Digital Technology and Democratic Theory


Book edited by Lucy Bernholz, Helene Landemore, and Rob Reich: “One of the most far-reaching transformations in our era is the wave of digital technologies rolling over—and upending—nearly every aspect of life. Work and leisure, family and friendship, community and citizenship have all been modified by now-ubiquitous digital tools and platforms. Digital Technology and Democratic Theory looks closely at one significant facet of our rapidly evolving digital lives: how technology is radically changing our lives as citizens and participants in democratic governments.


To understand these transformations, this book brings together contributions by scholars from multiple disciplines to wrestle with the question of how digital technologies shape, reshape, and affect fundamental questions about democracy and democratic theory. As expectations have whiplashed—from Twitter optimism in the wake of the Arab Spring to Facebook pessimism in the wake of the 2016 US election—the time is ripe for a more sober and long-term assessment. How should we take stock of digital technologies and their promise and peril for reshaping democratic societies and institutions? To answer, this volume broaches the most pressing technological changes and issues facing democracy as a philosophy and an institution….(More)”.

The High Price of Mistrust


fs.blog: “There are costs to falling community participation. Rather than simply lamenting the loss of a past golden era (as people have done in every era), Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam explains these costs, as well as how we might bring community participation back.

First published twenty years ago, Bowling Alone is an exhaustive, hefty work. In its 544 pages, Putnam negotiated mountains of data to support his thesis that the previous few decades had seen Americans retreat en masse from public life. Putnam argued Americans had become disconnected from their wider communities, as evidenced by changes such as a decline in civic engagement and dwindling membership rates for groups such as bowling leagues and PTAs.

Though aspects of Bowling Alone are a little dated today (“computer-mediated communication” isn’t a phrase you’re likely to have heard recently), a quick glance at 2021’s social landscape would suggest many of the trends Putnam described have only continued and apply in other parts of the world too.

Right now, polarization and social distancing have forced us apart from any sense of community to a degree that can seem irresolvable.

Will we ever bowl in leagues alongside near strangers and turn them into friends again? Will we ever bowl again at all, even if alone, or will those gleaming aisles, too-tight shoes, and overpriced sodas fade into a distant memory we recount to our children?

The idea of going into a public space for a non-essential reason can feel incredibly out of reach for many of us right now. And who knows how spaces like bowling alleys will survive in the long run without the social scenes that fuelled them. Now is a perfect time to revisit Bowling Alone to see what it can still teach us, because many of its warnings and lessons are perhaps more relevant now than at its time of publication.

One key lesson we can derive from Bowling Alone is that the less we trust each other—something which is both a cause and consequence of declining community engagement—the more it costs us. Mistrust is expensive.…(More)”

These crowdsourced maps will show exactly where surveillance cameras are watching


Mark Sullivan at FastCompany: “Amnesty International is producing a map of all the places in New York City where surveillance cameras are scanning residents’ faces.

The project will enlist volunteers to use their smartphones to identify, photograph, and locate government-owned surveillance cameras capable of shooting video that could be matched against people’s faces in a database through AI-powered facial recognition.

The map that will eventually result is meant to give New Yorkers the power of information against an invasive technology the usage of which and purpose is often not fully disclosed to the public. It’s also meant to put pressure on the New York City Council to write and pass a law restricting or banning it. Other U.S. cities, such as Boston, Portland, and San Francisco, have already passed such laws.

Facial recognition technology can be developed by scraping millions of images from social media profiles and driver’s licenses without people’s consent, Amnesty says. Software from companies like Clearview AI can then use computer vision algorithms to match those images against facial images captured by closed-circuit television (CCTV) or other video surveillance cameras and stored in a database.

Starting in May, volunteers will be able to use a software tool to identify all the facial recognition cameras within their view—like at an intersection where numerous cameras can often be found. The tool, which runs on a phone’s browser, lets users place a square around any cameras they see. The software integrates Google Street View and Google Earth to help volunteers label and attach geolocation data to the cameras they spot.

