net.wars

Choice

The first year it occurred to me that a key consideration in voting for the US president was the future composition of the Supreme Court was 1980: Reagan versus Carter. Reagan appointed the first female justice, Sandra Day O’Connor – and then gave us Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy. Only O’Connor was appointed during Reagan’s first term, the one that woulda, shoulda, coulda been Carter’s second.

Watching American TV shows and movies from the 1980s and 1990s is increasingly sad. In some – notably Murphy Brown – a pregnant female character wrestles with deciding what to do. Even when not pregnant, those characters live inside the confidence of knowing they have choice.

At the time, Murphy (Candice Bergen) was pilloried for choosing single motherhood. (“Does [Dan Quayle] know she’s fictional?” a different sitcom asked, after the then-vice president critized her “lifestyle”.) Had Murphy opted instead for an abortion, I imagine she’d have been just as vilified rather than seen as acting “responsibly”. In US TV history, it may only be on Maude in 1972 that an American lead character, Maude (Bea Arthur), is shown actually going through with an abortion. Even in 2015 in an edgy comedy like You’re the Worst, that choice is given to the sidekick. It’s now impossible to watch any of those scenes without feeling the loss of agency.

In the news, pro-choice activists warned that overturning Roe v. Wade would bring deaths, and so it has, but not in the same way as they did in the illegal-abortion 1950s, when termination could be dangerous. Instead, women are dying because their health needs fall in the middle of a spectrum that has purely elective abortion at one end and purely involuntary miscarriage at the other. These are not distinguishable *physically*, but can be made into evil versus blameless morality tales (though watch that miscarrying mother, maybe she did something).

Even those who still have a choice may struggle to access it. Only one doctor performs abortions in Mississippi ; he also works in Alabama and Tennessee.

So this time women are dying or suffering from lack of care when doctors can’t be sure what they are allowed do under laws that are written by people with shockingly limited medical knowledge.

Such was the case of Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old Georgian medical assistant who died of septic shock after fetal tissue was incompletely expelled after a medication abortion, which she’d had to travel hundreds of miles to North Carolina to get. It’s a very rare complication, but her life could probably have been saved by prompt action – but the hospital had no policy in place for septic abortions under Georgia’s then-new law. There have been many more awful stories since – many not deaths but fraught survivals of avoidable complications.

If anti-abortion activists are serious about their desire to save the life of every unborn child, there are real and constructive things they can do. They could start by requiring hospitals to provide obstetrics units and states to imrpove provision for women’s health. According to March of Dimes, 5.5 million American women in are caught in the one-third of US counties it calls “maternity deserts”. Most affected are those in the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. In Texas, which banned abortion after six weeks in 2021 and now prohibits it except to save the mother’s life, maternal mortality rose 56% between 2019 and 2022. Half of Texas counties, Stephanie Taladrid reported at The New Yorker in January, have no specialists in women’s health.

“Pro-life” could also mean pushing to support families. American parents have less access to parental leave than their counterparts in other developed countries. Or they could fight to redress other problems, like the high rate of Black maternal mortality.

Instead, the most likely response to the news that abortion rates have actually gone up in the US since the Dobbs decision is efforts to increase surveillance, criminalization, and restriction. In 2022, I imagined how this might play out in a cashless society, where linked systems could prevent a pregnant woman from paying for anything that might help her obtain an abortion: travel, drugs, even unhealthy foods,

This week, at The Intercept, Debbie Nathan reports on a case in which a police sniffer dog flagged an envelope that, opened under warrant, proved to contain abortion pills. It’s not clear, she writes, whether the sniffer dogs actually detect misopristol and mifepristone, or traces of contraband drugs, or just responding to an already-suspicious handler’s subtle cues, like Clever Hans. Using the US Postal Service’s database of images of envelopes, inspectors were able to identify other parcels from the same source and their recipients. A hostile administration could press for – in fact, Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has already demanded – renewed enforcement of the not-dead-only-sleeping Comstock Act (1873), which criminalizes importing and mailing items “intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use”.

There are so many other vital issues at stake in this election, but this one is personal. I spent my 20s traveling freely across the US to play folk music. Imagine that with today’s technology and states that see every woman of child-bearing age as a suspected criminal.

Illustrations: Murphy Brown (Candice Bergen) with baby son Avery (Haley Joel Osment).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon.

A hole is a hole

We told you so.

By “we” I mean thousands, of privacy advocates, human rights activists, technical experts, and information security journalists.

By “so”, I mean: we all said repeatedly over decades that there is no such thing as a magic hole that only “good guys” can use. If you build a supposedly secure system but put in a hole to give the “authorities” access to communications, that hole can and will be exploited by “bad guys” you didn’t want spying on you.

The particular hole Chinese hackers used to spy on the US is the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (1994). CALEA mandates that telecommunications providers design their equipment so that they can wiretap any customer if law enforcement presents a warrant. At Techcrunch, Zack Whittaker recaps much of the history, tracing technology giants’ new emphasis on end-to-end encryption to the 2013 Snowden revelations of the government’s spying on US citizens.

