Digital Politics

A couple of recent items I've come across highlight the subject's currency. From Tim O'Reilly's report of a Clay Shirky talk at ETech:

Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn't realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools. We need to have conversations about the explicit goals of what it is that we're supporting and what we are trying to do, because that conversation matters. Because we have short-term goals and the cliff-face of annoyance comes in quickly when we let users talk to each other. But we also need to get it right in the long term because society needs us to get it right. I think having the language to talk about this is the right place to start.

And from a New York Times op-ed titled Exporting Censorship, by Xeni Jardin of boingboing:

One of our most laudable national goals is the export of free speech and free information, yet American companies are selling censorship. While some advocates of technology rights have proposed consumer boycotts and Congressional action to pressure these firms into responsible conduct, a good first step would be adding filtering technologies to the United States Munitions List, an index of products for which exporters have to file papers with the State Department. While this won't end such sales, it will bring them to light and give the public and lawmakers a better basis on which to consider stronger steps.

If American companies are already obligated to disclose the sale of bombs and guns to repressive regimes, why not censorware?

Why not indeed. Increasingly wars will be fought via electrons over networks, not bullets over land.

It's a point I've made before, and from a comment by blogger George Walkley on my earlier post about Google cooperating with the Chinese government's censorship, I learned about this in the UK's Guardian newspaper:

Intriguingly, the Pentagon in its annual report of the military power of the People's Republic of China, published on July 28 last year, noted the development of computer attack systems by China's military, adding that the People's Liberation army (PLA) regards computer network operations as being "critical to seize the initiative" in establishing "electromagnetic dominance" at the start of a battle.

We're wandering towards the more extreme reaches of digital politics, but it all ties together (honest)... The US has its own information warfare organizations, of course. One reporter who tracks them ably is William Arkin, on his Early Warning blog at washingtonpost.com:

...One such organization was the new Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA), a part of the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). LIWA was organized in March 1995 to integrate "information warfare" into Army operations. On paper, that meant everything from manning new command centers in order to protect Army Internet connections from hackers to providing support for battlefield "psychological operations."

But LIWA, along with other information warfare organizations, was also developing offensive information warfare capabilities, including computer network attack and other cyber-related covert operations. And for that, there was a widespread recognition of the need for intelligence of much higher "granularity," or specificity, particularly about people, than had ever before been compiled on a large scale.

Less scarily, the intersection of free/open source software and motivated techies has led to the "netroots" movement, much of it kick-started by Howard Dean's net-enabled presidential run, which spawned the Civicspace content management system, built on top of Drupal--plus a million meetups. I've been sticking my head under those and other hoods, and I'll be writing about what I find.

Politics is communication about value, and more and more, both of those are technologically mediated. So more and more, everything you do in technology has a political implication.