UniLeaks: wikileaks for education

I just came across a new website called UniLeaks, which solicits...

restricted or censored material of political, ethical, diplomatic or historical significance which is in some way connected to higher education, an agency or government body working in partnership with an institution, e.g., a University.

As yet, I do not see the point in creating a system targeted at particular institutions. Maybe this is a way to attract specialists who would be interested in these documents. However, my first suspicion is that this is the work of anti-intellectuals who are digging for any possible dirt on academia.

In part, this is because I can't imagine that they would find particularly interesting documents that are distinctive of universities. The most likely "dirt" will relate to fund-raising, resource allocation, and employee relations -- just like with any large institution. My fear is that these people will be digging for documents like the stolen* emails at the center of Climategate, which they can then pass to the right-wing noise machine for selective quoting.

As I suggested in Privacy and Transparency at the University, this strategy seems to be increasingly common among some political factions. Michael Mann suffered legal harassment as a result of the Climategate brouhaha, and Frances Fox Piven was singled out and demonized by Glenn Beck at the height of his popularity. This may be a strategy of attacking soft targets -- mid-level public figures who will never wield political power and do not have a mass-audience.

With that being said, I am cautiously optimistic about the establishment of UniLeaks. I am deeply interested in maintaining transparency and accountability (but also political independence) among universities. I am also hopeful that the proliferation of Wikileaks-style organizations will help to move these whistle-blower systems into the political mainstream, and reduce the risk of retaliation.

Update: I found an article about UniLeaks in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The rhetoric used by the (Australian) administrator of the site seems to be a mixture of academia-idealist (e.g. students are not clients), and government-accountability (e.g. universities get a lot of state money). Also, some articles noted that this is just one of many specialized WikiLeaks clones.

*I say that these emails were stolen rather than leaked, because a leak requires that someone had legitimate access to the documents being leaked. Since no-one should have had access to the email database at the center of Climategate, that data must have been stolen.

Privacy and Transparency at the University

The Mackinac think-tank has filed a broad Freedom of Information Act request for the emails of professors of labor studies at three universities run by the state of Michigan. This appears to be nothing more than political harassment, similar to the harassment of climate researcher Michael Mann by Virginia's Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli, following the "Climategate" brouhaha. It is specifically to avoid this type of political pressure that we have the notion of "academic freedom", and that universities jealously guard their independence from the state.

The heavy use of the Internet by university professors has clearly opened them up to new forms of encroachment by political actors. Universities should dedicate some serious thought to how they manage their data, so as to keep private communications private, and properly document and release any information that should be made public.

I propose that, by default, all internal communications of university staff and students should be considered private, and should be handled in a way that maintains confidentiality. To accomplish this, university IT departments should develop encryption standards for individual email accounts and encourage their universal adoption. This is not a terribly difficult technical issue, as strong encryption systems have already been developed and deployed, such as Pretty Good Privacy. One of the big hurdles to adopting PGP encryption is to establish a network of users with trusted encryption keys; universities are in a perfect position to accomplish this.

This idea of secure communication within universities probably scares a number of people -- I've repeatedly heard mumblings about universities being sinister, oppressive forces in society (for example, view the first comment on this blog post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians). You don't have to be an anti-intellectual conspiracy theorist to insist that universities develop a high level of transparency. Universities provide some important public services where the quality of the final product (e.g. research results, student certification) cannot be easily evaluated without knowledge of the process by which it was produced. To maintain public trust, universities should develop a process that provides relevant information to anyone with a legitimate interest.

Documents relating to student evaluation should be available, both to administrators and to each student or their representative. If encrypted emails are among these documents, the student should keep a copy, and perhaps the university could keep a copy of the student's encrypted emails (at least, any from a professor), which could be recovered if the student provides his decryption key. One nice side-effect of widespread encryption would be widespread signing of electronic documents (using the same key), so that if a document is deemed relevant to an accusation, its authenticity can be easily validated.

Finally, we have the raw data that goes into research publications. The issues here are complicated, and many extend beyond individual universities. For instance, data accessibility has been a major source of contention in climate research, but much of the raw data is treated as a commercial asset by non-academic institutions, so there is little that universities can do. Additionally, scientists will always hesitate to release data until they have had a chance to analyze it themselves. Each field of research probably has to develop its own process for making raw data accessible. For instance, biologists have developed a massive database of DNA sequences (Genbank), and all major journals require that any sequence discussed in a publication be submitted to the database. There is currently a push to mandate the publication of the source code for any program used in an analysis. There has even been some frivolous dispute over accessibility to the raw data from traditional microbiological techniques (which is rarely digitized).*

The complete archiving of research data is an unreachable ideal, though it may become more common with the increasing automation of data collection. Every innovation in data collection and data storage will require researchers to develop new systems for archiving data, possibly leading to the loss of older data archived with obsolete systems. University IT departments (and perhaps librarian/archivists) may be able to provide resources that enable researchers to record their data in an accessible form, but ultimately the focus and extent of archiving and distribution will be determined by the value of the data to other researchers, not curious laymen.

*Addition: There are also experiments relating to transparency in the peer-review process.

