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But even as we wring our hands over all the ways AI might replace humans, we tend to forget or ignore what Torie Bosch, editor of the new book “You Are Not Expected to Understand This”: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World, called “the very human decision-making that goes into code.” Bosch, who is also editor of Future Tense (a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University), was moderating a Zócalo/Future Tense event that, like the book, was designed to help even those of us who know nothing about building software understand how the actual writing of code affects our lives and our world.

Bosch opened the discussion by asking a group of three tech scholars and makers to walk the audience, at the ASU California Center in downtown Los Angeles and watching online, through the process: How does a string of instructions tapped into a keyboard by a programmer—software, a.k.a. code—become ubiquitous in our everyday lives?

“I wrote a piece of code in 1997 that was really designed to solve a problem,” began internet activist Ethan Zuckerman—who contributed an essay to the book, and whose 2013 book Rewire won the Zócalo Book Prize. At the time, he was working at an early web hosting service. “This was the dawn of user-created content, and advertisers were uncomfortable,” said Zuckerman. “Did they want to be associated with random people’s content?”

He wrote code essentially creating the pop-up ad—ensuring that a brand would not appear on the same page as possibly objectionable material. He solved the problem, but eventually realized that he had erred when he hadn’t looked at the assumptions behind it: the belief that the internet—like magazines and broadcast media—had to be supported by advertisements that needed to grab viewer attention and monetize it. “I’ve come to think of [that] as the original sin of the web,” said Zuckerman.

What if he had instead asked if advertising really was the best way to support the internet? What if he and his employer had “looked at the internet as a public service?” Zuckerman wondered. “How often are engineers solving problems but not doing the work of asking, ‘Is this the right problem to solve?’”

Illustration by Soobin Kim.

Media, culture, and communication scholar Charlton McIlwain, who also contributed an essay to the book, shared a similar story—though in this case “about the intentional consequences of technology.” He recounted the Police Beat Algorithm, a piece of code designed in the mid-1960s to help police figure out where to place patrols in a city. The software was “ostensibly about solving and preventing crime”—but actually solved for “a problem of Black people … a group of people starting to amass power and challenge a system.” (In other words, the software was destined to send more police into low-income, Black and brown communities—and to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.) That algorithm ultimately created today’s global surveillance infrastructure and everything “from facial recognition systems to racial profiling,” McIlwain said.

But code alone doesn’t create problems, noted Bosch—the fact is that coding “reflects and shapes human values.”

Zuckerman said that algorithms for setting bail and prison sentences based on data from the existing criminal justice system “are now locking into code racial biases that have been plaguing our nation for decades.”

This isn’t surprising for a society that puts technology before people, said McIlwain. “Human values, human interest, end up baked into these technological products that we make because that is fundamentally where we live,” he said.

Bosch asked if educational institutions should be stepping in with ethics instruction, and McIlwain and Zuckerman both agreed that computer scientists and engineers need to learn more about the complexity of society before they try to solve its problems.

The third panelist of the evening, augmented/virtual reality entrepreneur Nonny de la Peña, a longtime journalist and founding director of ASU’s Narrative and Emerging Media program, agreed. She argued for adding the arts and humanities to STEM education—turning it into “SHTEAM,” and having coders adopt an ethical code as stringent as the one traditionally used by journalists and newsrooms. “It goes beyond ‘do no harm,’” she said. At an institutional level, she added, every city and county should also build “a technology board, like a water board” to treat tech more like a public utility, that doesn’t discriminate against or redline certain groups.

All three panelists discussed the complexity of putting the onus on programmers themselves to blow the whistle on big tech. McIlwain pointed to the tension between making big money or making the world a better place. Zuckerman said that the tech world needs to help ensure that people who do blow the whistle, like AI researcher Timnit Gebru (who was fired by Google after advocating for diversity and writing a paper on bias in AI), have a safe place to land.

Nonetheless, all three panelists are optimistic about the next generation of programmers, who, McIlwain said, “are not fraught with everything that’s wrong about the world, and who have found folks who are allowing them the space to imagine, to be creative, to give us a blueprint for what could be our future.”

The final question of the audience Q&A session—which also included back-and-forth about accessibility in tech and the possibilities of AI writing code—also addressed young people, and whether they can be taught to resist advertising in order to neutralize algorithms.

De la Peña, the mother of a teenage boy—“who experienced a lot of stuff coming at him from Alex Jones and other things fed at him on YouTube”—said that such education must “be real touch, not tech touch.” In her case, a one-on-one discussion succeeded, but the question remains how schools can address these issues.

McIlwain and Zuckerman both noted that systemic and structural change that goes beyond algorithms and individual choice is more likely to be effective. “It’s not too late,” said Zuckerman.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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