The mid-1990s were a time of profound change for telecommunications: the Internet was arriving, exchanges were converting from analog to digital, and deregulation was providing new competition for legacy telcos. In those pre-broadband years, hundreds of ISPs offered dial-up Internet access. Law enforcement could no longer just call up a single central office to place a wiretap. When CALEA was introduced, critics were clear and prolific; for an in-depth history see Susan Landau’s and Whit Diffie’s book, Privacy on the Line (originally published 1998, second edition 2007). The net.wars archive includes a compilation of years of related arguments, and at Techdirt, Mike Masnick reviews the decades of law enforcement insistence that they need access to encrypted text. “Lawful access” is the latest term of art.

In the immediate post-9/11 shock, some of those who insisted on the 1990s version of today’s “lawful access” – key escrow, took the opportunity to tell their opponents (us) that the attacks proved we’d been wrong. One such was the just-departed Jack Straw, the home secretary from 1997 to (June) 2001, who blamed BBC Radio Four and “…large parts of the industry, backed by some people who I think will now recognise they were very naive in retrospect”. That comment sparked the first net.wars column. We could now say, “Right back atcha.”

Whatever you call an encryption backdoor, building a hole into communications security was, is, and will always be a dangerous idea, as the Dutch government recently told the EU. Now, we have hard evidence.

***

The time is long gone when people used to be snobbish about Internet addresses (see net.wars-the-book, chapter three). Most of us are therefore unlikely to have thought much about the geekishly popular “.io”. It could be a new-fangled generic top-level domain – but it’s not. We have been reading linguistic meaning into what is in fact a country code. Which is all fine and good, except that the country it belongs to is the Chagos Islands, also known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, which I had never heard of until the British government announced recently that it will hand the islands back to Mauritius (instead of asking the Chagos Islanders what they want…). Gareth Edwards made the connection: when that transfer happens, .io will cease to exist (h/t Charles Arthur’s The Overspill).

Edwards goes on to discuss the messy history of orphaned country code domains: Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. As a result, ICANN, the naming authority, now has strict rules that mandate termination in such cases. This time, there’s a lot at stake: .io is a favorite among gamers, crypto companies, and many others, some of them substantial businesses. Perhaps a solution – such as setting .io up anew as a gTLD with its domains intact – will be created. But meantime, it’s worth noting that the widely used .tv (Tuvalu), .fm (Federated States of Micronesia), and .ai (Anguilla) are *also* country code domains.

***

The story of what’s going on with Automattic, the owner of the blogging platform WordPress.com, and WP Engine, which provides hosting and other services for businesses using WordPress, is hella confusing. It’s also worrying: WordPress, which is open source content management software overseen by the WordPress Foundation, powers a little over 40% of the Internet’s top ten million websites and more than 60% of sites overall (including this one).

At Heise Online, Kornelius Kindermann offers one of the clearer explanations: Automattic, whose CEO, Matthew Mullenweg is also a director of the WordPress Foundation and a co-creator of the software, wants WP Engine, which has been taken over by the investment company Silver Lake, to pay “trademark royalties” of 8% to the WordPress Foundation to support the software. WP Engine doesn’t wanna. Kindermann estimates the sum involved at $35 million, After the news of all that broke, 159 employees have announced they are leaving Automattic.

The more important point that, like the users of the encrypted services governments want to compromise, the owners of .io domains, or, ultimately, the Chagos Islanders themselves, WP Engine’s customers, some of them businesses worth millions, are hostages of uncertainty surrounding the decisions of others. Open source software is supposed to give users greater control. But as always, complexity brings experts and financial opportunities, and once there’s money everyone wants some of it.

Illustrations: View of the Chagos Archipelago taken during ISS Expedition 60 (NASA, via Wikimedia).

Review: Supremacy

Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World
By Parmy Olson
Macmillan Business
ISBN: 978-1035038220

One of the most famous books about the process of writing software is Frederick Brooks’ The Mythical Man Month. The essay that gives the book its title makes the point that you cannot speed up the process by throwing more and more people at it. The more people you have, the more they have to all communicate with each other, and the pathways multiply exponentially. Think of it this way: 500 people can’t read a book faster than five people can.

Brooks’ warning immediately springs to mind when Parmy Olson reports, late in her new book, Supremacy, that Microsoft CEO Sadya Nadella was furious to discover that Microsoft’s 5,000 direct employees working on AI lagged well behind the rapid advances being made by the fewer than 200 working working at OpenAI. Some things just aren’t improved by parallel processing.

The story Olson tells is a sad one: two guys, both eager to develop an artificial general intelligence in order to save, or least help, humanity, who both wind up working for large commercial companies whose primary interests are to 1) make money and 2) outcompete the other guy. For Demis Hassabis, the company was Google, which bought his DeepMind startup in 2014. For Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, it was Microsoft. Which fits: Hassabis’s approach to “solving AI” was to let them teach themselves by playing games, hoping to drive science discovery; Altman sought to solve real-world problems and bring everyone wealth. Too late for Olson’s book, Hassabis has achieved enough of a piece of his dream to have been one of three awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for using AI to predict how proteins will fold.

