DOs
• Have a specific topic in mind. Just about everyone is going to be interested in “The Internet and Social Change.” If there’s a specific issue, event, or book you have in mind, mention that.
• Offer a summary on the wiki of what your session will be about. Before the event, this helps others thinking about what they might want to discuss. After the event, it helps the organizers document what went on, so even if you propose a session during ISDT, please post a summary. This also helps folks checking on the sessions from their computers.
• Check out the venue before the session if possible. It’s frustrating to split up a group when it turns out that a restaurant won’t fit everyone.
• Take notes of the session and post them to the wiki. It’s often the case a participant might have to choose between sessions. They might be interested in seeing your comments or links.
• If you’re interested in a session, write your name by the session on the wiki; this helps organizers know if others are interested.
•

DON’Ts
• Don’t think your session has to be a discussion. It could also be a skill-sharing workshop, a cultural outing, or anything else relevant.
• Don’t bail on your session or head out before you say you’re leaving. That’s not cool, and sessions should include everyone who wants to participate.
• Don’t be too optimistic about start times or travel times. Presentations can go over, and participants may have different expectations of promptness.
• Don’t stress out about this too much. Have fun and enjoy the conversation!

Young Canadians, Participatory Digital Culture & Policy Literacy
Leslie Regan Shade

As an academic who also works on the policy side of media, the question becomes are we actually effectuating change? Important questions to keep in mind: 1. what are the everyday uses of digital technologies by youth? They are often active participants who are uncritical towards commercial aspects of media engagement and technically uninformed of infrastructure, etc. 2. How do these practices shape their knowledge of digital policy issues? We need digital literacy project for young people which consider everyday practices by youth (15-22) with digital technologies and projects which co-create digital literacy toolkits with young people. 3. What tools / techniques can be mobilized to create participatory and innovative digital policy literacy toolkits? And 4. What are examples / best practices of digital policy literacy projects developed by government / regulators, educators, and activist groups?

Often media focus is on panics (e.g. TIME magazine coverage of CDA).  Policymakers are missing insidious issues of policy – causal disregards for privacy, data mining, ethical ambiguity about copyright, etc. Policies often address young people as consumers rather than active media maker citizens, which lead to a troubling distinction between consumer and citizen. However, there is a lot of activism in Canada (Campaign for Fair Copyright – Canadian Student Activists; Net Neutrality; YouTube videos by young people – I Hate Bell; Facebook and privacy issues in 2008; CIPPIC Ottawa; Usage Based Billing UBB).

From Media Literacy to Digital Literacy: Media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and produce communication in a variety of forms. It is also about choice, conversation, curation, creating, and collaboration (according to the Center for Social Media, American University). Digital citizenship is the ability to read / write / create culture, active participation in digital culture, understanding one’s rights and responsibilities, understanding ethical behavior, and according to Renee Hobbs (Temple) it is “a constellation of life skills needed for active participation in our media rich society.”

Digital Policy Literacy understands the process, principles, and procedures of legal actions that govern the diverse uses of communication resources at the global, national, community level. It is also the structures of participation – understanding institutions of policy governance & ways to publicly intervene or shape policy processes and how to illustrate various regimes of policy intervention. Part of digital policy literacy is also an understanding of political economy: who owns the media, what’s the relationship between media and broader social structures of society, how do media systems reinforce, challenge, or influence existing social relations of class, race, and gender? A critical understanding of policy processes involves linking structural and historical struggles to create public interest policies. Leslie believes digital policy literacy is a necessary component of digital literacy.

Leslie demonstrated several examples of media and digital literacy projects she has worked on. One of which is “Surveilling the Girl” – a video created by a Communication Studies student Phil Creamer and turned into a chapter in “Mediated Girlhood” (ed. Mary Celeste Kearney). The project is about the domestic surveillance of youth spaces including online and mobile technology. Promotional and media discourse positions the young girl in need of safe technological spaces and employs safety techniques such as GPS and biometric technologies to monitor, control, behaviors etc. In terms of policy issues “Surveilling the Girl” raises questions such as: how to remedy the persistence of media and policy discourse that constructs young women as susceptible to cyber bullying, predation…and to counter the promotion of technological solutions? Also requires us to think about how childhood and parenthood is being reconfigured in an era of measurement / surveillance? And what are communication rights for youth as they negotiate the mobile landscape?

