MediaBerkman

Radio Berkman 149: Freedom of the Internet

April 15th, 2010

In 2008, Michael Slaby served as Chief Technology Officer from Obama for America, and helped with technology policy as the Obama campaign transitioned to an administration. One of the most difficult aspects of the transition has come in trying to keep a huge group of grassroots, web-enabled supporters, after the campaigning is over and the policy making has begun.

Today David Weinberger speaks with Michael about how government uses the web to stay engaged, and some of the policies regarding freedom and the internet that the administration has pursued since taking office.

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Reference Section:
Michael Slaby’s recent talk to the Berkman Center
Video and Transcript of Secretary Clinton’s January 21 speech on internet freedom
Tomorrow Ventures

CC Music this week:
Jasptertine: Pling
Jeremiah Jacobs

Photo courtesy of Flickr user balleyne

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In January of this year Secretary of State Hillary Clinton outlined the United States’ views on freedom and the world wide web, encouraging governments of the world to protect open access to an unfiltered internet for their citizens. Secretary Clinton called internet enabled information networks “the new nervous system for our planet,” and celebrated their ability to help lower the barriers between people and government, and to quickly respond to crises.

[CLINTON SPEECH EXCERPT]

The speech marked a dramatic new policy posture. There isn’t yet a global understanding of what a free and open internet means. And even in the United States, where freedom of speech and of the press are among our most sacred values, we are in a constant debate over how these values carryover onto the net, and figuring out just how we balance these values against some of the perils that have come with a free and open net – issues of anonymity, child endangerment, copyright violation.

At the same time the United States has never been in a better position politically to push for a conversation about these issues. The 2008 Presidential race engaged citizens in dialogue in a way that never would have been possible without the internet. And following the election many saw the opportunity to pull the open communication seen during the campaign into the actual process of policymaking.

Today’s guest is one of the experts behind Barack Obama’s multimedia strategy. Michael Slaby was the Chief Technology Officer of Obama for America, and helped plan the technology strategy for the President’s transition team. David Weinberger sat down with Michael to talk about the strategy of using the web to engage citizens in the often mundane work of policymaking. But first they talked a little bit about Secretary Clinton’s initiatives for internet freedom.

[INTERVIEW Topic 1: Secretary Clinton’s Internet Freedom speech
Topic 2: Using the internet to build an engaged public – moving from campaigning to policy making
Topic 3: Open Source Technologies in government]

MICHAEL SLABY: The internet freedom talk that Secretary Clinton gave was incredibly important that it happened I think it was incredibly important that it was given the promises given that was given by a cabinet secretary. There were limits to how far they or she or it was willing to go. When it comes to taking sides in the internet freedom debate. There’s a danger and suggesting that Internet freedom equals free societies. It’s not inexorably true that more access to Internet will inexorably lead to democratic institutions and liberal democracies in countries where they’re currently authoritarian regimes. There is not a cause and effect relationship necessarily between access and there’s other foreign policy outcomes that we as a nation still deem important, democratization being the one I’m talking about.

The problems with the speech lay in an unwillingness to be partisan about the process, that as in the US we are in favor of certain kinds of censorship, like child pornography, it is not that all censorship needs to go away. It’s that that the individual autonomy of a person and individual power is to be respected. An individual’s right to their own opinions and ideas needs to be respected. Free Press. These are social values that we take for granted in the US that don’t exist in some of these other places, where Internet freedom is questionable or suspect or completely foreign concept in some places. And there’s a gigantic spectrum of restricted freedom to the internet, and what that looks like it varies widely from country to country. There are technical limitations on Internet access like the Great firewall of China – the Great Firewall is what it’s often joked as – that is a technical filter on internet content. There’s also of self censoring. The social values around self-censoring where people have been indoctrinated in such a way into a culture that they refuse to participate. Which is not the same clearly as an internet filter but can be just as damaging to the marketplace of ideas and to the concept of the free press and to the concepts of dissent which I think if you look at what the speech hints at it’s moving toward the social infrastructures that make a liberal democracy possible in the United States. Things like the Free Press things like individual dissent, things like those kinds of rights that we tend to take for granted and assume are under the surface under an authoritarian regime but aren’t necessarily so. I think we need to be more explicit in what we value and what we are valuing if we’re going to really help this problem it’s going to be a fight and it’s a partisan situation where we have to have an opinion and has to be predicated on values we’re willing to stand behind. I think she was quite willing – and maybe more maybe the time wasn’t right, maybe you’d make one speech may make another one but think at some point at some point lines have to be drawn in this kind of a debate. It is not a non-partisan situation.

