🚀 go-pugleaf

[This is long, but I thought it would be of interest to the EFF-Austin
list because it focuses on the work of two people at the LBJ School,
Susan Hadden and Edward Lenert.  We might want to see if one or both
would care to speak to EFF-Austin some time.  -- Prentiss Riddle]
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1992 CPSR Annual Meeting
Focuses on Policy Issues

(from the CPSR Newsletter, vol. 10, no. 4, fall 1992)

CPSR Annual Meeting -- Saturday, October 17, 1992

The 1992 CPSR Annual Meeting, held October 17th and 18th at Stanford
University, focused on computer policy issues that were part of the
Presidential campaign as well as controversies that will be debated in
the next Congress.   The meeting, chaired by CPSR/Berkeley and national
board member Jim Davis, brought together CPSR activists from around the
country to discuss electronic democracy, encryption policy, digital
media, and government funding of scientific and technological research.
The meeting was highlighted by a banquet that featured a keynote speech
by David Liddle, president of Interval Research, and the presentation
of the 1992 Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional
Responsibility to Dr. Barbara Simons of CPSR/Palo Alto.

Beyond Teledemocracy

The Annual Meeting began with a talk by Edward Lenert, a doctoral
candidate in radio, television, and film in the program on science and
technology at the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at the
University of Texas at Austin.  Lenert was filling in for Professor
Susan Hadden, a CPSR member in Austin who has done pathbreaking work on
public education about technological risk.  Professor Hadden was unable
to attend the Stanford meeting at the last minute, but asked Ed Lenert
to substitute and carry her message to the CPSR audience.

Lenert began by asking what we mean by the term democracy.  He offered a
broad definition, that "people should participate in the process by
which their lives are determined."  He stressed that democracy must
involve participation, not merely the polling of citizens.
Unfortunately, said Lenert, the public is not always aware of what
democratic practice should include; he recalled an old saying that "no
matter what form of government we have in the United States, it's bound
to be called democracy."  Some of the current problems with American
democracy are large concentrations of money, unequal access to the
media, and general inequality.  There is also an unresolved debate in
the United States over whether democracy should be representative or
"direct," the latter allowing citizens to participate directly in the
decisions that affect their lives.

Lenert relayed Susan Hadden's opinion that in the present political
climate in the United States, we are unlikely to be able to "go beyond
teledemocracy" to substantive democratic practice, because that would
require deliberation among equals.  Town meetings today, whether
face-to-face or through electronic media, are rarely deliberative.  Ross
Perot's proposed model of an "electronic town hall" envisioned experts
debating issues with the public voting for choices following the debate.
That isn't democracy, said Lenert, that's polling.  Real democracy
involves not only active deliberation on the part of citizens, but the
resolution of inequality in public discourse, which we don't seem
prepared to tackle.

Lenert pointed out that this year's presidential campaign introduced
several innovations that were made possible by new technologies.
Candidate Jerry Brown used an 800 telephone number to help drive his
campaign.  Ross Perot used satellites to project his image and voice to
several political rallies in different cities simultaneously.  The major
candidates made use of television and radio call-in shows, such as
"Larry King Live."  And a couple of the candidates used computer
networks to broadcast their messages.  These technological innovations
were an interesting step in bypassing the traditional news media, but
they were largely passive experiences for citizens.

Lenert showed a chart that indicated the ubiquity of televisions in our
society.  Nearly all homes in the U.S. have at least one television set,
and nearly all of them are color.  The majority of people have two or
more TVs, and also cable access.  Over 70% of people with TVs have video
cassette recorders as well.  The average daily viewing of TV in the
U.S. is about four hours for adults, and more for children.  Television
is more common in homes than the telephone, especially in poor
neighborhoods, where only 70% of the homes have telephones, while close
to 100% have televisions.

Television is usually considered a poor model for democratic
participation because it is a "one to many" technological system.  It is
not broadly interactive, it is subject to centralized control, and it
is usually driven by commercial sponsors.  Two-way interactive TV is
starting to spread across the country, but usually in ways that we'd
like to avoid as a model for democratic practice.  Lenert showed a
screen from a service called "TV Answer," a system that provides
interactivity through a proprietary button-driven interface.  The sample
screen was for a service called "Create a Custom Pizza."  This
menu-driven method falls far short of the deliberation we need to
support genuine democratic participation, said Lenert.

