(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

Today there was a talk about Cyberbullying that revealed some really fascinating information. Elizabeth Englander from MARC (the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center) game a very spirited talk with some good statistics from her group's studies.

• Grappling is the name for either staging a fight or ambushing someone and recording it to upload to Youtube later. There has been at least one suicide as a result of these attacks where a girl was attacked, stripped, and violated with the entire episode uploaded to Youtube.
• When asked what the motivation was for being a cyberbully, kids (ranging from middleschool to college) listed mostly either "because it was fun" or "because I was angry". The most interesting thing about this statistic is that it broke down almost perfectly along gender lines. Can you guess which is which? Boys did it for fun and girls because they were angry.
• There's at least one school district where the teachers have threatened to strike unless they are allowed to collect cellphones at the door. This comes out of situations like the one where the students provoked their teacher on purpose and recorded his angy reaction for upload to Youtube.

Another very interesting thing that Elizabeth said due to a question about the effectiveness of Public Service Announcements about cyberbullying was that, in her state at least, they held a contest for teens to create public service announcements that would get the message out to people of their own age. That's brilliant! As the commenter in the audience said, the "This is your brain on drugs" and "I learned it by watching you" PSAs from our youth were really more of a joke than anything. Teens are probably best equipped to create something that their peers will pay attention to.

You can find out more about MARC at their website.

We all like our laptops

(Image is in the Public Domain)

Today before the first panel at the conference, I heard a presenter who had to be in his 70's or close to it say, "I feel so naked without my laptop".

And that has been today's CFP conference highlight 🙂

(Image is in the Public Domain)

I was given the opportunity to give a five minute talk on any topic of my choice relating to computers, freedom, or privacy preceding the conference dinner on Wednesday. Narrowing down all the things I would want to say was difficult at first, but of course had to be nothing other than credit freezes.

It drives me nuts that there's still so few people that know about this very important tool and I made sure that at least my fellow computer, freedom, and privacy advocates and peers would know. It turns out that there were many who hadn't heard of it before. After my talk, I had many people come to ask me about more details or to tell me that they spread the word to their friends and family. One even invited me to come speak at his church at a large event he's hosting in the fall!

It's a good start.

(Image used under: Fair Use doctrine)

Today at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference, we opened with statements from representatives from the Obama and McCain campaigns (Clinton declined to attend).

Obama

• Greater accountability in government
• Keeping government information and operations open and transparent
• Citizen participation in decision making
• The appointment of a government Chief Technology Officer to oversee these types of issues

McCain

• Promoting American innovation
• Taxing the rich is a popular idea, but it's the pursuit of riches that drives innovation
• The system should reward the behaviors that we want to reward
• We need to develop a skilled workforce
• We should very lightly regulate the market and let it take care of itself until such point as they fail
• Market regulation should focus on anti-competitive behavior

Open Questions

Next were questions asked by the moderators of the panel:

Q: "What do you see as the role of government in providing access to our basic communications infrastructure (the Internet)"

(McCain) Chuck – Can't understand his answer. Very politicalese. I'm fairly certain that he didn't answer the question, but it's hard to tell.

(Obama) Dan – Rather than focus on the infrastructure, it's important to protect the openness of the Internet. Even if we were to stay on dial-up or were years behind other countries on bringing broadband to our people, that's really secondary to protecting the nature of the Internet. He also noted that McCain's view of a self-regulating market will maintain open Internet (and I agree).

Q: "NSA Wiretapping – what would their position be on liability of carriers. What changes to Fisa"

(McCain) Chuck – "Immunity is a tough question because there's competing values. We're not talking about granting indulgences…" Again, hard to follow. Many words come out, but not much is said. The only thing he said of substance in his several minute non-answer to the question was "There needs to be hearings to find out what actually happened and what harm was actually done" which is to say that he will "look into it".

(Obama) Daniel – Obama's history and future view is to strengthen judicial review of administrative subpeonas, National Security Letters and the gag orders that accompany them. When surveillance is used, there must be real, meaningful oversight. Obama voted AGAINST retroactive immunity. McCain did not vote against them (which Dan feels is tacit approval).

Obama realizes that advanced surveillance and data mining can be important tools for national security, and they should be available, but with appropriate oversight. It's important to guard against mission creep! Woo! Someone gets it!

Q: "American companies are assisting China in censoring it's citizens. What would a given candiate do about that?"

(Obama) Dan – No official position, but if Dan had to offer advice to the campain, it would be that the lesson of the efforts in the US in the mid-90's to persuade countries to adopt an open Internet should be continued. We should open a dialogue and encourage and persuade countries to realize the benefits while using our influence to lead them towards more openness.

(McCain) Chuck – No explicit policy either. But the values that the campaign holds that would apply is to go slowly and carefully. It's always wrong to believe that you can legislate the behavior of people in other countries. Show the repressive regimes the benefits that openness provides, we will lead by example.

Open Questions

Q: "Email use by President – Will your candidate use e-mail. Does McCain know how? Will they avoid requirements to save e-mails by using other services outside of the Whitehouse?"

