Video: Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon 2021

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all right everybody hello welcome to air and sports day all right really excited uh to be here today we have a lot of awesome speakers for you

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and um today uh we have a hackathon going on i just wanted to make sure everybody knows there is a hackathon going on we have four main projects

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at this year's hackathon we have um the virtual museum sorry the virtual reality museum that we have the swartz manning which actually has has forked into several different projects now

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and um if you are interested in that we can give you more information we're going to have a separate zoom call for the hackathon all day so you just have to dm us on twitter

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at aaron swartz day and let us know or if you're on youtube actually you could also message uh us on youtube we've got the whole team on our youtube channel talking to you today

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and let us know and then we'll hook you up on the zoom call for the hackathon and we're gonna hear from um noah from bad apple and connor who's gonna be on next

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talking about secure drop first and then also the internet archive are gonna have um mech carpels brewster kale and tracy jaquise and mex is going to tell us about some internet

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archive projects you can hack on if you want and if you have a project that you want to add to the hackathon it's never too late to jump in and start telling people about your project

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and we can pop you on the stream later today and you can tell people about your project because that's what this is all about and don't worry about getting a lot done today um we have it set up so that you can

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continue to work on this throughout the week the secure drop folks have set up a whole system for you to be able to hack on secure drop today so that's really exciting you can actually participate

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in carrying on aaron's legacy by working on secure drop and if you start something today it's not we're not into this kill yourself over the course of the day

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to get something done kind of thing we want you to be able to hang out and talk to people hang out and hack fun zoom and do things at your own pace and really get set up to do things so you

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can enjoy the speakers and then we will take it from there as the week goes on and i'll be posting updates on the different projects i'll be talking about the different things people are doing we'll have some post q a with the

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different speakers if you don't get a chance to ask your question when they're live on camera we can get a question to them later and still have them uh answer all of your questions so we're really trying to build the community

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here in many ways last year's hackathon never ended we started having meetings in the weeks that followed and that collaboration led to our bad

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apple project which is a project of the aaron swartz day police surveillance project and noah is going to tell you about that after conor tells you about secure drop

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in just a second but we're really excited about bad apple and what potentially what it can do to help with the um terrible situation that we find

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ourselves in where if we want to go to a protest we have to think about if we want to get beat up by cops and you know that's just not the place that we want to be and we found out that these

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uh bad apples as the police force likes to call them um we sort of know it has more to do with the way they're trained from the beginning but just say for the sake of argument that it was some bad apples

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maybe we could store them in a database and track them if they get moved around from city to city and the other thing was to make a database of oversight commissions

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civilian oversight commissions for the most part there are some commissions that have the police chief on which you know isn't really the same thing

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same kind of oversight right it's like being on your own oversight commission uh where you can rubber stamp what you're doing kind of thing there's only a couple like that for the most part there has been a surge in civilian oversight commissions

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which is actually a place where you could file complaints maybe after a policeman mistreated you at a protest so we made a database of those and we have almost 180 of them in there nationwide

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and madison is going to tell you about those afternoon talks so that's what we're doing today you can ask us questions in the youtube chat you can also ask questions on the

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twitter dm we've got both those channels wide open and you can also send us email at aaronshortsday gmail.com that the team will be monitoring all day

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so hopefully we have things um you know a lot of good two-way communication going today if anything isn't working please let us know we can fix it right away like i said i have a

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i'm really excited to have a wonderful team of volunteers working with me that we've been working together for about a year now and uh today should hopefully go pretty smoothly so if anything isn't working

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don't just um you know be like oh yeah well it's earn sports day you know they couldn't get their together or whatever we we're really organized today so let us know if anything isn't working right and

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we will fix it okay all right so without any further ado i would like to introduce connor schaefer he is the cto of the freedom of the press foundation

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and they are the home of secure drop and i'm really excited to have him here today and um connor you're only slated for five minutes if you need a little more it's no problem at all we love to hear from you we want to make sure you

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can tell us all about what's going on uh today at the hackathon thank you so much lisa appreciate the introduction uh again my name is connor i work at freedom the press foundation um i'm giving a longer

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winded talk on secure jobs specifically later today so if you're really hungry for a lot of technical details uh please tune in uh the calendars on the website um what i'd like to prep people for now here just briefly is basically focused

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on the details of the hackathon you know what it means to get started uh before i dive into those details i just wanted to add a little bit to the framing uh that lisa so kindly provided here um the reason that we've been gathering uh here

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every day uh hopefully this is the last virtual one and we'll be back in person in the archive at that uh most hospitable of venues next year but the the occasion of this day i think a

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lot of us can really identify with the passion that aaron uh so clearly brought to so many different projects that he touched many of which went on to become something huge and several of which you know went the various directions as many

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uh open source projects often do so the project that i'm most closely affiliated uh that came out of aaron was the project called secure draw that was originally called dead drop back when aaron swartz was working on it um that's a reference to an old journalistic

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practice of leaving documents in a physical location uh that so that they cannot be observed um fpf picked up that project uh seeing the love that went into it and the promise that it would hold for empowering journalists investigative journalists in

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particular to communicate securely with sources and fpf adopted the project about eight years ago i've been at fpf for about seven years now focused primarily on secure drop as well as other engineering projects that we have

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the way the system works i will provide a lot more detail but in a nutshell it is installed on-premise and news organizations and makes heavy use of both gpg for encryption and tour for anonymity so if you're interested in

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hacking on some of these projects as aaron was so passionate about you can go to securedrop.org hackathon that's a redirect url that will take you right to all the nitty gritty details we have a bunch of our team uh full-time staff members at freedom of the press

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foundation who are also already online and clocking in and chugging away at some tickets so if you want to pop into our gitter channel you can use a github account to authenticate there and type in text with us lisa also will share some details about a zoom call and we'll be sitting in that

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if you prefer to speak to us directly i'll certainly be there as well so the specific nature of technical contributions we're looking for mostly most of our code is written in python so we're interested in server-side expertise for running python applications systems hardening on our

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newer project workstation we have all that plus some gui app development in the qt framework also written in python code and if you have any knowledge of lower systems virtualization or kernel hardening we'd be happy to chat with you

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as well so please pop by in any of those venues either gitter or zoom and i'd love to hear more from you no i'm going to toss it over to you awesome thank you so much let me go ahead and share my screen here okay

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great sorry i was going to introduce noah just a second no yeah no worries hey i just really wanted to make sure to give noah a proper introduction here because noah has been just an incredible

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um contributor to bad apple uh he uh his company privaezy.com sorry priveezy.org i do that all the time uh privacy.org

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makes it uh easier for people to have privacy applications such as vpn or um different secure i won't try to explain it uh wrong by mistake but but

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he came in and he really is pretty much the only reason we were able to pull bad apple off and we all contributed a lot but noah is the backbone of the project

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and the reason why it was able to be as and look as beautiful as it is he did the website too he did the database did the website and we were able to do everything else but the

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having a secure database and website was really the key to it all happening and it's just really amazing so now i will let him tell you about the project and um and then i'll go ahead and let

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noah um introduce madison uh when he's done and then and then uh kick it back to me so i can introduce the next speaker thank you very much here's noah

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thank you so much for that kind introduction that's awesome so i'm gonna go ahead and share my screen here hopefully you guys can all see that so yeah to begin as lisa said i am the tech lead with bad apple i've done a lot of

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the technical development work in terms of website database anything that requires technology and basically today i i really wanted to walk through what bad apple is built on and how it works and get a really good

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privacy focused overview because the reality is when building that apple that was the number one thing that we really wanted to make sure we focused on privacy because the type of information that

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we're hosting with bad apple whether we're collecting tips or hosting misconduct reports that information is really sensitive and because of that user privacy has to be our number one priority so let's begin

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so to start let's talk about what bad apple is as you can see if you go right to our website that apple provides valuable tools and resources with the aim of holding law enforcement accountable and putting a net police misconduct that is a really broad

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overview to get more specific let's talk about how bad apple was founded and start from the bottom and talk about how it's built so bad apple was founded at almost a year ago now which is crazy to think

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back in december of 2020 and we focused on collecting and publishing data related to police misconduct we knew that there was lots of bad things happening in the world and we wanted to find a way to help

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write these things and looking throughout history the best way that change has been affected has always been through media it's been through media press coverage making things public and because of that we wanted to make sure that we could collect data that should

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be public that in many cases is public and have an easy to access centralized location to make that available to everyone the ways we do that are through pra request templates so that means templates that you can templates of with

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wording that you can file to make public records back requests in order to get information on past cases of police misconduct we have an oversight commission database that madison will be talking more about that essentially allows people to find the

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oversight commission closest to them so bad things do happen they have resources that they can go to we have an apple database which is based off of our name and is the database of

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all of these so-called bad apples that have contributed to police misconduct over the years finally we have our tips missions this information we expect to be useful

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to citizens journalists police departments and more citizens can use our databases to find oversight commissions journalists can use our databases to gather statistics police departments they can even use this database so

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when they're hiring a new officer they can check our database first so that they can see does this officer have a history of misconduct is this one of those officers who just moved to the next town over when something happened with them and just get hired

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again we want to make sure that everybody has access to this information and that it's free free as in free freedom and free as and free to use so that everybody can use this to help affect better change in the future that's why our database is open source

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privacy respecting and accessible there's a lot that can be said for accessibility we don't have time to go into all of it but our website is available in both english and spanish our website does use specific color

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schemes that are wcag 2.0 aaa compliant which is basically means that people who have vision impairments or among other things can still read our content easily and there's more stuff that i'll get

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into later on moving on let's start from the bottom we're going to start from the base which is our physical infrastructure and then we're going to quickly work up to the more abstract stuff first we use green host

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greenhost is very privacy friendly very well respected throughout the community and they host a lot of open source projects they have a lot of important security features as well that we use such as full disk encryption which some hosting

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providers don't offer and their team is very kind and very open to a lot of things that most hosting providers aren't open to such as hosting vpns hosting tor because we do have an onion service meaning that there

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is tour traffic coming to and from our server additionally we host most of our infrastructure with them so that's web service dns service database servers etc now that we have that solid

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privacy-based foundation with a reputable company we're now going to go on to our server configurations all of our servers are configured using fetch apply fetch apply is an internal tool that is completely open source

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and it's similar to ansible or puppet it's largely based on aviary if you guys have ever heard of that which essentially is a way to save a server configuration in

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software so you can have a git repository that has a whole bunch of settings within it and all you have to do is install fetch apply on a bare-bones server point it to the git repository and it

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fully sets up and configures that server for you because of the way that this is designed it allows us to have the utmost transparency this is really important to us because as i mentioned at the beginning we know that we are hosting or

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we know that people will be sending us sensitive information and the number one thing we need is their trust we need them to know that we're not doing anything fishy when we say we're not hosting analytics we're not hosting analytics when we say we're properly protecting their submissions we need

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them to be able to prove that we need our servers to be auditable and we need them to know exactly what's happening that way they want to make suggestions or improvements or criticize they're more than welcome to and that way that we all end up getting

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better in the end so again fetch apply you can visit that link below if you want to learn more about it it's easy to use there's lots of documentation it's completely auditable the code is meant to be short so that it's easy to read through and you can verify everything

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that's being done and it's great for debugging as well it allows us to if anything goes wrong we can go back and see the full history and get of every change of remain to our servers also if someone else wanted to stand up their own server to play around

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and see how everything works they could simply install fetch apply and point to our git repository and it'll work all right going to go a little bit quicker now so our back end open source technologies we're open source all the

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way so that's ubuntu server we have a postgres database django is our web application framework engine s engine x is our actual web server reverse proxy

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these are all very secure very reputable very widely used open source programs these are really important they provide the whole backbone and infrastructure that makes all of our services work i'd

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love to go in more in detail so if you have questions feel free to post them and i'll answer them at the end all right let's focus on privacy all of the infrastructure all of the code goes up to ensuring privacy

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first we use a v3 onion service that is really important to us as i mentioned before we know that people might want to for example submit a tip or look up an oversight commission near

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them when something bad has happened to them we want to make sure that they can do so in a private way if they're submitting a tip they might genuinely have fear of being harmed if they're looking for an oversight commission

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if they're swinging a tip anonymously if they're looking for an oversight commission something bad may have just happened to them and it usually involves the police and that's a really scary that's a really scary prospect to go up against so we want to make sure that we

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can protect their privacy at all times using an onion service that ensures that their web traffic is hidden that way they're when they're accessing our site people on their end on their network it's difficult for them to tell that

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they're accessing our site and on the other hand it prevents us from having logs of them so we don't get to see their ip addresses connecting to our site and they can maintain their privacy we do not use javascript

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this helps with accessibility makes it easier for screen readers to view our site this helps with privacy because when people are using privacy technologies a lot of times like tor browser on full security settings javascript is disabled by default and

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finally it allows more people to access our site for example on older devices that may have compatibility issues with javascript all of our content self-hosted this means all of our fonts all of well pretty much everything all of our

00:36:07

images all every everything you see on the page all of our content is hosted on our own servers when you visit our site your computer will not be making any requests to any other ip addresses that are not owned by us this helps to keep you private and

00:36:19

make sure that your data does not leak out anywhere else our logs are self wiping there is no log containing any form of personally identifiable information that stays on our servers for more than 24

00:36:32

hours they are wiped at a random interval in less than 24 hours with the average log lasting 12 hours what this means is that we have just enough time to detect denial service attacks and block offending ip addresses

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but not enough time to actually be able to respond to a request for data and pull that data off of our servers and provide it again if you want to make sure that you do not show up in any logs even from the

00:36:56

beginning we recommend you use our onion service for those of you who can't our logs do automatically wipe and when they're wiped they're not erased they're wiped meaning that they're written over seven times with randomized data so that they are fully unrecoverable

00:37:09

finally all of our tips are well protected on our servers we use asymmetric cryptography with gpg but it's encrypted in memory on our servers before being written to a separate database table

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what this means is that this tip cannot be recovered even if our servers are hacked there is no way for a user to recover the information these tips because the encryption keys are not located on our servers

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we have a whole system in place where we have trusted people people who are well known and that we trust and they are able to access our tips from an air gap environment using decryption keys they

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can then respond to them as needed went one too far perfect so just to wrap things up now here is how you can help the number one thing you can do is spread awareness that means to post on social media about that apple start github repositories

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basically spread the word however you can that is the number one thing that is going to help us help more people if you can we would love for you to contribute submit tips volunteer to enter the data into our databases contribute code on github file pra

00:38:14

requests you can even send us art for us to use it as backgrounds on our page whatever you can do to help we will happily accept it finally please utilize utilize our services they're completely free they're

00:38:26

open to everybody you can take advantage of our api recommend your site at community events if you know that there's a local oversight commission that we don't have in our database please tell us about it we would love to add them basically do anything you can

00:38:38

to help utilize and promote our services if you ever have any questions at all do not hesitate to send them to info about apple.tools you can visit our site at the first link on the left you can visit our github at the second link and on the

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right we have our onion address awesome so now at this point i will see if there are any questions and i'm going to go ahead and stop sharing my screen and look for some questions okay great um

00:39:02

connor has a question for you noah oh perfect let's hear it hey noah can't get rid of me uh very good love it um hey connor turn your camera on will ya happily hey there noah um so it was

00:39:16

super cool thanks for the detailed overview love your use of onion services and things like that love your on the fly encryption as well familiar technologies are you my question are you familiar with the open oversight run by lucy parsons labs if not i highly

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recommend you reach out for collaboration they've been running an open source police misconduct database since 2016. if you haven't already spoken to them i highly recommend you reach out to them i think you guys would have a lot to talk about

00:39:39

awesome yeah thank you so much for sharing that we will definitely reach out that sounds very familiar i feel like we've we right reach us i see lisa talk in there go for it yeah so i just want to clarify you know yeah we we we talked to freddie and i just want to

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clarify and noah probably already said this while i was getting ready for the hackathon um but yeah we've reached out to them the thing that's different about our database is that

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we're only putting in officers that have actually had sustained findings for internal affairs reports so by their own system's judgment

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they have been found they don't use the word guilty they say the finding was sustained and so that way we don't have to be arguing about whether or not the officer

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did whatever we're saying they did we're taking their word for it that they did it and using their report and so when you look up an officer it links right to the internal affairs reports and it's just so we could skip that step

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about arguing about what was done or what was not done and then we can say hey by your own findings um why are you moving this officer to another city and and our argument is

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that if you exhibit this kind of behavior you don't get to be a police person anymore you know and you can do something else and and uh maybe there'll be a system for coming

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back after you've gotten some anger management or something right we'll cross that bridge when we're lucky enough to get the bad apples out of the cart so we're we're trying to buy into

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their own narrative that it's just a few bad apples and using people that have only been uh with sustained findings and so um we we are but we are trying to coordinate with

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lucy parsons labs and of course their work and freddie martinez who unfortunately couldn't be here this year um but that inspired the whole thing i mean of course and um and if you if you uh

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people in the audience if you're not familiar with lucy parsons labs get right over there it's oh and they have it's openoversite.com it's a very easy to remember website

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and also you can go to lucy parsons lab site who has a new beautiful website and it's really a great way of just ramping up on what this is what we're doing with public records what can be done with public records and there's really been a

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revolution over the last few years of journalists filing public records requests people like jason leopold who was actually inspired by aaron's work when he became a

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what is now known as a foia terrorist so the government if you ask too many questions now you're a foia terrorist if you file too many foia requests and um you know so

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we are moving forward with both local public records requests and federal public records requests we're getting a lot done um and yeah a lot of it was definitely just inspired completely by the great

