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Democracy, Ethics, Governance & Security, Politics & Government

Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material

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by Bertram Vidgen

Exploring the complexities of policing the web for extremist material, and its implications for security, privacy and human rights.

by Bertram Vidgen

In terms of counter-speech there are different roles for government, civil society, and industry. Image by Miguel Discart (Flickr).

The Internet serves not only as a breeding ground for extremism, but also offers myriad data streams which potentially hold great value to law enforcement. The report by the OII’s Ian Brown and Josh Cowls for the VOX-Pol project: Check the Web: Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material explores the complexities of policing the web for extremist material, and its implications for security, privacy and human rights. Josh Cowls discusses the report with blog editor Bertie Vidgen.* *please note that the views given here do not necessarily reflect the content of the report, or those of the lead author, Ian Brown. Ed: Josh, could you let us know the purpose of the report, outline some of the key findings, and tell us how you went about researching the topic? Josh: Sure. In the report we take a step back from the ground-level question of ‘what are the police doing?’ and instead ask, ‘what are the ethical and political boundaries, rationale and justifications for policing the web for these kinds of activity?’ We used an international human rights framework as an ethical and legal basis to understand what is being done. We also tried to further the debate by clarifying a few things: what has already been done by law enforcement, and, really crucially, what the perspectives are of all those involved, including lawmakers, law enforcers, technology companies, academia and many others. We derived the insights in the report from a series of workshops, one of which was held as part of the EU-funded VOX-Pol network. The workshops involved participants who were quite high up in law enforcement, the intelligence agencies, the tech industry civil society, and academia. We followed these up with interviews with other individuals in similar positions and conducted background policy research. Ed: You highlight that many extremist groups (such as Isis) are making really significant use of online platforms to organise,…

In terms of counter-speech there are different roles for government, civil society, and industry. Image by Miguel Discart (Flickr).

Governance & Security

New Voluntary Code: Guidance for Sharing Data Between Organisations

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by Alison Holt

For data sharing between organisations to be straight forward, there needs to a common understanding of basic policy and practice.

by Alison Holt

Many organisations are coming up with their own internal policy and guidelines for data sharing. However, for data sharing between organisations to be straight forward, there needs to a common understanding of basic policy and practice. During her time as an OII Visiting Associate, Alison Holt developed a pragmatic solution in the form of a Voluntary Code, anchored in the developing ISO standards for the Governance of Data. She discusses the voluntary code, and the need to provide urgent advice to organisations struggling with policy for sharing data. Collecting, storing and distributing digital data is significantly easier and cheaper now than ever before, in line with predictions from Moore, Kryder and Gilder. Organisations are incentivised to collect large volumes of data with the hope of unleashing new business opportunities or maybe even new businesses. Consider the likes of Uber, Netflix, and Airbnb and the other data mongers who have built services based solely on digital assets. The use of this new abundant data will continue to disrupt traditional business models for years to come, and there is no doubt that these large data volumes can provide value. However, they also bring associated risks (such as unplanned disclosure and hacks) and they come with constraints (for example in the form of privacy or data protection legislation). Hardly a week goes by without a data breach hitting the headlines. Even if your telecommunications provider didn’t inadvertently share your bank account and sort code with hackers, and your child wasn’t one of the hundreds of thousands of children whose birthdays, names, and photos were exposed by a smart toy company, you might still be wondering exactly how your data is being looked after by the banks, schools, clinics, utility companies, local authorities and government departments that are so quick to collect your digital details. Then there are the companies who have invited you to sign away the rights to your data and possibly your…

Collective Action, Governance & Security, Politics & Government

Controlling the crowd? Government and citizen interaction on emergency-response platforms

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by Gregory Asmolov

Government involvement in crowdsourcing efforts can actually be used to control and regulate volunteers from the top down—not just to “mobilise them”.

by Gregory Asmolov

RUSSIA, NEAR RYAZAN - 8 MAY 2011: Piled up wood in the forest one winter after a terribly huge forest fire in Russia in year 2010. Image: Max Mayorov (Flickr).