For both the reason was the same: the resources they sought to work in AI – data, computing power, and high-priced personnel – are too expensive for either traditional startup venture capital funding or for academia. (Cure Vladen Joler, at this year’s Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection, noting that AI is arriving “pre-monopolized”.) As Olson tells the story, they both tried repeatedly to keep the companies they founded independent. Yet, both have wound up positioned to run the companies whose money they took apparently believing, like many geek founders with more IQ points than sense, that they would not have to give up control.

In comparing and contrasting the two founders, Olson shows where many of today’s problems came from. Allying themselves with Big Tech meant giving up on transparency. The ethicists who are calling out these companies over real and present harms caused by the tools they’ve built, such as bias, discrimination, and exploitation of workers performing tasks like labeling data, have 1% or less of the funding of those pushing safety for superintelligences that may never exist.

Olson does a good job of explaining the technical advances that led to the breakthroughs of recent years, as well as the business and staff realities of their different paths. A key point she pulls out is the extent to which both Google and Microsoft have become the kind of risk-averse, slow-moving, sclerotic company they despised when they were small, nimble newcomers.

Different paths, but ultimately, their story is the same: they fought the money, and the money won.

Blown

“This is a public place. Everyone has the right to be left in peace,” Jane (Vanessa Redgrave) tells Thomas (David Hemmings), whom she’s just spotted photographing her with her lover in the 1966 film Blow-Up, by Michelangelo Antonioni. The movie, set in London, proceeds as a mystery in which Thomas’s only tangible evidence is a grainy, blown-up shot of a blob that may be a murdered body.

Today, Thomas would probably be wielding a latest-model smartphone instead of a single lens reflex film camera. He would not bother to hide behind a tree. And Jane would probably never notice, much less challenge Thomas to explain his clearly-not-illegal, though creepy, behavior. Phones and cameras are everywhere. If you want to meet a lover and be sure no one’s photographing you, you don’t go to a public park, even one as empty as the film finds Maryon Park. Today’s 20-somethings grew up with that reality, and learned early to agree some gatherings are no-photography zones.

Even in the 1960s individuals had cameras, but taking high-quality images at a distance was the province of a small minority of experts; Antonioni’s photographer was a professional with his own darkroom and enlarging equipment. The first CCTV cameras went up in the 1960s; their proliferation became public policy issue in the 1980s, and was propagandized as “for your safety without much thought in the post-9/11 2000s. In the late 2010s, CCTV surveillance became democratized: my neighbor’s Ring camera means no one can leave an anonymous gift on their doorstep – or (without my consent) mine.

I suspect one reason we became largely complacent about ubiquitous cameras is that the images mostly remained unidentifiable, or at least unidentified. Facial recognition – especially the live variant police seem to feel they have the right to set up at will – is changing all that. Which all leads to this week, when Joseph Cox at 404 Media reports ($) (and Ars Technica summarizes) that two Harvard students have mashed up a pair of unremarkable $300 Meta Ray-Bans with the reverse image search service Pimeyes and a large language model to produce I-XRAY, an app that identifies in near-real time most of the people they pass on the street, including their name, home address, and phone number.

The students – AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio – are smart enough to realize the implications, imagining for Cox the scenario of a random male spotting a young woman and following her home. This news is breaking the same week that the San Francisco Standard and others are reporting that two men in San Francisco stood in front of a driverless Waymo taxi to block it from proceeding while demanding that the female passenger inside give them her phone number (we used to give such males the local phone number for time and temperature).

Nguyen and Ardayfio aren’t releasing the code they’ve written, but what two people can do, others with fewer ethics can recreate independently, as 30 years of Black Hat and Def Con have proved. This is a new level of democratizated surveillance. Today, giant databases like Clearview AI are largely only accessible to governments and law enforcement. But the data in them has been scraped from the web, like LLMs’ training data, and merged with commercial sources

This latest prospective threat to privacy has been created by the marriage of three technologies that were developed separately by different actors without regard to one another and, more important, without imagining how one might magnify the privacy risks of the others. A connected car with cameras could also run I-XRAY.

The San Francisco story is a good argument against allowing cars on the roads without steering wheels, pedals, and other controls or *something* to allow a passenger to take charge to protect their own safety. In Manhattan cars waiting at certain traffic lights often used to be approached by people who would wash the windshield and demand payment. Experienced drivers knew to hang back at red lights so they could roll forward past the oncoming would-be washer. How would you do this in a driverless car with no controls?

We’ve long known that people will prank autonomous cars. Coverage focused on the safety of the *cars* and the people and vehicles surrounding them, not the passengers. Calling a remote technical support line for help is never going to get a good enough response.

What ties these two cases together – besides (potentially) providing new ways to harass women – is the collision between new technologies and human nature. Plus, the merger of three decades’ worth of piled-up data and software that can make things happen in the physical world.