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work at lucy parsons labs and also secure drop really was very inspirational we were trying to figure out a way that we could fit in and help the systems that are in place and so we're not sure somebody might

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send us a tip and we may advise them to go use secure drop and do something with their information and and the idea was to have those channels open so that we could securely give someone

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some advice if if we needed to um or maybe we would use secure drop to get some information to a journalist after someone gave us information uh and that that's why we're trying to

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have all these channels open so thank you so much for suggesting that connor that that's perfect suggestion all right great okay um if there are any other questions i'm not i'm going to look at the we have

00:43:39

a little um we're keeping track of your questions because we want to make sure that you can ask a question at any time for any speaker and we'll keep track of it and then they'll it'll be there ready for

00:43:51

when they come on so um if there i don't think there's any other questions for noah um yeah no worries and if at any point anybody has a question whether they're watching this recording later or later

00:44:04

on in the day they have a question for me feel free to reach out to info at apple.tools at any point in the future and we will happily respond back to you okay great thank you so much and now i'll go ahead and let madison take it away she's going to talk about our

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oversight database and then we're going to hear from mack at the internet archive about their projects madison take it away madison thank you lisa so

00:44:29

hopefully one can hear me well but in addition to the great overview that noah gave background noise is that just outside okay no problem thank you

00:44:44

um so as part of the bad apple database we als in addition to the api and the internal affairs reports that lisa explained um we also house a database of oversight commissions throughout the united states

00:44:58

um oversight commissions are a great way to give complaints a voice for citizens um and hold departments accountable for officers actions which if you join me today in the hackathon you will see is really important

00:45:11

um yes so so far in the bad apple database we have over 180 commissions track and some of which include the community advisory panel in hayward california

00:45:22

versus citizen review board in connecticut and then the offices of police oversight in texas when you view the commissions on the website you will be able to go and see all the complaint information

00:45:35

view the members of the oversight commission and get the contact info and through this if you have a complaint with an officer in your state you'll be able to have all the necessary information in one database

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if you would like to help us with our oversight commission database today you can join me in my in the hackathon and we can find more more oversight commissions to add

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in addition you can also add to our growing list of bad apples by helping me um with the secured form anonymize form enter in uh internal affairs report data as well

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um so yeah we have a lot going on on my end if you want to help kind of grow bad apple either through the oversight commission or through um internal affairs or if you want to help

00:46:22

me get information for pras you can also help me do that as well so there's a lot available to to kind of help grow that apple into this great all-inclusive database where we can see

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who our bad apples are and what needs to be done so thank you lisa that's probably much faster than you then yeah so thank you hey that's okay we're always uh

00:46:47

we're always happy to have things go faster than plan for a change um we're doing pretty good on time and we are trying to keep it moving this time um just so everybody knows um we've got a schedule that we will be

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probably about 10 minutes behind but basically on schedule um so that people can hop in and out and not miss the speakers that they want to see so um next up we have mech who is going

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to um tell us about the projects at the internet archive that you can hack on and then go into his talk thank you mack mech oh i just want to say real quick so

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mec was somebody i met at the internet archive i don't know how many years ago now maybe five years ago or something i can't remember he was very inspirational to me as just the kind of person that we that

00:47:35

we like having in uh aaron's fort's day the kind of person that we want to work with and that we were ultimately trying to protect in case they did something a little outside the box that would you know freak out the establishment or whatever and every year

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it's really interesting to hear what he has to say so thank you everybody and here is mack thanks lisa really quickly before before we we jump in i just wanted to see if anyone did

00:48:01

have any questions for uh for madison yo okay i don't think we have any questions all right thanks thanks man i aspire sure

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thing i aspire for for my talk to be as concise and useful madison noah and others really amazing uh work and thank you for for investing your time to tell us about it i'm gonna go ahead and

00:48:29

share my screen as well here um thank you lisa uh i appreciate you very much i'm really happy that we're still doing uh aaron swartz day and i know it takes

00:48:41

a tremendous amount of time and energy um as you said uh when i was in in college i was threatened with expulsion five times uh for for different things all of which

00:48:54

were pretty uh white hat uh but still i'm very sensitive to uh to when people are just trying to learn and explore and how sometimes the society can can be unfriendly uh to

00:49:07

those people uh so i would like to look a little bit at productive tools for for learning today with a talk called a learning map navigating books without borders and as always this talk is dedicated to aaron

00:49:19

and ilya all right if you want to follow along on the slides you can go to m e k dot f y i slash asd for aaron sportsday 2021 and that'll

00:49:32

bring you right here okay one of my favorite quotes by aaron is information is power but like all power there are those who want to keep it for themselves

00:49:44

the world's entire scientific and cultural heritage published over centuries in books in journals is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations

00:49:56

and in this spirit aaron and others helped establish this open book catalog called the open library whose mission is to have a catalog of the world's books and make them universally accessible and

00:50:09

useful um i wish aaron was here to to say this himself but the the three reasons that i think aaron would have said open library is important is that books are such

00:50:20

important artifacts uh a repository of knowledge in our culture to aaron it seemed tragic that these important cultural artifacts were not first class places on the web

00:50:32

and also some important context at the time in 2006 is there was a non-profit called oclc who was charged with aggregating and compiling all of the

00:50:44

book metadata at the time with libraries and oclc was changing their policy so that when libraries participated in this program they could no longer claim rights to their own data and aaron felt that having an open

00:50:57

alternative was really important and so if you also believe that having a an open library is important why don't i show you really quickly what openlibrary.org is so it's a

00:51:11

a catalog of more than 25 million works uh that you can learn about books you can as as this onboarding carousel on the top says you can read free library

00:51:23

books or borrow them from the internet archive or from now uh project gutenberg librivox standard ebooks uh soon we'll have we'll have wikisource and also openstacks included there you

00:51:35

can use it kind of like good goodreads to keep track of your favorite books and then we also have uh this really epic library explorer that dreamy cami created which lets you browse the entire library

00:51:49

in digital form and then enter different shelves and so you can kind of zoom in on any of the different library catalogs so if you want to help on

00:52:03

openlibrary.org there are a handful of ways that you can contribute one is if you happen to know many different languages or at least one other language then try to offer a uh a translation and internationalization of the

00:52:15

openlibrary.org website we have a whole set of instructions for doing that you can improve our site performance the accessibility of our website uh so that it's more accessible to to print disabled patrons and other classes of

00:52:28

you of patrons or you can help us with some known security issues uh all of these have pretty detailed plans you can just click on the link and then follow the instructions and choose a good first issue

00:52:41

also as i mentioned we're now supporting other backends and sources for for trusted book providers such as project gutenberg librivox and we just implemented this in the past few weeks so if you would like to

00:52:54

participate in making that program better or suggest other libraries or book sources we may want to integrate against this link is a great place to do so um all right and if you want to build

00:53:07

your own project there are three things that you might want to take advantage of the first is we have really good apis on open library's website and i have a tutorial that kind of walks you through using these apis firsthand

00:53:21

we also have data dumps of our entire catalog so if you would like to import all of the book data into your own project or do research that's available to you and finally

00:53:33

we created this thing called partner lib which will look for isbns on a web page and automatically insert read or borrow buttons according to what books are available through all of our trusted book providers and so

00:53:46

if i go to bookshop.org which is just an indie bookseller online and then i drop in this code and then i press enter then it decorates the page with these new borrow buttons that can take you

00:54:00

directly to the open library experience all right all right so aaron had an objective of of helping give every book

00:54:17

a page on the web and uh i love that in terms of being able to help people access fundamental information but ultimately my life's mission is to curate an open living map of the world's knowledge

00:54:30

together as ted nelson says everything is deeply intertwingled and i want all of those relationships the valuable relationships to be surfaced and here's a picture with me and tim berners-lee and ted nelson which was

00:54:43

hard to get and so sometimes connecting edges uh is not so easy and if that's our goal if our ultimate goal is to create a map of knowledge there's a few steps that

00:54:54

that maps have to do the first is summon the will to brave the seas then you have to survey and catalog the territory to identify what places even exist once you know what the places are you

00:55:06

need to understand the unique topologies of each place you need to figure out how they're connected what are the routes that get you from greece to uh to italy and then finally

00:55:18

there is a temporal aspect so learn how factors like traffic uh maybe you're in a traffic jam or new constructions may affect these routes and the places they go to so this talk in fact is the fifth part

00:55:31

of the series that has happened over the course of several years i'm doing good enough is kind of why i'm at the internet archive working on aaron's projects um the the second talk was about why

00:55:43

digital libraries matter and uh why we've been seeing increasing pressure to prevent libraries from making the jump to digital and in the moral imperative that that represents i've talked a little bit about library

00:55:55

history and um and how we can make libraries extremely useful in the digital age called building a library in the matrix then finally i i worked with nolan windham and jim champ

00:56:09

with a talk reading between the lines which is how community and technology are helping the internet archive capture the essence of a book's genome so if you've ever used pandora before where it analyzes all the music according to all these different

00:56:21

attributes we're basically having a robot that goes through and reads our books and sees how we can make those insights available in an open way even if the books might be um kind of

00:56:32

locked in the in in a library shelves so visualizing this as a map uh the first thing that the internet archive did and that open library did was try to create one webpage for every book

00:56:46

just have the the the survey of uh of the the land and today because of the work of brewster and everyone at the internet archive the open library has more than 24 million works in its

00:56:58

catalog and six million of them can either be read or borrowed through the the internet archives control digital lending library and it offers all sorts of features like browsing by author subject etc

00:57:11

and this is great i i think it it gels really well with a quote from venivar bush that says his prediction the encyclopedia britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox a library of a

00:57:24

million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk and here's a picture of of brewster at uh one of the the physical archives of the internet archive just showing how many books we're really talking about more than six

00:57:37

million titles and in fact we are able to fit it uh into a few hard drives and access it directly from a phone and so there have been some really really compelling examples of people

00:57:49

working on on maps of books here's one example from the open syllabus project open syllabus project is amazing they've basically taken a computer and crunched through every possible college

00:58:03

university uh syllabus that they can find and then do counts to say what are the what are the books or texts that have been referenced most and you you get a an emergent picture

00:58:15

uh of what books are valued by societies and then you can kind of zoom in and explore uh different books within calculus for instance and and how often that specific title is referenced

00:58:28

right so it gives you a cartography for knowledge which is just very impressive so amazing jobs the open syllabus team and we've seen other maps like this experiment from from google of trying to

00:58:41

create a an ocean of books that you can explore in a similar way but what do you do when you want to find a piece of text or a url with on within

00:58:56

all of these books it's not enough just to know the books exist uh we need to start examining the topology and indexing it and fortunately uh we now have a way to do full-text search and

00:59:08

even find links within books and then because it's a digital edition you can click on the link and go directly to the source material which is not something that you can do with the physical book

00:59:20

just one way that the internet archive is making things more accessible for patrons and so on this second layer of the manifold we're really going into the book level and you can learn more about

00:59:32

that in the talk how to build a library in the matrix this includes things like selecting text from public domain books searching inside and across books etc and the next step after that as i

00:59:45

mentioned before is the open book genome project and this thing called community reviews which lets people in the community vote on the different aspects of books and over time we see an emergent

00:59:58

[Music] answer of what are the books that are are best rated for uh for math for instance or vampire books and this is a second way that that you

01:00:10

can help if you're interested in participating in the the book insight engine the bot that reads through our books in gleams insights such as reading level the pace summaries extracting citations or even

01:00:23

comparing book similarity then the open book genome project is open source uh you can go directly to the website we have a google colab notebook which you can click and just step

01:00:35

through each of the examples and every quarter we're trying to run the sequencer on the books within the internet archives so that we can glean new insights and make books more more accessible to to the world

01:00:49

so the real problem that i want to describe in in this talk is if if i finish a book a week carl sagan says i will read only a few thousand books my lifetime about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest

01:01:02

libraries of our time the trick is to know which books to read and again vanity var bush presciently says there is a growing mountain of research and this is back in i think

01:01:13

1945 around that time but there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down as specialization extends the investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other works

01:01:25

workers and i think vanilla bush would have been very surprised to see this query on amazon showing that there are 30 000 results for calculus

01:01:36

and very naive or or limited mechanisms for determining which one is best and one of my favorite quotes from from this berkman talk that aaron was giving about open library uh

01:01:50

which i felt like was very futuristic when i joined the project is we want to add we want to let people add new kinds of relationships to library like this book was inspired by that book or this book is a rebuttal of that book or this

01:02:03

book shows some serious errors in that book and there's so much we can we can do with this uh so the next stage in the the the map toward the the center of the the book is

01:02:15

discovering latent relationships and connections and links between books and when we have that we're able to do some some amazing things like imagine if we were able to navigate the references and citations

01:02:28

between every book and seamlessly jump from one book to another we're soon going to be able to do that because of the work of brian newbald and others and their work on refcat which is an effort to to look not only for academic

01:02:42

paper citations but also books using various sources or what if we are able to visualize what books people purchased in the order that they purchased them this was a wonderful

01:02:55

interactive blog that used to exist called yassev which had some great demos of exploring books based on their connections and so one thing that we're doing within the internet archive is exploring

01:03:08

how can people work together to identify what the best books are on any topic and have a graph database almost like a tournament of different books where anyone can vote and then also use information from open

01:03:21

syllabus project to say this book appears on 3 000 different curriculum there are 100 people who think book a is better than book b etc and if that idea sounds cool to you this

01:03:33

is yet another way that you can participate thebestbookon.com is a an open source project which kind of sits side by side with open library and some of the other offerings at the internet archive

01:03:45

and you can volunteer you can join our friday calls uh or you can uh try recommending a book we're taking one of the the uh the issues on from from the github repository

01:03:58

okay so now we have an index of all of these different books we've started to examine the topology of every every book we've identified some of the relationships between them but once we have this graph what is the map that we

01:04:13

build on top of it the main feature of the memx is the ability to tie two things together at will in other words to be able to associate two arbitrary items when wanted the user is able to build a

01:04:26

trail which can be shared with others and can also be published so the memex might not make sense as a concept just from this paragraph uh but i've built one for myself which is basically an index

01:04:39

of one's own thoughts and i just want to type in memex which is something i've jotted down before and this just shows the power of a graph database if you use it for your own notes it's like a version of google custom tailored to

01:04:51

your own thoughts so i can go into the memex card and see that it's inventor with vanity var bush it's similar to mind maps it's like the rdf framework the definition is memory index i can see that it was involved in a book

01:05:04

called mastering information through the ages which i can then enter and see that its author was alex wright then i can see about alex wright and go directly to his website for instance and so if you have a graph and you have a system for a

01:05:17

cartography and a navigation system for traveling different points you can do some really magical things and i want to explore how this also relates to learning uh so we don't have time to watch this whole talk right now but i

01:05:30

highly recommend taking a look at danny hillis's the learning map from um open source con in 2012. essentially what he's describing is a

01:05:43

a way and here are two examples of mapping a a space of knowledge for instance probability in random variables and independent events and showing how all of these different components

01:05:54

connect to each other and even showing how long something will take to learn it's like a skill tree there's a skill map if you've ever played uh age of empires or civilizations or used duolingo

01:06:06

this example right here met academy is one of my favorite websites ever it's a great proof of concept unfortunately it's starting to bit rot so this version is is from the wayback machine but it shows you an entire map and each

01:06:19

one of these points expands into a list of resources that you can then read or watch in order to learn a topic and of course you can click i've i've already learned this topic and then that that

01:06:31

bubble will fill in and move you to the the next uh item in the map there was also this excellent one by by khan academy that similarly discontinued it but this is just a 30-second clip so

01:06:44

let's let's see how it works in action [Music] um i'm not sure if the volume is going to come through though so i'll let i'll let folks uh

01:06:55

watch this on their own time and basically what they're describing is that there's a list of different subjects um like mathematics and then each one of these subjects has exercises

01:07:08

associated with it and so as danny hillis likes to say you can you can map your own ignorance and and see your education happening before your your own eyes okay there's another example that i

01:07:21

thought was extremely compelling um called learning by by henry pulver which looks a little like this it's a a map of probability and statistics and

01:07:34

linear algebra and you can zoom in and then see all these different subjects and then get resources for them as well [Music] so what we really want is not just an

01:07:47

index of books and we don't just want a graph of books what we want is google maps for books we want a a way to see that these are all of the books that i can read in

01:07:59

order or there are many different possibilities of orderings and substitutions in order to get from the summerville of knowledge to the san francisco of knowledge even if it takes

01:08:10

276 hours uh hopefully next year we can follow the the same trend uh and we'll talk about how we we learn kung fu just by by sitting in the the the chair and having

01:08:25

it you know zipped into our head but we're not quite there yet uh and i'll leave you with uh one of danny var bush's quotes which is holy new forms of encyclopedias will appear ready made with a mesh of associative

01:08:37

trails running through them and imagine living in a world where a future or a world where being able to publish a new book is as easy as walking an interesting path through different paragraphs of a book and suddenly you

01:08:49

have a path of knowledge that you can share and anyone else can follow i hope you'll help in building this future and if you would like help let me know and i would love to discuss further

01:09:00

thanks from me and open library all right great thank you so much mack always great to hear from you and so much going on with the open library and the open library and secure drop are kind of the two big projects

01:09:21

that have been able to we've been able to keep alive uh and i really appreciate you being here um so thank you very much and i will check always as to see if we have any

01:09:34

questions before i let you go and um aha we have one um so someone's asking specifically