There is a great deal of interest in the use of crowdsourcing tools and practices in emergency situations. Gregory Asmolov’s article Vertical Crowdsourcing in Russia: Balancing Governance of Crowds and State–Citizen Partnership in Emergency Situations (Policy and Internet 7,3) examines crowdsourcing of emergency response in Russia in the wake of the devastating forest fires of 2010. Interestingly, he argues that government involvement in these crowdsourcing efforts can actually be used to control and regulate volunteers from the top down—not just to “mobilise them”. My interest in the role of crowdsourcing tools and practices in emergency situations was triggered by my personal experience. In 2010 I was one of the co-founders of the Russian “Help Map” project, which facilitated volunteer-based response to wildfires in central Russia. When I was working on this project, I realised that a crowdsourcing platform can bring the participation of the citizen to a new level and transform sporadic initiatives by single citizens and groups into large-scale, relatively well coordinated operations. What was also important was that both the needs and the forms of participation required in order to address these needs be defined by the users themselves. To some extent the citizen-based response filled the gap left by the lack of a sufficient response from the traditional institutions.[1] This suggests that the role of ICTs in disaster response should be examined within the political context of the power relationship between members of the public who use digital tools and the traditional institutions. My experience in 2010 was the first time I was able to see that, while we would expect that in a case of natural disaster both the authorities and the citizens would be mostly concerned about the emergency, the actual situation might be different. Apparently the emergence of independent, citizen-based collective action in response to a disaster was considered as some type of threat by the institutional actors. First, it was a threat to…

RUSSIA, NEAR RYAZAN - 8 MAY 2011: Piled up wood in the forest one winter after a terribly huge forest fire in Russia in year 2010. Image: Max Mayorov (Flickr).

Ethics, Governance & Security

Government “only” retaining online metadata still presents a privacy risk

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by Brent Mittelstadt

When considered in relation to individuals’ privacy, metadata should not be viewed as fundamentally different to data about the content of a communication.

by Brent Mittelstadt

Since 13 October 2015 telecommunications providers in Australia have been required to retain metadata on communications for two years. Image by h2hox (Flickr)

Issues around data capture, retention and control are gaining significant attention in many Western countries—including in the UK. In this piece originally posted on the Ethics Centre Blog, the OII’s Brent Mittelstadt considers the implications of metadata retention for privacy. He argues that when considered in relation to individuals’ privacy, metadata should not be viewed as fundamentally different to data about the content of a communication. Australia’s new data retention law for telecommunications providers, comparable to extant UK and US legislation, came into effect 13 October 2015. Telecoms and ISPs are now required to retain metadata about communications for two years to assist law enforcement agencies in crime and terrorism investigation. Despite now being in effect, the extent and types of data to be collected remain unclear. The law has been widely criticised for violating Australians’ right to privacy by introducing overly broad surveillance of civilians. The Government has argued against this portrayal. They argue the content of communications will not be retained but rather the “data about the data”—location, time, date and duration of a call. Metadata retention raises complex ethical issues often framed in terms of privacy which are relevant globally. A popular argument is that metadata offers a lower risk of violating privacy compared to primary data—the content of communication. The distinction between the “content” and “nature” of a communication implies that if the content of a message is protected, so is the privacy of the sender and receiver. The assumption that metadata retention is more acceptable because of its lower privacy risks is unfortunately misguided. Sufficient volumes of metadata offer comparable opportunities to generate invasive information about civilians. Consider a hypothetical. I am given access to a mobile carrier’s dataset that specifies time, date, caller and receiver identity in addition to a continuous record of location constructed with telecommunication tower triangulation records. I see from this that when John’s wife Jane leaves the house, John often calls Jill and visits…

Since 13 October 2015 telecommunications providers in Australia have been required to retain metadata on communications for two years. Image by h2hox (Flickr)

Democracy, Politics & Government

Does crowdsourcing citizen initiatives affect attitudes towards democracy?