Other projects which incorporate media and digital policy literacy is “Negotiating, managing, and designing privacy online” which asks young people how is privacy defined, negotiated and managed offline and online? What are the ethical issues and how they would design privacy? The “Remix Culture & the Politics of Copyright” project interviews young people about digital technologies for remix – sampling / mashups. In terms of policy it asks what the implications are of user generated content in participative web, fair use, and what is the context in which privacy happens? Leslie also showed other examples of digital policy literacy in action such as the UBB Stop the Meter YouTube campaign. In all of these examples there is tension between citizenship and consumerism; the government and individuals see themselves as both citizens and consumers and each position have different policy implications.

Monday

Coming Together - General Session for all IDST2011 students (Carina): following an initial inquiry done by Karen Gustafson on who would be interested in presenting their work, we have decided that the best format would be an informal session where everyone (those who are interested, obviously) can present their work in 10 minutes and get some feedback on their research. The aim is to get to know each other’s work from very early on in the week. This is an informal session so you don’t need to prepare something more formal… and you can present your research or present a specific aspect you have been working on lately. I hope to see everyone at the session! (We can probably do it on Monday).

Tuesday

Civic Science and Activism (Carina): What models of activism come up when local groups, hardware, software and Internet come together under a common interest? And how can such experiences help us consider issues surrounding openness, access and policy making? With urban environments becoming permeated by algorithm and software running basic urban infrastructure, defining patterns of access and mobility, and collecting massive amounts of data for GIS databases, we can no longer talk solely about Internet, social media or mobile phones when considering the implications of the digital within every realm of daily practices. I would like to propose a session where we can look at few examples of projects of civic science and activism and maybe try to outline (or map out) the different issues and interests tangled up within one of the projects; to finally work on different issues regarding: access and openness, agency and design processes, reverse-engineering practices and possible points of intervention. (Please do not feel intimidated if it sounds too structured… This is just a possible outline for the session.) Anyway, looking forward to it! (time and date TBA)

Andy: Interested. Big fan of publiclaboratory.org.

Social Media and Activism: I (Summer) would like to propose we get together over/after lunch one day to talk about the role of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media sites in recent/ongoing protest movements, such as in the Arab World, Spain, and Latin America. Is there anything new or different about such mobilizations?

Kamran: Sounds good Summer. I’m in.

Eva: I think this is an excellent proposal. Count me in.

Réhab: Please count me in as well. I am living this out so it would great to pick other people’s brains about this issue in particular.

Andy: Interested as well.

Kay: me too

Smári: Sounds good to me.

Laura: Very interested, I’m definitely in.

Music and Social/Political Activism: (Tuesday, 12 - 2 pm, Maus Habitus)I (Kamran) like to propose this session to all of you who see any role that music and musicians have played in creating social and political change. Most of us like various kinds of music from around the globe. But, in the recent uprisings in the Middle East, songs and chants were short condensed messages that could be transformed to protest tools at times directly questioning the status quo, and at other times, indirectly connecting and gathering people around a theme. Music can use metaphor to mask the real message of a song from the authorities, but, speak volumes to the ordinary citizens. These days, music is often broadcast via digital media. How does music engender power via these media? What are the social class relationships between various digital music platforms (one example is between Facebook and MySpace)? Whether you have researched this or not, or are simply interested, or just like certain genres of music with a subversive and transforming message, join me in this session and let’s chat about it! There is also a piano in Maus Habitus so some of us may play a tune or two.

Tiago Videira: Count me in. I want to share the Portuguese experience. “A cantiga é uma arma - homens da luta” (Song is a weapon - the struggle men).

