How to Track What Congress Is Doing on the Internet


Louise Matsakis at Motherboard: “There’s now a way to track what government employees, including elected officials, are doing online during working hours.

A new plugin created by a software engineer in North Carolina lets website administrators monitor when someone accesses their site from an IP address associated with the federal government. It was created in part to protest a piece of legislation the president signed earlier this year.

In April, President Trump signed a measure allowing internet service providers (ISPs) to sell sensitive information about your online habits without needing your consent, rolling back Obama-era regulations intended to stop that very thing from happening.

Corporations like Verizon and AT&T hated the regulations (and spent a boatload lobbying against them), because they made it difficult to monetize the mountain of customer data they have the ability to collect.

Consumers, on the other hand, were outraged, and wondered what could be done to get back at the lawmakers who voted in favor of the measure. One appealing suggestion was to buy and release their browsing history, then release it to the public.

Almost immediately, a handful of GoFundMe pages dedicated to raising money for the cause popped up. While the campaigns are well-intentioned, what their creators don’t realize is that what they want to do is illegal. The Telecommunications Act prohibits sharing (or selling) customer information that is “individually identifiable,” except under special circumstances.

In other words, there’s no database where you can purchase your Congressman’s online porn habits and there likely won’t be anytime soon, even with the data-collection regulations dismantled.

But a new tool created by Matt Feld, the founder of several nonprofits including Speak Together, could help the public get a sense of what elected officials are up to online….(More)”

Deliberative Democracy as Open, Not (Just) Representative Democracy


Paper by Helene Landemore: “Deliberative democracy is at risk of becoming collateral damage of the current crisis of representative democracy. If deliberative democracy is necessarily representative and if representation betrays the true meaning of democracy as rule of, by, and for the people, then how can deliberative democracy retain any validity as a theory of political legitimacy? Any tight connection between deliberative democracy and representative democracy thus risks making deliberative democracy obsolete: a dated paradigm fit for a precrisis order, but maladjusted to the world of Occupy, the Pirate Party, the Zapatistas, and other antirepresentative movements. This essay argues that the problem comes from a particular and historically situated understanding of representative democracy as rule by elected elites. I argue that in order to retain its normative appeal and political relevance, deliberative democracy should dissociate itself from representative democracy thus understood and reinvent itself as the core of a more truly democratic paradigm, which I call “open democracy.” In open democracy, popular rule means the mediated but real exercise of power by ordinary citizens. This new paradigm privileges nonelectoral forms of representation and in it, power is meant to remain constantly inclusive of and accessible–in other words open–to ordinary citizens….(More)”

Smart Cities: Foundations, Principles and Applications


Book by Houbing Song, Ravi Srinivasan, Tamim Sookoor, Sabina Jeschke: “Smart cities are emerging as a priority for research and development across the world. They open up significant opportunities in several areas, such as economic growth, health, wellness, energy efficiency, and transportation, to promote the sustainable development of cities. This book provides the basics of smart cities, and it examines the possible future trends of this technology. Smart Cities: Foundations, Principles, and Applications provides a systems science perspective in presenting the foundations and principles that span multiple disciplines for the development of smart cities.

Divided into three parts—foundations, principles, and applications—Smart Cities addresses the various challenges and opportunities of creating smart cities and all that they have to offer. It also covers smart city theory modeling and simulation, and examines case studies of existing smart cities from all around the world. In addition, the book:

  • Addresses how to develop a smart city and how to present the state of the art and practice of them all over the world
  • Focuses on the foundations and principles needed for advancing the science, engineering, and technology of smart cities—including system design, system verification, real-time control and adaptation, Internet of Things, and test beds
  • Covers applications of smart cities as they relate to smart transportation/connected vehicle (CV) and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) for improved mobility, safety, and environmental protection…(More)”