01:09:46

uh taylor's robots um taylor alexander is asking i guess taylor's robots mostly i have one book i want to scan a book from 2001 printed only in india

01:09:58

about the history of patents and why they're bad and uh they emailed you and hadn't heard back is that a book that you would be interested in having scanned for the open library

01:10:11

uh well let me check my my inbox and i can i can forward it to the the right people at the internet archive who who are most familiar with the the processes uh okay what is the best email

01:10:23

what is the best email for that you can email me at mek at archive.org and i'd be happy to fold it along okay great thank you so much yeah thanks for the question

01:10:35

great okay so next we have brewster kale from the internet archive the founder of the internet archive and uh he's going to talk to us about how it's been 25 years now of the

01:10:49

internet archive and also a little bit about the future as we look towards making the decentralized web a reality take it away brewster brewster is also a co-founder of aaron swartz day with me

01:11:01

and it was he and i that decided after the san francisco memorial that we had to keep this going so it's very special to have him every year all right take it away brewster thank you lisa um and thank you very

01:11:14

much everybody for coming to aaron sports day this year uh next year it's going to be physical i tell you it's going to be physical i'm actually here in the uh internet archive in san francisco and i'm in

01:11:28

our great place here our statue of aaron is over uh there uh anyway completely fun and completely great and we miss you physically but i'm glad it's

01:11:40

coming together digitally and the answer is on that question yes we want that book in the uh internet archive and in open library if it's not already there

01:11:52

so the internet archive is turning 25 years old uh this year and the idea is you know we're sort of looking back and looking forward we're looking back to

01:12:04

figure out what um has gone right and wrong where we come from and where should we go uh from here looking back uh the idea the internet archive was to build a digital library i would say at

01:12:18

this point we really kind of have one yes there's more to do but now we can turn our attention towards making it more usable filling in the holes and uh and really improving uh

01:12:31

the tools aaron schwartz was a an advocate strong advocate of bringing public access to the public domain that a lot of the public domain actually

01:12:43

wasn't publicly accessible this kind of seems uh unintuitive to the layman but to all of us in the field it happens all the time he wanted to make the public

01:12:54

domain unpaywall as well so not only could you go and see it you could use it for different things so for instance um he and carl malamud pioneered the us

01:13:07

court case documents of going and getting the pacer public domain documents and getting them out into the open and that spawned the recap project and that's free law and it's continuing on to this day

01:13:20

um and we have now over 8 million um cases documents and over 8 million cases and a lot of those cases have lots and lots and lots of documents are now available on the uh internet archive for

01:13:33

free download uh and free um reuse and data mining which is kind of awesome so yes there's actually more projects um that aaron helped uh participate in that are ongoing uh today

01:13:48

um the open library project you also heard uh from from mac and sort of where that's going towards making sense of the uh of the books and the materials in the books sense making i think is the is

01:14:00

another major challenge another was how can we get the public domain materials that are locked up in things like jstor uh and google books to be publicly available uh so you've got

01:14:14

it's not just for subscription-based people in very uh expensive university contexts um and he uh tried to get things available from jstor

01:14:25

and that didn't work very well um and uh yeah um but after the fact after aaron uh died jstor did uh reach out to the internet archive to make some of its uh

01:14:39

public domain papers available um and so those are now 450 000 items on the internet archives websites i'm hoping that there are links that are going up uh if not i'll post those in later

01:14:53

we also were are really working on other things that aaron uh pioneered was trying to get more access to journal literature um there has been an open access movement um towards making things uh

01:15:06

publicly uh accessible on the web and people have been posting things but uh those haven't been necessarily all that well brought together again for scholarly use um

01:15:20

google scholar is awesome but it's often of sort of publishers uh points of view of the world not the long tail so the internet archive and there's you know behind every one of these projects

01:15:31

there's awesome wonderful people i should probably list them but it would take up all of my time um but uh for instance we launched this year scholar.archive.org

01:15:43

and that is an index to over 30 million uh papers um and also tries to have a catalog called fat cat um of all of the papers even if we don't have them to

01:15:55

understand what uh state they are in um if they're just paywall or if they're in preservation someplace uh else so scholar.archive.org is uh

01:16:08

a new initiative of the internet archive to try to build this digital uh library we're also digitizing periodicals um for the print disabled

01:16:19

and also printing uh books at scale um so we're digitizing maybe a million books every year uh for the blind and dyslexic um and uh we then also make as

01:16:32

much of that we can available for free public download um we have some for in under control digital lending and we have most available through interlibrary loan so we're trying to make it so that

01:16:44

even if you aren't in an expensive uh university that's paying license fees to go and rent access to these databases you can still get access and learn from these materials we also want to then make it

01:16:58

more available than even that just making it available onesie choozy but to make it available in bulk so people can go and do this the digitized books are coming in um the books to

01:17:11

digitize um are coming in for a large part from better world books but we're now getting a large number more um libraries and people individually going to the internet archive and offering to

01:17:24

contribute so if you say donate physical materials the internet archive into your favorite search engine um you'll find a instructions for how to send things or if it's larger how we can pay for the packing and

01:17:36

shipping or if it's even larger than that we'll even send people um and we're now getting hundreds of thousands of uh materials that will then be preserved and then digitized as funding allows to

01:17:49

make them fully publicly accessible and great we right now have a grant to go and digitize all the physical holdings of the internet archive so it's a great day and people are donating 78 rpm

01:18:01

records lp cds a lot of microfilm and microfiche are coming in which is completely great so that's building the library and trying to preserve it then we've been

01:18:13

trying to make it more accessible by weaving the internet archive into the infrastructure of the web so we can make people smarter and we can make the web smarter one uh project which i really really

01:18:26

like is turn all the references blue can we make all of those footnotes turn live can we make them into clickable links um so and we're starting with wikipedia

01:18:37

so taking wikipedia links finding the the footnotes the references and if they go to dead web pages or change web pages then we put in an archive link um uh and we've now fixed

01:18:50

over 10 million broken links in wikipedia now go to the wayback machine to go and get a persistent uh link to a reference from that wikipedia

01:19:02

we're now also weaving in uh links to books so if there's a link to a book trying to figure out what book it is and if it has a page number it goes right to the right page you click go right to the right page and see

01:19:14

whether that reference is right whether they quoted it correctly um and how do we go and make it so that as good information is referenced within wikipedia as we can

01:19:26

for the contributors and we've now got over one million links to over 300 000 different books so the internet archive being the master of the long tail is going and bringing these materials

01:19:40

to wikipedia readers we're now just starting on getting periodicals linked in in the same ways because if things are linked then they get more weight in wikipedia and we need

01:19:52

wikipedia to be as good and strong as we can but imagine going and having any paper that you see in a pdf viewer come across in this way and that is also

01:20:03

um so on its way um and it's starting to happen so what we see now as for the next 25 years is continuing these weave knowledge into the infrastructure of our

01:20:17

minds and are an internet can we go and have the best knowledge be used and um and and be at the right place at the right time so you don't have to try to figure out how to go to archive.org to

01:20:29

get it it's right there from wikipedia or wherever else um that that is the opportunity of our time is to go and build knowledge as infrastructure um and it takes some changes to some of

01:20:43

the uh existing business models and especially the points of view of some of the uh the large corporate players um but a lot of them are coming around some of them are still suing libraries um but

01:20:55

we hope they get over this idea that that's a good thing uh to do and work with libraries that actually spend billions a year on publishers products um that this is a good way of supporting

01:21:07

uh publishers and authors and shouldn't be things that can be sued away or licensed into oblivion which seems to be some of the things that are are going uh forward so

01:21:20

what do we do now um we need to go and make it so that the web is more um preservable um that there's more things on the web that we adapt to the next generation of technology maybe it's

01:21:33

beyond the web the internet archive has been uh really pushing for and trying to inspire the decentralized web can we make it so that websites can live everywhere and nowhere that we go back

01:21:45

to some of the robustness of the old library system where a publisher would come out with a book it would go to hundreds or thousands of libraries and if any one of those libraries disappeared the book is still preserved that's not how the web works can we make

01:21:58

a decentralized web that does work that way so that there's long-term preservation of ongoing live websites not just snapshots of what websites look like in the wayback machine so a decentralized

01:22:11

web and uh towards that the internet archive is um has uh built a dweb.archive.org um which is trying to make the internet archive but decentralized as a technology pilot of some of these

01:22:24

technologies and we're starting to upload um huge collections of the internet archive into uh the decentralized web storage systems like filecoin um so we're starting with the

01:22:36

end-of-year term crawl of federal and government u.s government websites from the end of the terms and then going uploading that as a test

01:22:50

of can we get terabytes petabytes uh into uh the filecoin network and we uh are going to be working with other of these decentralized storage systems uh as well

01:23:03

so the internet archive while it has things on hard drives that we own um but we're now starting to put them in places like um uh into other non-profits in amsterdam

01:23:17

in alexandria egypt and starting to in canada um so what should we do going forward we need to help fight misinformation we need to go and make it so that the world

01:23:29

is a smarter place and not a dumber place because of this internet and we have people sharing information at a grassroots level but uh we have real constrictions uh at the corporate level

01:23:43

some of the government uh things are stepping in uh look actually really bad for this vision but we are we have an urgent issue to try to provide context and information around what people are

01:23:56

looking at i think the next 25 years has got a lot to do with context and and uh just like mac was talking about it's not just to know that the book exists it's what does it mean to the world how is it

01:24:08

interlinked intertwingled um ted nelson's line to in into the rest of the world we need large-scale data mining and we need data mining for the public good not just ai for corporate gain

01:24:21

how do we do this we need to archive materials uh on the internet archive and you can help with that you can go and find things that should be archived and uploading them the archive yourself or are asking for help from us at info

01:24:35

archive.org or you can work with the internet archive directly or indirectly to build on some of these tools technologies these uh information data sets to go and build something kind of awesome together

01:24:49

we can really make something rock and keep the open aspects uh growing blossoming so it's an interesting fun profitable

01:25:02

private when you want it to be world that is the promise of the internet and we just have to keep it on on these paths and on that uh direction and that north star that

01:25:16

basically aaron embodied so very well i'm brewster at archive.org feel free to uh to write to me back to you lisa hey thank you so much brewster really appreciate it

01:25:30

and um really looking forward to the next 25 years of the internet archive and the decentralized web woo very interested in watching that pan out and connecting together the um the different

01:25:44

applications and we heard aaron sports day are committed to the decentralized web it was actually something that aaron used to talk about when he was a kid and uh very interested in building that

01:25:55

out we used to call the distributed web uh and that it just wasn't uh centralized was distributed but now it decentralized it makes it better um is a better way of talking about it and also

01:26:08

i had to get clarification just a little while ago between the decentralized web which is the applications that are running on it blockchain and things and the d web which are the applications

01:26:20

running on it in a web-like way what we think of as internet apps but running on the decentralized web and that's the d web and the internet archive i think is going to be leading way on that so thank you so much for your talk

01:26:32

and next up is another person from the internet archive that is very important to aaron swartz day tracy jaqueth has um been worked on so many things with us

01:26:45

including helping getting chelsea manning out of prison she helped with um all the different archives that we've set up over the years with the larry archives other archives all sorts of aaron

01:26:57

sportsday stuff and then she's also very into the democratization of coding tools that make it easier for people to participate i really love these kinds of tools

01:27:10

because i am not really a coder per se i can do javascript and i know enough to be dangerous in terms of inserting variables and things like that into things that are interacting with websites but i am one of these people that is now

01:27:24

that can now do more because of all the great applications that are coming out and tracy's always the one to show me i remember soccer what is that somebody needs to mute

01:27:36

maybe madison cute thanks um i remember when docker first happened and tracy was like i came in to show her something and she was literally sitting at her

01:27:49

desk like going like this and was was all excited about about docker because you could put things in containers and i'm like what the hell does that mean

01:28:02

but now i understand and it's very very important and chelsea manning is also a big fan of docker now and she talks about her stream oh and i should tell everybody at the end of this stream we're all going gonna hop on to chelsea

01:28:14

manning's twitch stream which is just twitch forward slash chelsea manning um 87 and so anyway big family of people and i love

01:28:26

tracy she's very important to person to me and um she's gonna tell us this year about using a dinosaur to uh democratize code so take it away

01:28:39

tracy hello hopefully you can all hear me with the earpods in and i'm going to share my screen now welcome to the aquarium behind me

01:28:52

okay so today's talk is going to be about how javascript especially but other languages are getting very exciting in terms of uh basically zero config zero

01:29:04

setup so i wanted to show how you can start coding almost immediately right from your browser you can debug from your browser and do all that kind of stuff because i believe and i saw from aaron when we worked together

01:29:18

that he felt that everyone should have the right to data everyone should have some right to be able to code and i think he would be very pleased with the way the world has moved at least in terms of coding and democratizing that

01:29:31

so i kind of think of things as a coder as you're tending to go and fetch data you'll want to go ahead and process it you usually have to do something with it and then you want to visualize it somehow like you know in a web page

01:29:46

so i'm going to do like a little live coding here i haven't done that before so it'll be fun and i have one little pre-can thing this is just a url that gets some json from the archive and i will just show you that json really quickly

01:30:00

over that's that's what we're going to visualize hold on things in my way there we go uh the data should be where did i put the data sorry too many overlays

01:30:18

huh let me find it for my history there we go okay so it's some json data from the archive and it shows each band uh and then for every uh recording or

01:30:32

item on the archive what year that show is at we're just going to be kind of non-granular but it's a very long list in this case i'm getting 2500 entries so let's start there so that's the 2500

01:30:45

entries we're getting the creator or the band name we're getting the year uh getting it as json because then you can import it nice and easily um and then this is just saying these are live concerts and we're going to go

01:30:57

from 1995 to uh sometime in the future so the last 25 years okay so to show you how easy it is to import uh javascript these days uh

01:31:09

i'm going to go ahead and import d3 and we have set up what's called a cdn a content delivery network uh server so you can get things that normally live in node or npm

01:31:22

and you can just get them right from our server without tracking you so that's how your page or how you'd be setting up your javascript page would pull the d3 which is a graph visualizing program

01:31:35

if you've heard of jquery i'm just going to go ahead and grab that too that just makes things a little easier to throw into the dom and stuff like that esm dot archive

01:31:48

dot org i'm in um vs code right now so you'll see some auto completing so i'm not typing as fast as it seems sometimes i'm sorry for hearing the key clicks uh so now i'm going to go ahead and grab

01:32:01

one small piece of javascript that i already pulled down uh because this person who wrote d3 had a really nice um multiple graphing chart but didn't ever publish it to npm so i just grabbed it

01:32:13

and that lives here okay so that's that's the code we need to import for our setting up um there's one little quark with d3 when you import it this way i just have to set d3 into the global space

01:32:27

but now i'm ready to go so now i've got my json so that's the data that i want to do something with so i'm going to go ahead and fetch it that's what you do in javascript so we'll say fetch

01:32:39

the json and it's asynchronous so we have to do an await um and it's sort of quirky whoops it's sort of quirky because you have to then parse the data back as

01:32:52

json again so we're going to go ahead and await that as well and this is stuff you'll learn when you start programming in javascript if you haven't already it's pretty straightforward and we can now start parsing the actual data

01:33:04

so i happen to know and we can sort of see here if we can read uh the javascript the json there's a response header um and then there's a response and then there's some docs so we'll just go ahead

01:33:16

and grab that so now that's the the list of the band names and javascript sorry and years in javascript so now we're going to have to do a little bit of processing so make a

01:33:33

little hash map called n that'll count the number of of uh shows that a band has done so we'll say uh for const e of json so we're going to iterate over

01:33:46

that little array there that we grabbed from the jason parson and we will now grab the show name or the sorry the band name strange autocomplete oh right it doesn't

01:33:58

necessarily know my data is yet um and we're gonna um add it's basically doing plus plus but we have to do it in a slightly different way because it might not be uh defined yet so we have to say

01:34:11

either use it if it's defined or start with zero but it's basically just doing plus pluses so now we have a list of all we have an array or hash map of the band names and the number of shows that they've done over time

01:34:24

so now we're going to go ahead and sort it by the most prolific bands of uh all of our data so this just is kind of quirky but uh this is going to sort

01:34:38

that hash map by value and it's a little strange that's our n we're now pulling it out as a list of tuples

01:34:51

and now we can go ahead and sort it and this is how you can sort in javascript really nicely so these are numbers so i grab the the second element in each tuple and now at the end um because

01:35:08

you can keep programming like fluently in javascript as they call it we're going to grab the 50 most popular bands so that's the 50 most popular bands sorted which is nice

01:35:20

so now we're going to do shows by year so we're making another little hash map and this one's going to be three dimensional so it'll be um

01:35:34

it should be the bands by the year by the show count so it'll give us three axes of data which is what we're going to visualize on in our graph so we'll say um

01:35:46

for oops i think i might have a typo here yeah okay for um const of jason

01:35:58

so we're going back to our little jason simple array and we're saying uh shows per year over the band name equals shows per year

01:36:11

the creator or an empty hash map so this just says um use it if it's already there otherwise start with an empty hash map or dictionary or whatever you like to

01:36:25

think of it as okay so now we can go ahead and start using it so we'll say uh the creator is our first dimension the band name and then the year is our second dimension

01:36:37

so we are now going to add one for every show that we see so we have to do the same uh kind of little trick it can be a little annoying but i sometimes make little

01:36:49

little functions for this kind of thing okay so um so if it's not set it'll be zero otherwise we're just counting it um and by the way we can also just do