Books: Inside Wikileaks

Daniel Domscheit-Berg (DDB), a hacker and member of the Chaos Computer Club, had been keeping an eye on Wikileaks for over a year, nursing a suspicion that it was some sort of front for an intelligence agency. That suspicion fell away in November of 2007, when Wikileaks published the Guantanamo Bay handbooks. Shortly thereafter, DDB invited Julian Assange to speak at the December meeting of the Chaos Computer Club, and began collaborating with Assange on the Wikileaks project, becoming a major coordinator of Wikileaks activities in Europe. By September of 2010, DDB had fallen out with Assange, and left Wikileaks to establish a competing system, called OpenLeaks (I've added the blog to my list).

This book is a description of DDB's experience working with Wikileaks. The main theme of the book is the unstable genius of Assange, which provides the context within which all of the technical, administrative, and political problems of Wikileaks had to be addressed.

DDB obviously has a bone to pick with Assange, and is using this book to publicize his own competing project. Like everything, it should be read with a skeptical eye -- this is simply the story that one man is telling. I actually had trouble finding independent information about DDB. His Wikipedia entry is sparse, and I only found one news article describing the release of this book. (ForeignPolicy.com has posted a video of a recent interview.)

Anyway, this book provides some insight into what drives an entrepreneur like Assange. Wikileaks was a visionary project, and perhaps such a project can only be pushed through by someone with an exaggerated sense of his own importance. Based on DDB's story, not only did Assange essentially dedicate his life to this high-risk project, but he also had the charisma to convince several volunteers and journalists to make substantial contributions to Wikileaks. This type of achievement is not possible for people with a healthy sense of their own limits.

DDB's thesis is that Assange's egocentrism* is destroying the project. DDB presents Assange as insisting of keeping total control over the project, while also being a completely inept administrator. I suspect that many visionary projects encounter this type of problem. The entrepreneur basically has to get the project off of the ground on his own because no-one else understands what he is trying to achieve, or they doubt that it is possible. Once the project has demonstrated success, the visionary entrepreneur will suddenly have collaborators, but he will not necessarily have any ability to manage a team. Even worse for a visionary project like Wikileaks, the entrepreneur cannot assume that his team-mates actually have a clear understanding of his own goals for the project -- after all, there are no examples from which they can derive shared expectations or even terminology. The visionary project has to deal with all of the problems of any start-up, plus the additional burden of having to deal with issues that no-one has dealt with before.

DDB sees three major core objectives for a project like Wikileaks:

1. Maintain the anonymity of the source (while possibly enabling further communication)
   
2. Organize and filter the documents, perhaps removing information about private persons.
3. Publicize the documents.
   

These objectives can conflict with each other, especially when resources are scarce. DDB describes these conflicts, how Wikileaks tried to balance these objectives, and how the conflicts led to arguments among volunteers on the project.

Ultimately, DDB decided to start a competing institution, OpenLeaks. I wish him luck in this endeavor. This represents a maturation of the industry that Wikileaks established. Now we know what an institution like Wikileaks can accomplish. Now some people (like DDB) have first-hand experience tackling the problems of these anonymous leak systems. The only question now is how many of these institutions can be supported, and how will the public interact with them. Should a leak-source provide documents to both Wikileaks and OpenLeaks? Will that increase the chance of being identified? Will it assure prompt publication, or would it just waste resources with duplicate effort? How can a new institution gain the trust of potential sources? How does it demonstrate its ability to maintain anonymity?

It appears that the Wikileaks revolution has only just begun, and at some point it may be able to continue even if Wikileaks itself fails.


*my word, not DDB's; not meant as a psychological diagnosis

My respectability vs. their legitimacy

Over the past few years, I've been conversing with a bunch of anarchists, and have come to accept their basic arguments. Anarchists have a bad reputation, so I've been using a pseudonym for these online conversations. In fact, I now use the name Ricketson (from Benjamin Ricketson Tucker) in all my online political discussions, though this is simply because I prefer that a Google search of my real name points to my professional writings and not my political opinions.

The core doctrine of anarchism is that all coercive power, particularly the state, is illegitimate and should be resisted. As such, it can be difficult to support anarchist causes while maintaining respectability in mainstream society, where state power is generally taken for granted and is often considered an essential part of a good society. On top of that social pressure, there is also the fact that anarchists position themselves directly at odds with an institution that regularly deprives people of property, liberty, and life; so associating with anarchists brings some physical risks, and it is very important for anarchists to know what actions will provoke the state to action and stay within those bounds.

Fortunately, the USA and its citizens are generally tolerant of abstract political opinions, so there is a lot of room for advocacy of anarchic social reforms. However, anarchists necessarily push the limits of that tolerance in their attacks on the legitimacy of the state and its laws. If laws of the state are illegitimate, then interfering with the enforcement of those laws is implicitly legitimate, as long as the circumstances are appropriate.