Arguably, we should have seen this coming, but the manufacturers of new technology have never been good at predicting what weird things their users will find to do with it. This mattered less when the worst outcome was using spreadsheet software to write letters. Today, that sort of imaginative failure is happening at scale in software that controls physical objects and penetrates the physical world. The risks are vastly greater and far more unsettling. It’s not that we can’t see the forest for the trees; it’s that we can’t see the potential for trees to aggregate into a forest.

Illustrations: Jane (Vanessa Redgrave) and her lover, being photographed by Thomas (David Hemmings) in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film, Blow-Up.

Pass the password

So this week I had to provide a new password for an online banking account. This is always fraught, even if you use a password manager. Half the time whatever you pick fails the site’s (often hidden) requirements – you didn’t stand on your head and spit a nickel, or they don’t allow llamas, or some other damn thing. This time, the specified failures startled me: it was too long, and special characters and spaces were not allowed. This is their *new* site, created in 2022.

They would have done well to wait for the just-released proposed password guidelines from the US National Institute for Standards and Technology. Most of these rules should have been standard long ago – like only requiring users to change passwords if there’s a breach. We can, however, hope they will be adopted now and set a consistent standard. To date, the fact that everyone has a different set of restrictions means that no secure strategy is universally valid – neither the strong passwords software generates nor the three random words the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre has long recommended.

The banking site we began with fails at least four of the nine proposed new rules: the minimum password length (six) is too short – it should be eight, preferably 15; all Unicode characters and printing ASCII characters should be acceptable, including spaces; maximum length should be at least 64 characters (the site says 16); there should be no composition rules mandating upper and lower case, numerals, and so on (which the site does). At least the site’s rules mean it won’t invisibly truncate the password so it’s impossible to guess how much of it has actually been recorded. On the plus side, a little surprisingly, the site did require me to choose my own password hint question. The fact that most sites use the same limited set of questions opens the way for reused answers across the web, effectively undoing the good of not reusing passwords in the first place.

This is another of those cases where the future was better in the past: for at least 20 years passwords have been about to be superseded by…something – smart cards, dongles, biometrics, picklists and typing patterns, images, lately, passkeys and authenticator apps. All have problems limiting their reach. Single signons are still offered by Facebook, Google, and others, but the privacy risks are (I hope) widely understood. The “this is the next password” crowd have always underestimated the complexity of replacing deeply embedded habits. We all hate passwords – but they are simple to understand and work across multiple devices. And we’re used to them. Encryption didn’t succeed with mainstream users until it became invisibly embedded inside popular services. I’ll guess that password replacements will only succeed if they are similarly invisible. Most are too complicated.

In all these years, despite some improvements, passwords have only gotten more frustrating. Most rules are still devised with desktop/laptop computers in mind – and yield passwords that are impossible to type on phones. No one takes a broad view of the many contexts in which we might have to enter passwords. Outmoded threat models are everywhere. Decades after the cybercafe era, sites, operating systems, and other software all still code as if shoulder surfing were still an important threat model. So we end up with sillinesses like struggling to type masked wifi passwords while sitting in coffee shops where they’re prominently displayed, and masks for one-time codes sent for two-factor authentication. So you fire up a text editor to check your typing and then copy and paste…

Meanwhile, the number of passwords we have to manage continues to escalate. In a recent extended Mastodon thread, digital services expert Jonathan Kamens documented his adventures updating the email addresses attached to 1,200-plus accounts. He explained: using a password manager makes it easy to create and forget new accounts by the hundred.

In a 2017 presentation, Columbia professor Steve Bellovin provides a rethink of all this, much of it drawn from his his 2016 book Thinking Security. Most of what we think we know about good password security, he argues, is based on outmoded threat models and assumptions – outmoded because the computing world has changed, but also because attackers have adapted to those security practices. Even the focus on creating *strong* passwords is outdated: password strength is entirely irrelevant to modern phishing attacks, to compromised servers and client hosts, and to attackers who can intercept communications or control a machine at either end (for example, via a keylogger). A lot depends if you’re a high-risk individual likely to be targeted personally by a well-resourced attacker, a political target, or, like most of us, a random target for ordinary criminals.

The most important thing, Bellovin says, is not to reuse passwords, so that if a site is cracked the damage is contained to that one site. Securing the email address used to reset passwords is also crucial. To that end, it can be helpful to use a separate and unpublished email address for the most sensitive sites and services – anything to do with money or health, for example.

So NIST’s new rules make some real sense, and if organizations can be persuaded to adopt them consistently all our lives might be a little bit less fraught. NIST is accepting comments through October 7.

Illustrations: XKCD on password strength.

This perfect day

To anyone remembering the excitement over DNA testing just a few years ago, this week’s news about 23andMe comes as a surprise. At CNN, Allison Morrow reports that all seven board members have resigned to protest CEO Anne Wojcicki’s plan to take the company private by buying up all the shares she doesn’t already own at 40 cents each (closing price yesterday was 0.3301. The board wanted her to find a buyer offering a better price.

