Barry Schuler's Synapsis

(Note to readers...this commentary which I wrote back in July has stirred the pot a bit with WikiLeaks recent release of more classified documents. In the original posting I make the point that if you download documents from WIkiLeaks you are taking possession of illegally obtained classified documents and you are committing a crime.  Glenn Greenwald, a former Constitutional Law Litigator and columist for Salon.com took me to task on Twitter stating that we do not have a State Secrets act in the US and therefore my statement was incorrect.  Other legal experts promptly contacted me to point to recent Federal code 18 USC 793 that suggests that unauthorized possession of classified documents could lead to prosecution with up to 10yrs. $10K fine.  I am not smart enough to determine who is right, but it appears that this is one that might make it to our Judicial system much like the copyright cases spawned by Napster.  Suffice to say, it is clearly controversial enough and I don't have the expertise to make the original statement with conviction, so I have removed it).

For those not familiar, WikiLeaks is a website that encourages people to be whistle-blowers.  It provides a venue for people to anonymously publish secret or confidential information in an effort to give the public the "right-to-know."  Run by a self-professed anti-beaurocracy zealot Julian Assange, it is an operation that lurks in the shadows, with no actual physical location, and servers scattered around the world to avoid censorship.

While the mission may sound altruistic it has led to some serious results. Notably, they have regularly encouraged employees of  Government Agencies to leak classified documents (which in their judgement) expose any sort of abusive or corrupt behavior hidden under cover of "SECRET."  It is important to understand that anyone who holds a classified clearance is committing a crime by making classified info public.  But WikiLeaks' position is the public has the right to full transparency on EVERYTHING and they exist to "out" all of the bad guys.

One might  draw analogies to the early days of peer-to-peer media sharing sites that facilitated piracy of music.  "Music should be freely shared on the Internet!" was the mantra of the digerati. Napster facilitated the theft of copyrighted content but claimed they were clean of any wrongdoing. Ultimately the Courts ruled otherwise.

WikiLeaks is a far more onerous situation. It can kill.

It's worth a short trip back to 1997 for some WWW history. At the time, the Internet was really beginning to take off and I was a senior executive at AOL.  Being situated in the suburbs of DC, we had a unique position and relationship with the Feds.  We had a strong vision of what the Internet could become over time: a medium that reached and connected every person and could deliver mail, telephony, e-commerce, even music and video. Since these activities crossed the paths of many regulatory agencies we decided we should proactively educate and lobby Congress with two clear objectives. 1:  keep the Internet unregulated and protected by the First Amendment and 2: prevent any taxes on e-commerce to allow the category to take hold and flourish.  It took a lot of work, but we rallied the rest of the young industry and created The Internet Caucus.  We met and met and pitched our hearts out and we prevailed.

I vividly recall a meeting at the White House where the President Clinton stared us down and pointed that famous big pointer finger at us an said "I'm all for keeping the Internet unregulated, as long as all you boys understand you have to regulate yourselves."

Watching the Internet evolve over the last decade, a new generation of companies are in the driver's seat. Some run by people who were in grade school when the Internet was taking root.  They have no appreciation for that powerful warning by Clinton. In fact, many don't agree there should be any self regulation at all. From my view as an aging Internet Geek, I see some very bad trends:

1. Utter lack of regard for privacy.  There are no slander and libel laws, thus anything goes.  Anybody can say or post anything about anybody.  If a teacher loses their temper in class it's bound to be videoed by a student with a cell phone and posted by 3:30.  By 5:00 it's on CNN.  But the video is missing the part where the student getting yelled at just slugged some kid in the face.  Ultimately the context and facts come out, but a reputation is destroyed.

2. Journalistic integrity.  The democratization of media via the Internet has created an explosion of bloggers and very useful content.  But consumer beware.  Are you reading facts which have been checked and multiple sourced or is it opinion.  Worst of all, legit traditional media outlets like the NYT, CNN, Fox etc. are being dragged down to the blogger denominator, explicitly demonstrated by the sad Shirley Sherrod incident.

3. Cookies, super cookies, tracking, page scraping.  When was the last time you checked the cookies on your machine?  Guarantee you will be shocked.  Every click, everything you do is being studiously followed in an effort to provide you advertising you are more likely to find relevant. Good thing no? Perhaps they should be required to ask your permission first.

4. Porn glorious porn.  No judgements here.  Whatever floats your boat.  But what about protecting our kids? Want your 12 year old introduced to graphic pictures of fisting to compliment their Sex Ed? AOL in it's heyday had the best parental control tools ever created and used by a record 25% of members.  Today there is nothing.  No industry consensus on how to offer easy- to-use filtering tools or ratings.  Commonsense Media takes a good shot at educating parents, but most kids run circles around them when it comes to getting around the Internet.

5. Lack of disclosure of invasive tactics.  FaceBook is the poster child here.  If you use it, your postings, pictures, pages and activities will be published across the open Internet unless you manage your way through their complex configuration process to turn things off.  Plus, all of your behavioral information may be passed along to FaceBook advertisers without your knowledge.  Counter-argument:  you get it for free, and no one is making you use it.  

6. Spam, Scam, Fraud.  We have the technology to make it go away, but the industry would have to agree to some new authentication standards and update protocols.  Unfortunately money is made on Spam and since consumers have been trained to expect everything for free.  You gotta make a buck somewhere to pay for bandwidth and servers.

And then there is WikiLeaks.  Perhaps the most dangerous, egregious misuse of the Internet to date.  Full disclosure: I hold classified clearances in association with work I do with tech innovations for the Department of Defense.  It wasn't a fun process getting cleared.  I take the responsibility of protecting secret information seriously.  And I believe adamantly that our government cannot protect us without the ability to maintain secrets.  

Can this system be abused?  Of course.  But is WikiLeaks the right method of checks and balances? NO, NO and NO.  Aside from the illegality, it is very dangerous publishing information without context.  Battlefield reports can easily be misconstrued.  And oh btw, there are just as many disgruntled employees in the Public Sector as the Private Sector.  It may be fine to bash your boss on your blog or FaceBook wall, but when you try and embarrass your boss by releasing secret info, you can be putting lives at risk.  And you should be thrown in jail.  And FYI if you decide to download a classified document from WikiLeaks you are now in possession of illegally obtained information. 

So perhaps we have come to that place, where the Internet Industry has lost any sense of center.  Maybe it is so distributed that there is no controlling it.  WikiLeaks brokering illegal and dangerous activity is an open invitation for the Feds to step in with a brand new bureaucracy under the auspices of the FCC to create guidelines and censorship, just like they do with the commercial TV networks.  Make no mistake, it is already being studied.