Lenert showed a video clip from the CBS Evening News in which Dan Rather
asked viewers to respond to questions about the Presidential election
by calling an 800 telephone number and keying in phone-pad digital tones
in response to a series of questions.  Twenty four million callers
responded to this request, and only a fraction of them were able to get
through to the system.  Lenert said that Susan Hadden calls this
"acclamatory democracy," a term used by Hamilton and Madison in their
famous essays collected in The Federalist Papers.  "Acclamatory
democracy" reduces all democratic practice to polling and voting, the
least participative method of democracy.  Hadden believes that
electronic media can be used to support participatory democracy, not
just acclamatory democracy, if we can come up with the right models for
both enhancing participation and reaching consensus.

There was a great deal of discussion about these issues among the
audience members.  One person said that there is frequently the illusion
that talking endlessly about a problem will change the basic power
structures in our society.  CPSR Chairman Jeff Johnson commented that in
his experience with the Caller ID controversy, there was a lot of
discussion about the privacy implications of Caller ID on the computer
networks, but when these discussions reached some consensus there seemed
to be a feeling that what the participants had decided had in fact
become policy in the real world.  He said that there is an extra step
that too few people seem willing to take, which is to bring these
discussions to policymakers and to press for substantive action.

Howard Rheingold, editor of The Whole Earth Review, remarked that he
thinks television has had a lot to do with the decline in literacy and
public participation in our society.  Someone else said that there may
be a negative correlation between technological sophistication and
democratic participation -- witness the high levels of voter turnout in
less technologically developed societies like those in the Third World.
Ed Lenert said that he would like to find a technological system that
works within our political culture, as a practical application, even if
it is a "fairy tale" in the larger consideration of whether we're
advancing the cause of democracy.  CPSR Board member Steve Miller
commented that although unequal power creates limits to participation,
we should avoid self-flagellation; we need to think of pragmatic ways we
can open the political process.  It may be a "fairy tale" that mere
communication can lead to a democratic and equal society, but "fairy
tales are sometimes inspirations," he said.

The Politics of Cryptography

CPSR Legal Counsel David Sobel led a panel discussion on cryptography as
a public policy issue, an area that CPSR work in Washington, D.C., has
helped define.  The panel members included Joan Feigenbaum, from the
Computing Principles Research Division of AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill,
New Jersey; John Gilmore, employee #5 at Sun Microsystems, and
co-founder of Cygnus Support and the Electronic Frontier Foundation;
David Banisar, a staff member in the CPSR Washington office; and
Whitfield Diffey of Sun Microsystems, who created the field of public
cryptography by inventing public key encryption.

Before the panel started, the audience was shown a clip from the recent
movie "Sneakers," which is a popular thriller about computer security
and high tech gadgets.  The segment shown featured a former hacker
turned security specialist, played by Robert Redford, being confronted
by two men posing as officials of the National Security Agency.

Whitfield Diffey started the discussion by arguing that face-to-face
communication is probably in decline and will be replaced, gradually, by
electronically mediated communication such as through electronic mail
and teleconferencing.  Diffey said that we need to transfer the rules
and feelings of security of face-to-face communication, which have
existed for as long as there has been speech between people, to new
modes of communication using electronic technologies.  We also need to
address how apparently minor, incremental episodes of communication
affect the character of our lives because of the accumulation of data, a
new phenomenon.

Diffey described the concept of public key encryption.  He said most
encryption schemes are "lock and key" systems.  These put the locked
items in some encrypted form and take them out of that form using the
same mechanism -- once you know the lock you know the key.  Public key
encryption separates the lock and key as properties; if you know the
lock you don't necessarily know the key.  In fact, if you know the
public key you can't figure out the private key because it's
computationally infeasible.  In this scheme, you can make the private
key resemble a personal signature, with even more protective
capabilities than a written signature because it will be inaccurate and
unusable if even one bit is out place.

Diffey reviewed the history of encryption as a technology, and noted
that in the past, encryption schemes, because they had to be kept
secret, were usually in the hands of the military, intelligence
agencies, and big corporations that could weigh the large costs of the
systems against the benefit of security.  Now that there are new players
in the information technology field, and because costs for moving data
have declined dramatically over time, there is new demand for public key
encryption with its lower costs and public character.  Traditional
encryption experts in the military and intelligence agencies are worried
because they want to preserve the status quo that gives them enormous
power over the security of information.  Diffey said he believes that we
are moving into an era of new technology without adjusting our values,
and the result may be that only powerful economic and government
interests get represented in the process.