Handbook of Cyber-Development, Cyber-Democracy, and Cyber-Defense


Living Reference Work” edited by Elias G. CarayannisDavid F. J. Campbell, and Marios Panagiotis Efthymiopoulos: “This volume covers a wide spectrum of issues relating to economic and political development enabled by information and communication technology (ICT). Showcasing contributions from researchers, industry leaders and policymakers, this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the challenges and opportunities created by technological innovations that are profoundly affecting the dynamics of economic growth, promotion of democratic principles, and the protection of individual, national, and regional rights. Of particular interest is the influence of ICT on the generation and dissemination of knowledge, which, in turn, empowers citizens and accelerates change across all strata of society. Each essay features literature reviews and key references; definition of critical terms and concepts, case examples; implications for practice, policy and theory; and discussion of future directions. Representing such fields as management, political science, economics, law, psychology and education, the authors cover such timely topics as health care, energy and environmental policy, banking and finance, disaster recovery, investment in research and development, homeland security and diplomacy in the context of ICT and its economic, political and social impact…(More)”

Crowdsourcing the fight against mosquitos


YahooFinance: “That smartphone in your pocket could hold the cure for malaria, dengue and the Zika virus, a noted Stanford University scientist says.

Manu Prakash has a history of using oddball materials for medical research. His latest project, Abuzz, uses sound. Specifically, he asks regular citizens to capture and record mosquitoes. There are 30 unique species, and each has a different wingbeat pattern.

The big idea is to use algorithms to match sample recordings with disease-carrying species, and then recommend strategies to control the population.

Weird science, sure, but don’t knock it. In this age of massive amounts of compute and abundant sensors, dreamers are doing what should be impossible. They are replicating expensive research tools with inexpensive, makeshift solutions. Solutions that can, in many cases, save lives.

In this case, citizen-scientists capture a mosquito in a plastic bottle, poke a hole in the cap and record the buzzing with their phone. Then they send the digital file off to Prakash and his team.

It’s not the first time the Indian-born professor of bioengineering has made something from almost nothing.

In 2013, he saw a centrifuge being used as a doorstop at a Ugandan clinic. The expensive medical device had been donated by well-meaning researchers. But the village had no electricity.

So, Prakash put on his problem-solving hat. He later developed the Paperfuge.

Inspired by a toy whirligig, the paper-and-string device can separate blood cells from plasma. At a cost of 20 cents, the instrument is perfect for “diagnosis in the field,” Prakash told a TED conference audience.

And that’s just one example of how a little innovation can go a long way, for not a lot of money.

While visiting remote clinics in India and Thailand, he noticed expensive microscopes were collecting dust on shelves. They were too bulky to carry into the field. In 2014, his team showed off Foldscope, an inexpensive, lightweight microscope inspired by origami….(More)”.

6 Jurisdictions Tackling Homelessness with Technology


 in GovernmentTechnology: “Public servants who work to reduce homelessness often have similar lists of challenges.

The most common of these are data sharing between groups involved with the homeless, the ability to track interactions between individuals and outreach providers, and a system that makes it easier to enter information about the population. Recently, we spoke with more than a half-dozen government officials who are involved with the homeless, and while obstacles and conditions varied among cities, all agreed that their work would be much easier with better tech-based solutions for the problems cited above.

These officials, however, were uniformly optimistic that such solutions were becoming more readily available — solutions with potential to solve the logistical hurdles that most often hamstring government, community and nonprofit efforts to help the homeless find jobs, residences and medical care. Some agencies, in fact, have already had success implementing tech as components in larger campaigns, while others are testing new platforms that may bolster organization and efficiency.

Below are a few brief vignettes that detail some — but far from all — ongoing governmental efforts to use tech to aid and reduce the homeless population.

1. BERGEN COUNTY, N.J.

One of the best examples of government using tech to address homelessness can be found in Bergen County, N.J., where officials recently certified their jurisdiction as first in the nation to end chronic homelessness. READ MORE

2. AURORA, COLO.

Aurora, Colo., in the Denver metropolitan, area uses the Homeless Management Information System required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, but those involved with addressing homelessness there have also developed tech-based efforts that are specifically tailored to the area’s needs. READ MORE

4. NEW YORK CITY

New York City is rolling out an app called StreetSmart, which enables homelessness outreach workers in all five boroughs to communicate and log data seamlessly in real time while in the field. With StreetSmart, these workers will be able to enter that information into a single citywide database as they collect it. READ MORE(Full article)

Inspecting Algorithms for Bias


Matthias Spielkamp at MIT Technology Review: “It was a striking story. “Machine Bias,” the headline read, and the teaser proclaimed: “There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.”

ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize–winning nonprofit news organization, had analyzed risk assessment software known as COMPAS. It is being used to forecast which criminals are most likely to ­reoffend. Guided by such forecasts, judges in courtrooms throughout the United States make decisions about the future of defendants and convicts, determining everything from bail amounts to sentences. When ProPublica compared COMPAS’s risk assessments for more than 10,000 people arrested in one Florida county with how often those people actually went on to reoffend, it discovered that the algorithm “correctly predicted recidivism for black and white defendants at roughly the same rate.”…

After ProPublica’s investigation, Northpointe, the company that developed COMPAS, disputed the story, arguing that the journalists misinterpreted the data. So did three criminal-justice researchers, including one from a justice-reform organization. Who’s right—the reporters or the researchers? Krishna Gummadi, head of the Networked Systems Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbrücken, Germany, offers a surprising answer: they all are.

Gummadi, who has extensively researched fairness in algorithms, says ProPublica’s and Northpointe’s results don’t contradict each other. They differ because they use different measures of fairness.

Imagine you are designing a system to predict which criminals will reoffend. One option is to optimize for “true positives,” meaning that you will identify as many people as possible who are at high risk of committing another crime. One problem with this approach is that it tends to increase the number of false positives: people who will be unjustly classified as likely reoffenders. The dial can be adjusted to deliver as few false positives as possible, but that tends to create more false negatives: likely reoffenders who slip through and get a more lenient treatment than warranted.

Raising the incidence of true positives or lowering the false positives are both ways to improve a statistical measure known as positive predictive value, or PPV. That is the percentage of all positives that are true….

But if we accept that algorithms might make life fairer if they are well designed, how can we know whether they are so designed?

Democratic societies should be working now to determine how much transparency they expect from ADM systems. Do we need new regulations of the software to ensure it can be properly inspected? Lawmakers, judges, and the public should have a say in which measures of fairness get prioritized by algorithms. But if the algorithms don’t actually reflect these value judgments, who will be held accountable?

These are the hard questions we need to answer if we expect to benefit from advances in algorithmic technology…(More)”.

Slave to the Algorithm? Why a ‘Right to Explanation’ is Probably Not the Remedy You are Looking for


Paper by Lilian Edwards and Michael Veale: “Algorithms, particularly of the machine learning (ML) variety, are increasingly consequential to individuals’ lives but have caused a range of concerns evolving mainly around unfairness, discrimination and opacity. Transparency in the form of a “right to an explanation” has emerged as a compellingly attractive remedy since it intuitively presents as a means to “open the black box”, hence allowing individual challenge and redress, as well as possibilities to foster accountability of ML systems. In the general furore over algorithmic bias and other issues laid out in section 2, any remedy in a storm has looked attractive.

However, we argue that a right to an explanation in the GDPR is unlikely to be a complete remedy to algorithmic harms, particularly in some of the core “algorithmic war stories” that have shaped recent attitudes in this domain. We present several reasons for this conclusion. First (section 3), the law is restrictive on when any explanation-related right can be triggered, and in many places is unclear, or even seems paradoxical. Second (section 4), even were some of these restrictions to be navigated, the way that explanations are conceived of legally — as “meaningful information about the logic of processing” — is unlikely to be provided by the kind of ML “explanations” computer scientists have been developing. ML explanations are restricted both by the type of explanation sought, the multi-dimensionality of the domain and the type of user seeking an explanation. However (section 5) “subject-centric” explanations (SCEs), which restrict explanations to particular regions of a model around a query, show promise for interactive exploration, as do pedagogical rather than decompositional explanations in dodging developers’ worries of IP or trade secrets disclosure.

As an interim conclusion then, while convinced that recent research in ML explanations shows promise, we fear that the search for a “right to an explanation” in the GDPR may be at best distracting, and at worst nurture a new kind of “transparency fallacy”. However, in our final section, we argue that other parts of the GDPR related (i) to other individual rights including the right to erasure (“right to be forgotten”) and the right to data portability and (ii) to privacy by design, Data Protection Impact Assessments and certification and privacy seals, may have the seeds of building a better, more respectful and more user-friendly algorithmic society….(More)”

Technology is making the world more unequal. Only technology can fix this


Here’s the good news: technology – specifically, networked technology – makes it easier for opposition movements to form and mobilise, even under conditions of surveillance, and to topple badly run, corrupt states.