01:37:01

this anytime we like if we ever want to see shows per year so we'll see that in a browser in the debug console if we want to see what our data looks like which is nice okay so finally we just

01:37:14

have to do one last thing we now need to transform it into x y z coordinates so we're going to make a list of x y z coordinates from our data so we're sort of

01:37:25

processing of processing of processing but it kind of works out so we'll just call this like year 2 um so we're we're now getting the um

01:37:38

we're going to iterate over that prior three-dimensional array um this shows by here so that's our first two dimensions that we're pulling out and now we'll do one

01:37:55

more little loop and that will do and we're almost done year n of same thing object entry so this iterates over the

01:38:09

way this just iterates over a hash map and puts the keys and values into these left hand side here so we'll do um year to n

01:38:22

so now we've got our n or the number of shows we've got the year which is the year of the concert and then we've got the band so all we have to do is say x y z dot push

01:38:37

and we're going to push a three element array because that we can throw that right into our graphing uh function at the very top and the first one is a date it wants a date axis on the bottom

01:38:53

so we're going to go ahead and do the year and obviously that won't be very granular but that's okay because we'll still see it over the 25 years and then we do the shows per

01:39:07

year um and we just get the year i probably could have gotten that i could probably just use the n value i probably should have just used the n value i don't know why i'm typing it that way but that's fine

01:39:18

uh shows yeah let's just use the end value that's easier and then uh so that'll be our y the number of shows per band per year and then we get a tooltip hover um so we'll

01:39:30

call it this is blinking at me oh missing a comma so there's a little red thing there okay so that's the band so that'll be our tooltip okay great so in theory we have

01:39:44

everything we need um so now we can just use jquery and we can say we're going to add something into the body or just replace the body all together and we're going to use the function from above and you can see we

01:39:56

get these nice little tooltips when you're in um in coding mode so we just need to pass in our xyz array which is everything we need and then we're just going to do a couple little things just to make a little bit

01:40:08

easier to visualize or see so we'll do y oops y label and we'll say like archive archive concerts

01:40:27

and then um sorry we this is sort of a quirky thing but you have to pass in a function to give it the third value otherwise it'll just always show one it's kind of weird don't worry about the syntax like once you

01:40:40

start playing more of javascript if you haven't already it'll make more sense but that just makes sure we get the right coordinates i have to close these guys okay so we should be good to go so we've

01:40:52

started with jason and data we've used importing from the live web or wherever it doesn't really matter you don't need any uh special things now uh we've gone ahead and done a fair amount of processing that's probably most of it and then we're outputting it

01:41:05

so now let's see if this actually loads and if it doesn't that's okay because i'll show you how you can um how you can kind of debug okay so it didn't load that doesn't surprise me there's probably like a syntax error i won't do a lot of debugging here but

01:41:18

i'll show you at least how you can do one or two things so i am loading this directly in sorry there's like a tool tip kind of hovering how do i hide this stupid thing there we go

01:41:30

okay good um so it's saying there's a 500 on the css map that's okay i don't know i'd have to look at if there's some shift reload

01:41:44

so i'm loading it as a file url which is kind of interesting and you can see in the network tab like what things it pulled down so here's the d3 stuff so we know that's loading okay we know the um we think the advanced

01:41:56

search is loading okay let's take a look that's the preview oh actually yeah that's the json so that's loading okay and we know jquery looks like it's loading okay so everything's loading okay i'm probably

01:42:08

just there's anything obvious to me right off the top of my head but we're very close so let me just show you um so we we don't have to spend too much time on this what this ends up

01:42:21

looking like so if we go to here yeah that's where my code lives um and that's the code thing that i pulled

01:42:34

down and when you use github or gitlab you have the option to use their github or get lab pages which is free and they give you a url so you can now uh see your data so i

01:42:46

could load it locally if i probably just have like one little typo somewhere because i was live coding but now you can see the data so this is a really neat graph it shows you um kind of a big set of data all at once but then you can

01:42:59

hover over it and see the band so it's you know like what have we learned well i don't know we've maybe we've seen like some bands were more prolific in the beginning or in the middle um but it's kind of an interesting way to view data we don't have this kind of

01:43:12

visualizer on the graph on the archive anywhere so i'm hoping that this will make you encourage you to use our json apis or other json apis use visualizers or other visualizers and start playing

01:43:25

with data it's really easy to um to play with the data these days and um to just code you can use the the browser like i was showing the little developer tools um and it's it's really neat so this i

01:43:38

mentioned here how you can do that in safari uh and you can load a local file so you don't even need a network um and if you want to load code from uh npm directly into the browser you can use it

01:43:50

do it with a cdn these days if you want to do back-end code which is sort of the inspiration of this talk you can use something called dino and dino is a it's from the creator of node and it's

01:44:02

sort of like the next version of node so it does things like you can use fetch which you can use in the browser but now you can use the backend and you can pull code from anywhere just like you can in a browser now in the back end so it's

01:44:13

sort of democratizing um how uh code is done so um anyway i hope that was sort of interesting and and uh yeah hopefully i will figure out my

01:44:26

my zoom settings here and find the right window and hand it back to you lisa all right thank you so much tracy that was great um as always and uh

01:44:43

even though we have a joke about live demos and now the internet always seems to take poop on you right when you're doing a live demo we made it through that one and we will continue to do live demos

01:44:56

so that's important to uh you know it's fun and that's why we like to do that so um a reminder that you can always ask us questions i will get them to tracy we'll get answers back to you

01:45:09

and we're this um hackathon today and our event is always about connecting people and and um growing our community so thank you very much tracy thanks everyone

01:45:23

all right great we now have kurt opsahl from the eff um and he is the deputy executive director and also legal counsel for eff and he is

01:45:35

going to tell us what everybody has been asking me a lot lately about this van buren case and how exactly it applies to

01:45:47

the cfaa and future cases and also aaron's case specifically and then we're going to have corey doctorow up after him to talk more about the implications of all of that

01:45:59

so thank you very much for coming kurt take it away kurt hello everybody uh yes good to see you be here uh wish i could be there in person everyone so my name is kurt

01:46:11

opsahl i am the deputy executive director and general counsel with the electronic frontier foundation uh yes i'm here to tell you about van buren uh the recent supreme court

01:46:23

case on the computer fraud and abuse act so one second while i will share my screen for a slideshow uh let's see this will just take one second

01:46:54

all right uh so van buren uh can get this on the on the screen uh very good uh van buren was the first supreme court case to deal with the computer fraud and

01:47:07

abuse act in in many years uh and so it uh provided more guidance than we have had we wish we could add some of this guidance earlier uh and what are the the issues well there's been a long and unfortunate history of

01:47:20

cfa abuse uh federal prosecutors private actors because you're a civil component to the cfaa have exploited the vague terms uh and very draconian penalties that are

01:47:32

within the computer fraud and abuse act uh to uh in many bad instances we've had uh in the united states versus drew our criminal charges brought for violating the myspace terms of uh

01:47:45

service uh in unisex versus nozzle this was criminal charges for uh violating an employer's computer use policy and then very prominently for today uh the prosecution of aaron swartz

01:47:58

where he had based many cfaa charges threatening up to 35 years in prison for downloading articles on the mit network the jstor articles in violation of the jstor terms

01:48:12

so the underlying problem is that cfaa has vague language it makes it illegal to access a computer without authorization or in a manner that exceeds authorized access but congress never defined what those

01:48:26

terms mean so the good news about van buren is it is a victory against these overbroad and aggressive cfa interpretations it overturned a dangerous press president the van buren's 11th circuit

01:48:41

decision uh that permitted the cfa criminal charges and civil claims based on these terms of service violations and this will clarify the meaning some of these vague terms gave tools for

01:48:52

their further interpretation and this decision gives average empower united users much more comfort that they can use the web can interact with websites and not

01:49:05

face criminal charges for violating some terms of service that they'll never read they are long complicated and should not be criminally enforced so

01:49:17

since uh over the many years there's been a lot of efforts for cfaa reform uh and eff has been working on those efforts for many years looking for opportunities to reform the law they have aaron's law which was proposed in

01:49:30

the aftermath of his tragic suicide uh which included divining without authorization uh and making sure that as a circumvention of a technical access barrier this would be a necessary part

01:49:42

of it not on its own sufficient for a conviction but necessary because a technical access banner violating that that's what hacking is getting onto a computer system violation of term surf is not hacking and the cfaa

01:49:54

should be a hacking law and second very importantly is reducing the draconian penalties the over criminalization of the cfia allows for extremely serious lengthy prison terms

01:50:07

for doing things which can often have minor around harms and their circumstances in which it may make sense for the law to say that this is something we don't want people to do but it doesn't have to be

01:50:19

something which is a felony that will be a life-changing event and will oftentimes when uh used against uh people early in their lives early in their their careers who make a mistake and bar them from being able to

01:50:32

contribute their technical expertise uh for a long time because of the high penalties so eff has been filing amicus briefs in the major cases they're interpreting the cfaa and the state laws between state

01:50:45

law equivalent in most states and we also uh fight council through the coders rights project to security reachers academics and others who are trying to understand how the cfia applies to their situation

01:50:59

so let's get to the van buren case itself van buren was not a very sympathetic character uh and you know one of the problems is bad facts can make for bad laws so we'll go

01:51:11

into a little bit of what happened with the van buren case so uh van buren nathan van buren was a officer in the coming georgia police department and the course of his duties he

01:51:24

developed a friendly relationship with a guy named andrew albo he's a man in his early 60s who allegedly liked to hire young prostitutes and then accused them of stealing his money and van buren

01:51:36

apparently uh uh liked him enough to help out and handle some of these disputes between albo and various women [Music] and uh but you know he didn't want to

01:51:48

use that uh do that all for free and so we decided to go to albo uh after doing all this help and asked for a personal loan i was falsely claiming it was needed for his son's medical bills

01:52:00

uh and albo instead recorded that request and took it to the local sheriff's office complaining that van buren had thought to shake him down for this cash this got to the attention of the federal bureau of investigation

01:52:14

and they created a sting operation where albo was going to offer to pay vanguard and cash so that van buren would tell him whether uh carson a woman albo supposedly met in the strip club was

01:52:25

actually an undercover police officer uh and albo offered him five thousand dollars uh which was the amount of personal loan that uh van buren had asked for to search the georgia crime information

01:52:40

center database from the georgia bureau of investigation the gbi uh for a fake license plate number they had made up for this state and this would be in violation of the

01:52:51

police department's policies their policies and training said you can use this license database for law enforcement purposes but not for personal purposes now i want to take a moment to note that like ed barron's a bad guy he's misusing

01:53:05

his authority he is uh what at least was intending to as a fictitious licensed fictitious person but he was intending to totally misuse his authority as a police officer and violate the privacy of this

01:53:19

carson however evil as that is it's not a hacking car and that's one of the challenges that come up often they're trying to get good interpretations of criminal laws is

01:53:30

oftentimes people are very bad people but the point is that it's not a hacking crime and this should be limited to hacking crimes so that was the question that was in the main in the case

01:53:43

was the license plate search exceeding his authorized access and the federal prosecutors argued that violating the public policies and training prohibiting the misuse of this database that was exceeding authorized

01:53:55

access so a jury convicted van varen uh he appealed and the court of appeals for the 11th circuit affirmed that conviction finding that yes

01:54:07

violation of the terms could be a crime and as we were talking before this is a lot of interesting parallels to the accusations against aaron schwartz where violating the jstor terms were part of

01:54:20

the alleged crime and at this time there was a split in federal appeals court some courts found that violation of terms could be a crime some found that they weren't the doj is positioned that it wasn't that it was a crime

01:54:33

uh and we needed some clarification on this so it goes up to the supreme court and that's the good news the supreme court reversed the bad 11th circuit decision and they adopted what they called the

01:54:46

gates up or down function and by eights up and down they're referring to like a castle gate a port collapse that would be uh lowered down for defense or raised to allow people in uh that so exceeding authorized access

01:54:59

does not encompass violations of circumstance-based access restrictions on the employer's computer instead is limited to someone who accesses the computer with authorization but then obtains internet login to

01:55:11

particular areas of the computer such as files folders databases that are off limits so access controls if you have access to one part of the computer but need a password to access a different part of the view and you break through that that would be exceeding

01:55:24

your authorized access even though you were allowed on the computer itself however if you're allowed on the computer and allowed to have access to that database then the gates are up and we don't have a computer right

01:55:38

so this is a tremendous victory for security researchers for actually people all over the web because it means that terms of service limitations on how you can use information or for what purposes you can access it are no longer crimes

01:55:50

and so the the facts of the van buren case get every right to look up a license plate but not for the purpose of giving it someone for a bribe

01:56:03

yeah the purpose to look for law enforcement purposes so so long as the computer is open people can access this and this happens a lot on other websites websites around the world where you have access to them

01:56:15

but there might be something returns about what you can do with the information after you access it so uh this should be very helpful for internet research security research a

01:56:27

lot of data journalism requires going able to scrape websites pulling down information that is available to them and using them in ways that perhaps the website itself does not

01:56:38

want to be done so i had some further limits on broad cfa readings and i think one of them really uh uh should resonate with a lot of people because the court agreed with eff's concerns about overbroad

01:56:52

interpretations they wrote that if the exceeds authorized access clause criminalizes every violation of computer use policy as the doj was arguing then millions of people would be criminals the courts found it difficult to see why

01:57:05

would not also encompass violations of restrictions on website providers computers and a nod to eff and many other amiki who wrote in about this issue they recognized that the government's

01:57:18

readings would criminalize everything from embellishing an online dating profile to using a pseudonym in violation of the facebook real names policy or authentic news policy the court said that the cfia

01:57:31

interpretation should be instead based on technology and technical terms and they rejected a view when the descent that we should look to the physical world of trespass as analogies

01:57:44

and this is a very key thing this uh statutory interpretation is what they were doing and statutory interpretation often says you use the plain meanings of terms but in this context they're saying looking at the history of the cfaa what

01:57:58

it was trying to do you should look to technical terms that would guide the interpretation moving forward they also found that damage and loss under the computer fraud and abuse act requires harm to the computer system to

01:58:10

the systems of files to data and that misuse of sensitive data doesn't count towards the damage and loss and this is particularly important because loss and damage are necessary to bring a civil

01:58:23

cfa one of the weird things about the computer fraud and abuse act is it has both civil and criminal components in the same statute which means that there are interpretations of the same word in both

01:58:35

criminal and civil settings when oftentimes there are different policy issues in criminal and civil settings and this has led to uh some of the problematic interpretations of the cfaa best to perform it to separate these

01:58:48

things but as it is there is a limitation when the civil component suit and loss and damage is key to that then there's one issue that that is sort of a stand down issue in the van buren case a curious case of footnote number

01:59:03

eight so we have an opinion that has a lot of these good things we just talked about but they insert a little footnote in there saying that we are not addressing whether it requires a

01:59:14

technological access barriers code-based barriers or instead looks to limit uh contained in contracts or other policies which you know seems a little bit weird because they spent all this time saying about how you shouldn't be using website terms

01:59:27

of search and other policies to find criminal cases now to be fair uh if they had made a decision on that it probably would have been dicta dicta is a term for when a

01:59:39

court says something in an opinion that is not actually relevant to the case in front of them and in this case uh there wasn't a technological access barrier and so you might have said it would be dicta to rule about whether

01:59:53

it needed a technological access barrier it wasn't actually a fact in the case but this footnote does leave some further interpretation down the road so and with this footnote they neither

02:00:05

adopted nor rejected a requirement of their technical aspect now we believe aff has argued in both in the courts and in things like aaron's law that it must be hacking through a technological

02:00:18

defense as the proper interpretation either we can interpret the law as it is to say that you mean that or actually make it explicit in the law but the court did leave a bunch of clues in this opinion about what it thought

02:00:30

about this uh for example later in the opinion the court rejected a government argument that a rule against using a confidential data rule about how you use it for non-law enforcement

02:00:41

purposes should be treated as a crime and that coupled with the language we talked about above we're talking about how millions people will be criminals strongly implied that there should be a technical access barrier but that was

02:00:53

left for another decision so coming soon there is another decision high q versus linkedin uh this was another case before the ninth circuit also about the cfaa both of them were on the supreme court stock

02:01:06

at the same time high q concerns also the without authorization provision well this one was exceeds access iq without authorization uh iq is raising the question of whether

02:01:19

scraping publicly accessible information after you receive a cease and desist letter amounts to a computer crime and also the question of whether linkedin's ip address blocking was a

02:01:30

sufficient technical access barrier so they sent it back down to the ninth circuit to decide that uh case again uh in light of what they just said in in

02:01:43

van buren in the ninth circuit case uh they link high q is victoria so a little bit about that case iq began when linkedin attempted to stop its competitor they iq labs from

02:01:56

scraping the information publicly available posted by users of linkedin so linkedin sent to iq a cease and desist letter asserting that high q is in violation of the user agreement and demanding them they stop accessing it

02:02:09

and saying that this would be a cfaa violation also iq would have systems that would throttle uh or sometimes block activity from suspicious

02:02:20

i p addresses and had a bad ipad block list so high q sued uh which is a little bit of an unusual procedural posture they didn't wait to be sued by linkedin but rather so on a declaratory judgment that this

02:02:33

uh cease and desist letter uh would uh uh uh should be taken down so they would be able to move forward and continue this raven program without fear uh and the

02:02:46

ninth circuit held to the cfa does not prohibit the scraping so it was sent back down it was argued before the ninth circuit on october 18th a little less than a month ago