The map is part of a larger campaign called “Ban the Scan” that’s meant to educate people around the world on the civil rights dangers of facial recognition. Research has shown that facial recognition systems aren’t as accurate when it comes to analyzing dark-skinned faces, putting Black people at risk of being misidentified. Even when accurate, the technology exacerbates systemic racism because it is disproportionately used to identify people of color, who are already subject to discrimination by law enforcement officials. The campaign is sponsored by Amnesty in partnership with a number of other tech advocacy, privacy, and civil liberties groups.

In the initial phase of the project, which was announced last Thursday, Amnesty and its partners launched a website that New Yorkers can use to generate public comments on the New York Police Department’s (NYPD’s) use of facial recognition….(More)”.

Sharing Student Health Data with Health Agencies: Considerations and Recommendations


Memo by the Center for Democracy and Technology: “As schools respond to COVID-19 on their campuses, some have shared student information with state and local health agencies, often to aid in contact tracing or to provide services to students. Federal and state student privacy laws, however, do not necessarily permit that sharing, and schools should seek to protect both student health and student privacy.

How Are Schools Sharing COVID-Related Student Data?

When it comes to sharing student data, schools’ practices vary widely. For example, the New York City Department of Education provides a consent form for sharing COVID-related student data. Other schools do not have consent forms, but instead, share COVID-related data as required by local or state health agencies. For instance, Orange County Public Schools in Florida assists the local health agency in contact tracing by collecting information such as students’ names and dates of birth. Some districts, such as the Dallas Independent School District in Texas, report positive cases to the county, but do not publicly specify what information is reported. Many schools, however, do not publicly disclose their collection and sharing of COVID-related student data….(More)”

Citizen acceptance of mass surveillance? Identity, intelligence, and biodata concerns


Paper by Westerlund, Mika; Isabelle, Diane A; Leminen, Seppo: “News media and human rights organizations are warning about the rise of the surveillance state that builds on distrust and mass surveillance of its citizens. Further, the global pandemic has fostered public-private collaboration such as the launch of contact tracing apps to tackle COVID-19. Thus, such apps also contribute to the diffusion of technologies that can collect and analyse large amounts of sensitive data and the growth of the surveillance society. This study examines the impacts of citizens’ concerns about digital identity, government’s intelligence activities, and security of the increasing biodata on their trust in and acceptance of government’s use of personal data. Our analysis of survey data from 1,486 Canadians suggest that those concerns have direct effects on people’s acceptance of government’s use of personal data, but not necessarily on the trust in the government being respectful of privacy. Authorities should be more transparent about the collection and uses of data….(More)”

Re-use of smart city data: The need to acquire a social license through data assemblies


Written Testimony by Stefaan G. Verhulst before the New York City Council Committee on Technology: “…In crises such as these, calls for the city to harness technology and data to help policy-makers find solutions grow louder and stronger. Many have spoken about accelerating already ongoing work to turn New York into “a smart city” — using digital technology to connect, protect, and improve the lives of its residents. Some of this proposed work could involve the use of sensors to collect data on how people live and work across New York City. Other work could involve expanding the city’s relationships with private organizations through data collaboratives. Data collaboratives, which are central to our work at the GovLab, are a new form of collaboration that extends beyond the conventional public-private partnership model, in which participants from different sectors exchange their data to create public value. The city already operates one such data collaborative in the form of the NYC Recovery Data Partnership, a partnership that allows New York-based private and civic organizations to provide their data to analysts at city agencies to inform the COVID-19 pandemic response. I have the privilege of serving as an advisor to that initiative.

Data collaboration takes place widely through a variety of institutional, contractual and technical structures and instruments. Borrowing in language and inspiration from the open data movement, the emerging data collaborative movement has proven its value and possible positive impact. Data reuse has the potential to improve disease treatment, identify better ways to source supplies, monitor adherence to non-pharmaceutical restrictions, and provide a range of other public benefits. Whether it is informing decision-making or shaping the development of new tools and techniques, it is clear that data has tremendous potential to mitigate the worst effects of this pandemic.

However, as promising and attractive as reusing data might seem, it is important to keep in mind that there also exist widespread concerns and challenges….