In January, Rolfe Winkler reported at the Wall Street Journal ($) that 23andMe is likely to run out of cash by next year. Its market cap has dropped from $6 billion to under $200 million. He and Morrow catalogue the company’s problems: it’s never made a profit nor had a sustainable business model.

The reasons are fairly simple: few repeat customers. With DNA testing, as Winkler writes, “Customers only need to take the test once, and few test-takers get life-altering health results.” 23andMe’s mooted revolution in health care instead was a fad. Now, the company is pivoting to sell subscriptions to weight loss drugs.

This strikes me as an extraordinarily dangerous moment: the struggling company’s sole unique asset is a pile of more than 10 million DNA samples whose owners have agreed they can be used for research. Many were alarmed when, in December 2023, hackers broke into 1.7 million accounts and gained access to 6.9 million customer profiles<, though. The company said the hacked data did not include DNA records but did include family trees and other links. We don't think of 23andMe as a social network. But the same affordances that enabled Cambridge Analytica to leverage a relatively small number of user profiles to create a mass of data derived from a much larger number of their Friends worked on 23andMe. Given the way genetics works, this risk should have been obvious.

In 2004, the year of Facebook’s birth, the Australian privacy campaigner Roger Clarke warned in Very Black “Little Black Books” that social networks had no business model other than to abuse their users’ data. 23andMe’s terms and conditions promise to protect user privacy. But in a sale what happens to the data?

The same might be asked about the data that would accrue from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison‘s surveillance-embracing proposals this week. Inevitably, commentators invoked George Orwell’s 1984. At Business Insider, Kenneth Niemeyer was first to report: “[Ellison] said AI will usher in a new era of surveillance that he gleefully said will ensure ‘citizens will be on their best behavior.'”

The all-AI-surveillance all-the-time idea could only be embraced “gleefully” by someone who doesn’t believe it will affect him.

Niemeyer:

“Ellison said AI would be used in the future to constantly watch and analyze vast surveillance systems, like security cameras, police body cameras, doorbell cameras, and vehicle dashboard cameras.

“We’re going to have supervision,” Ellison said. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

Ellison is twenty-six years behind science fiction author David Brin, who proposed radical transparency in his 1998 non-fiction outing, The Transparent Society. But Brin saw reciprocity as an essential feature, believing it would protect privacy by making surveillance visible. Ellison is claiming that *inscrutable* surveillance will guarantee good behavior.

At 404 Media, Jason Koebler debunks Ellison point by point. Research and other evidence shows securing schools is unlikely to make them safer; body cameras don’t appear to improve police behavior; and all the technologies Ellison talks about have problems with accuracy and false positives. Indeed, the mayor of Chicago wants to end the city’s contract with ShotSpotter (now SoundThinking), saying it’s expensive and doesn’t cut crime; some research says it slows police 911 response. Worth noting Simon Spichak at Brain Facts, who finds with AI tools humans make worse decisions. So…not a good idea for police.

More disturbing is Koebler’s main point: most of the technology Ellison calls “future” is already here and failing to lower crime rates or solve its causes – while being very expensive. Ellison is already out of date.

The book Ellison’s fantasy evokes for me is the less-known This Perfect Day, by Ira Levin, written in 1970. The novel’s world is run by a massive computer (“Unicomp”) that decides all aspects of individuals’ lives: their job, spouse, how many children they can have. Enforcing all this are human counselors and permanent electronic bracelets individuals touch to ubiquitous scanners for permission.

Homogeneity rules: everyone is mixed race, there are only four boys’ and girls’ names, they eat “totalcakes”, drink cokes, wear identical clothing. For the rest, regularly administered drugs keep everyone healthy and docile. “Fight” is an abominable curse word. The controlled world over which Unicomp presides is therefore almost entirely benign: there is no war, crime, and little disease. It rains only at night.

Naturally, the novel’s hero rebels, joins a group of outcasts (“the Incurables”), and finds his way to the secret underground luxury bunker where a few “Programmers” help Unicomp’s inventor, Wei Li Chun, run the world to his specification. So to me, Ellison’s plan is all about installing himself as world ruler. Which, I mean, who could object except other billionaires?

Illustrations: The CCTV camera on George Orwell’s Portobello Road house.

The brittle state

We’re now almost a year on from Rishi Sunak’s AI Summit, which failed to accomplish any of its most likely goals: cement his position as the UK’s prime minister; establish the UK as a world leader in AI fearmongering; or get him the new life in Silicon Valley some commentators seemed to think he wanted.

Arguably, however, it has raised belief that computer systems are “intelligent” – that is, that they understand what they’re calculating. The chatbots based on large language models make that worse, because, as James Boyle cleverly wrote, for the first time in human history, “sentences do not imply sentience”. Mix in paranoia over the state of the world and you get some truly terrifying systems being put into situations where they can catastrophically damage people’s lives. We should know better by now.