02:02:58

uh eff filed an amicus brief we actually filed one in the original case we filed again for this reconsideration uh we argued that uh the court should adopt a rule that one cannot access uh

02:03:12

a publicly available website without authorization because those websites do not employ authentication or other technical systems that privilege such access that ip address blocking

02:03:24

should is insufficiently secure or reliable to be considered an authorization system many people will change their ip addresses without even knowing move from like going to a cafe to going at home or if

02:03:36

they're there at home and they turn on and off their router and it gets a new ip address it is not really a technical authorization matter instead it must be a technical

02:03:48

access barrier a password gate is sort of a paradigm example that clearly prevents uh or releases putting up a barrier that dividing what is

02:04:00

available to what is not available so let's turn back to why why it's relevant uh in particular for today and if the van buren case had been out uh during

02:04:13

the time that aaron swartz was being prosecuted it would be clear that he should not have been prosecuted for downloading the json files the gates were up aaron was allowed to access the jstor files

02:04:26

and van buren rejected or teases the united states attorney uh the theory that violating these jstor storms made the access criminal uh jstor did do some ip address blocking

02:04:39

i think is properly interpreted at least as we're hoping that the high q case will do the ip address blocking does not bring the gates down and moreover jstor ultimately uh did not

02:04:51

want to prosecute and pulled back but van buren would have uh its description of loss and damage would have undercut any possible civil claim that jstor might have

02:05:04

made but the fight for reform continues van buren is a critical start there's more to be done the tragic and unjust results of the cfa misuse against aaron torch should never happen again

02:05:18

moving forward we'll need to guide the court's interpretation of van buren because all the ambiguity of footnote eight ongoing with high q at least in the ninth circuit uh i want to make sure that there's a good interpretation there

02:05:30

and every other circuit or maybe back to the supreme court and also untouched by van garen and may need statutory reform is the draconian penalties penalties of the computer fraud and

02:05:42

abuse act must be proportionate to the offense and should not be facing years and years or even decades in prison for accessing a computer especially in a way that does not do substantial harm

02:05:56

what we want to make sure is that computer crime laws are not chilling security research journalism and other novel or interoperable uses of technology that will ultimately benefit all of us

02:06:09

so thank you all for listening and i'll be happy to uh any questions from the audience okay um so um i'm gonna check real quick

02:06:23

because we do have our little running list of questions and if not i have a couple of questions of my own that i will ask okay okay cool we're cool so um so basically

02:06:36

the point is in a nutshell that um aaron was an employee of harvard at the time and had access to the jstor database

02:06:48

database and therefore we could argue about what he was going to do with all the articles later although we're pretty sure he was going to conduct big data research on those

02:07:00

but it was definitely not hacking [Music] accessing the database correct so this that is the thing he had access to the database now you know they may not have wanted him to access it in that manner

02:07:11

not going in and plugging into a server in the closet or the amount or speed at which he was doing it but all of those are policy restrictions the gates were up under the van buren

02:07:25

and then there is some questions like what was he going to do with them so that is something that could be addressed perhaps if there was a civil dispute afterwards but it doesn't make it a crime and that is sort of a really

02:07:37

important thing if you give people access to something you shouldn't be able to have hidden terms or terms that are not enforced by technology turn it into a crime you don't have

02:07:49

these kinds of disputes enforced with the power of the criminal law and the tragedy is that this interpretation is an important thing to understand about uh supreme court

02:08:01

interpretations of the law is what they are interpreting is what the law has always meant so they're not changing the interpretation but recognizing the interpretation and what van buren did was recognize that that's what the

02:08:15

cfa meant but we didn't understand that at the time we didn't but carly ortiz didn't understand at the time leading to this prosecution and unfortunately we weren't able to

02:08:28

uh change that interpretation or clarify that interpretation at the time but just sort of a great tragedy than a law that was not intended to do that allowed to have was about putting up barriers that

02:08:40

didn't exist here not about going after people who had access to the material uh was nevertheless used to threaten somebody with 35 years in jail

02:08:53

right um yes and um shout out bop over the head to carmen ortiz and stephen hayman for being career prosecutors and u.s attorney who didn't take uh aaron's

02:09:06

fragile character into account when they went after him tooth and nail on his grand jury so always nice to get that out of the way um there's a good post um

02:09:17

by dan purcell one of the um one of erin's attorneys called aaron was not a criminal that i will post on the twitter after this and i think we have a question from corey doctorow no we don't oh okay we don't have any

02:09:31

questions we don't have any questions kurt because you explained that very well and uh everyone understands it and this is why we i really appreciate you coming on personally to explain this very

02:09:43

important issue to us and thank you very much for coming all right thanks everybody and take it away all right great so next we're going to go to will house

02:09:54

who is an aaron sports day volunteer that you know hopped on a plane uh to come to aaron's horse day a few years ago and has been a very important volunteer for aaron swords day ever since

02:10:08

and i get emotional sorry it's the first time i knew i wasn't gonna make it through the day i've been doing so well but i'm gonna let will uh introduce corey so here you go take it away will

02:10:23

all right so it is my distinct honor to introduce corey doctorow um you know science fiction author uh award-winning notably uh currently the eff special

02:10:35

advisor uh or an eff special advisor notably the author of i guess we're going back to author of little brother a book that i sort of magically came upon in in the library in seventh grade that uh you

02:10:49

know opened my eyes to the rest of the world and is you know certainly one of the reasons i'm here today so uh you know without any further ado and with uh you know a big round of applause

02:11:02

i am happy to introduce corey doctorow you're muted cory i have two mutes it's not a zoom conference until someone speaks well muted uh hi thank you very much that was a very kind introduction and it's an honor

02:11:18

to be back at erin sports day thank you lisa for organizing this so i was reflecting this morning that uh the internet we use every day today is a very different internet to the one that

02:11:31

uh aaron left behind and one that he might struggle to recognize he did not leave us in a world where the internet consisted of five giant websites filled with screenshots screenshots of text from the other four

02:11:43

that was something that's happened in the years since um and to understand how we got to this place where the internet is uh on the one hand feels like a lot harder to stick up for and on the other hand feels

02:11:56

a lot scarier there are a lot of different explanations and many of them come out of economics so if you've ever heard people talk about this in policy in econ circles

02:12:08

chances are you've heard someone use the phrase network effects network effects describe when a product or service gets better because more people are using it so facebook's a kind of good network effects story

02:12:21

every time someone joins facebook that's a reason for other people to join facebook because their friends are there now um and network effects really do work right they are how tech achieves scale uh you know every time someone

02:12:34

made a microsoft office document that was a reason to buy a copy of microsoft windows because that was where microsoft office ran best and that was a larger pool of files that you might access

02:12:47

the more people there were who had windows the better reason there was to use microsoft office same thing goes for the apple app store and all kinds of services that we're used to using but though even though

02:12:59

these companies have grown to this incredible scale through network effects there's a much more important economics idea that doesn't really get talked about nearly enough and it's one that really relates very closely to the story

02:13:13

of of aaron's life and that's switching costs switching costs are what economists use to describe all the stuff you have to throw away or give up when you change from using one product to another um

02:13:26

so if you leave facebook you leave behind your friends uh if you leave the microsoft windows microsoft office universe before there were lots of

02:13:37

interoperable versions of of word and office like iwork suite and libreoffice and google docs you would leave behind all the documents you'd created and would struggle to access them afterwards

02:13:49

if you leave behind ios you lose your apps and if you leave behind audible you lose your audio books those switching costs are not natural they don't they don't arise out of nowhere they are engineered in in fact

02:14:02

if you look at the latest filings in the ftc's amended complaint against facebook you see all these memos from facebook executives to zuck saying things like well it's really important that we make

02:14:15

facebook photos work really well so people will entrust us with their family pictures because once their family pictures are locked up inside our walled garden they'll have to pay a very high switching cost they'll have to basically

02:14:28

leave behind their memories to leave facebook and we can treat them a lot worse and make a lot more money without worrying about them quitting because we'll have imposed this high switching cost and those high switching costs

02:14:42

are are a feature then and not a bug and to attain high switching costs to to be able to take your users hostage you need to add engineering to the system because by default

02:14:55

computer systems and the networks they run on are intrinsically interoperable they have low switching costs if you know the entire internet is made up out of gopher and you invent the web and

02:15:07

everyone's using gopher all you need to do is add gopher support to your web browser is like ncsa mosaic did and then you just never need to use gopher again and you can still access all the things

02:15:17

that are on gopher um if you uh were to leave your email provider you could just keep your address book and email everyone that that you were emailing from your old email provider and you know if you switch uh phone

02:15:31

carriers because we have a mandatory standard for number porting you don't even have to tell anyone your new phone number you just keep your phone number it's completely invisible to the other people that are part of your network the switching costs are

02:15:43

effectively zero and so switching costs are are a way to take big firms that have gotten big through network effects but have stayed big by taking us all hostage and freeing the hostages uh

02:15:56

you know knocking down the walls through interoperability and standards are one way to get that and you know aaron did his share standards work i've done my share of standards work and standards have their place but you know honestly they're very

02:16:10

easy to corrupt because standards are sort of proceduralist game that are won by the last person who gets bored and it's pretty easy to if you've got a lot of resources to take over a standard

02:16:22

beyond standardization there's another form of interoperability the kind of interoperability that aaron was quite fond of which was adversarial interoperability that's when you take a thing that already exists and you plug something new into it

02:16:35

without their permission like maybe there's a service called jstor and the way that you normally access articles on it is by clicking on links and you can instead create up a small program that

02:16:49

iterates through the links and clicks on them for you that's a form of adversarial interoperability and it's no different in practice to the form of interoperability adversarial interoperability that was practiced by the likes of apple

02:17:01

back in the early 2000s the mac was really on the skids because microsoft office for the mac was really bad and so if you worked in a mixed office environment the only way you could communicate with your colleagues

02:17:13

really was by having a windows machine on your desktop i mean i i ran big networks back then we tried you know we'd give our our designer who had the quadra or the power pc we'd give them a copy of office for mac but when someone

02:17:25

sent them a a word file from a windows machine it wouldn't open or if it did open and they saved it to be corrupted or then no one else would be able to read it and eventually we just started giving them

02:17:36

windows machines and then after that became too cumbersome we just started buying things like quark and adobe for windows and taking away their macs because there was no other way to make it work steve jobs knew this was a problem he didn't

02:17:49

solve it by asking permission from bill gates he moved fast and broke things he he went off and had some engineers reverse engineer the microsoft office file formats he created iwork suite it

02:18:02

included pages keynote and numbers and they read word excel and powerpoint files and you know it's interesting because after the switching costs to go to the mac are really low and they ran that switch campaign

02:18:16

microsoft stopped playing games with their standards because it cost them a lot of money to have all these non-interoperable versions of office and once there was no advantage to it they just went and standardized it that's when we got pptx and xlsx and

02:18:29

docx these xml versions you know again another another errand shout out there and so you know one of the ways that you can get to standards is by having adversarial interoperability now i should say at eff we started using the

02:18:41

phrase competitive compatibility or com com adversarial interoperability is hard to pronounce especially for non-english speakers and it shortens to ai and that already means something so we say comcom

02:18:55

competitive compatibility and i want to tell you a tale today of two different kinds of comcom both relating to facebook the first one is is one that i'm sure you're familiar with a company called cambridge

02:19:08

analytica cambridge analytica created a deceptive quiz that it was uh that it used to exploit a loophole in a facebook api that allowed it to gather information

02:19:20

not just on the people who took the quiz but also their friends and facebook designed the api to work this way but they didn't anticipate or they said later they didn't anticipate that it would work this way and cambridge

02:19:32

analytica created a lot of privacy harms for a very large pool of people we can discuss some other time what those amounted to i'm skeptical of the claim that you know an evil republican billionaire used machine learning to

02:19:46

make a mind control ray that turned your uncle into a cue and on racist i think your uncle might have been a q a on racist all along but you know leaving aside whether you think it worked or it didn't work it's definitely not how we want these big services to work right if you're if

02:19:59

you're holding on to a bunch of user data there are some adversarial inter-operators some comcom practitioners who you really don't want to have inside your network doing stuff because they harm your users

02:20:10

but let's talk about another comcom user who is in trouble with facebook it's a project from the nyu engineering school called ad observatory it comes in two parts there's a browser plugin called ad observer if you're a facebook user you

02:20:24

install this plugin and whenever you see an ad on facebook while you're using it it just grabs the ad it grabs the html it grabs the image and it uploads it to the other part which is called ad observatory and ad

02:20:35

observatory it's just a gallery of ads that have been shown to facebook users with their associated metadata and the reason this exists is that facebook promised after the 2016 election that it would do something about paid

02:20:48

disinformation disinformation that was floated on facebook using its ad platform and pushed out to a lot of users and they have failed they're really they're either really bad or they just don't

02:21:01

care because the one thing that we find over and over again with ad observer and ad observatory is that there's a ton of paid political disinformation on the platform that facebook said it would stop now facebook says that it needs to kill

02:21:14

ad observer in that observatory because uh if it doesn't have the absolute authority to decide who can plug stuff into its network then it won't be able to stop the next cambridge analytica so cambridge analytica moved fast and broke

02:21:26

things ad observatory move fast and fix things facebook says we just need to stop everyone from moving fast whether they're fixing or breaking things and you know let's ignore for the moment

02:21:38

the obvious fact that facebook has permanently disqualified itself from being the entity that defends us from cambridge analytica the day that it allowed cambridge analytica to attack us all like they're surely not the people

02:21:50

we do want to entrust with that and let's ask instead if we're going to protect ad observat ad observer how do we prevent cambridge analytica like how do we make a a tuna

02:22:01

net that we don't get dolphins stuck in what does a dolphin-proof tuner net look like well currently the way that we do this is with a bizarre kind of fugly hack we have a whole bunch of private laws like section 1201 of the dmca

02:22:15

that's a law that says that it's a potential felony to give people tools to reverse engineer drm companies use this all the time now they just add enough drm to their product that to do anything useful with it you have to

02:22:28

remove the drm and then they just say okay anything you've done that we don't like all perforce had to involve removing drm and that's a felony so we'll we'll come after you they have uh we have legal theories like tortious interference with

02:22:41

contract basically says you know if if um i have a user agreement that i make my users click through and then you do something that makes it easy for them to violate that user agreement like you know if every time you join facebook you

02:22:53

have to click a long garbage novella of legalese that says you know by being dumb enough to use facebook i promise that that mark zuckerberg can come over to my house and punch my grandmother and wear my underwear and make long distance calls and eat all the food out of the

02:23:05

fridge and then i make a tool that keeps zuck out of your house and teaches your grandma to defend him from from defend herself from from mark zuckerberg they say oh that's tortious interference you're helping our users

02:23:18

violate a contract they entered into with us and then of course we have this computer fraud and abuse act right we have this law that um as you heard kurt describe allowed companies uh prior to

02:23:30

the van buren decision and now to a lesser extent after the van buren decision allow companies to just define things as illegal uh it is all of these laws taken together they are what amounts to a kind of felony

02:23:43

contempt of business model to use a phrase from jay sorek uh the the founder of saidia who's just filed an antitrust lawsuit against apple go go jay and felony contempt of business model was what we saw

02:23:56

when they came after aaron you know aaron there really isn't a question about whether aaron was allowed to access the articles that he downloaded from mit's network the question was whether he downloaded them in a way

02:24:09

that interfered with the business model of the people who are hosting them not whether they given him permission not whether it was illegal not whether he was violating copyright but but whether he was making their investors sad

02:24:23

and the idea that that we are going to somehow defend our privacy and other legitimate interests just by giving companies the power to use like any law they have lying around

02:24:35

to defend those has some pretty obvious problems like for one thing there may be privacy abuses that aren't covered by this weird melange of contract law cyber security tortious

02:24:48

interference there may be other forms of abuse fraudulent offers and and other things that we would want to prevent that just aren't covered by those things you know if you want to defend privacy there's a there's a pretty obvious path

02:25:02

in law to defending privacy and that's to have a law that defines what our privacy rights are which you know may surprise you to hear america doesn't have

02:25:14

we do not have a federal privacy law and the fact that we don't have a federal privacy law we don't have a broad data protection law that our anti-fraud laws have thus far not done the job and so firms are

02:25:27

turning to uh uh copyright and torturous interference and cyber security law to to settle these these criminal acts on their networks that is not caused to give companies more leeway to create more errands

02:25:42

in the service of protecting our interests and their shareholders interests and you know deciding when those two things are in conflict sort of leaving it up to them to decide who wins

02:25:53

instead we need um uh these laws to be freestanding laws that are passed by our legislature and in particular we need these laws to have what's called a private right of action so this is kind of the flip side of

02:26:06

private law under private law a company gets to decide what the law is and under a private right of action every person has the right to decide uh whether the law needs enforcing and so

02:26:19

private right of action means that if your privacy was abused by facebook or by cambridge analytica or even by ad observer who you know for the record aren't abusing anyone's privacy if your privacy was abused

02:26:32

you would have the right to go to court and seek redress for it and you know that is the kind of aaron swartz model right rather than convincing some attorney general or some uh

02:26:46

district attorney that someone's rights have been violated you could say your rights have been violated and you could go to court and that private right of action is pretty controversial among big businesses they

02:26:58

all say the same thing they say oh well think about the nuisance lawsuits that we'll get well that's another way of saying think about what happens when everyone who wrong who we wrong and not just the people who are

02:27:11

connected enough to get a district attorney or another federal official to take action when when they get to seek redress for the harms that we visit upon them um