Kay : I am very interested

Walking Tour of Autonomous Spaces in Porto Tiago Assis, Chris

Wednesday

Children, Youth, and Social Media (Jacqueline): Young people continually utilize social media as tools for community, identity, empowerment, learning, and socialization. While there is a lot of great research (both quantitative and qualitative) regarding how young people engage with online spaces, I continually come back to the question of methodology. What are some productive and creative methods for gaining more nuanced understandings of the ways young people utilize social media? How might we employ more participatory and collaborative methodologies in order to provide young people with a voice in our research? What unique ethical issues arise when researching young people’s use of social media? And what are some ways we can ensure our research is used to foster progressive policies which create opportunities for all young people to engage, learn, and create? These are just a few questions I continually come back to as I think about researching young people and social media and I would love to hear from others about creative, diverse, and ethical methodological approaches. (time and date TBA - but definitely let me know if you are interested in participating)

Kay : I am interested, looking forward to it

Maria José: I am interested. Useful data:
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/EUKidsOnline/EU Kids I (2006-9)/MethodologicalResources.aspx
Higgins, Jane, Nairn, Karen, et al. (2007). Peer research with youth: negotiating (sub)cultural capital, place and participation in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Participatory Action Research, Approaches and Methods: Connecting people, participation and place. Sara Kindon, Rachel Pain and Mike Kesby. London and New York, Routledge.

Thursday

Deluded by The Net Delusion? (Chris) One of the threads in the discussion forum got me thinking about Evgeny Morozov’s recent book The Net Delusion, which relates to the themes of ISDT in many ways. It’s got some issues in terms of argumentation and evidence, but the main point of the book is to throw cold water on a lot of the utopian rhetoric that surrounds the potential of social media for positive social change. I thought I would organized a session to discuss the book with folks who have read it or just people who have been interested in it. If you’re interested, it might be good to indicate whether you’ve read the book or are just interested in the topic.

Chris: read the book a few months back & followed the debates online.

M.E.: interested in the book/discussion as counter-balance for utopian notions of citizenship and social engagement. Particularly in relation to culture, cultural production and media.

Carina: I haven’t read the book, but I will try to have a look at it before getting to Porto. I am always interested in what doesn’t work, failure, breaking down, and so on… and in everything else that can come out of it.

Kamran: reading the book now, so, by then, I’ll probably chime in as well.

Alison: I chaired Evgeny’s lecture on the book back in January, and posted a review on it here . So count me in.

Meet one of Porto’s most revolutionary spots:  (Sara)
Documentary on the Spanish Revolution (1930s) “LA REVOLUCIÓN SOCIAL” (includes the “Report of the Revolutionary Movement in Barcelona”, “Barcelona works ahead”) | Thursday, July 21 at 10pm | Free entrance | Taking place at Gato Vadio (Vagrant Cat), a subversive bookshop, a cutural association, a space for social intervention, right across the street of the Hotel.

Democratic Participation and Social Media (Susanna): We know that social media is a powerful force in political campaigns, but what role does it play in governance? I’m interested in talking about recent efforts in crowdstorming policy ideas and crowdsourcing emergency management, to identify what works and what’s limited about these approaches. And, it would be great to dream a bit. What would regular public involvement in pressing policy issues look like if it was augmented by the Internet? (I say augmented in order to emphasize my belief in the need for complementary in-person and online engagement efforts). Looking forward to it!
time and date TBA

Carina: I am in Susanna. Actually I think “crowdsourcing” is a good way to look at the impact of certain technical and design aspects on the outcome of the project. Many issues with geo-crowdsourcing start with the problem to define exactly the notions of “location” or “proximity” for each unique case.

Derek: Count me in. I’m keen to chat about bottom-up local policy innovation and “interfaces” with official policy-making institutions—not just for pressing policy issues, but for everyday life in local communities.

Tiago Videira: This would be a very nice place to discuss my issues with the Lisbon Participatory budget and similar iniciatives!

Maria José: a fundamental discussion. Count me in.

Andy: Me too.

Friday

How the Internet Really Works Derek, Smari, Eva, Alison, Chris

Audio and Internet Radio Skillshare Rui and Graham gave participants an overview on how to produce an audio stream.