My colleagues and I at The GovLab believe the Data Assembly methodology offers the city a new way forward on the issues under discussion today, as they relate to smart cities. In our view, oversight cannot just be a reactive process of responding to complaints but a proactive one, inviting city residents, data holders, and advocacy groups to the table to determine what is and is not acceptable. Amid rapidly changing circumstances, the city needs ways to collect and synthesize actionable and diverse public input to identify concerns, expectations, and opportunities. We encourage the city to explore assembling mini-publics of its own or, failing that, commission legitimate partners to lead such efforts.

New York faces many challenges in 2021 but I do not doubt the capacity of its people to overcome these struggles. Through people-led innovation and processes, the city can ensure that data re-use conducted as part of the smart city is deemed legitimate and more effective and targeted. It can also support the city in ensuring work across the city is more open, collaborative, and legitimate…(More)”.

Nowcasting Gentrification Using Airbnb Data


Paper by Shomik Jain, Davide Proserpio, Giovanni Quattrone, and Daniele Quercia: “There is a rumbling debate over the impact of gentrification: presumed gentrifiers have been the target of protests and attacks in some cities, while they have been welcome as generators of new jobs and taxes in others. Census data fails to measure neighborhood change in real-time since it is usually updated every ten years. This work shows that Airbnb data can be used to quantify and track neighborhood changes. Specifically, we consider both structured data (e.g. number of listings, number of reviews, listing information) and unstructured data (e.g. user-generated reviews processed with natural language processing and machine learning algorithms) for three major cities, New York City (US), Los Angeles (US), and Greater London (UK). We find that Airbnb data (especially its unstructured part) appears to nowcast neighborhood gentrification, measured as changes in housing affordability and demographics. Overall, our results suggest that user-generated data from online platforms can be used to create socioeconomic indices to complement traditional measures that are less granular, not in real-time, and more costly to obtain….(More)”.

Rescuing Our Democracy by Rethinking New York Times Co. v. Sullivan


Paper by David Andrew Logan: “New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) is an iconic decision, foundational to modern First Amendment theory, and in a string of follow-on decisions the Court firmly grounded free speech theory and practice in the need to protect democratic discourse. To do this the Court provided broad and deep protections to the publishers of falsehoods. This article recognizes that New York Times and its progeny made sense in the “public square” of an earlier era, but the justices could never have foreseen the dramatic changes in technology and the media environment in the years since, nor predict that by making defamation cases virtually impossible to win they were harming, rather than helping self-government. In part because of New York Times, the First Amendment has been weaponized, frustrating a basic requirement of a healthy democracy: the development of a set of broadly agreed-upon facts. Instead, we are subject to waves of falsehoods that swamp the ability of citizens to effectively self-govern. As a result, and despite its iconic status, New York Times needs to be reexamined and retooled to better serve our democracy….(More)”

When FOIA Goes to Court: 20 Years of Freedom of Information Act Litigation by News Organizations and Reporters


Report by The FOIA Project: “The news media are powerful players in the world of government transparency and public accountability. One important tool for ensuring public accountability is through invoking transparency mandates provided by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In 2020, news organizations and individual reporters filed 122 different FOIA suits[1] to compel disclosure of federal government records—more than any year on record according to federal court data back to 2001 analyzed by the FOIA Project

In fact, the media alone have filed a total of 386 FOIA cases during the four years of the Trump Administration, from 2017 through 2020. This is greater than the total of 311 FOIA media cases filed during the sixteen years of the Bush and Obama Administrations combined. Moreover, many of these FOIA cases were the very first FOIA cases filed by members of the news media. Almost as many new FOIA litigators filed their first case in court in the past four years—178 from 2017 to 2020—than the years 2001 to 2016, when 196 FOIA litigators filed their first case. Reporters made up the majority of these. During the past four years, more than four out of five of first-time litigators were individual reporters. The ranks of FOIA litigators thus expanded considerably during the Trump Administration, with more reporters challenging agencies in court for failing to provide records they are seeking, either alone or with their news organizations.

