the technology looks to many more like an ideology, you get blowback. It’s vital to understand why.

The post Why the U.S. Should Stop Lecturing the World About “Internet Values” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the next presidential election, we may not be so lucky. With antiquated voting devices at the end of their projected lifespans still in widespread use across the country, the U.S. is facing an impending crisis in which our most basic election infrastructure is unacceptably vulnerable to breakdown, malfunction, and hacking. It’s not just an inconvenience. If the machinery of democracy is called into question, so are its foundations.

Those of us who can recall the presidential election of 2000 know exactly what can happen when faulty technology meets a razor-close election. The Bush-Gore contest came down to just a few hundred votes in Florida, and butterfly ballots and faulty punch card machines left us arguing about hanging, dimpled, and pregnant chads. It left wounds that still afflict the country. In today’s hyperpartisan environment, such a scenario—or even unfounded accusations of a “rigged” election that gained postelection traction—would be far more contentious. Just imagine what it might be like in 2020.

Absent a wholesale replacement of our outdated electoral equipment, this scenario is becoming increasingly likely for our future elections. The problem of aging voting technology reaches nearly every corner of the United States, as we documented in a report released by the Brennan Center for Justice in 2015. Unlike voting machines used in past eras, today’s systems were not designed to last for decades. Although it is difficult to predict how long an individual machine will reliably function, the experts we spoke with generally agree that machines purchased since 2000 have expected lifespans of only 10 to 20 years. (And for most systems, it’s probably closer to 10.) This makes sense: No one expects a laptop to run reliably for more than a decade. Yet on Election Day 2016, 42 states used voting machines that were at least 10 years old, and 13 of those states used ones more than 15 years old. If replacements continue to stall before the next presidential election, many more will surpass their recommended retirement age.

Perhaps even more troubling, these aging machines are particularly vulnerable to hacking. Although the country has made important advances in securing our voting technology in recent years, these older devices often rely on unsupported software (we found machines still operating on Windows 2000) that doesn’t receive the regular security patches that help protect against modern methods of cyberattacks and hasn’t been through the relatively rigorous federal certification program that exists today. What’s more, many of these systems don’t have physical paper trails or ballots to back up the results, meaning there’s no way to independently verify how voters intended to cast their ballots in the case of a suspected hack. Our country’s patchwork of jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction voting systems would make it difficult to manipulate results on a national scale, but hackers could still do considerable damage by tampering with votes in a swing district, stealing records to undermine voter privacy, or just sowing suspicion of a larger conspiracy.

Though voting went relatively smoothly this year, a scattering of issues that popped up during the election hinted at what problems may await if we fail to replace aging equipment. Voters complained of touchscreen calibration errors that “flipped” votes in North Carolina, Texas, Nevada, and Georgia and interfered with selecting straight party tickets in Pennsylvania. Optical scan machines malfunctioned in parts of Michigan and Massachusetts, and a few in Illinois had to be replaced because a “memory card blew.” Although all of these issues appear to have been resolved by delayed or alternate voting methods, that doesn’t mean that glitches like these are unproblematic. It may never be clear how many people didn’t vote in this election because of the wait times. In the 2012 election, one study estimated that between 500,000 and 700,000 failed to vote because of long lines.

These voting machine issues aren’t a surprise. We have heard from dozens of election officials who say they struggle to keep their aging machines running and that replacement parts are increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to find. Some even said they have resorted to eBay to find antiquated parts—from analog modems to dot matrix printer ribbons—to keep their voting systems running. Prior to the election, we surveyed 274 county election officials in 28 states. More than half of the officials said that they would need new machines by the 2020 presidential election, and 80 percent of those said they did not know if or how they would be able to pay for the replacements.

There’s a serious risk that we’ll create a two-tiered voting system—one in which wealthier counties will replace their equipment as needed, while poorer counties will be forced to use aging equipment for much longer than they should. This is a worry that has been voiced by Edgardo Cortés, the commissioner for Virginia’s Department of Elections. In 2014, the state legislature stripped funding for new voting machines from the budget, leaving the cost to localities. In the aftermath, Cortés said, richer counties such as Loudoun and Fairfax bought new equipment, but “smaller, poorer and more rural counties around the state are going to have a tough time.”