“Educational Walk” - a tour along several places in Porto discussing digital transformation on education Ademar (Friday 11h00-15h30)

As a group interested in “digital transformation education”, we will do a walking tour along several interesting places in Porto at walking or public transportation distance that for some reason the participants didn’t see before. During the walk, we will use every excuse to stop and talk about our affinity topic, altogether, or in groups, or with only those walking side-by-side with us. We will enjoy some panoramic points, some historical points, eat and drink, seat, all of this, with one single purpose: to talk about how digital technology may help education and schools to evolve.

eDemocracy for the iCitizen (Tiago Videira): a Top-Down approach to a bottom up participation. The design of a centralized system/platform for services that affect today citizens’ lives. Using the Portuguese case as a basic example: The finances (taxes and receipts) online, the Social security and health, the public jobs vacancies and applications, universities and school profiles, participatory budgets, etc.

The pros and cons of a statal centralized system with cross-data. Issues of transparency and online privacy. Issues of meritocracy, the end of parallel economies and corruption, the rise of the “big brother feeling”, the rise of the part of the citizen in the decision making process at every level (local, global).

Possible work out for a paper or a project regarding the system and all of its issues.
—>

Slides from this presentation are available here.

Fiorella de Cindio began her discussion by asking about the role computer scientists and professionals in the new society and suggesting 3 possible answers. First, we need to develop digital systems which allow people to shape a better world. We also need more emphasis on participatory design, involving people in the design of computer-based systems. Finally, in order to be better developers, we need to know more about the background or our discipline.

Informatics (which is preferable to the term Computer Science) differs from math and engineering in that it is an empirical science, similar to physics, biology, or botany. In order to exploit the potential power of science, we need to understand the theories and laws by which they are governed. In order to validate these theories, we need to conduct experiments.

1. Phenomenology or empirical basis, (identification, observed behaviors, properties) description (Tycho Brahe in astronomy, Linnaeus in botany)

2. Comprehension and explanation of phenomenon through models based on an underlying theory which includes properties, concepts, relations, anticipation of behavior. (Newton in astronomy, Darwin in botany)

3. Validation of models and theories through experiments (CERN in physics) experiments have to be designed

The phenomena and empirical basis of all these is the programmable computer therefore experiments are just small applications done in the laboratory. Technology is shaping the world. Revolutions have been made possible thanks to the internet but what happens after the protests? We need to look at how technology can support the evolution and sustainability of movements that begin online as well as whether Internet and Communication Technologies (ICT) help people to shape their world.

If we don’t use the internet after protests or elections, they will fail. How can technology support citizen movements which have found online support to organize and mobilize to set up a democratic organization? Public institutions which really want to engage citizens but need to learn how to do it in a sustainable way.

How can we design technology support?
• the phenomenology of informatics is not the programmable computer, but the network society
• look for frameworks i,e., sets of organized concepts and tools from various disciplines.

These tools allow us to have a better understanding and to learn from experiments are case studies in real life settings, where we can learn from both successes and failures. Our experiments are in real life and ethically very demanding because we are working with real people. So transparent failure becomes important (Kuhn, 1963). We need a way to look at case studies as a way to improve the discipline.

Double Iteration (the software lifecycle)
We can no longer develop systems in the lab, going from the micro to macro.  We need real-life settings to learn from experience; experiences as experiments.

De Cindio considers Italy her laboratory for several reasons:
•It is a well established democracy with a very good constitution
•for the last10-15 years, it has suffered from “democratic anomaly” where the prime minister is also the owner of a large media empire.
•the internet is increasingly a channel for gathering and distributing info (against media control), organizing activities, sharing experiences and speaking freely: in sum to sustain civic engagement and organization political opposition

But what about the use of existing platforms (Facebook, Google, Blogger, NING, Meetup) for protests? These are all good solutions aggregating people but what happens after the protests? Both government administrations and grassroots movements rely on these platforms but these limit the sharing materials. De Cindio looked at 2 case studies:

• A “success” story of a comic/blogger who became a political leader
• A failure from a grassroots movement started on Facebook

Beppe Grillo is a popular comic and blogger who, through his blog organized a protest against the political “caste” in Italy which took place in Bologna in September 2007. Grillo launched the 5 Stelle (5 Stars) movement which consists mainly of people who see him as opposition to Berlusconi and the political caste. He is “anti-politics” and has had real impacts on election results.

