Tag: speech

Categories
Library Issues Personal Writing

The World We Dream About & the One We Live in Now

On February 12, 2020, I received an email from Gary Marchionini, the Dean of the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science (UNC SILS), asking if I would be the Commencement Speaker for graduation this year. I have rarely been so emotional about a speaking engagement, and about the honor of being asked. SILS changed the course of my life and career, and the idea of being in a place in both that was sufficient for them to ask me to speak is one of the most humbling and wonderful outcomes of my work. 

If the world were different, last week would have been spent in Chapel Hill, seeing friends and visiting old favorite places. My Masters Paper advisor is retiring, and I would have been able to see him, thank him, and take him out to celebrate. Then March happened. Things begin falling apart at a pace, and among the myriad of swirling chaos (quarantine, canceled vacations, emergency preparation) one of the things that stopped was Commencement at UNC SILS. And so this, too, went away.

By the time it was clear there wasn’t going to be a commencement, wasn’t going to be a gathering of any kind for these students, for the community, I had already sketched out what I wanted to say. It was informed by the times, as it was already apparent that things were on a path to get much worse…but even then, just a few weeks ago, it wasn’t obvious how bad and how quickly. 

Here’s some of what I would have said, in another timeline, standing in the Dean Dome on the stage in front of a few hundred students and family members. I hope that all of you who would have been there are safe, and that the uncertainty of the future is kind to you and yours.

The World We Dream About
&
The One We Live In Now

What a wonderful Spring day here in Chapel Hill! Thank you to Dean Marchionini and everyone involved in making me a part of your day. I’m honored to be here, as I have been where you are, wearing my UNC gown and hood and accepting my MLS (although in my day we didn’t need the Dean Dome as a venue). When I was asked to give this talk, I thought a lot about what a commencement speech should be. Dean Marchionini gave me the advice to “inform and inspire our current graduates”, and while I took that to heart, I decided that ultimately what I wanted to do was give you the advice that I wish I had heard earlier in my career. I gave this talk a title, since I needed something to ground it as I was writing, and as a result I give you “The World We Dream About, and the One We Live in Now.”

The title is from Hadestown, the Broadway musical by Anais Mitchell, directed by Rachel Chavkin, about the story of Orpheus, Eurydice, Persephone and Hades. In the play, the line in question is found in a toast given by Orpheus on a day much like today, in honor of Persephone’s return to Earth and the subsequent growth and plenty that comes with her. The line is delivered with the recognition that the world of momentary plenty is transient, that we know there are hard times ahead in the world, even if right now is comfortable. Winter, as they say, is coming. The play itself is a meditation on telling stories, about love, and most of all it is a song about hope. I saw it last year, and have rarely stopped thinking about it since. I wanted to take just a few minutes with you here today to talk both about the World We Dream About, as well as the challenges of the One We Live In Now. 

The One We Live In Now

The world that you are moving into, the one we live in now, is unlike that of any generation before. The promise of worldwide instantaneous communication and publication that was nascent during my time here in 2004 has been transformed into a panopticon for selling people better versions of themselves. The revolution of a supercomputer in every pocket enables social movements like the Arab Spring, but also allows for the data necessary to hypertarget political opinions and manipulate the population and elections. The removal of gatekeepers for publication didn’t result in a thousand flowers blooming, but instead an advertising-clickbait economic model that centralizes and destroys agreement about what is true in the world. 

The pressure of gathering eyeballs has pushed partisanship to a never-before-seen level, where the arguments aren’t about policy or perspective, but about the nature of facts and recorded history. Blatant and direct lies are being told, repeated, reinforced, and supported by powerful platforms that are unwilling to take responsibility for the slow-motion destruction they are causing. Foreign powers are manipulating information to their own ends, and our own country has neither response nor reply. Epistemology is at war with ideology. 

And so, I ask you: What can we do, in the face of this? 

The World We Dream About.

I hope that we build the World We Dream About, of course. A world of equity and inclusion, of facts and truth. Bringing this world into being will be neither easy nor free, and it isn’t fair that this burden falls partially to you. Building this world is a fight against willful ignorance, a fight against anti-intellectualism and the denigration of expertise that is rampant today. This is not a fight that can be won by the Campbellian Hero, riding forth upon a white horse to vanquish foes. This work, this necessary effort, is a different kind of thing than that. It takes the type of work that maintains, that builds, that gathers people together towards a vision. It takes the work of different people, all wanting to make the world fair and equitable for all people. It is often quiet work that goes unrecognized. It takes people who are willing to stand up for the truth of reality, that insist on rationally understanding the world through expertise and evidence.