Inequality creates instability, and not just because of the resentments the increasingly poor majority harbours against the increasingly rich minority. Everyone has a mix of good ideas and terrible ones, but for most of us, the harm from our terrible ideas is capped by our lack of political power and the checks that others – including the state – impose on us.

As rich people get richer, however, their wealth translates into political influence, and their ideas – especially their terrible ideas – take on outsized importance….

After all, there comes a point when the bill for guarding your wealth exceeds the cost of redistributing some of it, so you won’t need so many guards.

But that’s where technology comes in: surveillance technology makes guarding the elites much cheaper than it’s ever been. GCHQ and the NSA have managed to put the entire planet under continuous surveillance. Less technologically advanced countries can play along: Ethiopia was one of the world’s first “turnkey surveillance states”, a country with a manifestly terrible, looting elite class that has kept guillotines and firing squads at bay through buying in sophisticated spying technology from European suppliers, and using this to figure out which dissidents, opposition politicians and journalists represent a threat, so it can subject them to arbitrary detention, torture and, in some cases, execution….

That’s the bad news.

Now the good news: technology makes forming groups cheaper and easier than it’s ever been. Forming and coordinating groups is the hard problem of the human condition; the reason we have religions and corporations and criminal undergrounds and political parties. Doing work together means doing more than one person could do on their own, but it also means compromising, subjecting yourself to policies or orders from above. It’s costly and difficult, and the less money and time you have, the harder it is to form a group and mobilise it.

This is where networks shine. Modern insurgent groups substitute software for hierarchy, networks for bosses. They are able to come together without agreeing to a crisp agenda that you have to submit to in order to be part of the movement. When it costs less to form a group, it doesn’t matter so much that you aren’t all there for the same reason, and thus are doomed to fall apart. Even a small amount of work done together amounts to more than the tiny cost of admission…

The future is never so normal as we think it will be. The only sure thing about self-driving cars, for instance, is that whether or not they deliver fortunes to oligarchic transport barons, that’s not where it will end. Changing the way we travel has implications for mobility (both literal and social), the environment, surveillance, protest, sabotage, terrorism, parenting …

Long before the internet radically transformed the way we organise ourselves, theorists were predicting we’d use computers to achieve ambitious goals without traditional hierarchies – but it was a rare pundit who predicted that the first really successful example of this would be an operating system (GNU/Linux), and then an encyclopedia (Wikipedia).

The future will see a monotonic increase in the ambitions that loose-knit groups can achieve. My new novel, Walkaway, tries to signpost a territory in our future in which the catastrophes of the super-rich are transformed into something like triumphs by bohemian, anti-authoritarian “walkaways” who build housing and space programmes the way we make encyclopedias today: substituting (sometimes acrimonious) discussion and (sometimes vulnerable) networks for submission to the authority of the ruling elites….(More).

Governments and Citizens in the Digital Age


European Commission: “In 2009, the Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment was adopted in Malmö, Sweden, uniting EU member states around a comprehensive programme for administrative reform and digital government. Now, as the government of Estonia prepares to take over the presidency of the Council of the European Union, EU Member States look again at the renewed prospects for restoring public trust in the digital age and unleashing the power of the Internet towards better public services and easier citizen/state interaction.

At the High-Level Roundtable on the European Union Ministerial Declaration on Digital Government, delegations from 13 member states met to discuss a “concept paper” prepared by the Lisbon Council.

It spelled out three areas for highlight:

  1. the “once-only” principle
  2. open government
  3. eIdentity and security

Delegations promised to take up the discussion in the Council of the European Union, but they want to hear from you, too. If you haven’t already, please visit www.ideas4digitalgov.eu, where you will find a commentable version of The 2017 Ministerial Declaration on Digital Government: Key Principles and Guidelines, the “thought paper” launched at the high-level roundtable.

Let us know what you think. The consultation is open and the results, if successful, will contribute to a new Ministerial Declaration on Digital Government to be adopted at the Council of the European Union informal meeting in Autumn, 2017. (More information)”