02:27:23

now we obviously need these laws and the fact that we don't have these laws i think it's the inverse of aaron's most important fight the fight over sopa right aaron said that um

02:27:35

you know that that we needed to not keep passing bad cyber laws he was right but you know the corollary of that is like why are we passing good ones

02:27:46

back in 2010 aaron very memorably said it is no longer acceptable for a politician not to understand the internet that's a phrase that i i hold dear in my heart

02:27:59

but you know i think we need to contrast it against a remark that was made by upton sinclair many decades before in 1934 in which he said it is difficult to get a man to

02:28:12

understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it so we we live in an age of very complicated technical questions technical questions that you or i can't

02:28:25

resolve on our own i mean maybe you know the people listening to this are qualified to distinguish the cambridge analyticas from the ad observers right that people are moving fast and breaking things from the people who are moving fast and fixing things

02:28:39

and maybe some of you are technical enough that you can like do the cell biology to figure out uh what's what's right and wrong about vaccines maybe some of you are respirologists and you can figure out what's right or wrong about masks

02:28:51

are any of you metallurgists who can tell me whether the standard that define the reinforced steel joist over my head was any good uh and whether my ceiling is gonna cave in on me you know i drive a kia they had a big data breach can anyone tell me

02:29:04

whether i can trust the anti-lock um my kid is going to zoom school off and on is anyone a pedagogist who can tell me whether it's going to make her an ignoramus there are more technical questions than

02:29:18

any of us can resolve no matter how smart we are no matter how much research we do no matter how much time we spend uh trying to parse out and and be responsible uh citizens who who make informed choices

02:29:31

ultimately the way that we know whether we can get a boeing 737 max now that they're flying again and not worry about it falling out of the sky is not by mastering avionics and aviation and aerospace engineering

02:29:45

it's by having a process that we trust a process of truth seeking in which complex technical claims about what is and isn't true are adjudicated by experts who are

02:29:58

neutral and work for us the public and they show their work when they make a decision and then they revisit their choices when those decisions are challenged by new evidence and it's been a long time since we had

02:30:12

anything recognizable as a good truth-seeking exercise in our halls of power as our firms and industries have become more concentrated those two seeking exercises have turned into something that looks a lot more like an auction

02:30:24

where big companies uh decide what the truth is and you know one of the things that helps them decide what the truth is is if the industry is concentrated down to the point where there's only

02:30:37

one two three four or five companies who can all get together sit around a table and make that choice you know a lot of us in 2017 saw that picture of donald trump sitting around that table at the top of trump

02:30:51

tower with all the leaders of the tech industry and we were appalled to see these technologists meeting with this this um you know bigot strongman and sure that was alarming but i think we should be even more

02:31:03

alarmed by the fact that they all fit around one table you know once everyone does fit around one table they will sit around one table and once they're sitting around one table they're going to figure out how to collude

02:31:15

to pervert the process to make it harder for us to know what is and isn't true to know what is and is in good policy to convince our lawmakers that we need

02:31:27

our freestanding privacy right and not for companies to just have the right to and to declare anything to be illegal and say well we'll only use this in service to our users privacy so you know you may have seen that

02:31:41

there's a lot of antitrust action right now um the presumption that it's okay for companies to buy or merge with their rivals to engage in predatory pricing and other uh historically unlawful

02:31:52

anti-competitive conduct that that idea is kind of past its cell date and uh policymakers are revisiting it long past due but it's going to take a long time to get any action out of that i mean if

02:32:05

you're my age i turned 50 this year you probably remember exactly one major breakup that antitrust enforcers managed that was the breakup of att in 1982 and people go oh that took like

02:32:17

more than a decade it took like 12 13 years for 18t to get broken up it's actually not how long it took for 18t to get broken up the first antitrust action against ett was in the teens

02:32:29

it took nearly 75 years to break atm t up it is a slow moving process because by the time a company is a monopoly and is extracting the monopoly rents the high profits

02:32:42

that are the reason that companies form monopolies it is able to amass both influence and money that it can use to beat back attempts to break it up or hold it to

02:32:55

account right the the best time to enforce anti-monopoly law is before you have monopolies once you have them they're really hard to get rid of an ounce of prevention is really worth a pound of cure here

02:33:08

um and so you know you can see this play out over and over again uh you know the other antitrust case that roundup in 1982 the year that they broke up 18t was ibm's antitrust case

02:33:21

ibm spent 12 years itself in antitrust hell being investigated by the doj every year that it was in antitrust hell ibm's legal bill just for that one

02:33:33

lawsuit was more than the hr bill for all the lawyers in the department of justice antitrust division ibm had so much money that they could literally hire more

02:33:44

lawyers in the u.s government to defend itself it's no surprise that after 12 years it walked away effectively unscathed now it's not to say that we can't and shouldn't try to take muscular

02:33:56

enforcement action against monopolists but if all we're going to do is wait until finally those processes run their course it's gonna be too late it's gonna be a lot of people who get ground up in

02:34:08

between right the only thing worse than losing aaron would be doing nothing about all the future errands that might got caught in the teeth of this system and so you i think that this is where

02:34:20

aaron like tactics this interoperability stuff really comes in because you know antitrust used to be enforced antitrust might be enforced tomorrow but right now we're not going to get much out of it that's a classic

02:34:34

jam yesterday jam tomorrow no jam today kind of situation but if we allow for interoperability it has some really significant immediate effects right if you could plug new services

02:34:46

like um like mastodon or discord or diaspora into facebook you could leave facebook and still stay in touch with the family members the communities the friends the customers

02:34:59

that you rely on facebook for but you could have your own policies you could have your own policies about what data is collected you could have your own policies about how it's used you could have your own moderation policies you could kick off the bullies that facebook

02:35:10

wouldn't kick off that make your life hell or you could permit the kind of speech that facebook keeps blocking like if you're part of black lives matter or you're a trans rights activist or you're a sex worker who's getting caught up in

02:35:22

things like a real names policy you could jettison that policy and you could have your own rules in your own space we could enable people to have technological self-determination we could let people not just be present

02:35:35

and have a voice in the design of facebook you know you hear this from the disability rights movement they say nothing about us without us ask disabled people people with disabilities what

02:35:47

they need rather than making up out of your own impressions of what it means to be a person with a disability what accommodations would help but you know the apotheosis of nothing about us

02:35:59

without us is nothing about me without me that at the end of the day my own use case is one that i will always understand better than any design team than any firm than

02:36:13

even a committee a multi-stakeholder committee of people who are supposed to be similarly situated to me that ability to adapt the tool to your hand it's key to the hacker ethos it's what made us all so excited about

02:36:25

computers in the first place because they were so malleable but it's also you know something that people have enjoyed since the first person shipped an axe head out of stone and made it fit their hand let me see if i can find my there's

02:36:36

my stone axe head right like here's some interoperability for you right this is a 70 000 year old stone axe head and the person who made it made it fit their use case they didn't have to rely on someone

02:36:49

else to tell them what the optimal ax use was they got to design it for themselves if we give people interoperable tools we let them out of the walled gardens if we free the hostages then not only

02:37:02

do we maybe stay the hand of the people in the design briefings at these large companies who are trying to decide just how badly they can treat those users before they leave because we make it easier for them to leave but if we don't

02:37:15

stay their hand if they decide to abuse users anyway then we give users somewhere to go we make it easier for them to seize the means of computation to be in charge of

02:37:26

their own technological destiny and so there are a lot of paths to making that happen here in the us there's the access act working its way through congress in the european union there's the digital markets act we've seen some recommendations in the

02:37:39

uk from the competition and markets authority and canada which has been pursuing just an absolutely terrible approach to this maybe reconsidering it i've had some emails from people in parliament lately about this so maybe we'll get something

02:37:52

better out of there and you know there are things that we can do administratively we don't have to wait for congress to act like not only could the administration act but they should act to promote interoperability by saying we're just not going to buy

02:38:05

anything anymore from a technology provider or a vendor unless it's interoperable like you wouldn't build a va hospital where the contractors who built it said uh we're the only ones who

02:38:17

are allowed to like plug things into the wall or change where the plugs are we're also going to keep all the math we use to calculate the load stresses and the atrium a secret and there's no as-built diagram showing you where the network

02:38:30

cables the power cables and the water and sewage are right that is not a good hospital and anyone who insisted that that was the condition under which they were going to sell uncle sam a hospital they should be sent packing and yet here

02:38:42

we are every school district in america last year uh procured licenses for google classroom without insisting that they'd be allowed to plug in

02:38:52

arbitrary uh tools for um uh textbooks assessment and so on into google classroom right that's just dereliction of duty the us government just shouldn't buy anything nor should local or state

02:39:06

governments buy anything unless it comes with interoperability and that interoperability could take the form of a promise that says by selling this stuff to the government we promise that you know your motor pool vehicles that we're going to

02:39:19

allow independent mechanics to fix them by providing an independent part stream and service manuals and access to diagnostic codes you know this is a very old principle in good governance in the u.s it goes back

02:39:32

at least to the civil war during the civil war the union army lincoln's army they refused to buy rifles from uh gun manufacturers unless they hewed to a standard unless

02:39:45

they had standard parts and ammunition because again they were like okay yeah you guys need to make a profit that is not as important as us having working rifles wherever we are we're not going to be beholden to you so we could do that up and down the

02:39:58

entire supply chain when you think about all the different things that the us government buys phones and tablets and cars and planes and network services and and so on you know

02:40:09

we could we could use procurement as a huge lever without any congressional authorization to completely remake what's available not just to government customers but to all customers and ultimately to everyone in america and

02:40:23

perhaps around the world because you know once those services are interoperable they're interoperable once the diagnostic codes for all the cars the us government has bought are available to the us government it's inevitable that they'll be available to

02:40:36

all of us um we might also see other means of solving this means that might arise from the prosecutions anti-trust prosecutions these big firms you know if the ftc ends up entering

02:40:49

into a settlement with uh with say facebook which is a thing that they usually do when there's an interest complaint that's been the usual method for the last couple of decades that whenever a company is looking like it's going to lose it

02:41:01

offers a settlement that settlement could come with the requirement that they take on a special master that was the job larry lessig got when after the microsoft anti-trust settlement before they before they got it appealed and that special master could be in charge

02:41:14

of when they get to sue people you know they could say look i see you want to sue ad observer uh for a computer fraud and abuse act claim or a tortious interference claim or a reverse engineering claim under under dmca 1201

02:41:27

i'm going to look at that claim before i let you file it to make sure it's not pretextual to make sure that you're actually trying to protect your users and not just your shareholders so i want to close by saying that the

02:41:39

problem with what happened to aaron was not that someone who operated a service objected to a third party altering the way that that service worked the problem is that they could convert their objection into a legal right that as as

02:41:51

kurt said the state would enforce on their behalf it's a dominant companies are are not or rather interoperators are not the only people who can do bad things to their users

02:42:04

dominant companies can also be as harmful you know cambridge analytica took our data and did a bunch of bad things to us with it and invaded our privacy facebook takes our data and does bad things with it and

02:42:15

invades our privacy we don't just need a law that stops cambridge analytica from taking the data that facebook has on us and abusing it we need a law that stops facebook from taking the data that it

02:42:27

has on us and abusing it so the existence of cambridge analytica shouldn't be a reason that allows facebook to kill that observer but likewise the existence of ad observer shouldn't mean that someone like

02:42:39

cambridge analytica or even facebook itself gets off the hook for the bad acts that they do the harms that they visit on us we need to get rid of felony contempt of business model but we need to put something in to fill

02:42:52

the void we need rights for inter-operators that are demarcated by democratically accountable law not by corporate whim so that's that's all i want to say you know it has been

02:43:06

a long time since we lost aaron and things have not gotten better by and large uh the van buren decision is a huge victory and very vindicating but um we have seen a general discrediting

02:43:20

of the idea of operating the way aaron operated of just unilateral unilaterally taking action to fix things that are manifestly broken and i'm worried that we're going down a path that's going to be hard to reverse course on

02:43:33

and that what we're going to end up with is a kind of duopoly of all powerful states that are beholden to all powerful companies with no room for individual action to fix our lives and that

02:43:45

in that realm yeah we might see the extinction of small companies that abuse us but it will be extinct because they will have been out competed by large companies that abuse us in ways that

02:43:57

they can only dream of so this is why i think the work that eff is doing right now on interoperability and competition is so important and why it's so exciting that interoperability is on

02:44:09

the agenda in so many different forums in brussels and washington and sacramento and around the world and i hope that you will use this talk and the the nuance from it

02:44:22

to help understand what the difference is between aaron and a hacker and a hoodie on a on a mr robot knock off what the difference is between ad observer and um

02:44:34

and uh cambridge analytica because there is a difference and we can tell the difference thank you all right great thank you so much corey for that um and again um so we were just

02:44:48

talking about um or i was just talking about with a number of people about marcus hutchins and who actually got a very good decision in his case

02:45:00

sort of miraculously um in the sense that a judge i don't have the name handy but the judge um actually weighed

02:45:12

marcus's past deeds when he was young very young teenager with how he has done very inspirational

02:45:24

things as an adult um so he figured it out you know as as kids oh it all often do and again a lot of times judges don't

02:45:35

give kids a second chance uh especially people of color seem to never get second chances they get thrown in jail often when they are still before they're even

02:45:47

an adult in many states and so do you have any thoughts about that judge's decision and you know does it give us hope that judges might actually sort of do their

02:46:00

homework more about what's going on with these kinds of cases especially looking towards the future yeah i mean it's it's it's hard to know what was going on

02:46:13

in that judge's head but i'll tell you the thing that i think we can take away from it which is that it it um kind of kills the the old tired trope that um

02:46:26

lawmakers and elements of the justice system are just too clueless to understand technology and that's why we have bad technology policy and as far as i know there aren't any like microbiologists

02:46:38

in congress uh and yet we're not all dead of listeria right you can trust your drinking water right so all of those technical questions that i raised before

02:46:48

about the 737 mass mat max and masking and vaccines and the roof over your head and whether or not the kitchen safety standards at the restaurant you're going to have dinner in tonight are going to kill you before breakfast

02:47:02

all of those questions get resolved somehow and when they don't get resolved i think it's not just aegis to say that they weren't resolved well because congress is full of old people although we do have something of a gerundocracy

02:47:15

i think it's it's also kind of it lets them off the hook because judges can do their homework right they can get briefed by experts they have clerks clerks they have clerks who understand

02:47:28

steps yeah shout out to the clerks the kevin smith moment there uh yeah so you know like the reason we have bad policy is not because they're clueless it's because

02:47:41

they don't care right or or they they don't bother to care they don't bother to find out they don't bother to educate themselves and they can so uh

02:47:52

you know let's let's just remember marcus the next time we see a judge get it wrong and realize that getting it wrong is a choice right it's not it's not an epic phenomenon of what decade you were

02:48:04

born in all right okay great we have a question from you from the youtube chat very good an actual question from the interwebs as promised and it is this

02:48:18

um it's from uh geck3 gck three my country shares all citizen state communications by private companies we speak about facebook and others but

02:48:31

google controls all internet communications with android but no one speaks about this who is actually going to hold these companies accountable afterwards i don't know about afterwards

02:48:45

like i don't know if we're ever going to have truth and reconciliation with the android team uh maybe but you know that's that's jam tomorrow i want jam today uh

02:48:56

you know it's not enough to like set in motion the forces that might someday hold these companies to account we also need remedies for people right away uh and you know i i think that google is is not

02:49:10

neglected by people who worry about about market concentration and privacy far from it um you know if i use facebook as my major example it's it's only because i think that you can kind of draw a little like two by

02:49:23

two grid of the big firms and on one axis you can put a company that wants to control everything you do and on the other axis you can put a company that wants to spy on you all the time

02:49:36

and you know over here they want to control you all the time is apple but they don't care what you're doing right they're just not even going to look inside the box so long as you're locked up in their box they're not going to look inside of it

02:49:48

and over here you got google they don't want to put you in a box but they're going to spy on you wherever they are wherever you are because they don't need a box to spy on you and then over here you've got kind of the worst of all worlds which is google uh which is

02:50:00

facebook rather which wants to spy on you all the time everywhere right like they they and and lock you up right so facebook wants to lock you up and spy on you all the time so they're they i think that's why they get the most attention

02:50:12

that and like their latest publicity stunt you know the the like willfulness reading of science fiction that the you know cyberpunk dystopia is a suggestion rather than a warning uh uh

02:50:25

pivot to vr uh has has made them kind of the poster child for for bad stuff but i agree i mean you know google as i often say is a company that is kind of a poster child

02:50:36

for antitrust enforcement they've had one and a half successful internal products right they made a really really good search engine and a pretty good hotmail clone everything else that they made in-house failed

02:50:48

everything that they did that succeeded they bought from someone else their whole ad tech stack their video service you know the second largest um calculus oculus that's facebook oh oh i thought

02:51:01

i'm sorry i'm talking about google okay so you know we forget that before google bought youtube they had google video which sucked and failed right if we had had the kind of antitrust enforcement

02:51:12

in the 90s and 2000s that we had in the 60s and 70s google wouldn't have been allowed to buy youtube youtube would be a freestanding company same with admob same with doubleclick right google had internal versions of

02:51:25

these and they they failed uh the one product that we can call a big success that google has had in uh that it designed internally is um google photos and google photos is

02:51:37

a success because it comes free with android which is something they bought from someone else right so if we had the kind of presumption against uh integrated vertical monopolies that was once common

02:51:50

in america we wouldn't have this giant firm that is able to wield such outs outsized influence on everything we do and distort so much of our markets i mean