DAVID WEINBERGER: So in one sense it was a highly partisan speech.

MICHAEL SLABY: Highly political.

DAVID WEINBERGER: Well and highly partisan in favor of the net which is one of the reasons why Internet people said-

MICHAEL SLABY: The internet utopians were going crazy.

DAVID WEINBERGER: So in some sense it was partisan. But it can put this in the position of saying well what we’re in favor of Internet freedom and going to another country and saying well sure OK then how about allowing all the child porn. And if you don’t allow a child porn and yours who are you to say that we should not allow just normal naked porn of adults on ours because we are a faith based government. So what you’re suggesting is that the policy should have been more specific about the types of freedom we’re talking about, it’s freedom to dissent, it’s freedom of the press more or less moved onto individuals and on the Internet. It’s that kind-

MICHAEL SLABY: Freedom of expression, these are the kinds of things that that I think were not explicitly stated and should be because in the end what we’re really talking about I believe, what the Secretary is really addressing is we’re in favor of our form of Internet freedom. The Chinese would say that they have internet freedom. They’re protecting their society the same way we say we’re protecting our society from child pornography they say they are protecting their society from dissent. This is the values question and this is a fight over the values of expression and freedom and dissent in society and we have to game up for that fight.

DAVID WEINBERGER: Although it’s certainly not an easy situation. Because what looks like suppression of dissent from outside a culture can look like protection of values of core values.

MICHAEL SLABY: Absolutely and I think that that it is extremely challenging to be to promote your own values and be respectful of others at the same time.

DAVID WEINBERGER: Interestingly I thought in her speech she a couple of times referred to the need to- what the speech said as I understood it was remove anonymity and this was coupled with protection of a different sort of well call it censorship, of filtering so that we can’t put copyrighted materials on the internet. Sort of the West’s obsession with what doesn’t get posted. And that seemed to some of us, or at least to me, a jarring note to hear anonymity raised as something that needs to be gotten rid of since its anonymity that protects a lot of political dissent.

MICHAEL SLABY: But this is one of the questions that she at least raised. And I don’t think she went far enough, she certainly wasn’t prepared for the Q&A about this question. But anonymity is a serious question on the Internet. There are as you say there are certain types of anonymity that are virtually required for safety. But there are also a lot of problems online that would be solved by doing away with anonymity. It is not a black and white question. Like very few discussions are, obviously. Anonymity is just like censorship is there is some grey. In a non-anoymous internet child pornography would be a self selecting problem for the most part. Right? If people had to identify themselves as the consumers of this who in most societies these people be ashamed out of their behavior very very quickly. But at the same time in an authoritarian regime where political dissent results in indefinite detention anonymity becomes a requirement for participation. The other challenge with a lot of stuff is that while it’s not particularly technical it’s very detail oriented. The distinctions are very fine grained, and being able to speak in generalities about internet freedom is really really hard because the subject just resists.

DAVID WEINBERGER: Her very first question, the first question posed to her was, and I will roughly paraphrase, was exactly about anonymity, and you’ve said that that anonymity is basically a bad thing and yet we need it for dissent, what would you do? And her answer was you have to strike a balance. I guess the question is in technical terms how you strike a balance so that we have anonymity if we’re talking about dissent within your authoritarian country but you do not if you are making salacious remarks about underage-

MICHAEL SLABY: You’re posting copyrighted material.