David Banisar described the "stakeholders" in this debate.  The National
Security Agency has the job of both intercepting communications and
protecting government communications, tasks often in conflict with each
other.  The FBI has control of federal law enforcement and foreign
counter-intelligence.  There are two ways that these agencies try to
restrict the development of encryption systems.  First is through the
setting of encryption standards.  The Congress has instructed the
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop a
standard for encryption.  In 1975 they developed DES, or Digital
Encryption Standard, and more recently DSS, or the Digital Signature
Standard.  All DSS does is authenticate the sender of a message, it
doesn't protect the message itself like DES does.  The National Security
Agency had a lot of influence in the development of DSS, which worried
a lot of people since the NSA is involved in actually intercepting
messages.

A second method of government management is export control.  It is
illegal to export standard encryption schemes, so most companies don't
bother to encrypt software that is sold overseas in order to avoid
government intervention.  The Software Publisher's Association has
recently cut a deal on export controls regarding software, so there may
be some sale of encrypted products overseas in the future.  But DES is
still not exportable.

Joan Feigenbaum had a different take on these issues. She said that the
principle obstacle to the dissemination of commercial encryption
products is not resistance by traditional stakeholders like the military
and intelligence agencies, but the lack of demand among businesses and
consumers.  She offered the example of commercial banks.  Banks know
that most of their losses are due to  "inside" theft by authorized
users, so they can't clearly see how encryption systems might benefit
them.  Another example is the use of credit cards.  Most people seem to
know that credit card use is not secure -- people routinely give out
their card information over the telephone -- but don't seem to care
about this. In response to a comment from the audience that security
systems are "just a pain in the neck to use," Feigenbaum said that this
is exactly the problem, in her view, and the primary reason why there
has been resistance to the widespread use of encryption, much more than
any blocking maneuvers by government agencies.  She did admit that there
are problems of meddling from the FBI and NSA, but that their proposals
will probably only make security systems more difficult to use, not
make them impossible.

John Gilmore identified five key players in this area:  intelligence and
military agencies, law enforcement agencies; commercial interests,
privacy and civil liberties advocates, and ordinary users.  He noted
that it's only been recently that all of these groups have started to
talk about the intersections of privacy, technology, and security.  He
said that the most powerful representatives of the intelligence,
military, and law enforcement agencies have been silent or reticent
until recently because they didn't view this issue as a forum of public
debate.  Joining a public debate has been a difficult step for these
traditionally secret and largely unaccountable agencies.  But there has
been progress recently, and people from the government are starting to
talk openly about their interests with public representatives.

Diffey and Feigenbaum agreed that a goal in the design of encryption
systems is a tamper-proof device.  However, there have been serious
problems getting people to remember long strings of nonsense data as a
key.  Feigenbaum advocated a standardized smart card, but said that this
would require much more cooperation than has been visible so far,
probably with government support.  And until the demand problem is
solved, such cooperation is not likely to appear.  Feigenbaum also said
that solving the demand problem will be difficult in that the benefit to
the public is intangible presently.  She suggested providing security
benefits for free for some time until people realized that these are
worth paying for rather than giving up.

Digital Convergence

After a lunch break, CPSR Executive Committee member Amy Pearl moderated
another panel discussion, this one on the convergence of various forms
of media through digital technologies.  The panel members were Denise
Caruso, a journalist and editor of the Digital Media newsletter; David
Bunnell, chairman of HyperMedia Publications, editorial director of
Upside magazine, and one of the founders of PC Magazine; Jim Edlin, who
helped found PC Magazine with David Bunnell and also works at HyperMedia
ublications; and Howard Rheingold, editor of The Whole Earth Review
and author of a recent book on "virtual reality."

Rheingold began by observing that technological innovators rarely
anticipate what their technology will eventually be used for, let alone
what its broader social implications might be.  He said that progressive
media advocates fought for public access cable television, and now the
only people who watch that are the producers' relatives.  He expects
that the idea of "rolling your own media," which is promised by so many
products available today, will probably face the same problem.  He
recalled the claims made about Apple's HyperCard product, which was
advertised as a way for non-programmers to develop their own
applications.  He said he considers himself to be above average in
sophistication about technology, but he gave up trying to learn
HyperTalk.  Rheingold remarked that he "would love to know how to use
MacroMind Director," a desktop video software package for the Macintosh,
"But I doubt I have enough time in my life to learn."  He believes that
we may develop a class of people who will be able to use digital media
products creatively, but it will always be a small and elite group.

