A special collection of papers by the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and King’s College London (KCL) resulting from: “… a virtual conference as part of KCL’s Project for Peaceful Competition. It brought together an intellectually and geographically diverse group of experts to discuss the geoeconomics of new digital technologies and the prospects for governance of the technologies in a multi-polar world. The papers prepared for discussion at the conference are collected in this series. An introduction summarizes (in heavily abbreviated form) the principal analytical conclusions emerging from the conference, together with the main policy recommendations put forward by participants….(More)”.
Technology is revolutionizing how intelligence is gathered and analyzed – and opening a window onto Russian military activity around Ukraine
Craig Nazareth at The Conversation: “…Through information captured by commercial companies and individuals, the realities of Russia’s military posturing are accessible to anyone via internet search or news feed. Commercial imaging companies are posting up-to-the-minute, geographically precise images of Russia’s military forces. Several news agencies are regularly monitoring and reporting on the situation. TikTok users are posting video of Russian military equipment on rail cars allegedly on their way to augment forces already in position around Ukraine. And internet sleuths are tracking this flow of information.
This democratization of intelligence collection in most cases is a boon for intelligence professionals. Government analysts are filling the need for intelligence assessments using information sourced from across the internet instead of primarily relying on classified systems or expensive sensors high in the sky or arrayed on the planet.
However, sifting through terabytes of publicly available data for relevant information is difficult. Knowing that much of the data could be intentionally manipulated to deceive complicates the task.
Enter the practice of open-source intelligence. The U.S. director of national intelligence defines Open-Source Intelligence, or OSINT, as the collection, evaluation and analysis of publicly available information. The information sources include news reports, social media posts, YouTube videos and satellite imagery from commercial satellite operators.
OSINT communities and government agencies have developed best practices for OSINT, and there are numerous free tools. Analysts can use the tools to develop network charts of, for example, criminal organizations by scouring publicly available financial records for criminal activity.
Private investigators are using OSINT methods to support law enforcement, corporate and government needs. Armchair sleuths have used OSINT to expose corruption and criminal activity to authorities. In short, the majority of intelligence needs can be met through OSINT…
Even with OSINT best practices and tools, OSINT contributes to the information overload intelligence analysts have to contend with. The intelligence analyst is typically in a reactive mode trying to make sense of a constant stream of ambiguous raw data and information.
Machine learning, a set of techniques that allows computers to identify patterns in large amounts of data, is proving invaluable for processing OSINT information, particularly photos and videos. Computers are much faster at sifting through large datasets, so adopting machine learning tools and techniques to optimize the OSINT process is a necessity.
Identifying patterns makes it possible for computers to evaluate information for deception and credibility and predict future trends. For example, machine learning can be used to help determine whether information was produced by a human or by a bot or other computer program and whether a piece of data is authentic or fraudulent…(More)”.
How privacy’s past may shape its future
Essay by Alessandro Acquisti, Laura Brandimarte and Jeff Hancock: “Continued expansion of human activities into digital realms gives rise to concerns about digital privacy and its invasions, often expressed in terms of data rights and internet surveillance. It may thus be tempting to construe privacy as a modern phenomenon—something our ancestors lacked and technological innovation and urban growth made possible. Research from history, anthropology, and ethnography suggests otherwise. The evidence for peoples seeking to manage the boundaries of private and public spans time and space, social class, and degree of technological sophistication. Privacy—not merely hiding of data, but the selective opening and closing of the self to others—appears to be both culturally specific and culturally universal. But what could explain the simultaneous universality and diversity of a human drive for privacy? An account of the evolutionary roots of privacy may offer an answer and teach us about privacy’s digital future and how to manage it….(More)”.
A Taxonomy for AI / Data for Good
Paper by Jake Porway: “There is huge potential for AI and data science to play a productive role in advancing social impact. However, the field of “AI for good” and “data for good” is not only overshadowed by the public conversations about the risks rampant data misuse can pose to civil society, it is also a fractured and disconnected space without a single shared vision. One of the biggest issues preventing AI for Good from becoming an established field is a lack of clarity. “Data” and “AI” are treated like they’re well-defined terms, but they are stand-ins for a huge set of different – and sometimes competing – outcomes, outputs, and activities. The terms “AI for Good” and “Data for Good” is as unhelpful as saying “Wood for Good”. We would laugh at a term as vague as “Wood for Good”, which would lump together activities as different as building houses to burning wood in cook stoves to making paper, combining architecture with carpentry, forestry with fuel. However, we are content to say “AI for Good”, and its related phrases “we need to use our data better” or “we need to be data-driven”, when data is arguably even more general than something like wood.
