New Tools

NDN and the New Politics Institute are excited to announce a cutting-edge event – an examination of how Twitter and the new media landscape are drastically changing government and journalism both in the United States and around the world, creating the possibility of a more bottom-up politics.

Joining NDN President Simon Rosenberg to discuss these seismic shifts will be Eric Jaye and Theo Yedinsky of Storefront Political Media and Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post. Jaye and Yedinsky are the new media masterminds behind Gavin Newsom’s pioneering gubernatorial campaign. Using Twitter as never before, they have helped Gavin accrue more than 700,000 followers, up from 250,000 just ten weeks ago. This explosive growth is raising questions about whether the model pioneered by Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election has already become obsolete.

Twitter is also having a profound impact on politics around the world. Staying connected through Twitter and other new media, Nico Pitney has been providing real-time coverage of what has been happening inside Iran, and becoming himself a witness to the historic uprising there. His work, which quickly became the “blog of record” on Iran and has been closely followed by millions around the world, is an inspiring example of the paradigm shift that is now occurring in journalism. In a recent press conference, President Obama answered a question from Nico, a question he passed along from a reader inside Iran. The State Department even asked Twitter to postpone their scheduled maintenance to allow the Iranians to keep speaking to the world.

We hope you will be able to join us next Wednesday, July 15, at 12 p.m. Lunch will be served. Space is limited, so please click here to RSVP. For those unable to join us in person, the live webcast of the event will begin at 12:15 p.m. ET.

The internet continues to become an increasingly important part of many people's lives - there have been several studies showing that many people would rather give up sex than internet access, and with each day more of our communications, media consumption, and commerce are conducted online. And we have seen in Iran these last few weeks just how important the internet has become for political organizing and citizen journalism.

But as our lives become increasingly digitized, a number of fundamental questions are being raised. Who owns the internet? Who polices it? What constitutes acceptable or unacceptable behavior on the web? Many internet users are accustomed to thinking of it as a free and open communal place, something which seems integral to the very nature of the net itself. Yet there is no law guaranteeing this, and companies and governments have increasingly sophisticated ways of monitoring and controlling internet traffic.

A cyber war is being now waged, fortress walls now replaced with firewalls. China's hacking of U.S. agencies and companies is well-known, as is its strict censorship of internet content within its own borders. China even went so far as to crack down on Google this week, perhaps as a reaction to their perceived role in prolonging unrest in Iran. This despite the fact that Google has already made considerable concessions to China, removing a huge amount of political and pornographic content from their Chinese service.

The United States supposedly advocates freedom of speech on the internet, and we have invested millions of dollars in Iran over the last few years in technologies designed to circumvent the state's censorship efforts:

“Our goal was to promote freedom of speech for Iranians to communicate with each other and the outside world. We funded and supported innovative technologies to allow them to do this via the Internet, cell phones and other media,” former State Department Iran democracy program coordinator David Denehy tells Eli Lake of the Washington Times.

Forget the driven-by-DC mock-populism and the all-too-clever schemes; this is how America should be promoting democracy abroad. Give activists the tools — and then let them decide how and when to use ‘em.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which oversees the Voice of America and the Farsi-language Radio Farda, has a three-person anti-censorship team that focuses on China and Iran. “Iran has a growing audience of young activist Internet users and we have repurposed our tools to work in Farsi and make it available to Iranians,” BBG’s Ken Berman says. “We open up the channels so the Iranian blogosphere is more accessible to Iranians in Iran.”

However, there are questions about the U.S. Government's commitment in this space: FOIA requests have unearthed an incredible amount of abuses of spying powers at the NSA and the FBI, among others. And the front-runner for Obama's Cyber Security Czar, Tom Davis, is no champion of online rights. From a Wired profile of the former GOP Congressman:

...an examination of Davis’ record in Congress shows that he’s been on the wrong side of key privacy issues, including the controversial REAL ID Act, which aims to turn state driver’s licenses into a de facto national identification card linked by shared databases and strict federal authentication standards.

“Given his role in REAL ID, Tom Davis would not be a good choice for privacy, which is something that President Obama specifically promised to protect in his remarks on the cyber security strategy,” says Jim Harper, the director of information policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Many cyber security planners refer obliquely to ‘authentication’ and ‘identity management’ programs that would devastate privacy, anonymity and civil liberties. Davis would probably work to roll past these issues rather than solve them.”

...

In announcing the creation of the new position last month, Obama stressed that privacy was key to the government’s cyber security efforts. But Davis’ most notable action on privacy was his failed attempt to undo a measure that put a chief privacy officer in every major government agency.

The ACLU’s legislative scorecard on Davis shows he disagrees with that group on many privacy matters.

For instance, he voted consistently to give the government wide latitude to wiretap the internet and spy on Americans’ communications. That program, including the NSA’s massive database of emails known as “Pinwale,” made news recently again when The New York Times reported that the NSA examined Americans’ domestic e-mails without authority.

It's been a very busy week on the new tools front. On Monday, I wrote about "Social Media and the Iran Protests." On Tuesday, I wrote about how internet users around the world were hacking Iranian government sites, providing mirror proxies for Iranian activists, and even changing their locations to "Tehran" in a move straight out of "Sparticus."

Since then, the new-media blitz in Iran has only continued to accelerate. As foreign reporters leave the country in droves, citizen journalists there are taking matters into their own hands, uploading videos of beatings and shootings to YouTube and giving real-time first-hand accounts and organizing directions on Twitter.