Using the FOIA Project’s unique dataset of FOIA cases filed in federal court, this report provides unprecedented and valuable insight into the rapid growth of media lawsuits designed to make the government more transparent and accountable to the public. The complete, updated list of news media cases, along with the names of organizations and reporters who filed these suits, is available on the News Media List at FOIAProject.org. Figure 1shows the total number of FOIA cases filed by the news each year. Counts are available in Appendix Table 1 at the end of this report….(More)”.

Figure 1. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Cases Filed by News Organizations and Reporters in Federal Court, 2001–2020.

The War on Professionalism


Jonathan Rauch in National Affairs: “…As a child, I asked my father, a lawyer, what the word “professional” meant. He replied, “it means you do something for a living.” He contrasted it with the term “amateur,” meaning someone who works for pleasure.

My father’s definition has merit. I recall it whenever I tell interns that, to me, professionalism means performing a job to the highest standards, even when I don’t feel like doing it at all. One might think of the doctor who shows up for emergency surgery on Christmas Eve, the journalist who takes care to verify every fact mentioned in a report, or the concert pianist who gives the audience the best he is capable of night after night, even on nights when he would much rather be doing anything else.

That concept of professionalism is a good starting point, but we can dig deeper by drawing on the work of the American Enterprise Institute’s Yuval Levin. In his book A Time to Build, Levin explores the role and meaning of institutions. Institutions, he says, are — or, when they function well, should be — forms, training and shaping people to work together toward a larger goal. The military is a classic example, as are churches and schools. These “structures of social life” provide the durable arrangements that frame our perceptions, mold our character, and delineate our social existence.

When institutions do not or cannot perform those shaping functions, they collapse into something more like platforms — stages upon which individuals perform in order to build audiences and self-advertise. He locates the collapse of trust in institutions — and the resulting public sense of anomie and disconnectedness — in the conversion of many institutions from places where people are formed to places where people perform. Thus a self-promoting real-estate magnate can become a self-promoting reality-TV host and then a self-promoting presidential candidate, hopping from one stage to the next, all while putting on pretty much the same show.

As institutions have drifted away from shaping us and toward displaying us, they have lost both efficacy and legitimacy. And we, in turn, have naturally lost confidence in them. Moreover, Levin argues, institutions have been taken for granted for so long, and yet are neglected so generally, that we have lost even the vocabulary for talking about what they are supposed to be doing. We don’t realize what we are missing, although we acutely feel the void.

Something very much like that has happened with professionalism. A combination of institutional absence, lazy thinking, and populist politics has collapsed the idea of professionalism down to the much flatter notion of elitism.

To some extent, it is natural to think of professionalism and elitism as two sides of the same coin. After all, many professionals are people with advanced degrees and high incomes who occupy elite positions in society. We imagine professionalism to be about excluding others from certain pursuits or occupations like law and medicine — a seemingly elitist practice. We think of it, too, as synonymous with professional schooling, something not everyone can aspire to.

Still, there is a world of difference between professionals and elites. Elites are influential by dint of who they are and whom they know. They are elite because they have social connections and powerful positions. Professionals, by contrast, are influential by dint of what they know and what they do. Their status is contingent on both their standing and their behavior.

That distinction gestures toward a fuller definition of professionalism, one that implies commitment to personal standards, social norms, and expert knowledge in furtherance of a mission or an institution. That is, professionalism defines a right way of doing things — a notion of best practices — that is grounded in dedication to a mission or an institution rather than personal advancement or partisan loyalty. As Levin says, professionalism “tends to yield a strong internal ethos among practitioners. In uncertain situations, a professional asks himself, ‘What should I do here, given my professional responsibilities?’ And his profession will generally have an answer to that question.”

As Levin notices, institutionalism and professionalism are cousins. Both institutions and professions organize individuals to accomplish missions, they seek to inculcate norms and guide behavior, they assemble and transmit knowledge and best practices across generations, they cultivate reputational capital over long spans of time, and they draw and enforce boundaries between insiders and outsiders….(More)”