One way to cut through this fog is to be far more clear about what a given AI-for-good initiative seeks to achieve, and by what means. To that end, we’ve created a taxonomy, a family tree of AI-and-Data-for-Good initiatives, that groups initiatives based on their goals and strategies. This taxonomy came about as a result of studying and classifying over 600 initiatives labeled as “AI for good” or “data for good” publicly (you can read more about the methodology here). At the highest level, the taxonomy identifies six major branches of AI and data for good activities, which will help field builders, funders, and nonprofits better understand the distinctions in this space. Within each branch, you’ll see sub-branches that further subdivide initiatives, which we hope will aid collaboration for the groups within those branches and help funders make more strategic funding decisions.
Below you’ll find a landscape map of a subset of initiatives in the AI and Data for Good space, categorized into those six main branches we observed. Before we dive into describing each branch, here are a few caveats on how to interpret this work:
- We are focused on initiatives that are enabling and advancing the field of Data for Good, not trying to catalog every data science project every nonprofit or company is doing (though that would be an interesting landscape to see as well). These initiatives are those focused on advancing the field of using data and AI for good.
- We chose to categorize initiatives, not organizations. It would be impossible to classify “Microsoft”, when their activities span funding through Microsoft Philanthropies, creating open satellite imagery through Microsoft AI for Earth, providing infrastructure through nonprofit licenses of Microsoft Azure, and so on. Therefore you may see organizations appear multiple times across the landscape.
- The current database of organizations is minuscule – it is nowhere near exhaustive. We have only mapped enough initiatives to show the results for feedback, but we encourage you to recommend other initiatives you know of but don’t see here with this form.
- While we are incredibly privileged to have advisors contributing to this project from countries like Brazil, Nigeria, and Nepal, the initiative still skew Western…(More)”.
Direct democracy and equality: a global perspective
Paper by Anna Krämling et al: “Direct democracy is seen as a potential cure to the malaise of representative democracy. It is increasingly used worldwide. However, research on the effects of direct democracy on important indicators like socio-economic, legal, and political equality is scarce, and mainly limited to Europe and the US. The global perspective is missing. This article starts to close this gap. It presents descriptive findings on direct democratic votes at the national level in the (partly) free countries of the Global South and Oceania between 1990 and 2015. It performs the first comparative analysis of direct democracy on these continents. Contradicting concerns that direct democracy may be a threat to equality, we found more bills aimed at increasing equality. Likewise, these votes produced more pro- than contra-equality outputs. This held for all continents as well as for all dimensions of equality….(More)”.
Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media
Book by Jacob Mchangama: A global history of free speech, from the ancient world to today. Hailed as the “first freedom,” free speech is the bedrock of democracy. But it is a challenging principle, subject to erosion in times of upheaval. Today, in democracies and authoritarian states around the world, it is on the retreat.
In Free Speech, Jacob Mchangama traces the riveting legal, political, and cultural history of this idea. Through captivating stories of free speech’s many defenders—from the ancient Athenian orator Demosthenes and the ninth-century freethinker al-Rāzī, to the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells and modern-day digital activists—Mchangama reveals how the free exchange of ideas underlies all intellectual achievement and has enabled the advancement of both freedom and equality worldwide. Yet the desire to restrict speech, too, is a constant, and he explores how even its champions can be led down this path when the rise of new and contrarian voices challenge power and privilege of all stripes.
Meticulously researched and deeply humane, Free Speech demonstrates how much we have gained from this principle—and how much we stand to lose without it…(More)”.
Guide to Digital Participation Platforms
Guide by People Powered: “In the past decade, it has become increasingly common to engage citizens in various aspects of government via online platforms. In fact, in the release of their most recent data, the publishers of the PB Atlas reported an “accelerating trend toward the digitalization of participatory budgeting,” spurred on by the COVID pandemic.
To satisfy this demand, several comprehensive digital participation platforms have emerged. They help governments, civil society groups, and other institutions engage residents in all types and stages of participatory processes, ranging from planning and budgeting to citizens’ assemblies and the drafting of legislation.
While we often think of such technological platforms in the context of advanced democracies, they have been used to facilitate participatory decision-making in a wide variety of contexts.
At their best, platforms enable decision-makers or communities to manage:
- Community and stakeholder engagement.
- Collective deliberation and decision-making.
- Public communication.
- Project tracking and monitoring.
- Internal coordination.
If you are looking to engage your community through a digital platform, this guide is for you. It explains what they are and shows you how to choose, set up, and run them. We’ve reviewed hundreds of participatory democracy tools and platforms, and this guide shares a limited subset for your consideration (see our Digital Participation Platforms Matrix)…(More)”.