At least according to data we collected from four states—Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota, and Colorado—Cortés’ suggestion proved troublingly true. In these states, counties whose election officials purchased or had near-term plans to purchase new machines had an average median household income of $10,000 or more than those that did not. In Colorado, we also found an urban and suburban versus rural divide—counties that replaced machines generally had a higher population density. If only some counties can replace aging voting equipment, it is possible that machine breakdowns could disproportionately affect certain voters—namely, rural or working class and poor voters.

Our political discourse is full of talk of the need for investment in infrastructure such as roads and bridges but almost never includes mention of that infrastructure most critical to a functioning democracy: our voting system. We estimate that the nationwide cost to update voting machines could easily cost $1 billion—in fact this might be a low estimate since replacing machines will likely require the replacement of other incompatible systems. Considering the size and scope of the federal budget, this is a paltry sum. If the expense is shared with the states, it should be a small lift. Lawmakers can start with a smaller, immediate investment prioritizing the aging electronic devices that are, by far, the most insecure.

Unfortunately, to date, there has been a lot of buck-passing, with federal officials arguing this is a responsibility of the states, and with state officials arguing that the burden should fall on counties. But counties and towns have other pressing budgetary needs. The truth is that until there are problems, most citizens don’t think about voting machines. They are far more likely to be concerned about whether their roads are paved, the snow is cleared, and their teachers are paid.

The good news is that at least a few federal officials and experts are paying attention. Last year, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., introduced a bill that would allocate $125 million in matching grants for states to replace outdated voting equipment. Some—including Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson and a bipartisan group of security experts that included former National Security Agency director Michael Hayden—have stressed the necessity of securing and investing in our voting systems, as we do critical infrastructure like the electric power grid and nuclear sites. Others, such as computer security expert Bruce Schneier, recommend that the government develop processes for detecting and responding to malfeasance, including standards for fair resolution of an election should tampering be discovered.

Considering all that could have gone wrong, Americans were lucky not to have a major contestation of the results on Nov. 8. We can’t rely on such luck next time. There’s four more years until the next presidential election—and we need to start thinking about this problem now, not just a few days before we cast our 2020 ballots.

The post Vulnerable Voting Machines Are Putting America at Risk appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the near future, information technology may provide new, more effective ways to organize disaster response. We’ve already seen the power of Twitter to coordinate political revolution, and we’ve seen the Pokémon Go augmented reality game motivate tens of thousands of people to get outdoors and chase imaginary monsters. What if, in response to crises, augmented and alternate reality games like Pokémon Go switched into a mode that rewarded players for donating blood? Delivering water bottles? Filling sandbags? Offering temporary housing? Or evacuating areas threatened by storm, wildfires, floods, tornadoes, or other hazards?

Author and game designer Jane McGonigal popularized the notion of gamification, in which players can get points, badges, or other rewards for ordinarily mundane tasks. According to McGonigal and others like Ian Bogost, gamification can motivate us to recover from personal setbacks including injury, depression, or distress, and improve our lives by forming new habits or skills. For example, Duolingo allows people to learn a language online while translating online documents and websites. Students earn skill points as they complete lessons or translate web content, and the complexity of sentences increases as the user progresses. Other games use competition and peer pressure among neighbors to reduce electricity consumption when appeals to saving money and the environment don’t work.

So gamification can work in our private lives. But what if we combined gamification and the sharing economy to coordinate the manpower of gamers for the public good in response to disaster? Already Airbnb’s disaster response unit allows hosts to open their homes to storm victims. Uber has offered free rides to facilitate evacuation of areas during emergencies like the Boston Marathon bombing and the Dallas police shootings. In this way, the sharing economy taps into the empathetic human impulse to do meaningful and pro-social work in response to need. Maybe all Pokémon Go players need is a little nudge in the direction of emergency response tasks when disaster strikes.

Such an emergency response system would be a logical extension of the emergency broadcast system. If you haven’t cut the cord, you’re probably familiar with the EBS regularly interrupting television and radio programming. And we all know about the alerts that get pushed out to our mobile phones to warn us of dangerous weather (or, as recently occurred in the New York City area, an alleged terrorist on the run). While these broadcasts go over public airwaves, they have always been delivered to our private communications equipment—temporarily seizing control of private property for a public purpose.