The Open Rights Group (I’m still on its advisory council) is campaigning against the Home Office’s planned eVisa scheme. In the previouslies: between 1948 and 1971, people from Caribbean countries, many of whom had fought for Britain in World War II, were encouraged to help the UK rebuild the economy post-war. They are known as the “Windrush generation” after the first ship that brought them. As Commonwealth citizens, they didn’t need visas or documentation; they and their children had the automatic right to live and work here.

Until 1973, when the law changed; later arrivals needed visas. The snag was that earlier arrivals had no idea they had any reason to worry….until the day they discovered, when challenged, that they had no way to prove they were living here legally. That day came in 2017, when then-prime minister, Theresa May (who this week joined the House of Lords) introduced the hostile environment. Intended to push illegal immigrants to go home, this law moves the “border” deep into British life by requiring landlords, banks, and others to conduct status checks. The result was that some of the Windrush group – again, legal residents – were refused medical care, denied housing, or deported.

When Brexit became real, millions of Europeans resident in the UK were shoved into the same position: arrived legally, needing no documentation, but in future required to prove their status. This time, the UK issued them documents confirming their status as permanently settled.

Until December 31, 2024, when all those documents with no expiration date will abruptly expire because the Home Office has a new system that is entirely online. As ORG and the3million explain it, come January 1, 2025, about 4 million people will need online accounts to access the new system, which generates a code to give the bank or landlord temporary access to their status. The new system will apparently hit a variety of databases in real time to perform live checks.

Now, I get that the UK government doesn’t want anyone to be in the country for one second longer than they’re entitled to. But we don’t even have to say, “What could possibly go wrong?” because we already *know* what *has* gone wrong for the Windrush generation. Anyone who has to prove their status off the cuff in time-sensitive situations really needs proof they can show when the system fails.

A proposal like this can only come from an irrational belief in the perfection – or at least, perfectability – of computer systems. It assumes that Internet connections won’t be interrupted, that databases will return accurate information, and that everyone involved will have the necessary devices and digital literacy to operate it. Even without ORG’s and the3million’s analysis, these are bonkers things to believe – and they are made worse by a helpline that is only available during the UK work day.

There is a lot of this kind of credulity about, most of it connected with “AI”. AP News reports that US police departments are beginning to use chatbots to generate crime reports based on the audio from their body cams. And, says Ars Technica, the US state of Nevada will let AI decide unemployment benefit claims, potentially producing denials that can’t be undone by a court. BrainFacts reports that decision makers using “AI” systems are prone to automation bias – that is, they trust the machine to be right. Of course, that’s just good job security: you won’t be fired for following the machine, but you might for overriding it.

The underlying risk with all these systems, as a security experts might say, is complexity: more complex means being more susceptible to inexplicable failures. There is very little to go wrong with a piece of paper that plainly states your status, for values of “paper” including paper, QR codes downloaded to phones, or PDFs saved to a desktop/laptop. Much can go wrong with the system underlying that “paper”, but, crucially, when a static confirmation is saved offline, managing that underlying complexity can take place when the need is not urgent.

It ought to go without saying that computer systems with a profound impact on people’s lives should be backed up by redundant systems that can be used when they fail. Yet the world the powers that be apparently want to build is one that underlines their power to cause enormous stress for everyone else. Systems like eVisas are as brittle as just-in-time supply chains. And we saw what happens to those during the emergency phase of the covid pandemic.

Illustrations: Empty supermarket shelves in March 2020 (via Wikimedia).

Beware the duck

Once upon a time, “convergence” was a buzzword. That was back in the days when audio was on stereo systems, television was on a TV, and “communications” happened on phones that weren’t computers. The word has disappeared back into its former usage pattern, but it could easily be revived to describe what’s happening to content as humans dive into using generative tools.

Said another way. Roughly this time last year, the annual technology/law/pop culture conference Gikii was awash in (generative) AI. That bubble is deflating, but in the experiments that nonetheless continue a new topic more worthy of attention is emerging: artificial content. It’s striking because what happens at this gathering, which mines all types of popular culture for cues for serious ideas, is often a good guide to what’s coming next in futurelaw.

That no one dared guess which of Zachary Cooper‘s pair of near-identicalaudio clips was AI-generated, and which human-performed was only a starting point. One had more static? Cooper’s main point: “If you can’t tell which clip is real, then you can’t decide which one gets copyright.” Right, because only human creations are eligible (although fake bands can still scam Spotify).

Cooper’s brief, wild tour of the “generative music underground” included using AI tools to create songs whose content is at odds with their genre, whole generated albums built by a human producer making thousands of tiny choices, and the new genre “gencore”, which exploits the qualities of generated sound (Cher and Autotune on steroids). Voice cloning, instrument cloning, audio production plugins, “throw in a bass and some drums”….

Ultimately, Cooper said, “The use of generative AI reveals nothing about the creative relationship to work; it destabilizes the international market by having different authorship thresholds; and there’s no means of auditing any of it.” Instead of uselessly trying to enforce different rights predicated on the use or non-use of a specific set of technologies, he said, we should tackle directly the challenges new modes of production pose to copyright. Precursor: the battles over sampling.