An archaeology of innovation: Approaching social and technological change in human society
Book by Catherine J. Frieman: “This book is the first monograph-length investigation of innovation and the innovation process from an archaeological perspective. We live in a world where innovation, innovativeness, creativity, and invention are almost laughably over-used buzzwords. Yet comparatively little research has been carried out on the long-term history of innovation beyond and before the Industrial Revolution. This monograph offers both a response and a sort of answer to the wider trans-disciplinary dialogue on innovation, invention, and technological and social change. The idea of innovation that permeates our popular media and our political and scientific discourse is set against the long-term perspective that only archaeology can offer in dialogue with a range of social theory about the development of new technologies and social structures. The book offers a new version of the story of human inventiveness from our earliest hominin ancestors to the present day. In doing so, it challenges the contemporary lionization of disruptive technologies, while also setting the post-Industrial-Revolution innovation boom into a deeper temporal and wider cultural context. It argues that the present narrow focus on pushing the adoption of technical innovations ignores the complex interplay of social, technological, and environmental systems that underlies truly innovative societies; the inherent connections between new technologies, technologists, and social structure that give them meaning and make them valuable; and the significance and value of conservative social practices that lead to the frequent rejection of innovations…(More)”.
The Voltage Effect
Book by John A. List: “Scale” has become a favored buzzword in the startup world. But scale isn’t just about accumulating more users or capturing more market share. It’s about whether an idea that takes hold in a small group can do the same in a much larger one—whether you’re growing a small business, rolling out a diversity and inclusion program, or delivering billions of doses of a vaccine.
Translating an idea into widespread impact, says University of Chicago economist John A. List, depends on one thing only: whether it can achieve “high voltage”—the ability to be replicated at scale.
In The Voltage Effect, List explains that scalable ideas share a common set of attributes, while any number of attributes can doom an unscalable idea. Drawing on his original research, as well as fascinating examples from the realms of business, policymaking, education, and public health, he identifies five measurable vital signs that a scalable idea must possess, and offers proven strategies for avoiding voltage drops and engineering voltage gains. You’ll learn:
• How celebrity chef Jamie Oliver expanded his restaurant empire by focusing on scalable “ingredients” (until it collapsed because talent doesn’t scale)
• Why the failure to detect false positives early on caused the Reagan-era drug-prevention program to backfire at scale
• How governments could deliver more services to more citizens if they focused on the last dollar spent
• How one education center leveraged positive spillovers to narrow the achievement gap across the entire community
• Why the right set of incentives, applied at scale, can boost voter turnout, increase clean energy use, encourage patients to consistently take their prescribed medication, and more…(More)”.
Oversight Board publishes policy advisory opinion on the sharing of private residential information
Press Release by Oversight Board: “Last year, Meta requested a policy advisory opinion from the Board on the sharing of private residential addresses and images, and the contexts in which this information may be published on Facebook and Instagram. Meta considers this to be a difficult question as while access to such information can be relevant to journalism and civic activism, “exposing this information without consent can create a risk to residents’ safety and infringe on an individual’s privacy.”
Meta’s request noted several potential harms linked to releasing personal information, including residential addresses and images. These include “doxing,” (which refers to the release of documents, abbreviated as “dox”) where information which can identify someone is revealed online. Meta noted that doxing can have negative real-world consequences, such as harassment or stalking…
The Board understands that the sharing of private residential addresses and images represents a potentially serious violation of the right to privacy both for people who use Facebook and Instagram, and those who do not.
Once this information is shared, the harms that can result, such as doxing, are difficult to remedy. Harms resulting from doxing disproportionately affect groups such as women, children and LGBTQIA+ people, and can include emotional distress, loss of employment and even physical harm or death.
As the potential for harm is particularly context specific, it is challenging to develop objective and universal indicators that would allow content reviewers to distinguish the sharing of content that would be harmful from shares that would not be. That is why the Board believes that the Privacy Violations policy should be more protective of privacy.
International human rights standards permit necessary and proportionate restrictions on expression to protect people’s right to privacy. As such, the Board favors narrowing the exceptions to the Privacy Violations policy to help Meta better protect the private residential information of people both on and off its platforms.
In exchanges with the Board, Meta stressed that “ensuring that the “publicly available” definition does not exempt content from removal that poses a risk of offline harm” is a “persistent concern.” Public records and other sources of what could be considered “publicly available” information still require resources and effort to be accessed by the general public. On social media, however, such information may be shared and accessed more quickly, and on a much bigger scale, which significantly increases the risk of harm. As such, the Board proposes removing the “publicly available” exception for the sharing of both private residential addresses and images that meet certain criteria….(More)”.