What the EBS system doesn’t do is facilitate or coordinate a response. A more appropriate emergency system for the social media age is one that does not merely push messages—but that also mobilizes communities, to collect intelligence from them or to take other action. Already apps like Google Maps, Waze, and Swift.ly collect real-time information on traffic flows and incidents. These kinds of apps would just need augmented reality disaster response modes that encourage coordinated emergency actions, helping create community resilience. We could call it an Emergency Interaction System.

That might sound a little techno-utopian, but there are precedents. Emergency response organizations like the Red Cross already have extensive experience using table-top simulations and simulation learning tools to train personnel and prepare adaptive responses. If the Red Cross integrated these simulations with networked sharing-economy apps and augmented reality games, it could mobilize and coordinate an extraordinary group of volunteers and private resources on a scale that might rival official government efforts.

An app called SwingVoter Go is an example of serious game inspired by Pokémon Go. The game sought to motivate people to become more engaged in the 2016 election by inspiring gamers who don’t live in swing states to influence voters who do. It would prompt you to pick any battleground state, like Florida or Pennsylvania, and use Facebook to find people in your social network from those states that you can engage in election-related conversations. SwingVoter Go provides “lures” that you can share on social media to draw undecided voters into a conversation with you with the goal of influencing them to vote for a particular candidate. If successful you increase the collective score of the game as well as get one step closer to becoming a “swing master.”

In a similar way, an emergency interactive disaster response system could use social media and augmented reality to connect people with needs to those who want to help. By building a “Red Cross mode” into existing apps, emergency response tasks could appear instead of Pokémons or other lures, and players could earn hero points for finding or distributing emergency supplies, providing transportation to shelters, making charitable donations, or helping clean up. Players could opt out, but building an emergency mode into existing apps would solve the problem of distributing the software ahead of time so that it could be mobilized at a moment’s notice.

Of course, potential catastrophes will require more than human resilience. An Emergency Interactive System does no good if it doesn’t function in an emergency, so technological infrastructure must also be adaptive to stress. We’ve already noticed a degradation of mobile phone signals at crowded venues like music concerts or sporting events, when uploading data-intensive videos and photos can overwhelm mobile phone towers. During massive events, relying on normal tower signals will only exacerbate the disaster—especially in cases that affect the towers themselves. For example, since the loss of service that accompanied hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, several measures have been taken to help make cell phone towers and service more resilient to disaster. Nevertheless, each new catastrophe seems to expose some previously unknown vulnerability, at the worst possible time. What we need from the Emergency Interactive System is a more resilient way of connecting people to one another, so that they can check in on loved ones and participate in recovery efforts.

Fortunately, smartphones are already equipped with the capacity to connect via mesh networks that could allow our disaster response players to drop in and out, bypassing mobile phone towers. For example, FireChat is an app that allows text messaging independent of Wi-Fi and mobile data. The app gained popularity in 2014 when hundreds of thousands of protesters in Hong Kong used it to communicate and coordinate without being intercepted by the Chinese government. Like many other peer-to-peer data sharing apps, FireChat can use Bluetooth connectivity to send messages between devices within about 200 feet of each other—perfect for dense crowds that typically overtax towers.

A new version called FireChat Alert even allows emergency responders to broadcast text messages during a crisis. Originally developed in collaboration with the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, FireChat Alert is being tested in a Philippines pilot program to improve communication during and after typhoons. While the app is currently a one-way broadcast medium only, it proves the potential to adapt private, mobile technologies for public purposes, even without existing data towers.

By combining advances in augmented reality games with the sharing economy and mesh networking, we could be poised on the threshold of a revolution in disaster response that empowers the public to follow their natural helpful instincts in response to all kinds of crises, without getting in the way, and even when our electricity, Internet, and/or cell service fails.

The post How <i>Pokémon Go</i> Can Save Lives in a Hurricane appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Recent years have exposed the fault lines in our conception of digital ownership. Amazon has deleted purchased copies of e-books, including Orwell’s 1984, from the Kindles of its customers. Apple disables access to iTunes purchases when users move to another country. Google-owned Nest unilaterally bricked thousands of $300 Revolv home automation hubs. As Jason Schultz and I outline in our new book, The End of Ownership, copyright holders, device makers, and retailers have succeeded in undermining traditional notions of ownership. They have relied on a combination of expansive interpretations of copyright law, restrictive license terms, and digital rights management technologies. But they have also leveraged the power of language and our shared expectations of ownership.