Jim Edlin agreed that it's likely that only a small group of people will
be able to use the products that are available or coming.  But Edlin
said that desktop digital media tools are just that -- tools.  They
don't guarantee widespread use, especially widespread and creative use,
he said.  Edlin pointed out that pencils and paper are readily available
to everyone -- they're cheap -- but they're only used creatively by a
handful of people at any given time.

Edlin was surprised, he said, to be confronted with the question of
whether there might be a negative effect of new digital media
technologies.  He asked himself one question:  do these tools help
people communicate effectively?  And, he said, his answer was yes.  He
said the new digital tools that are becoming available dramatically
expand the toolbox of communicators.  He offered a speculative example
of a hypermedia version of Dr. Spock's baby book.  In the "old," paper,
book media, a baby was either a "he" or "she" as a pronoun.  In a new
digital, hypermedia version, the book can start with a question, "Is
your baby male or female?"  The rest of the information can be tailored
to the answer.  Edlin says he thinks the addition of that feature is a
powerful new tool for communicators and a great resource for consumers.

David Bunnell said he worried that the "customizable" hypermedia Spock
baby book could be viewed another way by people who want to "customize"
the Bill of Rights.  Bunnell said he thinks there are some dark sides to
digital multi-media.  He raised concerns about how candidates in this
year's election bypassed "filters" of deliberation like conventional
newspapers in order to appeal directly to the electorate through radio,
TV, and telephones.  Bunnell said we need to think about ways to protect
the process of deliberation while at the same time promoting and
protecting free speech.

Denise Caruso expressed her frustration at the huge amount of time
required to find out the truth in the mountains of hype spewed out by
multi-media companies.  She said that if the public is not involved in
public policy determining the character of our communication
technologies, controversies will be settled in favor of the
"hype-masters."

Caruso noted that inexpensive digital multi-media is viewed by some
people as a way to break down monopolies of information.  But, she said,
we have to be aware as well that people are not willing "to open their
mouths to a firehose of information."  The more pressing need is for
quality material.

Caruso also asked whether we want to dedicate more and more of our lives
to "the TV paradigm."  Current multi-media technologies are based on
the viewing screen, like TV.  We might possibly spend more of our lives
viewing an edited, "mediated" version of experience rather than
experiencing it ourselves.  We can fool ourselves into thinking that
we're experiencing the real world when we're only viewing it through a
technological media.

As a demonstration of a potential social issue posed by digital
technologies, the audience heard an audio tape of a digitally doctored
segment of the testimony of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, taken
from the latter sessions of his confirmation hearings.  The tape, which
was manipulated on a Macintosh with sound editing software, featured
Thomas confessing to all the sexual harassment charges leveled by Anita
Hill.

Jim Edlin said this isn't an indictment of digital media technologies:
people commit crimes with every conceivable kind of tool that's
available.  David Bunnell responded by saying this phenomenon isn't new,
and he mentioned the doctored photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald carrying
a rifle and brandishing a radical pamphlet.  But it's getting cheaper
and more widespread, said Bunnell.  Denise Caruso said it might be a
blessing in disguise because too many people uncritically believe
everything that comes over the TV or radio today.  Cultural absorption
of the idea that things may not be as they seem may actually engender a
more critical view of the world.

Someone in the audience says that one of the themes of talk about
digital "reality" seems to be numbness, cynicism, of people being "had."
But there seems to be a process by which people know they're being
had, and there is engendered an even deeper cynicism, a complete turning
off from the political process -- where anything is possible, nothing
is real.

Caruso said we have to promote real experiences in education as well as
computer learning; computer professionals can't promote technology at
the expense of real life-affirming experience.

Envisioning Technology in a Democratic Society

Annual Meeting chair Jim Davis facilitated the last panel discussion of
the day.  Jim noted that the idea for the panel grew out of the
CPSR/Berkeley chapter's efforts to draft a technology platform for the
1992 election.  The broad theme of the panel was what kind of technology
policy we should promote in order to support democratic values.  The
panelists included Jay Stowsky, a research fellow at the Berkeley
Roundtable on the International Economy at the University of California;
Ted Smith, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition
and chairman of the Campaign for Responsible Technology; Claire Zvanski,
vice president of Service Employees International Union Local 790,
which serves the public sector personnel of the City of San Francisco;
and Gary Chapman, director of CPSR's Cambridge office and coordinator of
The 21st Century Project.