According to de Cindio, Grillo is an example of “I/we participate, he/they profit.” Although he presents himself as a popular alternative, his blog is managed by the Casaleggio Associati web agency. They apply the same marketing strategies used for corporations to his blog: the use of hidden moderators promotes a deceitful “vision” of the future which demands reflection about direct online democracy.

De Cindio showed a video produced by Grillo’s web agency called “Gaia: The Future of Politics”. This video demonstrates both what can happen when we view direct democracy as an opportunity as well as Casaleggio Associati’s un-democratic strategy of managing Grillo’s blog. The lessons to be learned from this video are that we must beware of bloggers who become political leaders, scrutinizing the way their private space is managed, but we must also beware of the danger of direct democracy or referenda governance where media is not free.

Case 2: Onda Viola (Violet Movement)
The Onda Viola was organized around a Facebook page no support from political parties and trade unions based on the platform of forcing Berlusconi to resign. This page was created and administered by an anonymous profile (San Precario) who organized the No B-day protest in December of 2009. The day after the protest, the Facebook page was renewed but only some of the group administrators were invited to join again. Suddenly the page is managed by a small group of people who determine the rules for managing it according to San Precario’s needs. This lead to conflicts among the administrators around political issues which include:
• the relationship between national and local groups
• the internal democracy of the movements
• passwords, permission, etc.
so their online behavior eventually led to the devaluation of the movement.

Software system design is like architecture. Software is not just a device with which the user interacts it is also the generator of a space in which the user lives. We have to consider software and web design just as we would consider the physical design of public and private spaces, using it to shape the way people live. Thus, we need a design framework. De Cindio has identified framework for civic digital habitats which is a collection of organized concepts rooted in democratic tradition and experiments from an online participatory project.

Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft, and Technology:
In software design, we have a need to balance these 3 dimensions and support different kinds of activities. This framework looks at the community dimension and the structured way that people can organize. The glue (Gemeinschaft), the rules (Gesellschaft), and now the technology must all be well balanced.

• Gemeinschaft holds people together. An appropriate metaphor is a “win/win” situation. Although we cannot assume that people share goals, we can assume that they share interests.
• Gesellschaft: we must consider the participatory contract among the social actors (terms of service), identification policy, how to preserve a civil, civic dialogue, as well as who will be the referee
• Technology: spaces and tools must be built up. De Cindio identified four spaces:

• Community space: free interactions (similar to the picnic space referred to Allison Powell’s presentation)
• Personal Space: reputation/social relationships
• Purposeful Space: purposeful interactions/deliberation
• Information Space: knowledge sharing

This is the framework which de Cindio’s group uses to develop their web sites (such as Sicurezza Stradale
and thanks to this, have obtained interesting results from encouraging people to share both problems and solutions.

Slides from this presentation are available here.

In this session, Jillian’s initial premise was that “public spaces are becoming privatized”. Additionally, social networking sites are limiting their user’s freedoms by the rules in their terms of service agreements. However, she argued, some of thee rules are not clear and there is a need for some community guidelines that can govern the privacy aspects of thee platforms.

She brought up two court cases to substantiate her argument about the “privatization of our publics”:

The Marsh v. Alabama (1946) case in the U.S. which allowed religious literature in the town’s business district, as a right of expression;

and, the

New Jersey Coalition Against War in the Middle East vs. J.M.B. Realty Corp. (1994), which “established the right of individuals to hand out protest literature in one of the state’s shopping malls”.

She then showed how some social networking sites (used Google’s policy as example) report abuse by presenting the user with a drop down menu to choose a reason for the reporting. Jillian talked about a specific case of the website of Sayeb Sala7, a Tunisian activist who went by the pseudo name Sayeb Sala7 (meaning “let it go” in Arabic). During the Tunisian protests, Sayeb’s site was taken down and he did know why. When asked from Facebook, the reply was that the “site’s name was too generic”. After an investigation that Jillian conducted, it turned out the reason it was taken down was because the site administrator did not know the meaning of the name, so it was dismissed. She also discussed the rules pertaining to multiple user names on Facebook vs. Google +.