02:52:02

don't forget that in the antitrust case against google that's going through texas right now it's a multi-party antitrust case they just unsealed this giant indictment full of incredibly salacious stuff about how google and

02:52:15

facebook got together and colluded to rig ad markets you know so they were they were colluding to to raise the price of ads and then pass less of it on to uh newspapers and other publishers

02:52:28

and you know when newspapers say oh the problem with the internet is that google steals our content or facebook steals our content by linking to us that's obviously untrue right the thing that's also obviously true and

02:52:41

that i don't understand why they don't put all their energy into is google steals from facebook google and facebook steal from publishers by stealing their money right not by stealing their not by stealing their content but by collecting

02:52:54

dollars for ads on their website that they don't give them right by by rigging the market for ads so that their website can command less for the ads right that that's you know that's what do you mean they're collecting money on their behalf that

02:53:07

isn't being so they're like i pay to advertise on your website you put the ad on your website google brokers the transaction and they don't give you the money for the ad that i gave them money to show on your website

02:53:19

right like that's that that's the the heart of this and srivasanan wrote a very good um law review paper where she really unpicks the the kind of ad fraud run by the big duo

02:53:32

and you know like the reason google has all this dry powder the reason they have all this money to do all of this uh sort of policy uh entrepreneurship is because they're extracting monopoly rents by

02:53:43

running fraudulent ad markets so i'm not i'm not talking about this because like i think that saving content is the most important thing i'd like to save content too but it's not the most important thing i'm saying this because if we fix if we unrigged our ad markets if we fix

02:53:57

the monopolization illegal collusion if we enforced antitrust law as it still is written on the books these companies wouldn't have the money to do the bad things to us that they're doing right they just their their choices would not be so salient they

02:54:10

could still be they could still make bad choices you know i think that we are in in danger of saying well the problem with facebook is that mark zuckerberg is bad at being the unelected internet

02:54:23

czar of three billion people's lives and he is really bad at that job he sucks at that job but like that job shouldn't exist right the problem isn't that we have the wrong internet czar the problem is that

02:54:35

we have an internet car right and and this is where uh creating more competition by reducing the barriers to entry by lowering the switching costs this is where it can make a really big difference not because

02:54:49

of some like kind of uh neoliberal fetishization of markets as the solution to all of our problems but because if you fight for the user if you fight for the rights of people who use the internet then first among

02:55:03

those rights has to be the right to decide how the internet works for them and when one company gets to call all the shots then they lose that fundamental right and everything else falls out of that

02:55:15

okay so you're saying we should break up google i'm saying we should break them all up but i'm saying that it's going to take us maybe if it takes as long as it took with att it could take 75 years which is why we need interoperability now because that'll let us do something

02:55:27

about it while we're waiting and like and you know without getting too deep in the weeds on this um breakup stuff even failed breakups actually do some good right so like ibm famously did not get

02:55:39

broken up 12 years in antitrust hell i spent the doj every year that it was in antitrust hell and yet one of the things that happened as a result of this is they kind of lost their nerve right ibm knew that the doj really didn't like

02:55:51

it when they tied software to hardware because that was a way to create monopolies right and so when um ibm made its first pc they didn't make its operating system they got a couple of

02:56:03

weirdos named bill gates and paul allen to start a little company called micro dash soft which is how it was originally spelled and sell them a program that they bought from someone else called dos right that's where we got microsoft from

02:56:17

right it's how we got what became the most successful company in the history of the world was just terrorism as they attached their software to their hardware no because they were able to sell the software for a whole bunch of hardware

02:56:29

no i mean microsoft was i don't know they attached it to ibm's hardware but not only that ibm knew that um one of the things the doj really didn't like about them was that they'd gone after what were called plug compatible

02:56:43

uh add-ons so these were people who made like printers and keyboards and stuff that plugged into ibm mainframes so trying to lock up the hardware so phoenix computers was a little uh startup that reverse engineered the rom

02:56:55

in the ibm pc and uh they made a rom that anyone could buy and make a pc compatible right and those pc compatibles are where we got dell and compaq and so on well

02:57:07

the reason ibm didn't crush phoenix computers like a bug which they absolutely had the power to do was because they were worried about the doj having just gone through 12 years of antitrust hell right so like

02:57:20

it it cost them their nerve and it opened the space for all those pc companies for microsoft for all the companies that built on microsoft's platform and then you know microsoft got too big for its britches it became a monopolist every pirate wants to be an

02:57:33

admiral you know give them long enough they'll turn into the thing that they fought and then you know the doj came and they stopped them again and they convicted microsoft to being a monopolist but then microsoft would appeal it

02:57:44

right right and and whatever so that was lawrence lessig's case at the supreme court and he won sort of but then they got out of it what happened there well they successfully

02:57:57

appealed it so but the point being that even after they even after they won and they didn't get broken up when google launched they could have done the same thing to google that they did to netscape right all the same dirty tricks that

02:58:10

that extinguished netscape could have been brought to bear on google and it's pretty clear that the reason they let google live was because they just spent seven years being crushed by the doj and like bill gates had been personally

02:58:22

humiliated during his deposition and so on so we got something out of it so even like even the weak form of antitrust that we had after the 80s after the reagan revolution did something but it got weaker and weaker and now we have

02:58:35

google and google is clearly where microsoft and ibm and at t were right their predatory acquisitions predatory pricing out and out fraud in the in the ad market and so on and um

02:58:47

there there wasn't until this new administration and and lina khan and tim wu and uh and cantor there wasn't any energy to do to them what we did to microsoft

02:59:00

and to do to them what we did to ibm that created microsoft and so on we we kind of interrupted the cycle and so that's what's unusual about our world right it's it's like this tech exceptionalist idea

02:59:12

that the tech barons are either geniuses or exceptionally evil i think really just feeds into their own mythology they are they're like as peter thiel once said i'd rather be thought of as evil than incompetent right the reality

02:59:26

is that they're just like or the evil guy yeah but they're just they're just ordinary mediocrities they're no better and no worse than you or me and the one thing that they've got is an open field they've got nobody telling them no

02:59:39

and so this is exactly you know what if steve jobs could have done it he would have done it during his life the idea that we can like somehow contrast steve jobs and bill gates and say bill gates was the evil tech billionaire of the 80s and steve jobs was the good one it's

02:59:52

ridiculous if steve jobs could have gotten away with it he would have gotten away with it you know that he had lived long enough to get away with it yeah if he hadn't switched from taking effective cancer therapy to juice cleanses uh

03:00:05

but um you know the the reality is that the thing that constrains firms from becoming monopolists is not their good will it's rules that prohibit the formation

03:00:18

and continuation of monopolies and when we stopped enforcing those rules we got monopolies not just in tech in every sector you know we are down to five or fewer companies and sectors as varied as professional wrestling beer brewing

03:00:31

finance eyeglasses cheerleader uniforms athletic shoes accounting you know that that's not the result of like you know some exceptional thing about technology or silicon valley's

03:00:44

ability to attract you know the titans of the universe it's it's the result of like a systemic change that created monopolies and what we can do with tech is that because we have interoperability

03:00:56

we can weaken the grasp of a monopoly in a way that's harder to do with beer say where they have these like stubborn atoms that they have to like move around from you know breweries to stores to

03:01:08

bars and stuff yeah you know we can we can we can do it in a way that no one else can and so that's that is the one exceptional thing about technology is this interoperability that is that is distinctive

03:01:20

and really unique about digital computers a new thing in the world and and that's why we need to be the vanguard here that's why we need to fight back that's why we need that spirit of moving fast and fixing things

03:01:33

right and that is the spirit of aaron sports day and what we try to do here too is try to remind people that there are things we can do and i also want to say aaron called it on google aaron literally used to when he was 14

03:01:45

15 years old make jokes about the don't be evil motto that everybody was believing for some reason he had the google blog because he was watching google he wasn't sure what was going on over there but it

03:01:58

didn't look right and he and he was smart he didn't say it didn't look right right he was he was casually putting this blog saying they're doing this they're doing this they're doing this is there anybody out there

03:02:11

that notices that they're doing this they're doing this you know and then when it was too late it never and you know then he was sorry i got bored with it and i think he handed it over uh he may have even handed it over to them the point was it was it was over it

03:02:24

wasn't interesting anymore it was just obvious it had become the plumbing like a lot of things that aaron wrote about in the beginning that then you know became um the plumbing so and tim wu you mentioned tim wu is he actually

03:02:37

working for biden yeah he's in the white house tim will is a law professor that we camped out with in front of eldridge at the eldridge argument uh he was there with some grad students aaron and i camped out and

03:02:51

tim wu was there and so shout out to tim wu okay we've got one more do you have time for another couple questions because we've got them if you've got time corey do you have time sure yeah sorry i thought you were

03:03:04

asking for other questions no no no i'm asking you okay yeah sure okay great so our next um question is from grant smith ellis if you want to turn your camera on grant and um he's actually doing our webcast

03:03:17

today and he's going to speak later about the different ways that he is leveling the playing field um in the uh cannabis industry actually making sure that there is more diversity in the cannabis industry but he has a

03:03:30

question for you right now take it away grant well thank you lisa your introduction is far too kind and thank you corey that was an amazing talk i enjoyed every minute of it thank you my i i had a question about private right

03:03:42

of action and then i'm going to leave you with a case recommendation um you talked about the positives of private rights of action which actually can help trust busting because you can do things like trouble damages and things like

03:03:53

that to incentivize consumers to ward off regulatory capture oligopolies monopolies so i guess my question is what do you think about the inverse where private right of action is weaponized like we

03:04:05

saw with sb8 in texas to undermine reproductive health care and then the case recommendation is connecticut general life insurance v johnson from 1939 uh justice hugo black's descent okay

03:04:18

can you put that i love these kind of questions all right so i think there's something fundamentally different about a private rate of action uh where you don't have to show um standing

03:04:30

so again we're getting into like legal stuff that as a non-lawyer i'm maybe getting out of my depth but i will say that that the the major difference between a private rate of action in a

03:04:42

privacy statute and sba is that um to have a private right of action and a privacy statute you have to have had your privacy violated right this is not about like if if

03:04:54

if uh alice tells bob a secret that is alice's secret to tell bob carroll doesn't get to sue because alice should have kept that secret private that bob now knows something private about alice because alice and bob made

03:05:07

that call between themselves right uh the private right of action in sb-8 as i understand it was that you could be a completely unrelated party right like you could not

03:05:19

be the person who wanted an abortion not be the person who was uh helping to create the abortion or abetting it in some way you were just uh some rando who could then go to court and say

03:05:33

i am entitled to damages because uh um this person is breaking a law and i don't need the attorney general to enforce it and so that that i think is the the main difference again with the

03:05:46

caveat that i'm not a lawyer i'm an activist uh i don't know if kurt's still on the line and wants to weigh in but yeah it's that that's that's my understanding kurt do you want to weigh in well we've got you

03:05:58

i think one of the uh one of the problems with uh the private right of action uh is also the damages so the supreme court had a decision uh unfortunate decision that

03:06:10

said you had to have damages and in a privacy circumstance there will be statutory damages which establish you know private value you are owed this much but the court says well you have to actually be damaged

03:06:24

so we're still working on the interpretation of the law but one of the ongoing challenges in privacy uh lawsuits is to show that you were harmed more than just what the statutes say you

03:06:35

know not just because the statute said so but you were actually harmed by the privacy violation i think it you know privacy violation has many harms associated with it but the court has to recognize that and in some cases sure

03:06:48

you know you've suffered identity theft you there can be actual harms but for these things to be most effective as to recognize that it is a problem for for everybody if their privacy is violated

03:07:01

if you go through uh enforcing them through the government you know the ftc or state attorney generals or such that can be relaxed a little bit so i have a question just is so if if

03:07:13

people are allowed to file these lawsuits that aren't really directly related to the law that they are filing a lawsuit again complicated to intervene

03:07:25

um does that mean that we can all file amicus briefs whether or not uh we're directly related i mean are is it no holds bars now with these crazy cases in texas what can we do uh

03:07:37

for mika's briefs uh you know anybody can can ask for leave to file an amicus brief to assist the court the court has the discretion about whether to accept that or not but you do not have to have

03:07:50

standing you do not have to uh you know be a party or be affected the the by the decision or by the the law in order to find an amiku street amicus is the latin friend because kurai is the

03:08:03

full name so a friend of the court and it's what you're doing with an attraction you're just trying to help out the court come to the right interpretation though the court is more likely to accept your leave to file if you explain

03:08:15

why you have a perspective or an understanding that would be valuable for the court so wait a minute you're saying that in these cases and at least with the with the texas

03:08:26

abortion law ban law that people were allowed to file cases even though they did not have a direct connection but the amicus people would still have to go under some scrutiny by the judge if we wanted to file a brief

03:08:39

in that case is that what you're saying kurt uh you know there there seem to be i mean i don't wanna you know uh jump ahead of things but it does seem like this texas law turns everything on its head and is quite crazy

03:08:51

for uh this notion that anyone has standing to to do this and we will see how the supreme court uh sees about it but it's wait can we throw this out from on a standing ground people are trying to throw it out on a wide variety of

03:09:05

grounds i mean almost fundamentally that uh you know there's the precedent of roe v wade and such uh but also uh that is doing something innovative uh procedurally and if they

03:09:18

are correct about that you could make all sorts of other laws where you could enforce rights that you would not be doing like you could imagine the same structure except it's now a a gun law and if you see anybody with a gun you could sue

03:09:31

them for ten thousand dollars uh despite the you know don't have to worry about the second amendment this is like and this is the complaint with with that law that it allows anybody to go in

03:09:42

there so we will see standing is about the constitution's requirement that any lawsuit have a controversy a case or controversy and this is the notion that uh to to best interpret the law you should have

03:09:56

the people advocating uh on either side the adversarial system the people who are invested in the outcome they're not just observers coming along uh and a law that allows anybody to to sue

03:10:09

doesn't have that and in some cases you know whatever it is you can just disagree or agree about whether that's a bad thing you should make it easier to sue uh but in order to uh get back to like privacy and some of the things that

03:10:22

we're trying to address in digital rights you don't have to go to something like a texas law in order to to get there okay great uh hey corey i've got a question from carl malamid oh hey carl

03:10:33

yeah uh who worked with aaron um collaborated with aaron on on many things the pacerprojectpublicresource.org and he has a question and his question is what's your advice corey to individuals

03:10:47

who wish to practice adversarial interoperability how do you learn to do that and has it become more dangerous i think it has become more dangerous um as a legal matter i don't want to chill

03:11:00

anyone from trying it but i think that you know aaron is i mean quite literally the poster child for the environment that we're working in today um and i think in many ways things got worse afterwards not better

03:11:13

although you know van buren as kurt said earlier is a major step forward i mean adversarial interoperability reverse engineering i i think i'm maybe the best place to start would be bunny

03:11:24

wang's books um he's written three of them the last one was called the hardware engineer but the first one hacking the xbox is particularly interesting as a kind of meditation reverse engineering the whole pentascale reverse engineering world the

03:11:38

security research world is the place where we see this kind of thing uh done most aggressively and interestingly it is by definition adversarial uh and um they're they're performing such an

03:11:51

important public service so you know um like there's a zine called poc or gtfo proof of concept or get the out that published a great anthology with peach a couple of years ago that is just

03:12:04

papers uh describing um reverse engineering and pocs um and so you know that's that's as a print resource i'd start there um you know beyond that the world reverse

03:12:17

engineering is so well co-terminal with the security research world that like just you know following security research forums infosec forums is a great place to to go

03:12:29

all right great well thank you very much for that it was really really helpful i will take my last check to make sure we don't have another

03:12:41

pressing question from the interwebs do no we're good okay so now corey uh if you would please introduce will so our next our next speaker is will house he's an aaron

03:12:56

swartz day volunteer who works on the bad apple project and hopped on a plane to go to aaron swartz day in his junior year of high school the rest as they say is history uh will's talk is called general guidelines for effective high

03:13:08

school activism and it's based on aaron's blog post how to save the world part one and take it away well [Music] okay uh thank you so much corey i'm going to

03:13:21

share my slides here okay all right so that's right today i'm going to be talking about uh lessons in high school activism

03:13:40

um and we're going to be doing it through uh where i guess inspired by this piece aaron wrote about a decade ago called how to save the world part one um it was this very interesting piece uh

03:13:55

that essentially had aaron introduce i guess what you could call eight disciplines and uh with those disciplines he imagined a team uh consisting of experts in each of those disciplines that then worked

03:14:09

together um in dynamic ways uh to resolve you know political goals and specifically uh aaron was talking about how the internet allowed this this team

03:14:21

of these experts in these disciplines to engage in a way that wasn't previously possible without that sort of revolutionary he hesitantly called it revolutionary connectivity so we're going to look at

03:14:33

those eight principles here they include investigations uh policy development pr in media or press activism

03:14:46

lobbying elections and lawsuits and i highly encourage you to read this piece um for yourself you can search you know how to save the world part one uh

03:14:57

aaron swartz you'll find it um but one of the really important i think ways he sort of explores this in the piece is he takes the viewpoint of a person in one of these

03:15:08

fields and he explores the ways that that person would engage with the seven other disciplines and i think that that's a very important way of thinking about it because you know if you were to be a part of this sort of dream team as he calls it

03:15:22

one of these experts um it's important to you know rationalize how is it that you're uh you know interacting with these people in this modern internet way um so

03:15:34

here uh we're gonna be taking these eight disciplines that aaron set out and i'm gonna do my best to apply them to a high school context um we have i have three stories and then