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by Henrik Serup Christensen

Exploring how involvement in the citizen initiatives affects attitudes towards democracy

by Henrik Serup Christensen

Crowdsourcing legislation is an example of a democratic innovation that gives citizens a say in the legislative process. In their Policy and Internet journal article ‘Does Crowdsourcing Legislation Increase Political Legitimacy? The Case of Avoin Ministeriö in Finland’, Henrik Serup Christensen, Maija Karjalainen and Laura Nurminen explore how involvement in the citizen initiatives affects attitudes towards democracy. They find that crowdsourcing citizen initiatives can potentially strengthen political legitimacy, but both outcomes and procedures matter for the effects. Crowdsourcing is a recent buzzword that describes efforts to use the Internet to mobilise online communities to achieve specific organisational goals. While crowdsourcing serves several purposes, the most interesting potential from a democratic perspective is the ability to crowdsource legislation. By giving citizens the means to affect the legislative process more directly, crowdsourcing legislation is an example of a democratic innovation that gives citizens a say in the legislative process. Recent years have witnessed a scholarly debate on whether such new forms of participatory governance can help cure democratic deficits such as a declining political legitimacy of the political system in the eyes of the citizenry. However, it is still not clear how taking part in crowdsourcing affects the political attitudes of the participants, and the potential impact of such democratic innovations therefore remain unclear. In our study, we contribute to this research agenda by exploring how crowdsourcing citizens’ initiatives affected political attitudes in Finland. The non-binding Citizens’ Initiative instrument in Finland was introduced in spring 2012 to give citizens the chance to influence the agenda of the political decision making. In particular, we zoom in on people active on the Internet website Avoin Ministeriö (Open Ministry), which is a site based on the idea of crowdsourcing where users can draft citizens’ initiatives and deliberate on their contents. As is frequently the case for studies of crowdsourcing, we find that only a small portion of the users are actively involved in the crowdsourcing process. The option to deliberate…

Collective Action, Interviews, Politics & Government

Do Finland’s digitally crowdsourced laws show a way to resolve democracy’s “legitimacy crisis”?

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by Taneli Heikka

Discussing the digitally crowdsourced law for same-sex marriage that was passed in Finland and analysing how the campaign created practices that affect democratic citizenship.

by Taneli Heikka

There is much discussion about a perceived “legitimacy crisis” in democracy. In his article The Rise of the Mediating Citizen: Time, Space, and Citizenship in the Crowdsourcing of Finnish Legislation, Taneli Heikka (University of Jyväskylä) discusses the digitally crowdsourced law for same-sex marriage that was passed in Finland in 2014, analysing how the campaign used new digital tools and created practices that affect democratic citizenship and power making. Ed: There is much discussion about a perceived “legitimacy crisis” in democracy. For example, less than half of the Finnish electorate under 40 choose to vote. In your article you argue that Finland’s 2012 Citizens’ Initiative Act aimed to address this problem by allowing for the crowdsourcing of ideas for new legislation. How common is this idea? (And indeed, how successful?) Taneli: The idea that digital participation could counter the “legitimacy crisis” is a fairly common one. Digital utopians have nurtured that idea from the early years of the internet, and have often been disappointed. A couple of things stand out in the Finnish experiment that make it worth a closer look. First, the digital crowdsourcing system with strong digital identification is a reliable and potentially viral campaigning tool. Most civic initiative systems I have encountered rely on manual or otherwise cumbersome, and less reliable, signature collection methods. Second, in the Finnish model, initiatives that break the threshold of 50,000 names must be treated in the Parliament equally to an initiative from a group of MPs. This gives the initiative constitutional and political weight. Ed: The Act led to the passage of Finland’s first equal marriage law in 2014. In this case, online platforms were created for collecting signatures as well as drafting legislation. An NGO created a well-used platform, but it subsequently had to shut it down because it couldn’t afford the electronic signature system. Crowds are great, but not a silver bullet if something as prosaic as authentication is impossible. Where should the…