DAVID WEINBERGER: Exactly, so it’s the strike a balance sounded good. It’s hard to know how that would be-

MICHAEL SLABY: Yes and this is this is where the rubber hits the road between the difference between campaigning and governing. Campaigns typically almost exclusively done in generalities. Governing is the process of implementation. And so it is both less interesting on a certain level, and much more difficult to talk about the implementation of some kind of balanced anonymity than it is to say balanced anonymity is what we need to strive for.

DAVID WEINBERGER: So is it less interesting or more divisive? Because everybody’s in favor of some large campaign goal. But when you go to implement it people have to decide if they’re going to fund it this way or that.

MICHAEL SLABY: I think it depends on the audience. I think for a large audience it’s less interesting. For a small concerned audience it’s more divisive and more interesting once you get to the where the rubber actually hits the road with people like us, people who actually spend their lives talking and thinking about the Internet and technology and the relationship between that and policy and politics. This is the part that is most interesting. The generalities are least interesting. But for the general public, the general public is probably bored, by this point in the radio broadcast they fell asleep a long time ago. This is just too detailed, it’s just not their interest. But the idea of supporting democratic values abroad? People can gets behind that. That is a soundbite that is accessible and consumable by a general audience. Translating that into action is hard, and this is the the role of the people who now take on the challenge of what we did on the campaign from a new media perspective and translating the same passion and intensity from a values driven big picture campaign to a policy driven issue oriented governance process. That’s a very hard translation and it’s actually that the lack of overarching value set in an agenda makes it more difficult for the guys in the in the White House to be executing on new media as well is they might be able to otherwise.

DAVID WEINBERGER: So let’s take a concrete case. We’ve just been through the year of pretty intense debate about health care reform. Looking back – what might we have done in order to use either the tools or the the approaches that the Obama campaign used to build a social movement an engaged public in order to move the healthcare debate forward?

MICHAEL SLABY: Possibly the most and most effective thing to help the health care problem is the ability to do other things at the same time. It is a endemic problem of progressive organizations that they become single issue entities. And OFA acting as a single issue-

DAVID WEINBERGER: Obama for America.

MICHAEL SLABY: Obama for America, now Organizing for America at the DNC – acting as a single issue entity on health care falls into a similar trap. The campaign was a vehicle for everyone’s passion and every one’s desires to see change in all of their areas. Government is big, health care is not the only thing going on. There are massive issues we spent the whole first ten minutes of this talking about internet freedom abroad and US foreign policy. There’s two wars going on. There’s an economy problem I heard, I think there’s this banking thing. There are other issues and the inability to focus on a goal and still allow people to continue to engage on the things that they are most passionate about diminishes both. It turns people off to try and engage in the process and by forcing your priority on to a community it diminishes their interest in it.

DAVID WEINBERGER: Is this the difference between the top down bottom up, The top downs tend to over focus and the bottom up the people who are actually engaged in this will naturally see health care as one issue among many but also be interested in it. Would a more bottom up approach-

MICHAEL SLABY: I think you need to do both. I think what I’m advocating is that you have to be able to do both. You have to have your own priorities and have your own voice and health care was an important one and there was an opportunity to pass it and it was important to be done and it was done. That it was hard and long and complicated does not diminish the fact that it was significant. The issue for me is that you need to be able to have your own priorities while continuing to support the fact that other people have other priorities. That your supporters, the millions of people that helped drive the energy of the campaign, and are still eager to spend themselves in a worthy cause to quote Teddy Roosevelts, are still they’re just not all willing to die on health care. That’s not the hill that they’d all choose to fight on. So you have a choice. You can either let them choose their battle. Or you can lose them. I think we have trumped ourselves back into a little bit of being so single issued around health care makes us less effective on health care because we are less passionate as a group. Because we are fighting ourselves to be too focused on one thing.