However, not all law-breaking is the same. Anarchist "direct action" can come in the form of scofflawry*, civil disobedience, and outright resistance against the enforcers of the law. Anarchists are safe as long as their opposition to the law is kept abstract (even the American Declaration of Independence advocates the right to resist the state), but they could get in hot water if they were to support particular acts of resistance. Even if they stay within the formal limits of the law, they would risk attracting the attention of law enforcement agencies and facing extra-legal harassment from these powerful groups. I've got a family to support, and don't want to go there.

The recent brouhaha surrounding Wikileaks illustrates these dynamics. For details, go to Wikileaks Watch at the Ruling Class Blog, but there are two important points relevant to the topic of this essay: first, a person who says "the wrong thing" can be targeted for extra-legal harassment by the USA; second, reciprocal harassment of the state and its allies will be taken very seriously by the state.

The harassment of Wikileaks is a prime example of extra-legal (i.e. no due process) harassment in response to "saying the wrong thing". Following their publication of a whole bunch of slightly confidential documents, Wikileaks' website suffered a denial-of-service attack, law enforcement agencies effectively froze several accounts associated with Wikileaks, and several high profile politicians called for extra-legal action to be taken against Wikileaks.

In response to this harassment, several of the instigators and collaborators have been themselves targeted for similar harassment, such as denial-of-service attacks on their websites. This has sparked debate among anarchists over whether this counter-harassment is justified. Some of the rhetoric has made me question whether I can openly associate with these people (for instance, by making a donation) and maintain my mainstream respectability (i.e. avoid unwanted attention from powerful institutions).

It's one thing to make abstract arguments for breaking the law; it's another to provide moral support for people who are breaking a specific law as we speak. The difference is even greater when the law-breakers are physically interfering with another person's activities (an "attack", in the broadest sense of the word).

Finally, the justification of the law-breaking is important. The DoS attacks by "Anonymous" are often portrayed as Civil Disobedience; such cases are treated as limited threats by the established powers, but they can still be met with substantial retaliation. However, if the attacks are viewed as resistance (i.e. an attempt to directly block the exercise of power) , the full power of the state will be brought against the lawbreakers and their supporters. In this case, Anonymous has really escalated the seriousness of the Wikileaks situation. Compare the "Civil Disobedience - Resistance" of Anonymous with the "Scofflawry - Civil Disobedience" of Wikileaks. It isn't even clear that Wikileaks did anything illegal, but there is no doubt that the acts of Anonymous are illegal. Furthermore, Anonymous has a clear victim. This type of escalation had better be necessary, or else I am going to stay a mile away.

Through my associations with anarchists, I have been comforted by those who swear off confrontation, insisting that their goal is to expose the illegitimacy of the state and start building the institutions that will replace the state. Not only do I believe that they make an important point about what is the most productive strategy for improving society, but I feel comfortable that associating with such people will not bring me to the attention of the police.

I hope this doesn't sound like I'm whining about how hard it is for me to contribute to "the cause"; I did not write this to make excuses for myself or belittle those who have shouldered the responsibility for developing and communicating anarchist ideas. I just want to make a small point about the tactics of a political movement -- if we want to gain mainstream influence, then mainstream people need to feel comfortable associating with us.



*I believe that I have coined the term "scofflawry". Is there a better term for the habit of evading law enforcement? Scofflawry is a bit awkward, but is conveniently parallel to outlawry.

CA district court shuts down Wikileaks

A district court in California has ordered Wikileaks.org to be shut down, at the request of the Cayman Island's Bank Julius Baer, apparently because Wikileaks published internal company documents related to money laundering.

I'm not happy. I'll be watching this.

Hat Tip to OpenLeft and the Draft Lessig movement.

Wikia search engine

It looks like Wikia is launching their search service. Wikia is a spin-off of Wikipedia, and since I like the design of Wikipedia and the attitude of Jimmy Wales, I'm gonna give Wikia a shot.

Right now, it's pretty primitive, so to remind myself to return to it in the future, I've installed its search engine into my web browser (Firefox). Here is the Wikia search engine add-on for Firefox.

Blogger censorship?

It seems that Blogger will not allow users to register the subdomain "regicide.blogger.com". I tried to register this site, but was rejected, despite the fact that no-one else seems to be using it.

It is understandable that Blogger (Google) would want to distance itself from anyone who would advocate killing a king or other head of state (I don't advocate this form of killing)....but it's odd that they didn't prohibit the use of the subdomain "tyrannicide.blogger.com", since this is arguably more applicable to the USA (Google's home country) than the idea of regicide.

Whatever.

Community Voice Mail

Welcome to Community Voice Mail: "Community Voice Mail provides free, 24-hour nationwide voice mail to people in crisis - connecting them to jobs, housing and hope"

This represents one of those things that most of us take for granted, but which many people do not have access to -- the means of receiving private communications. According to the CVM website, it seems that many of their clients are focused on trying to find housing or a job, but I assume that this would also be helpful for persons stuck in an tyrannical household where they would be afraid to have messages left on their home answering machine or sent to them by mail.

CVM also seems to have a very reasonable strategy--they provide the technical service and "subcontract" to established organizations (Goodwill, YMCA, etc) who actually have contact with the people who need this service.

Secure, reliable communication systems are essential for freedom. Good for them!