You all leave here today as proud graduates of UNC, members of a tradition and curriculum dedicated to the equity of access to both information and knowledge. The former is a pathway to the latter, and the work that is done by graduates of this program is wide-ranging and important. I graduated from SILS in 2004, and my fellow graduates went on to far-flung corners of the world, working in start-ups, libraries, government, and corporations. In the time since then, they have moved across the US and around the world and have accepted increasingly more responsible positions. You, too, will go out into the world, find your communities, and work to make them better than they were when you arrived.

My first piece of advice to you is: look around yourself right now, at your fellow graduates. As big as the world of libraries and information is, you will see and probably work with some of these people again. Libraries and information are everywhere, but librarians and the information professions are a small and tightly knit bunch. The people you see around you now will be the people you hear about in the next decade making their names and changing the world. Don’t lose them. 

Keep your community with you, and grow it as you move along, because absolutely no one succeeds without the support of others. There really is no such thing as succeeding by yourself. Everything is contingent on the community you are in, the people you surround yourself with, and the world that you help to build for others. As you gather your communities around you, be aware of the connections between you and them, of the support necessary for society to thrive. The myth of the “self-made” person is just that…a myth. Don’t fall prey to it, and find the people, places, and connections that make you the best you can be. 

Finally, here are a few last pieces of advice, the ones that I wish I had learned a bit earlier in my life.

  1. Learn from history.
    As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Learn from the history of place, the history of people, the history of struggle and the history of pain and sadness that make up the world. I never thought that I would live in a time when I had to explain to adults why Nazis were bad, and yet here we are. 
  2. Build your community through radical inclusion. Treat others as agents and actors in the world, and believe them when they show you who they are, both good and bad.
  3. Make good choices.
    Not necessarily best choices, just make good ones, in the moral sense. When you have an important choice to make, ask yourself: Will this make me better, and will this make my community better? It’s ok if the answer is Yes to only one of the two sometimes…but if you find yourself in a situation where it’s always the same one, you should rethink your moral position. 
  4. Do not condone or allow evil in your community.
    This is more challenging than it should be, but it is easier if we all do it together.  

You are all now information professionals. Information is the gift we give to the future, so choose carefully the gifts you leave behind for the generations that follow you. 

And with that, to you all I raise a glass: To The World We Dream About, and The One We Live In Now.  

Thank you.

From the New York Times
Categories
Berkman Digital Culture Privacy Technology

Anonymous Communication on the Web

I wasn’t sure how my previous post would go over, but after some back-and-forth emailing with the reporter on the piece, WTVC asked me to come in for an interview on anonymity and the “deep web”. So I did!

We talked for almost an hour, and for some stupid reason I didn’t think to record the interview myself (will not make that mistake again). They did a fine job representing my views, although clearly edited the piece for a specific audience. I’ll admit that I probably got too heavy into the weeds of the details of Tor. They were particularly touchy about my correcting the use of “Deep Web” and “Dark Web” as useful categories. I just kept using anonymity, security, privacy and tried very hard not to fall into using their very fuzzy language to describe something with lots of complexity.

My talking points revolved around how anonymity is a requirement for the freedom of speech in a free society, and that fear-based reports like their last one are actually damaging to how people should react to the world (my example, that they didn’t use, was that instead of worrying about the incredibly rare possibility of child-abduction due to predators on Tor, perhaps parents should be more worried about driving their child to school in the morning, since it was orders of magnitude more dangerous). I suppose we’ll see if there’s any feedback that comes from this as a positive concept.

I’m glad they gave me the chance to come in and talk, and I do hope it’s useful for someone out there in Chattanooga to see that wanting anonymity and privacy online isn’t just something to abet criminal activity. Privacy issues online are something that increasingly everyone should be aware of, because the risks are going to be omnipresent as we continue to move our lives into the digital space.

Categories
Berkman Legal Issues Library Issues

Tor, Libraries, and the Department of Homeland Security

During an appearance on the LITA Top Technology Trends panel in 2014, I was discussing privacy of patron data, and mentioned that I thought it was a good idea for libraries to run Tor nodes on library servers. So when the Library Freedom Project launched their Tor in Libraries project, I was totally behind them…I even did a Tor workshop for Librarians for their workshop at ALA Annual in San Francisco.

If you aren’t familiar with Tor, I recommend reading the Wikipedia article. The TL:DR version is that Tor is a protocol and a network that is currently the best mechanism that we have for accessing information on the Internet anonymously. There are a few ways that one can use Tor, ranging from using an operating system that routes all your Internet traffic over the Tor network to just using the Tor browser, which just anonymizes your web traffic.