Jillian used two more examples, that of Egyptian activist and Google employee Wael Ghoneim who’s page was titled “We Are All Khaled Saeed”, and the case of Michaled Anti, a famous Chinese blogger to demonstrate the arbitrariness of the social networks’ “real name” policy. She argued that Santa Claus, for example, is completely allowed as a name by many, perhaps because “he is not an activist”!

Other examples were of Malath Aumran’s page who follows his nick name with his real name in parentheses (Rami Nakhle), and Flikr’s censoring of Maarten Dors photo of a Romanian young boy smoking “something”, which later had to be blacked out to be allowed, and a YouTube video.

Jillian mentioned that a paper she wrote on this topic can be found at http://is.gd/k25yar .

Group Exercise
For this part of the workshop, the participants were divided to four groups: video sharing site, photo sharing site, blogging platform, and a social networking site. The groups were asked to write community guidelines for each of their platforms that make sense from the user’s point of view. They were to keep in mind the following points:

-  built in community rights
-  Whether community policing is the answer?
-  Better community guidelines
-  Robust processes for users

After a brief congregation, the groups came back with a short summary of their conclusions and the session was ended.

Here’s a link to Jillian’s relevant paper: http://opennet.net/policing-content-quasi-public-sphere

The ‘gamification’ of life

Slides from this talk are available here.

The Serious Games Institute designs games for serious purposes such as education and training in a serious and often real-life context. Worldwide population growth and globalization have led to many problems which games have the potential to solve - problems such as financial and economic crisis, debt and inflation, wars, environmental changes, epidemics, migration, terrorism, etc. Games are a living platform for global scale simulation of our techno-socio-echomoic-environmental systems. For example, using participatory methods games can simulate and create crisis observatories which can be used to predict the sequence of possible impacts after an earthquake. This can also be used to generate policies and priorities based on the data and predictions gathered within the game.

Serious games must rely on open innovation, crowd sourcing, and the rise of community. We’ve moved away from linear diffusion of innovation models and come to rely upon more complex Actor-Network Theory and Social Shaping of Technology models instead. These models of user innovation need to be tested and understood more deeply. We can think of diffusion of innovation as a fluid dynamic process with a feedback loop of how people engage with technology and interact with each other.

The ‘gamification of life’ refers to the potential of games to play an important role in social and behavioral changes as well as awareness raising. Games have become increasingly pervasive and popular. The game industry posted total sales of $1.7 billion in Jan 2010. Several studies have demonstrated the efficacy of serious games for training in particular behavioral change. Games facilitate learning in multimodal ways: mixed reality, mobile learning, haptics, which allow players to interact a more immersive environment. Additionally, serious games employ sociality and collaboration and allow for more complex social structures. 

Game design also draws from euro-psychology approaches to learning with games, (that is, how brain works during learning). Design also takes into consideration artificial intelligence and real life (data sets as characters), multimodal interface (interfaces between user and environment), semantic web, standards and metadata (layer up information and data sets). They must create complex systems of interaction with the environment.

Sara demonstrated several examples of how virtual environment and social collaboration are changing much about how we live, learn and work. For example, “dying Dave” was part of a triage game which encouraged immersion and engagement with triage patients after a disaster. The game was tested by nurses and paramedics and it was found that those using the game performed significantly better than more traditional modes of training. So why successful? It’s more realistic, enhanced learning, allowed the transfer of skills, can rehearse and make mistakes and go through it again, and the feedback is personalized.  Another example was Roma Nova which focuses on social interactions with a dialogical approach. It is a cross curriculum approach to studying history, math, and citizenship. The game allows for layering of complex data sets and real world interactions.

There are still many research challenges to serious game design, particularly because it is a fragmented research community.  There is literature in different disciplinary areas and virtual worlds are a new area so lack of frameworks and metrics. Of course there are also technical and cost issues preventing uptake as well as a division between practice and theory. The education sector tends to still be rather conservative and a new paradigm of learning is just slowing emerging. We need to bring the academy and industry to work together to establish methods and evaluation strategies.

Serious games have a lot of potential to change the world, effect social and behavior changes, and the way we learn and train. We need the serious games community to work with educationalists and user communities. The definition of gaming is broadening and allowing for more people to participate which is a good thing, but it makes it more difficult to coalesce.  Games have become and will continue to become cheaper and cheaper to produce, additionally more users will get into development. However, what we really need more people doing this!