Jay Stowsky started off by saying he was more or less a spokesperson for
the Clinton campaign, since he'd been working to help draft Clinton's
technology policy platform.  He addressed Clinton's plans for
technology.  He said they were oriented primarily around defense
conversion and infrastructure investment.  The end of the Cold War is a
historic opportunity to shift funding away from the military and toward
civilian programs.  The threat is a loss of public support for
scientific and technological investment because this has always been
channeled through the military and with military justifications.
Stowsky said that although there have been problems with spending money
on technological innovation through the military, there have been four
positive effects in the economy:  1) a patient, long-term sector built
into research and development; 2) a chance for collaboration between
competitors; 3) a market for risky ideas; and 4) a chance for rapid
diffusion of technologies.  All of these things will be needed in a
civilian program in order to replace military spending effects and to
respond to new needs in the economy.

Stowsky said he believes that future U.S. government spending should
focus on potential or real bottlenecks to economic growth:
communications, transportation, and waste management are examples.
These are targets of the Clinton public investment program.

Claire Zvanski discussed the campaign in San Francisco to pass
legislation controlling the use of video display terminals and to
promote ergonomic office equipment and frequent work breaks, all in an
effort to reduce repetitive strain injuries (RSI) caused by prolonged
computer use.  The campaign was directed by organized labor and opposed
by many of the city's largest businesses.

Zvanski said that even though she had worked with computers for years,
she didn't understand at first the very debilitating character of RSIs.
She didn't think white collar workers or people sitting at a desk all
day got occupational injuries.  Then she saw some cases of RSI, such as
people who couldn't pick up a coffee cup or couldn't lift their
children.

The VDT campaign started slowly.  At first there was discussion with
business leaders about the problem, and these people denied that there
was such a thing as job-related RSI; they said injuries must be caused
by "playing tennis" or doing something strenuous at home.  There was a
realization that there might be no consensus position on the issue, so
the trade unions started a legislative drive that eventually passed.
The city council passed the toughest VDT regulation bill in the country.
But a business coalition took to the ordinance to court and judges
ruled in favor of management, voiding the legislation.  City and county
offices are still under the rule of the legislation, so now they're
looking to those offices for an evaluation of the success of the rules.

Ted Smith described some of the history of the Silicon Valley Toxics
Coalition (SVTC), the ten-year old organization he heads.  Smith said
that the community of Silicon Valley got a "wake-up call" to the
problems of semiconductor manufacturing ten years ago when a leaking
tank at the Fairchild Corporation was revealed to have caused massive
groundwater contamination.  And shortly afterward a cluster of birth
defects was traced to pollution.  Since then, Silicon Valley has found
over 150 groundwater contamination sites, and over 25 are SuperFund
sites.  The whole problem may take a hundred years to clean up, and cost
hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.

Smith described the campaign around SEMATECH, which CPSR members and
staff have helped develop, and which has been reported in detail in
previous issues of The CPSR Newsletter.  Smith said that the primary
lesson of the SEMATECH campaign was how effective coalitions can be,
especially when they include local activists concerned about the health
of their communities.

Gary Chapman, the director of CPSR's Cambridge office, talked about the
impact of the Clinton campaign's promises on national policy, assuming
for the purpose of the discussion that Clinton would be elected.
Chapman pointed out the Clinton's proposed defense budget is a mere 4%
cut from the levels proposed by President Bush, or $1.34 trillion
compared to $1.4 trillion in planned spending over the next five years.
There are no planned cuts in defense R&D spending, except for a small
cut in money allocated to nuclear testing programs, which will be ended,
and some money shifted away from proposed increases in "Star Wars"
funding to new civilian technology programs.  The goal of the Clinton
administration will be a fifty-fifty split between military and civilian
R&D spending, and that's only 6 percentage points away from what the
distribution is now.

Chapman described the history of the shift in the high tech elite from
supporting Republicans to supporting a Democrat like Clinton, who picked
up the endorsements of John Sculley of Apple Computer and John Young of
Hewlett Packard.  Chapman said this is partly a generational shift,
partly one of style, but it also reveals long-standing frustration, on
the part of high tech leaders, with the rigid laissez-faire ideology of
the Republicans.  The danger we're facing now, said Chapman, is the
transformation of the old "military industrial complex" into a more
comprehensive "technology industrial complex" but without democratic
reform.  And, moreover, there is a disturbing tendency of the proponents
of "economic competitiveness" to use Cold War rhetoric and
institutional models to promote their agenda.  What we need instead,
said Chapman, is a rhetoric built around principles of cooperation and
social justice.