03:15:45

hopefully three lessons from uh my high school career that i'm gonna try to paint you know what went well and the important takeaways from these things um generally speaking here the first story is about acting with preparation the

03:15:58

second is about acting with intent and the third is about acting with others those get sort of split where the first two are about i think advocacy of sort of national or like larger scale issues

03:16:12

and the third is more about affecting change on a smaller scale more local level but starting with these uh first two part one we're going to be advocating for the big issues so where does that take us

03:16:25

uh we're going to be looking back to 2017 um if you were you know tuned in there i'm sure you know this guy here ajit pai uh the then fcc chairman uh fighting to repeal

03:16:38

the recently won net neutrality legislation just two years before he was in office uh there was a big fight and and we won and we had these great net neutrality rules put in place

03:16:50

um and then obviously uh there was a sort of battle uh where ajit pai was trying to repeal them he was the chairman there so just a quick run through of what net neutrality is

03:17:03

essentially it's about equal access to information on the left you can imagine information flowing equally and on the right without net neutrality there's this fear that right uh some information is prioritized in one way or another

03:17:16

again this is a very broad overview there's a lot of nuance there but that's the general idea i'm from south dakota and the application of net neutrality here isn't just about um you know one service being

03:17:29

prioritized over another but it's also about uh inequal access to information or internet you know in general so rural broadband access is a big thing that net neutrality addresses but without uh

03:17:42

you know good net neutrality rules that is threatened and and for that reason i think it was particularly relevant where i was coming from so uh well i'll stay here for a sec

03:17:54

my sort of introduction to this i mean i've been following that neutrality for a while but um i think it was uh fight for the future and demand progress we're teaming up to host a national day of protest and

03:18:08

they had this great website called like battleforthenet.com and you could see a map of all the protests that were happening on the day it was happening and you could see a lot on the east coast and a lot on the west coast um but there was very sparse you know protests

03:18:20

happening in the middle of the country right where i was and i could see that nowhere uh in my town was a protest and i thought well you know why not me why not and i was uh i guess at this time i was 16 years old i was a junior in high

03:18:32

school and and so i did this and i signed it up and i talked to my parents and they're like okay like we'll support you and i was you know i was ready to go so the first thing i did

03:18:43

was i made a bunch of posters uh i made the poster and then i printed out a bunch of copies and i got in touch with high schoolers at other high schools um people that i

03:18:55

knew that were sympathetic to this cause that would be able to sort of spread the word and i'll say this right now is the goal of this sort of what i was doing here wasn't uh you know i didn't think oh if i do this

03:19:07

protest that's going to change this is going to be the you know put us over the edge and we're going to keep that neutrality in place but it was more about advocacy of the existence of the issue that was the whole sort of goal here and so in service of that goal

03:19:20

getting information both out about the protest but also what it was that net neutrality was was happening these things are happening in parallel the whole time so i got these students handing out or i guess putting up posters in their

03:19:31

own high schools um i put up posters in mine um i also made heavy use of social media both right advocating for the protest and for explaining uh net neutrality

03:19:44

using snapchat instagram and i guess reddit if you want to count that as a social media i think if you were doing this today you probably use tiktok because that's where everybody is um and then finally uh i you know

03:19:58

if ever there's a club you know that is even tangentially related to something you're advocating for we had a it was called the young progressives club i talked to them and i gave a little talk about net neutrality and there was a pretty good turnout there and so a lot

03:20:11

of people that they learned what it was and they also learned about this protest that was happening so um that was uh sort of some of the aspects of pr that were happening here um i guess i'll just uh make a point here

03:20:24

quick is that right with this whole framework that aaron has it's you know you're trying to act as one of these eight disciplines and then you're trying to engage with people in the other disciplines in an effective

03:20:36

and internet savvy way um and so in this way i'm trying to be the activist operating with other pr people and so here i've got the people you know doing pr for me in a competent way at the

03:20:48

other high schools and i've um and i'm i'm rallying the troops in that way so um there's also this uh well i just want to let you know that we've got plenty of time because

03:21:00

um you've got time and it's just the break after you sure though i just didn't want you to feel rushed because okay it's so interesting what you're talking about okay great great um yeah so here we are uh there's this

03:21:13

discipline of press um and this is gonna be a running theme throughout is the importance of press um but looking at specifically your high school press your local uh paper i guess sorry your paper at

03:21:26

your high school assuming you have one hopefully you do uh i think that's an indispensable resource no matter what it is you're doing uh whether you approach them or they approach you getting a story written about

03:21:37

what it is you're doing is is very important uh and a lot of these papers right aren't just print uh your high school paper oftentimes you have this online component as well which is indispensable because not only do the

03:21:51

students get to read about it but anyone can read about it so that was another element of that was something i did leading up to the event i did also reach out to

03:22:04

local papers in the community notably the argus leaders are sort of big local paper and they did end up writing a piece after the protest um but we'll get there in just a second on the day of the

03:22:16

protest it was very busy because it suddenly dawned on on us that we needed a permit that's something that you need in many places but you have to be 18 years old to get a permit and i

03:22:30

was only 16. so i had to ask my mom to go down to the police department and get a permit for the protest that was happening in six hours um while that while she was handling that god bless

03:22:42

her my grandma shout out to mom yeah exactly exactly um i my grandma was at our dining room table making um the posters i think you can see this poster right now making a

03:22:54

number of posters for people to have in case they showed up and didn't have any um so yeah shout out to my grandmother as well but anyway um you know when the event happened we people showed up and it was like 20

03:23:07

degrees and that's not even talking about wind chill it was freezing cold uh but you know i think we had 50 people come through all in all it's not really um numbers aren't so important here the fact that we had a lot of young people

03:23:19

and surprisingly a lot of people from the community as well you know primarily we were advertising to younger people um but i think in some i think this reddit post that i did got a little bit of traction as well as just the battle for

03:23:31

the nets uh platform putting it on the map made anyone be able to see that and so in terms of you know that certainly that wouldn't have been possible without the internet right this this this map showing that this protest

03:23:45

was happening it's it was just crazy so the event happened uh you can see i love this picture you can see we're right out front of verizon um sometimes the employees would like pee through the window like trying to figure

03:23:56

out what the deal was um the press showed up uh they filmed us and i think i gave a little blurb or something um but all in all i mean it was you know young people and people in the community

03:24:08

came out uh in impressive numbers i would say to advocate for something that some of them didn't even know about until uh this event had been put onto their radar and so in that way uh

03:24:22

it was a big success i would say this event but some of the takeaways here to keep in mind are it's very important to be prepared had uh we not realized that we needed a permit or had you know my mom not been free to emergency style get

03:24:34

this permit uh there could have been disaster you know they could have lawfully shut us down now i don't think that that is like a good reason to shut it down right it's kind of dumb but it's something that could have been a real uh

03:24:47

thorn in our side have we not been conscious of it another very important takeaway here spreading the word is is making use of proper pr and media channels to maximize engagement uh

03:24:59

and and yeah i'm gonna just shout out use the press use and i mean not just your local press but use your high school paper um because more often than not you know these there's these journalists they get

03:25:11

sick and tired of writing about like who's the prom king and queen i'm like doing like a top 10 funny halloween costume list and they're itching to write about something impactful meaningful and if you can find that journalist in your uh program they're

03:25:24

going to be all over your story and they're going to take on a lot of the work that uh you would otherwise have to do and so yeah i can't recommend it enough so yeah i mean these are the relevant uh

03:25:36

principles that sort of tie back to what aaron was talking about there um [Music] so moving on here to the next event uh

03:25:48

after this net neutrality thing was in early 2018 there were there was uh the tragic parkland shooting um and in the aftermath of that there was a lot of discourse about

03:26:02

gun violence and gun control and uh specifically there was a number of entities planning uh some sort of national school walkout you know in protest of a lack of action

03:26:16

against gun violence and so i had a couple buddies uh and we all thought that it was that we should participate in that in some capacity but our situation is a little bit complicated

03:26:28

uh just because of where it was that we were right if i can remind you i'm from south dakota and that's right it'd be one thing if you can imagine being in berkeley california i think you know some high

03:26:42

schoolers might plan this event and everyone's excited to like get out of class and and support this conversation and this discussion but it's a little bit of a different culture in south dakota regarding you know nobody's pro-gun violence but the solutions are

03:26:55

that discussion is a lot harder to have and so we made early on um a strategic choice to involve the administration uh when planning the event in order to

03:27:08

maximize attendance uh because we were pretty sure that if it was the case that in order to uh participate in what it was we were playing to walk out uh that if students were gonna risk getting in trouble that

03:27:22

they wouldn't bother um and so right we made this sort of concession that we would uh work within the boundaries that the administration set for us in order to maximize attendance and so

03:27:36

uh leading up to that we and i guess in some sense that was us lobbying the administration uh we were using the again the school press uh to promote the event uh

03:27:47

notably there were articles written before during and after we had some really strong support from the paper on this event there were

03:28:00

a surprising number of people that actually showed up to the event um over a thousand kids i think easily which was over half the school's population and again like no way that would have happened uh i i know kids that told me

03:28:12

like i'm not gonna show up if i'm gonna get in trouble and yet i saw their faces here today so there's there's some impact there's some there's some validity there um in terms of making these compromises

03:28:23

but it's important uh i guess i'll just briefly say we had uh during the event we memorialized um sort of the victims and we had some commentary about gun violence and then i talked about

03:28:36

uh sort of trying to keep an open mind about these things because the principal he said you can't be political about this and so obviously the fact that we were able to get like a thousand kids into an

03:28:50

auditorium in the middle of the school day in south dakota uh you know for an event about gun violence is itself that's a political you know there's a politics there but we weren't

03:29:01

allowed to i think he was saying like you can't say like gun control or anything is the specific solution so we sort of had to dance around that um which i'll get to in a sec how i feel about that uh but like i said we had this post

03:29:15

event press i think that keeping uh the press going is critical here uh where possible um just because i mean this was a great article written by my friend tim uh summarizing the sort of response to the

03:29:29

event and the the discussion that happened at because of the event which is just uh critical so some of the takeaways here are this was a harder event

03:29:41

in general than the net neutrality one because uh your act like i i say your act with intent it was unclear you know exactly what the goal was of what we were doing or at least the goal got a little

03:29:53

muddied when we had to make these compromises with the administration because when you look at that net neutrality event the goal was clearly advocacy and education and here um it was you

03:30:05

know sort of muddied between uh uh memorial and and solidarity and but also you know trying to uh promote discussion using you know a limited vocabulary so

03:30:18

that was just sort of difficult so having a very clear goal in mind is important and following that up is having a call to action i say the biggest sort of downfall of our event or

03:30:30

the biggest shortcoming was that we did not conclude with a call to action and i think you could have had a meaningful call to action that wasn't exactly political per se um but definitely

03:30:43

i mean political i think you could have worded it carefully such that you were being clever about it but we just didn't uh and and i think that was sort of a result of not having clear intentions about what it was we were trying to

03:30:55

accomplish with the invent event in general um so having those two things uh paired together i think is yeah of the utmost importance again i'm calling out use the press use your

03:31:07

student paper they're itching to write these stories they're itching to do something meaningful and so right uh the principles doing pr lobbying the administration in some capacity lobbying is about compromise

03:31:20

but be careful about what it is you're compromising and yeah so here we are moving on to the sort of second part if you will but it's the last event i'll be talking about and

03:31:33

i've titled it here saving the world in front of you what i mean by that is affecting change at a local level not just sort of promoting uh knowledge about these existential i'm not

03:31:45

existential these larger institutional problems or what have you but um trying to affect change right in front of you so here we've got uh the athletics dress

03:31:56

code rebellion and what that means is i'll give you some context i ran cross country for all four years of high school and for the first three years we were allowed to

03:32:08

run without a shirt on and obviously high school sports and sports in general are very gendered um in their organization there but i mean essentially here if you had breasts you had to wear a sports bra but that was

03:32:22

all right if it's a hot day it's muggy you know no one's going to make you wear a big like cotton shirt or whatever and for people without a press you know you just run and show this and that's fine and that was cool for the first three years

03:32:34

for that fourth year my senior year of high school they suddenly changed the policy uh or i think more accurately began to enforce a policy that had always been on the books where you then did have to

03:32:46

wear a shirt even if it's you know miserable outside you must be wearing uh some you know some something more than a bra or

03:32:57

or just nothing so what i did is at this time you might have noticed my adoration for high school press i myself was on the paper and i thought well gee

03:33:10

i'm going to uh investigate i'm going to figure out the source of this policy and i'm going to write a paper about it or an article about it so that's what i did i spent a month doing interviews from everyone from

03:33:24

fellow student athletes to other coaches of other sports to the principal to the school's athletic director and then the entire district's athletic director and i would just ask him i thought like what are your thoughts on this policy and why

03:33:37

is it in place and what is very interesting about this scenario that i think is probably widely applicable and especially just dress code policies in general

03:33:48

is that when you press people who uh whose jobs it is are to defend these policies they start sweating and they start answering in ways that don't make a lot of sense and you

03:34:01

might ask the same person this question once every week and their answer is going to be different every time and so by the time i was done with this month of data collection i was amazed at uh you know the nonsensical

03:34:14

uh answers i had received and uh it was just laughable i mean one of my favorites is i interviewed my school's athletic director and we were talking about it and he just brings up his service

03:34:26

in iraq and he's like yeah man like if i was walking around in the desert in 125 degree heat with my kevlar vest on and i survived you know so get over it it's kind of what he was saying i was just like dude we're not talking about that

03:34:40

uh but it's like you know they don't have answers they're just pulling from whatever they can and so if it is if you find yourself in the role of an investigator doing investigations um

03:34:53

i think just being consistent with your question asking and really putting uh i guess these people's hands to the fire to uh see what you can get out of them is just critical

03:35:06

so i published that piece um and at the end i included a call to action for people to attend a school board meeting a public school board meeting that was happening a couple days from then

03:35:20

and so i publicized that meeting uh on my instagram account um i sort of and i'll get to all kind of explain this

03:35:32

in this uh story here i'm playing the role of many different disciplines here um and so in this instance i you know before i was the investigator now i'm sort of doing pr here and i post it to my instagram account uh this picture

03:35:46

here this very goofy image of me just no shirt on you know nips out and all and and i i encourage people to you know read this article i wrote and show up to the meeting uh you know to clarify what it is you know

03:35:58

we believe in as a community and uh so you know and then here i am now uh wearing the head of a lobbyist addressing the school board you know creating uh engagement with them trying

03:36:11

to move them onto my position uh and you'll notice in the background you can see some young people sitting there i had invited a lot of people uh and i think maybe

03:36:24

it's about all that showed up like four or five uh cross-country runners one of my fellow newspaper staff men showed up but otherwise it wasn't a great uh turnout

03:36:36

so uh that did end up garnering some press there was a person that attended the um event who just always goes they were like that was their beat and they saw me

03:36:49

give this address and then they wrote this article here which was i would not say very well written if only because

03:37:01

i was having something written about me rather than approaching the press and having you know some control over the narrative and i'll have a little bit more about to say about that in a second

03:37:13

but interestingly enough this article was then syndicated onto fox news and i just wanted to share with you some of the lovely comments uh found in this comment section uh

03:37:25

yeah i mean people are like basically like get over it buddy i love this one says hey boy get used to being told what to do it's gonna happen the rest of your life so stop whining and i just would love to meet this granny sims

03:37:38

um and then yeah it's just like the wild just wild misogyny throughout this comment section is insane um but i guess that's you know what you're going to find on that website

03:37:50

so the conclusion to this was sort of unsatisfying i addressed the board i wore all these hats i did all these things and uh i ultimately ended up getting an

03:38:02

audience with the superintendent of the district and he said like oh i know i love when young people take charge and have a belief and i was like you know okay cool like what can we do about that he's like well i'll get back to you and

03:38:14

then he emailed me back like a month later and he's like we're not gonna we're not gonna do anything and i was like all right so it ended up that nothing actually uh changed there no policy difference was instituted and that was

03:38:27

heartbreaking uh for sure so when i reflect back on this i i you know i sort of pointed out that i was wearing many hats and i think that that sort of goes chiefly against what

03:38:40

it was that aaron is talking about in this how to save the world part one essay that he wrote where ideally you know you're you're gonna have a group of people who all specialize in these different you know disciplines um but

03:38:52

they're all going to be working together and you know as competent as one person might be as competent as aaron ever was he was never doing anything alone he was working with all sorts of other people and so uh

03:39:03

you know i had i had reached out to um some local business owners who like sold sportswear and sports apparel and i said hey i'm working on this thing here uh would you lend any support but i emailed

03:39:16

them like two days before the event i didn't give them enough time so if i were to do that again or something like it i think it's very important to build a coalition of people who have a similar interest here and and that includes

03:39:29

athletes not just in cross country but in football and volleyball and in all of the sports and and build that coalition beyond just your school right and you know you have the means to establish like a legitimate uh

03:39:42

political force here if owning flaw of my approach to this issue um failure stinks and it hurts uh but i do have something to say on that in just a little bit here uh

03:39:54

again i'm gonna shout out the student press here because there was some lovely coverage of that i guess in some sense i'm patting myself on the back but i don't mean to i mean that um that was instrumental in terms of creating

03:40:07

awareness of uh the problem outside of even just the school board um and and the students at the school they were comments on that article from parents who you know didn't really know about this but had some

03:40:18

thoughts to share on the matter um and so this you know i've listed out all of the relevant principles here and in some sense i was playing the role of all of