DAVID WEINBERGER: So this is a way that we can learn from and which the organization and technology that worked for a campaign didn’t work so well for governing. But I want to point to another possibility in addition which is when you’re campaigning you have very clear goal which is you’re trying to get your person elected. When you’re governing you because it’s politics you go through what can be a grinding process of giving up pieces in order to get what you want. It’s how you govern.

MICHAEL SLABY: Compromise is part of the process.

DAVID WEINBERGER: And I assume it can be harder to gather public enthusiasm for a long process in which you see the big goal that you’re working toward gets narrowed down to what actually can be implemented. So does this mean that there is a gap between the tools that we use to organize for a campaign and the tools that we use government. That there is not a seamless transition?

MICHAEL SLABY: I don’t know that it’s a tool gap as much as it’s a communications and education gap. It’s easy to say we have an election day, we have to get out we have to do these things. You know, GOTV is a simple process, Get Out The Vote is a simple process that any volunteer for a campaign understands. Gotta get our people out on Election Day. Health care with this Senate you know everybody needing to turn themselves in the Senate parliamentarian to understand what’s going on is harder to sort of stay fired up about over a long period of time. The nice thing about campaigns is they have all these actual deadlines and deadlines are good for a sense of urgency. Urgency is good for activation and mobilization. This is only a limitation governing if you get away from talking about how health care is part of your values as a whole, where your agenda is. Healthcare as its own issue that is somehow separate from everything else you’re doing, and engaging in? It becomes much harder to maintain momentum when the Senate stalls. When the Senate stalls you could talk about something else. In the same vein in the same with the same values in the same things and pivot to another issue you can maintain momentum with, and then come back to health care when things move again in a more fluid way, if you can translate the values driven stuff we did on the campaign to the values driven governing process.

DAVID WEINBERGER: So if you’re going from Obama for America the campaign organization, to Organizing for America which is the Democrat National Committee’s version of it. Basically the same set of people and tools, you would change the communication of values to make sure that continues in a high level of enthusiasm. What else would you change to go from campaigning to governing?

MICHAEL SLABY: I don’t want to get too far into second guessing Natalie and the team the new media team at the DNC because I think they’re doing a really good job.

DAVID WEINBERGER: and you’re still doing some work for the White House.

MICHAEL SLABY: Yeah, I still do some operational technology stuff for the White House. And I’m going in contact with these people and they’re friends and colleagues and we talk and these are ideas I’ve shared with them. I think that it is a big challenge to take on for someone like Natalie to come into the DNC and take on the new media with the expectations the were set during the campaign that were totally unrealistic for a noncampaign setting in certain regards. And I think they’ve done a really good job. They’ve added people to the community that are interested now that weren’t engaged during the campaign and so they’re doing things well. I think that the limitation is being able to from a communications standpoint have a framework that allows them to walk and chew gum at the same time. That allows them to engage on multiple fronts because it’s much harder to have a message of the day in campaign talk in a government where you don’t necessarily control what’s important on any given day. And there’s a lot more things to deal with. Government’s big. This is the lesson of the transition process which is an insane project all of its own to figure out the entire you know federal government in seventy seven days. It’s a big government there’s a lot to do. There are a lot of problems to take care of, there are a lot of things steward, there are a lot of programs. Being able to be a master of your entire domain is important. And I think that it’s really communications challenge and not a toolset question that has been hard to it’s been a hard needle to thread over the last year.

DAVID WEINBERGER: An unrelated question. The role of open source in Government tech and in campaign tech as well

MICHAEL SLABY: There are lots of good uses for open source technology in lots of different areas. WhiteHouse.gov is now on open source content management platform called drupal. It was a choice made for a lot of reasons not the least of which was the ability to be more flexible about features and how we develop and being able to draw on and commit back to a large community developing a lot of projects so that the platform can grow expand in ways where a proprietary system is hard to be as flexible with. It’s a great opportunity for using open source software. A well battle tested system that is very secure- you know any web enabled or any computer system is going to have security questions. People will argue that open source is less secure and more secure. It isn’t either. It can be more secure or or it can be less secure depending on the project, depending on the people working on the project, how big the project is, how many developers have their hands in the code and finding bugs, which can be a benefit to large project like Drupal, where problems are caught and found quickly.