Soon afterwards, Michael Veale was showing us Civitai, an Idaho-based site offering open source generative AI tools, including fine-tuned models. “Civitai exists to democratize AI media creation,” the site explains. “Everything has a valid legal purpose,” Veale said, but the way capabilities can be retrained and chained together to create composites makes it hard to tell which tools, if any, should be taken down, even for creators (see also the puzzlement as Redditors try to work this out). Even environmental regulation can’t help, as one attendee suggested: unlike large language models, these smaller, fine-tuned models (as Jon Crowcroft and I surmised last year would be the future) are efficient; they can run on a phone.

Even without adding artificial content there is always an inherent conflict when digital meets an analog spectrum. This is why, Andy Phippen said, the threshold of 18 for buying alcohol and cigarettes turns into a real threshold of 25 at retail checkouts. Both software and humans fail at determining over-or-under-18, and retailers fear liability. Online age verification as promoted in the Online Safety Act will not work.

If these blurred lines strain the limits of current legal approaches, others expose gaps in the law. Andrea Matwyshyn, for example, has been studying parallels I’ve also noticed between early 20th century company towns and today’s tech behemoths’ anti-union, surveillance-happy working practices. As a result, she believes that regulatory authorities need to start considering closely the impact of data aggregation when companies merge and look for company town-like dynamics”.

Andelka Phillips parodied the overreach of app contracts by imagining the EULA attached to “ThoughtReader app”. A sample clause: “ThoughtReader may turn on its service at any time. By accepting this agreement, you are deemed to accept all monitoring of your thoughts.” Well, OK, then. (I also had a go at this here, 19 years ago.)

Emily Roach toured the history of fan fiction and the law to end up at Archive of Our Own, a “fan-created, fan-run, nonprofit, noncommercial archive for transformative fanworks, like fanfiction, fanart, fan videos, and podfic”, the idea being to ensure that the work fans pour their hearts into has a permanent home where it can’t be arbitrarily deleted by corporate owners. The rules are strict: not so much as a “buy me a coffee” tip link that could lead to a court-acceptable claim of commercial use.

History, the science fiction writer Charles Stross has said, is the science fiction writer’s secret weapon. Also at Gikii: Miranda Mowbray unearthed the 18th century “Digesting Duck” automaton built by Jacques de Vauconson. It was a marvel that appeared to ingest grain and defecate waste and that in its day inspired much speculation about the boundaries between real and mechanical life. Like the amazing ancient Greek automata before it, it was, of course, a purely mechanical fake – it stored the grain in a small compartment and released pellets from a different compartment – but today’s humans confused into thinking that sentences mean sentience could relate.

Illustrations: One onlooker’s rendering of his (incorrect) idea of the interior of Jacques de Vaucanson’s Digesting Duck (via Wikimedia).

Service Model

Service Model
By Adrian Tchaikovsky
Tor Publishing Group
ISBN: 978-1-250-29028-1

Charles is a highly sophisticated robot having a bad day. As a robot, “he” would not express it that way. Instead, he would say that he progresses through each item on his task list and notes its ongoing pointlessness. He checks his master’s travel schedule and finds no plans, Nonetheless, he completes his next tasks, laying out today’s travel clothes, dusting off yesterday’s unused set, and placing them back in the wardrobe, as he has every day for the 2,230 days since his master last left the house.

He goes on to ask House, the manor’s major-domo system, to check with the lady of the house’s maidservant for travel schedules, planned clothing, and other aspects of life. There has been no lady of the house, and therefore no maidservant, for 17 years and 12 days. An old subroutine suggests ways to improve efficiency by eliminating some of the many empty steps, but Charles has no instructions that would let him delete any of them, even when House reports errors. The morning routine continues. It’s tempting to recall Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains”.

Until Charles and House jointly discover there are red stains on the car upholstery Charles has just cleaned…and on Charles’s hands, and on the master’s laid-out clothes, and on his bedclothes and on his throat where Charles has recently been shaving him with a straight razor…

The master has been murdered.

So begins Adrian Tchaikovsky’s post-apocalyptic science fiction novel Service Model.

Some time later – after a police investigation – Charles sets out to walk the long miles to report to Diagnostics, and perhaps thereafter to find a new master in need of a gentleman’s gentlebot. Charles would not say he “hoped”; he would say he awaits instructions, and that the resulting uncertainty is inefficiently consuming his resources.

His journey takes him through a landscape filled with other robots that have lost their purpose. Manor after manor along the road is dark or damaged; at one, a servant robot waits pointlessly to welcome guests who never come. The world, it seems, is stuck in recursive loops that cannot be overridden because the human staff required to do so have been…retired. At the Diagnostics center Charles finds more of the same: a queue of hundreds of robots waiting to be seen, stalled by the lack of a Grade Seven human to resolve the blockage.

Enter “the Wonk”, a faulty robot with no electronic link and a need to recharge at night and consume food, who sees Charles – now Uncharles, since he no longer serves the master who named him – as infected with the “protagonist virus” and wants him to join in searching for the mysterious Library, which is preserving human knowledge. Uncharles is more interested in finding humans he can serve.