Politics & Government

Assessing crowdsourcing technologies to collect public opinion around an urban renovation project

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by Simo Hosio

How do you increase the quality of feedback without placing citizens on different-level playing fields from the outset—particularly where technology is concerned?

by Simo Hosio

Ed: Given the “crisis in democratic accountability”, methods to increase citizen participation are in demand. To this end, your team developed some interactive crowdsourcing technologies to collect public opinion around an urban renovation project in Oulu, Finland. What form did the consultation take, and how did you assess its impact? Simo: Over the years we’ve deployed various types of interactive interfaces on a network of public displays. In this case it was basically a network of interactive screens deployed in downtown Oulu, next to where a renovation project was happening that we wanted to collect feedback about. We deployed an app on the screens, that allowed people to type feedback directly on the screens (on-screen soft keyboard), and submit feedback to city authorities via SMS, Twitter and email. We also had a smiley-based “rating” system there, which people could us to leave quick feedback about certain aspects of the renovation project. We ourselves could not, and did not even want to, assess the impact—that’s why we did this in partnership with the city authorities. Then, together with the city folks we could better evaluate if what we were doing had any real-world value whatsoever. And, as we discuss, in the end it did! Ed: How did you go about encouraging citizens to engage with touch screen technologies in a public space—particularly the non-digitally literate, or maybe people who are just a bit shy about participating? Simo: Actually, the whole point was that we did not deliberately encourage them by advertising the deployment or by “forcing” anyone to use it. Quite to the contrary: we wanted to see if people voluntarily used it, and the technologies that are an integral part of the city itself. This is kind of the future vision of urban computing, anyway. The screens had been there for years already, and what we wanted to see is if people find this type of service on their own when…

Governance & Security

Crowdsourcing ideas as an emerging form of multistakeholder participation in Internet governance

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by Roxana Radu

Assessing the extent to which crowdsourcing represents an emerging opportunity of participation in global public policymaking.

by Roxana Radu

What are the linkages between multistakeholder governance and crowdsourcing? Both are new—trendy, if you will—approaches to governance premised on the potential of collective wisdom, bringing together diverse groups in policy-shaping processes. Their interlinkage has remained under explored so far. Our article recently published in Policy and Internet sought to investigate this in the context of Internet governance, in order to assess the extent to which crowdsourcing represents an emerging opportunity of participation in global public policymaking. We examined two recent Internet governance initiatives which incorporated crowdsourcing with mixed results: the first one, the ICANN Strategy Panel on Multistakeholder Innovation, received only limited support from the online community; the second, NETmundial, had a significant number of online inputs from global stakeholders who had the opportunity to engage using a platform for political participation specifically set up for the drafting of the outcome document. The study builds on these two cases to evaluate how crowdsourcing was used as a form of public consultation aimed at bringing the online voice of the “undefined many” (as opposed to the “elected few”) into Internet governance processes. From the two cases, it emerged that the design of the consultation processes conducted via crowdsourcing platforms is key in overcoming barriers of participation. For instance, in the NETmundial process, the ability to submit comments and participate remotely via www.netmundial.br attracted inputs from all over the world very early on, since the preparatory phase of the meeting. In addition, substantial public engagement was obtained from the local community in the drafting of the outcome document, through a platform for political participation—www.participa.br—that gathered comments in Portuguese. In contrast, the outreach efforts of the ICANN Strategy Panel on Multistakeholder Innovation remained limited; the crowdsourcing platform they used only gathered input (exclusively in English) from a small group of people, insufficient to attribute to online public input a significant role in the reform of ICANN’s multistakeholder processes. Second, questions around how crowdsourcing should…

Social Data Science

Creating a semantic map of sexism worldwide: topic modelling of content from the “Everyday Sexism” project