Slides from this presentation are here.

At the start of his presentation, Sunil Abraham pointed to two aerial drawings of cybercafes: one where each computer was part of a private booth, and one where the computers were in the open so the screens would be visible to any one. Which layout would be more friendly to women, and why, Abraham wanted to know. Some participants selected the first option, liking the idea of the privacy, while others liked the second option so that the cybercafe owner would be able to monitor users’ activities.

Abraham said he was surprised no one said option one looked like masturbation booths, adding that in May, India passed rules prohibiting the first design option to avoid just such an issue. This is despite a survey conducted of female college students, who liked the idea of privacy in cybercafés that typically are male-dominated.

Cybercafes are just one of the areas impacted by India’s plan for collecting and using biometrics to create unique individual identification cards.

Abraham focused his presentation on activists’ efforts to counter the government’s myths about a unique identification (UID) program.

One campaign image showed two soldiers on the border asking for an east-Asian looking person’s identification. The way to balance, or rectify, the drawing, Abraham said, would be to allow citizens to be able to ask the soldiers for the identification information.

The campaign, “Rethink UID Project,” included several images illustrating various problems with the plan. For example, one said: “Central storage of keys is a bad idea, so is central storage of our biometrics.” As Abraham explained, if storing a copy of your housekey at the police station does not make us feel more secure, then why wouldn’t storing our biometrics with the government also make us a little more scared?

In the Indian scheme, Abraham said, the government says biometrics will be used as an authentication factor in order to prove your identity, but from a computer science perspective, it’s a bad idea because it is so easy to steal biometrics. And, as Abraham pointed out, if your biometrics are stolen, it’s not possible for you to re-secure it—it’s not like getting a new ATM card and password, he said.

If this system of national UID was designed using digital keys instead of biometrics, then we would have a completely different configuration, Abraham said.

Centralized storage is nonnegotiable, and therefore the process of authentification is done through a centralized database, but with digital keys or digital signatures, authentification could be done on a peer basis, so citizen could authenticate border guards and vice versa.

Another image from the “Rethink UID Project” campaign pointed out that “Technology cannot solve corruption.” As Abraham said, problems of corruption in the subsidy system (food, loans, education, employment guarantee act in rural India, etc) won’t be fixed with biometrics. For example, if biometric equipment is installed at fair-price shops, before the shop owner gives the grain, the citizen would have to present biometrics, which would go through a centralized server and be authenticated, then the citizen would get the grain, and ultimately there would be a record saying this particular citizen collected this amount of subsidized grain at this particular time.
But there are a whole range of ways shop owners can compromise the system, Abraham said.

The first way: 30-50 percent of India is illiterate, so shop owner can say the biometrics were rejected by the server and the citizen would not know better. Or, the owner can say there was no connectivity so authentification didn’t go through, or the owner could say there was no electricity so the system won’t work, or the shop owner could give just part of the grain that the citizen is due.

Corruption innovates and terrorism innovates—if technology innovates, so does corruption, as it is not a static phenomenon, Abraham said. You can’t wish away human beings from technological configurations.

One village will have multiple biometric readers.

Abraham said they have proposed an alternative schema: remove readers from the shop, school, hospital, bank, etc., and have only one scanner at the local governance hall. Instead of the citizen becoming transparent to the government, the government should become transparent to the citizen. The shop owners should make transparent which IDs they have given how much grain to, and only if they are going to dispute the ID of a citizen, can they go to the local government administrative office to prove the ID.

Another image from the “Rethink UID Project” campaign said, “The poor and the rich: who do we track first?”
Abraham explained that one problem in India is “black money,” or money for which you don’t pay taxes because the accounts are in fake names in order to store money. Like creating fake bank accounts, he said it also would be easy to create fake biometrics by combining the handprints and eyes of multiple people to get a second fake ID. Also the system could be hacked into and iris images Photoshopped. Ghost ideas also could be created and then sold off. Because the rich will get their IDs behind closed doors, Abraham said, it will be easy for them to get multiple IDs, but the poor will not be able to.