(McCain) Chuck – McCain does know how to use e-mail. As for avoiding requirements, you can tell from the tenor of his career that any perceived impropriety is anathema. Very little is more important for himself and country than acting honorably and keeping himself clean.

(Obama) Dan – There's a real commitment in Obama tech policy to keep government open and keep the flow of information open. Hiding e-mail wouldn't meet his commitment to open government.

Q: "Bush doesn't want to use e-mail because it becomes public record, but both of these candidates have records of believing in open government. But what will they do to keep government open?"

(McCain) Chuck – Answered by listing the example of require reporting of all data about sex offenders. He seems to have misunderstood that open government is about reporting what the GOVERNMENT is doing, not citizens.

(Obama) Dan – Bush administration has gone way overboard in classifying information. Obama called for national declassification center.

Q: "Clinton administration mandate cell companies to track users for 911. Companies are tracking all the time when powered. No legal limitations for what use can be made. Should this be protected by judicial oversight?"

(Obama) Dan – No position on that, but clear position of looking at tech capabilities that are not being addressed from a privacy perspective.

(McCain) Chuck – First ask, is there a problem and does the law already deal with it? If there was a possibility of current harm or future harm, then perhaps regulation would be appropriate, but otherwise, just trust but verify.

Q: "Net Nuetrality – How far would either of you go to live up to the view that the Internet is a tool for Democracy?"

(Obama) Dan – Obama wants to maintain openness of the Internet. Before we fight what the Internet may become, we should ask if we want to go where it's going. Do we like what it's evolving too. Either way, currently the regulatory agencies lack the power to get involved.

(McCain) Chuck – Understand Internet is important. But adverse to regulation, must have real evidence of harm. Don't want to stifle innovation.

Q: "Where do you think the burden lies for protecting information. American's must show harm? Or burden on Government that there's a justification for accessing my private information"

(McCain) Chuck – Companies always have known more about us than the government. We shouldn't have solutions seeking problems, but the opposite. Show the problem before acting.

(Obama) Dan – Increase FTC enforcement authority and budget. Too much burden on individuals to negotiate their privacy rights with whoever they deal with. Though our privacy laws are more modest than others, we've seen progress in our regulation. It's not up to normal people to protect their personal security. That's unreasonable. We don't have the time, energy, or (sometimes) capability.

Q: [my question] "Does your candidate realize the problem of Congress creating laws that over-rule stronger state laws that protect our privacy and freedom and would they have the balls to veto such a law?"

(McCain) Chuck – Clearly recognizes the importance of federalism. Always the rub whether what you have is well intentioned preemption or something else. Not the campaign's policy to over-turn what approaches of 3 centuries of preemption law. In other words, leave it to congress to make the determination of what is an appropriate level of preemption.

(Obama) Dan – No general position on preemption, but it's a right thing to keep an eye on. In other areas the benefit of some mount of federalism, but preemptive will come up. Depends on context.

Summary

McCain is a fool that believes the market can regulate itself.

(Image used under: Fair Use doctrine)

I'm really jazzed about going to this conference. They've got some really cool events lined up like:

Kids taunting classmates (with resulting emotional scars and even suicide); harassment, stalking, and death threats; and organized and race-, gender-, religion-based hate groups; prominent bloggers like Kathy Sierra and Blackamazon have take their blogs down after death threats or attacks ... along with all its promise and power of cyberspace, the Internet also distributes words and images of hate that often lead to real-world violence.

And

Activism and Education Using Social Network

We plan on examining several different types of social networks. Some of these networks are geared toward sending out 'news blasts' to your network of friends, while others support having a much deeper conversation about the topic at hand. Protest groups on Facebook can quickly grow to over a million people– and lead to millions demonstrating in the real world. New technology such as "causes," now available both on Facebook and MySpace, allows for fundraising and eases recruiting. Easy sharing can increase the viral spread of videos and web pages. Innovative mashups like those promoted by Netsquared with their Mashup Challenge make information and calls to action more easily available to more people. We'll survey the available functionality and describe how to use the different variants for education and activism activities, as well as giving tips on how to become part of the particlar social network community that the participant is interested in.

The program is here, but you only have a few more days to sign up so get on it!

(Image used under: Fair Use doctrine)

The CFP2008 conference is coming up in late May. They're not taking registrations yet, but their information page is up at least. I wasn't able to attend last year, but the 2006 session was very cool.

The conference is the perfect place for paranoid anti-government/business privacy invasion types to congregate and complain as a group. Besides that, there are useful technical sessions about privacy technologies and such. I particularly liked the session hosted by Public Citizen where they described the ways they protect people against companies trying to stifle their free speech online. In cases where a blogger was issued take-down notices by big companies that didn't like what the blogger was saying, Public Citizen took their case for free and defended them. Very cool.

Also of note was the session about RFID where an industry crony "debated" the author of the book spychips (though to call it a debate is laughable). When the crony was challenged about his company's use of privacy protections and he didn't have any good answers for the crowd, he bacame flustered and accused us of being "technophobes" (HA!). What an idiot. But it was very entertaining 🙂

Anyway, if you'd like to meet some of the people in all the various consumer groups who are protecting your rights every day, this is an awesome way to do it.