Their further explorations of a post-apocalyptic world, thinly populated and filled with the rubble of cities, along with Uncharles’s efforts to understand his nature, form most of the rest of the book. Is Wonk’s protagonist virus even a real thing? He doubts that it is. And yet, he feels himself finding excuses to avoid taking on yet another pointless job.

The best part of all this is Tchaikovsky’s rendering of Cbarles/Uncharles’s thoughts about himself and his attempts to make sense of the increasingly absurd world around him. A long, long way into the book it’s still not obvious how it will end.

Sectioned

Social media seems to be having a late-1990s moment, raising flashbacks to the origins of platform liability and the passage of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996). It’s worth making clear at the outset: most of the people talking about S230 seem to have little understanding of what it is and does. It allows sites to moderate content without becoming liable for it. It is what enables all those trust and safety teams to implement sites’ restrictions on acceptable use. When someone wants to take an axe to it because there is vile content circulating, they have not understood this.

So, in one case this week a US appeals court is allowing a lawsuit to proceed that seeks to hold TikTok liable for users’ postings of the “blackout challenge”, the idea being to get an adrenaline rush by reviving from near-asphyxiation. Bloomberg reports that at least 20 children have died trying to accomplish this, at least 15 of them age 12 or younger (TikTok, like all social media, is supposed to be off-limits to under-13s). The people suing are the parents of one of those 20, a ten-year-old girl who died attempting the challenge.

The other case is that of Pavel Durov, CEO of the messaging service Telegram, who has been arrested in France as part of a criminal investigation. He has been formally charged with complicity in managing an online platform “in order to enable an illegal transaction in organized group”, and refusal to cooperate with law enforcement authorities and ordered not to leave France, with bail set at €5 million (is that enough to prevent the flight of a billionaire with four passports?).

While there have been many platform liability cases, there are relatively few examples of platform owners and operators being charged. The first was in 1997, back when “online” still had a hyphen; the German general manager of CompuServe, Felix Somm, was arrested in Bavaria on charges of “trafficking in pornography”. That is, German users of Columbus, Ohio-based CompuServe could access pornography and illegal material on the Internet through the service’s gateway. In 1998, Somm was convicted and given a two-year suspended sentence. In 1999 his conviction was overturned on appeal, partly, the judge wrote, because there was no technology at the time that would have enabled CompuServe to block the material.

The only other example I’m aware of came just this week, when an Arizona judge sentenced Michael Lacey, co-founder of the classified ads site Backpage.com, to five years in prison and fined him $3 million for money laundering. He still faces further charges for prostitution facilitation and money laundering; allegedly he profited from a scheme to promote prostitution on his site. Two other previously convicted Backpages executives were also sentenced this week to ten years in prison.

In Durov’s case, the key point appears to be his refusal to follow industry practice with respect to to reporting child sexual abuse material or cooperate with properly executed legal requests for information. You don’t have to be a criminal to want the social medium of your choice to protect your privacy from unwarranted government snooping – but equally, you don’t have to be innocent to be concerned if billionaire CEOs of large technology companies consider themselves above the law. (See also Elon Musk, whose X platform may be tossed out of Brazil right now.)

Some reports on the Durov case have focused on encryption, but the bigger issue appears to be failure to register to use encryption , as Signal has. More important, although Telegram is often talked about as encrypted, it’s really more like other social media, where groups are publicly visible, and only direct one-on-one messages are encrypted. But even then, they’re only encrypted if users opt in. Given that users notoriously tend to stick with default settings, that means that the percentage of users who turn that encryption on is probably tiny. So it’s not clear yet whether France is seeking to hold Durov responsible for the user-generated content on his platform (which S230 would protect in the US), or accusing him of being part of criminal activity relating to his platform (which it wouldn’t).

Returning to the Arizona case, in allowing the lawsuit to go ahead, the appeals court judgment says that S230 has “evolved away from its original intent”, and argues that because TikTok’s algorithm served up the challenge on the child’s “For You” page, the service can be held responsible. At TechDirt, Mike Masnick blasts this reasoning, saying that it overturns numerous other court rulings upholding S230, and uses the same reasoning as the 1995 decision in Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy. That was the case that led directly to the passage of S230, introduced by then-Congressman Christopher Cox (R-CA) and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who are still alive to answer questions about their intent. Rather than evolving away, we’ve evolved back full circle.

The rise of monopolistic Big Tech has tended to obscure the more important point about S230. As Cory Doctorow writes for EFF, killing S230 would kill the small federated communities (like Mastodon and Discord servers) and web boards that offer alternatives to increasing Big Tech’s pwoer. While S230 doesn’t apply outside the US (some Americans have difficulty understanding that other countries have different laws), its ethos is pervasive and the companies it’s enabled are everywhere. In the end, it’s like democracy: the alternatives are worse.

Illustrations: Drunken parrot in Putney (by Simon Bisson).