Referring to “tailgating,” or when one ID is card swiped to gain entrance for multiple people, such as swiping one metro card and then two people walking through, Abraham noted that the problem is that the tailgating only is seen as a problem when it’s at the bottom of the pyramid, such as one woman goes to the fair-price shop to collect grain for five or six families so only one person has to lose a day’s wage instead of all five or six losing a day’s wages. Tailgating at the bottom if the pyramid is usually a question of survival, he said.

Thus, another image from the campaign showed a pyramid and said, “Transparency at the top first…before transparency at the bottom.”

The first principle is that expectations of privacy should be inversely proportional to power, so people who are really powerful, like NGOs, politicians, or heads of corporations, should have less privacy, and people who have very little power should have more privacy, Abraham said.

Also, from a business perspective, the nation gets greater return on its investment if surveillance equipment is trained on people at the top of the pyramid to catch big-time corruption, he said.

Most of the panic around the UID is over the transaction database. Beyond a databse storing everyone’s biometrics, another database will track transactions: every time you buy a mobile phone or purchase a ticket or access a cyber cafe or subsidies, thanks to UID, there will a record made in the transaction database, Abraham said.

Abraham said it is important to note that surveillance is not an intrinsic part of information systems, but once surveillance is engineered into information systems, both those with good intentions or bad intentions can take advantage of that surveillance capability.

The UID means there will be 22 databases available to 12 intelligence agencies, he said.
So when a girl enters into a cybercafé, first she will have to provide her UID, and then the café owner will photocopy the card, then the owner has the right to take a photo of the girl using his own camera, then the owner is supposed to maintain browser logs of her computer for a period of one year.

So the question then is how to assure accountability without surveillance?

The first possibility, Abraham said, is partial storage. The transaction database could store half the data, and the central database could store the other half, so the full 360-view of the data would not be available without a court order.

The second solution is a transaction escrow, where every time a record is put into the main database, it will be encrypted using 2-3 keys, and only if 3 agencies cooperate with keys, can the information be decrypted. Thus, it is targeted surveillance, not blanket surveillance.

To conclude his presentation, Abraham divided participants into four groups in order to design surveillance systems for internet surveillance, mobile technologies, CCTVs, and border control.

Sharon Strover spoke on behalf of the CCTV group, saying they ended up with more questions than anything else. They agreed there should be notices when cameras are in use, there should be public knowledge of who is doing surveillance and who has access to the footage, and the data shouldn’t be sold. But the group couldn’t decide which spaces warranted CCTVs and which not.

Abraham then pointed out that the next generation of CCTVs can read everybody’s irises as they pass the cameras—it’s in the lab now, and 2-3 years from the market, he said.

Next, Andy Carvin spoke on behalf of the mobile technologies surveillance group. Whether or not capturing metadata or content as well, the mobile phone company can collect it, but it shouldn’t be able to keep any identifiable information for the person – it should only be able to look at information in the aggregate. The rest of the information should be shipped to a non-governmental organization or government agency specialized in privacy, and 2 keys would be required: one from the judiciary and one from the NGO or governmental agency.

Smári McCarthy reported back for the Internet surveillance group, pointing out that data retention has been useful in criminal cases less than 0.2 percent of the time in one study, and another showed there has been no statistically significant increase in the number of criminal cases solved because of data retention. So, he said, the group concluded there should be no blanket surveillance, only court orders in certain criminal cases that define who will be under surveillance and for how long. Also, they wanted to see a transparency register available so the public could be informed about how many people are under surveillance currently and throughout year and other general information, such as the success rate—how many of these surveillances have led to criminal convictions or similar.

Finally, Summer Harlow spoke on behalf of the border control group, which said scanning of checked- and carry-on luggage is acceptable, but there should be no luggage searches without specific probable cause from intelligence agencies or if the scans pick up weapons or other contraband. Similarly, people could be subject to spectrum scans and drug/bomb sniffing dogs for weapons and contraband, but again they would not be physically searched by border agents without probable cause. Also, people and luggage could not randomly be searched based on the country of their passport or their flight destination or origin.

In summary, Abraham said, surveillance is like salt in food: it is essential in small amounts, but completely counter-productive if even slightly excessive.