There are probably more opportunities that have been realized in open source technology because the government procurement process is complicated and hard and expensive and there is much less tolerance for making mistakes with innovation. One of the things about the campaign that makes innovation easy is that if you mess something up as long is it’s not and truly critical you just sort of roll with it and try something else the next day. And it’s a lot more tolerant of error in certain areas. Government is not in a lot of places and one of the things I think that is a struggle with government – and this is not just about open source this is about innovation in general – I think this is something that guys like Vivek Kundra the White House OMB CIO and Aneesh Chopra the OSTP CTO – God, there’s a lot of acronyms going around-

DAVID WEINBERGER: The Office of Science and Technology Policy

MICHAEL SLABY: – run into all the time is that creating spaces where innovation is safe, because innovation is messy. Things work sometimes and sometimes they don’t and sometimes that is a process that gets it’s like cooking sometimes it’s messy. And creating spaces where that’s OK and protecting the things were that’s not is an ongoing and important challenge for technology that is an organizational challenge that nobody sees happen and nobody sees progress, but it’s so important to be able to create spaces where innovation is possible and allowed and encouraged but protect things, classified systems and secure things were innovation is not to be tolerated. Not even wanted necessarily depending on what you’re talking about.

DAVID WEINBERGER: And there are some wonderful examples now of projects that to my mind would have been unthinkable just a few years ago because they are high risk, they’re experimental, they may work, they may not. There’s the open gov stuff for example that Beth Noveck has been doing and even the massive release of government data-

MICHAEL SLABY: data.gov

DAVID WEINBERGER: Yes, is another way of getting information out quickly may not be perfectly cleaned up and could take years and years to allow innovation to occur on top of and with that data.

MICHAEL SLABY: It’s really a question of perspective and sort of an operational posture that tolerates imperfection. Right, this is a system where we want to empower other people to mashup government data and surface it for other people in ways we haven’t even conceived of or they haven’t even realized might be useful.And in order to do that you have to be you have to have some tolerance of the data’s not perfect if you’re going to do this efficiently. And that requires trust on a number of levels with a number of different audiences that is laudable. That is a thing that is not easy to find.

DAVID WEINBERGER: Part of my reaction to Secretary Clinton’s talk was as much as I loved hearing this coming from a Secretary of State, was it’s sort of easy for us to say the freedoms that we have you ought to have too. And doesn’t require us to make any changes. It doesn’t cost us anything. Are there types of Internet freedom that we either don’t have or don’t have sufficiently that we should be advocating more for ourselves as sort of a way of modeling that we’re willing to make a change too?

MICHAEL SLABY: Talking about access questions we have significantly worse broadband penetration than a lot of other countries in the world. If you talk about true access to the internet being on unfettered ability to consume information and video in all of the ways that are possible it’s pretty hard on a slow connection. The Internet has become and multi-headed multimedia space that doesn’t require broadband to participate but for all intents and purposes it’s required to fully engage in the internet. So if we take the assumption that broadband is a requirement for access we have a lot of problems to solve. I think that’s an area where we fall way behind a lot of other countries and you know the concept of Internet and technology infrastructure in this country is often talked about but not seen as a major priority but should be. This could certainly be couched in our own fight for our own Internet freedom, which I think would help make this less of a you need what we have problem and more of a universal human need for better information, for better access, for more clarity and more openness in communications across all cultures including ours, rather than your culture needs to have our values, which is a much tougher sell.

DAVID WEINBERGER: Thank you very much.

MICHAEL SLABY: Thank you.

Michael Slaby was the Chief Technology Officer for Obama for America. He is now an advisor and Chief Technology Strategist for TomorrowVentures. You can find out more about Michael, and even catch a talk he recently gave to the Berkman Center at our blog.

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