The way that Tor anonymizes your traffic is through a combination of encryption and blind routing,  When you initially connect to the Tor network, the connection is encrypted in much the same way that the connection to your bank would be, via a public key encryption system. When you make a request for a website through the network, the Tor protocol bounces the request from one network node to the next, encrypting the traffic at every hop. Once the traffic gets a couple of hops away from the originating computer, it’s impossible to know where the request came from. Eventually the traffic exits the Tor network, back onto the regular old Internet, and gathers what you asked for, then reverses the process to get back to you.

The result is that, under ideal conditions, it is completely impossible to track or trace what’s being transmitted via Tor. For Tor to continue to operate, it needs two sorts of nodes….relay nodes that act as the “bouncing” nodes for inside the network, and exit nodes that are the places where the traffic goes out of the encrypted Tor network and back onto the regular Internet. You need both, although a ratio of more relay nodes to fewer exit nodes is fine. The traffic that goes across relay nodes is completely anonymous…from the perspective of both the network and the individual server, it is just a random string of binary code. Only at the exit nodes does the traffic decrypt, and thus exit nodes bear the brunt of all of the requests going across the network. The traffic for the broader network all has to squeeze itself through exit nodes, and the fewer exit nodes there are, the easier it is for them to be monitored…although you can’t tell where the requests for the information came from without advanced knowledge.

So why am I talking about Tor? Because I wanted to set up the story that broke last week about the first library in the US to publicly go live with a Tor relay (a middle relay) getting pressured by their local police to turn it off. The police were, in turn, pressured by the US Department of Homeland Security. From the original article on the event:

In July, the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was the first library in the country to become part of the anonymous Web surfing service Tor. The library allowed Tor users around the world to bounce their Internet traffic through the library, thus masking users’ locations.

Soon after state authorities received an email about it from an agent at the Department of Homeland Security.

“The Department of Homeland Security got in touch with our Police Department,” said Sean Fleming, the library director of the Lebanon Public Libraries.

After a meeting at which local police and city officials discussed how Tor could be exploited by criminals, the library pulled the plug on the project.

“Right now we’re on pause,” said Fleming. “We really weren’t anticipating that there would be any controversy at all.”

He said that the library board of trustees will vote on whether to turn the service back on at its meeting on Sept. 15.

That’s tomorrow, for those keeping track at home.

Why do I think that libraries should be running Tor nodes? I had a long discussion about this on Twitter recently, but let me use the freedom of more than 140 characters to try and talk through my thinking on this. Tor is, currently, the best option that people have for anonymous speech on the Internet. It is possible to create accounts without using your real name, it’s possible to use wifi at coffeeshops and your local library to prevent your IP from being recorded…but for real anonymity of network traffic, nothing beats using Tor.

Anonymous speech is important because it is a necessary component of the freedom of speech. The US Supreme Court has ruled again and again that the right to anonymous speech is a protected part of the First Amendment, saying in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission:

Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority…It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation…at the hand of an intolerant society.

Libraries have been concerned over time with the Freedom to Read, but to doubt the role of the library in the Freedom of Speech in the US is to fundamentally misunderstand the Library (and possibly speech itself). Speech is a necessary precursor to Reading, as creation is a necessary precursor to consumption. Libraries are and should be cornerstones of free expression in the United States, and have worked to provide access to the tools of speech for years and years.

For the Department of Homeland Security to use the boogie-man of “bad things happen on Tor” as a lever to get the relay turned off is the worst sort of fear mongering. Any tool can be a weapon, and any communications mechanism can and probably will be used to enable illegal activity. There is enormously more illegal activity on the open Internet, and yet libraries everywhere provide open and robust access to the Internet via both terminal and wifi. To paint Tor as a haven for thieves and drugs and child pornography is to misunderstand not only the Tor network but to, in my opinion, to mistake the forest for the trees. Yes, tools can be used for immoral and illegal things. But that does not make the tool either immoral nor illegal.

The only rational explanation for the DHS pressuring the library to shut down their Tor relay node is that the DHS doesn’t want individuals, including US citizens, to have more robust mechanisms for anonymous speech. Per the US Supreme Court’s rulings on the links between anonymity and freedom of speech, this indicates to me that the DHS is actively attempting to prevent free and open speech on the Internet.

That is not ok with me, and it absolutely should not be ok with libraries.  

If you have made it this far, please visit the EFF’s Take Action page on this effort and sign.