When it comes to physical products, we have a pretty good idea of what ownership means. If you own a vinyl record, you can lend it to a friend. You can sell your old VHS tape collection on eBay. You can donate your book collection to the local library or leave it to someone in your will. Or you could rent a storage unit and hoard to your heart’s content. No one will stop you. Through a lifetime of experience with physical goods, most of us understand intuitively what it means to buy things and to own them. Words like own and buy prime consumers to rely on these familiar concepts of personal property to understand their rights in digital purchases. But those engrained consumer expectations are a far less reliable guide for digital goods.

The Department of Commerce’s Internet Policy Task Force recently took note of the Buy Now button’s potential for consumer deception. Copyright holders respond to this critique by insisting that consumers don’t take the “Buy Now” language literally, or even more implausibly, that they think “Buy Now” means “Buy a Copyright License Now.” As Ben Sheffner of the Motion Picture Association of America recently told the Task Force, “If you ask people when you go to a site to buy a movie or a book or a song, I think they pretty much understand that … you’re purchasing or buying a license which permits you to do certain things.”

Luckily, this question—how consumers actually understand their rights in the digital goods they buy—is one we can answer empirically. In a paper forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, my collaborator Chris Jay Hoofnagle and I surveyed nearly 1,300 digital consumers to find out. We created a fictitious online retail store that mimicked the design of popular sites like Amazon—most importantly the ubiquitous “Buy Now” button. Our survey respondents could shop for digital books, music, or movies. After they chose a product, they reviewed the corresponding product page, which included a link to the site’s full license terms, cribbed from Amazon’s license. No surprise, just more than 1 percent of our consumers read those terms.

Next, we asked respondents a series of questions about the rights they believed they acquired in their e-book, digital album, and digital movie. The results were striking. More than 80 percent believed that after clicking the Buy Now button, they owned it, could keep it for as long as they wanted, and could use it on the electronic device of their choice—rights that consumers are often denied when it comes to digital goods. What’s more, more than 40 percent of our respondents mistakenly believed they had the rights to lend and give away their digital purchases. Nearly 30 percent incorrectly thought they could leave their e-books, MP3s, and digital movies in their wills. And 16 percent believed that clicking the Buy Now button gave them the right to resell their digital goods. Even at the low end, these results raise serious worries about consumer deception.

The Federal Trade Commission is charged with preventing the use of “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” A deception case requires proof that a claim is likely to mislead consumers—but it doesn’t have to mislead most consumers. To violate the law, it only needs to mislead a “significant minority” of customers—as little as 10 percent or 15 percent. False-advertising law, after all, wouldn’t do much good if it only protected the savvy and the skeptical. Our survey shows that the Buy Now button easily clears that threshold. Unlike subscription streaming services like Netflix and Spotify, where consumers receive clear signals that their ability to watch and listen hinges on paying their monthly bill, the digital download market preys on consumers who misunderstand the basic terms of the deal.

But not all misleading statements are deceptive under FTC policy. They also have to be important enough to affect price or purchasing behavior. If consumers knew the truth, would they have refused to buy the product, or paid less for it, or preferred an alternative? Our survey found strong evidence that the rights of lending, resale, and device portability matter to consumers. First, the vast majority of respondents said they preferred products that came with those rights. In fact, the preferences of digital-media consumers were practically indistinguishable from those of consumers of tangible media. We also asked respondents to put a dollar value on their preferences. Would they pay more for these rights? More than half said yes. Most respondents were willing to pay at least $1 above the current Amazon prices for e-books, MP3 albums, and digital movies, with an average price increase of $9.60.

So if the Buy Now button is deceptive, what can we do about it? In our survey, we tested an alternative design, one meant to communicate as clearly as possible, in a way consumers could understand, exactly what they were getting for their money. We created a “short notice”—a brief, prominent, readable, bullet-pointed list of the rights consumers acquired, and just as importantly, the ones they didn’t.

The short notice significantly reduced deception, and produced more accurate assessments of consumer rights. For e-books and digital music, we observed marked decreases in incorrect “yes” answers to our questions about the rights to lend, resell, give away, and leave digital goods in one’s will. Admittedly, the short notice was less effective for movies, suggesting that our design has room for improvement. But overall, the short notice is a promising, simple, and inexpensive solution to the deception problem created by the Buy Now button. If retailers and copyright holders don’t take that lesson seriously, regulators like the FTC have an obligation to protect the interests of the public.

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