These services, realizing how politically consequential they have now become, responded well to the situation. Twitter, heeding the pleas of many of its users and even the State Department, put off a critical scheduled update that would have interrupted service. YouTube made exceptions to its policy of banning violent material. From the New York Times:

“In general, we do not allow graphic or gratuitous violence on YouTube,” the company said in a statement. “However, we make exceptions for videos that have educational, documentary, or scientific value. The limitations being placed on mainstream media reporting from within Iran make it even more important that citizens in Iran be able to use YouTube to capture their experiences for the world to see.” 

Google, which owns YouTube, also just added Farsi (Persian) to its translator service, stating that they "hope that this tool will improve access to information in Iran and outside." Over half of Google's employees were born in other countries, which may help to explain their particular sensitivity on this issue. Finally, although the Iranian government has blocked Facebook, the social networking service added a Persian version today.

On Twitter, people around the world continue their outpouring of support - #iranelection is still the top topic, and a great deal of Twitter users (myself included) have made their icons green in a show of solidarity. For those that are not photoshop-inclined, you can even change it automatically by visiting helpiranelection.com, which turns your existing icon green (the "friendly web-geek" creator of this app is running this off of his own server at his own expense).

We will see where all of this leads. As I said myself, I don't think that the use of these new tools in and of itself constitutes a "revolution," as some have asserted. But it is very clear that, as the techniques and technologies of power multiply and evolve, so too do the methods of resistance. This organic, horizontal, distributed, and deeply democratic process stands in stark contrast to the autocratic theocracy that is the Iranian government.

For those of you who didn't spend all of Monday simultaneously watching four different tech liveblogs, here are some of the highlights from Apple's WWDC 2009:

There were a lot of exciting announcements for Apple geeks like myself ($29 upgrade to 64bit Snow Leopard OS with free Exchange support! 7 hours of battery life for the new MacBooks!), but probably the biggest news for most people is the next-generation iPhone. Apple's new iPhone, dubbed the "3GS" (the S is for speed, apparently), will be available on June 17th in 16 and 32 GB flavors ($199 and $299, respectively). The 3GS includes a 3 megapixel camera (see sample picture at right), compared to the old 2 MP camera, and the new camera also features autofocus, tap focus, and video recording. It also includes a built-in compass, voice dialing, and a faster processor.

The most important of these upgrades is the processor, the part which gives the 3GS its "S." The new 600MHz (same speed as the Palm Pre) processor makes this iPhone about twice as fast when running many applications, and its graphic processor supports OpenGL ES 2.0, while the 3G only supports ES 1.1. This means that the new iPhone will be able to run some pretty cool games in the future which won't be available on the old one.

Owners of the old iPhone will still be able to download the new 3.0 OS, which will come standard on the 3GS phones. Version 3.0 adds many things that iPhone users have been griping about, such as cut and paste, MMS (immediately on most carriers, late summer on ATT here in the states), landscape keyboard mode, and tethering (except on ATT, again), as well as push notification support and developer support for accesories and external devices.

This last bit in particular is big news. Here are a few examples of apps Apple showed off at WWDC 2009, courtesy of engadget:

The new Zipcar app users GPS to find where you are and shows you all of the Zipcar locations year you. You can then tap on any location to see a list of available cars, their specs and pricing, reserve one, and even unlock it from your phone.

They also showed a demo of TomTom's slick new turn-by-turn navigation app and car kit, which effectively renders standalone GPS units obsolete and irrelevant.

Finally, one of the coolest apps in the demo takes advantage both of the new exteranal device support and push notification to do something really remarkable and, for lack of a better word, awesome. The app, from Airstrip Technologies, allows doctors to receive a patient's information on their iPhone. So, the way this works is that a patient has, say, a heart monitor attached to their iphone. This sends information that the doctor can check on their iPhone at any time. If something abnormal happens, the program can send a push message to the doctor. It can also send lab info to the doctor; in the demo, the doctor receives a notification that says "New lab result for David Smith: Critical Value - Potassium level under 3.0" The doctor can then tap "view" to see all of the patient's stats (see picture).

Apple also unveiled an awesome e-reader app with an extensive book store and an app that connects your iPhone to your amp and guitar and allows you to choose different effects, amp sounds, and even different "virtual" tunings. All of this on a single device. The mobile revolution continues to accelerate, and the impact it will have on our lives over the next decade is difficult to overstate.

Yesterday, TeleGeography released a new report projecting that by the year 2013,

• there will be 700 million broadband subscribers worldwide, an increase of 76%
• there will be over 2 billion new mobile subscriptions, an increase of 60%
• wired phone line subscriptions will actually decline slightly worldwide

Furthermore, much of this growth is coming from the developing world. NDN and our affiliate the New Policy Institute recently released a paper, Harnessing the Mobile Revolution, which explores just how big of an impact this explosion of mobile infrastructure can have in poor countries in improving healthcare outcomes, combating poverty, and promoting democracy. So we're very encouraged by these projections.

Another important thing to note is that by 2013, smartphones will be much more ubiquitous and even more capable than they are at present. There's a ton of hype around the immenent release of the Palm Pre and the 3rd generation iPhone, which is likely to remain the class leader, but Google also just announced that there will be between 18 and 20 new phones running their mobile OS, Android, by the end of the year (two are pictured here).

Android is a powerful and highly customizable OS which continues to develop impressively, but until now it has been hindered by its hardware matches. Android also features an application store similar to Apple's, and although Apple still pretty much owns the app space (which it created), Android's app store does have the appeal of being completely open and uncensored (on some phones, depending on the carrier), unlike Apple's regulated App Store, which sometimes intentionally limits the iPhone's functionality.

The proliferation of these phones is in some ways more exciting than the spread of cheap netbooks - mobile phones today are more powerful and can do more things than most computers just a few years ago. Look for more from NDN in the coming weeks on this critical issue, which is huge not just for American politics but for global society. It will be very interesting to see what happens as much of the world comes online.