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by taha yasseri

What are the most common types of sexism globally, and (how) do they relate to each other? Do experiences of sexism change from one country to another?

by taha yasseri

When barrister Charlotte Proudman recently spoke out regarding a sexist comment that she had received on the professional networking website LinkedIn, hundreds of women praised her actions in highlighting the issue of workplace sexism—and many of them began to tell similar stories of their own. It soon became apparent that Proudman was not alone in experiencing this kind of sexism, a fact further corroborated by Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism Project, who asserted that workplace harassment is “the most reported kind of incident” on the project’s UK website. Proudman’s experience and Bates’ comments on the number of submissions to her site concerning harassment at work provokes a conversation about the nature of sexism, not only in the UK but also at a global level. We know that since its launch in 2012, the Everyday Sexism Project has received over 100,000 submissions in more than 13 different languages, concerning a variety of topics. But what are these topics? As Bates has stated, in the UK, workplace sexism is the most commonly discussed subject on the website – but is this also the case for the Everyday Sexism sites in France, Japan, or Brazil? What are the most common types of sexism globally, and (how) do they relate to each other? Do experiences of sexism change from one country to another? The multi-lingual reports submitted to the Everyday Sexism project are undoubtedly a gold mine of crowdsourced information with great potential for answering important questions about instances of sexism worldwide, as well as drawing an overall picture of how sexism is experienced in different societies. So far much of the research relating to the Everyday Sexism project has focused on qualitative content analysis, and has been limited to the submissions written in English. Along with Principal Investigators Taha Yasseri and Kathryn Eccles, I will be acting as Research Assistant on a new project funded by the John Fell Oxford University Press…

Ethics

Ethics in Networked Systems Research: ACM SigComm Workshop Report

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by Ben Zevenbergen

Experimentation and research on the Internet require ethical scrutiny in order to give useful feedback to engineers and researchers about the social impact of their work.

by Ben Zevenbergen

The image shows the paths taken through the Internet to reach a large number of DNS servers in China used in experiments on DNS censorship by Joss Wright and Ning Wang, where they queried blocked domain names across China to discover patterns in where the network filtered DNS requests, and how it responded.

To maintain an open and working Internet, we need to make sense of how the complex and decentralised technical system operates. Research groups, governments, and companies have dedicated teams working on highly technical research and experimentation to make sense of information flows and how these can be affected by new developments, be they intentional or due to unforeseen consequences of decisions made in another domain. These teams, composed of network engineers and computer scientists, therefore analyse Internet data transfers, typically by collecting data from devices of large groups of individuals as well as organisations. The Internet, however, has become a complex and global socio-technical information system that mediates a significant amount of our social or professional activities, relationships, as well as mental processes. Experimentation and research on the Internet therefore require ethical scrutiny in order to give useful feedback to engineers and researchers about the social impact of their work. The organising committee of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) SigComm (Signal Communications) conference has regularly encountered paper submissions that can be considered dubious from an ethical point of view. A strong debate on the research ethics of the ACM was sparked by the paper entitled “Encore: Lightweight Measurement of Web Censorship with Cross-Origin Requests,” among others submitted for the 2015 conference. In the study, researchers directed unsuspecting Internet users to test potential censorship systems in their country by directing their browser to specified URLs that could be blocked in their jurisdiction. Concerns were raised about whether this could be considered ‘human subject research’ and whether the unsuspecting users could be harmed as a result of this experiment. Consider, for example, a Chinese citizen continuously requesting the Falun Gong website from their Beijing-based laptop with no knowledge of this occurring whatsoever. As a result of these discussions, the ACM realised that there was no formal procedure or methodology in place to make informed decisions about the ethical dimensions of such…

The image shows the paths taken through the Internet to reach a large number of DNS servers in China used in experiments on DNS censorship by Joss Wright and Ning Wang, where they queried blocked domain names across China to discover patterns in where the network filtered DNS requests, and how it responded.

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