Poetry from M.I.T.; David Ferry

Welcome to innovation hab. I'm Karen Miller. So let's start with a little quiz. I'll mention a few books and see if you can figure out what they have in common. The Catcher In The Rye The Grapes of Wrath The Lord Of The Rings. So you're thinking is there something similar about their authors and their main characters. Well here's what unites them. They're all on the banned and challenged classics list from the American Library Association along with a ton of other books including Gone With The Wind. The call of the wild and a farewell to arms. And we're actually going to put the full list from the American Library Association on our website innovation hub dot org. But Jonathan Zittrain who's one of the nation's experts on censorship and privacy says that if you think information control isn't such a big deal in the age of the internet think again. And if you've got a tablet let's say Kindle keep an eye on it during this interview. It turns out it may have come with a lot more features than you realized. So Jonathan Zittrain from Harvard Law School author of the future of the Internet and how to

stop it. Explain this new era of censorship that you think that we're facing. Well here's an example that is so textbook perfect it's hard to believe that it's real. But a couple years ago Amazon had released the Kindle and you can buy all sorts of books through the Amazon store to deposit on to the reader and enjoy an Amazon in turn lots lots of different publishers put stuff through the Amazon store and they take a cut of the profits. So that sounds great. It turns out that one publisher had published through the store George Orwell's 1984 mistakenly thinking that 1984 had fallen into the public domain that there were no rights that had to be cleared from the original author's heirs in the state. And they got it wrong and they had already sold a number of copies of 1084 at 99 cents a pop through the condemned store and. I can only imagine how much

Amazon panicked when they found this out because they could be potentially liable themselves for copyright infringement and more than 99 cents a copy it could be a lot. So in their panic they flipped a switch that reached into everybody's Kindle who had downloaded 1984 and deleted it off the Kindle that each user had which included any annotations the person may have made it cetera. And then offered a coupon for 99 cents. So there's something incredibly fitting about the fact that 1984 a book about information control was deleted from Kindles and it does have the sort of you know you don't have 1984 there's no such book as 1984 ever existed. It's our welly and to say the least. So right now I think a lot of people are listening thinking wait a minute I downloaded that onto my Kindle it's mine and paid for it. What are you talking about that the Long Hand of Amazon came into my living room while I was sleeping and took back my copy of Orwell's 1984.

How did they do. That well at a technical layer it's because you are on the Internet. If you're using your Kindle as much as you are when you use a browser or you're using an app on an iPhone or an android machine or whatever you might have. These are all services not products. And when you get something like an e-book reader you're really starting a long term relationship with the vendor of that device which is very different from buying a book or even inheriting a book. It's not like you have a long term relationship with the paper company that printed the book. They have something to say about what you do once you open the covers and that can lead to a lot of features. It means your Kindle can get upgraded from afar and have new stuff it could do that it couldn't do before but it also means that what you have is contingent and there may well be legal fine print the purports only to license the material to you rather than to transfer it outright. And the deletion of the Kindle of

the 1084 at the time from the Kindle was not. I think I mean it's a humorous example more than it is a really painful one because there are so many other places to get 1984. Amazon apologized but the principle is very powerful in its very and during of service rather than product of what it means is not only might you find a book that you previously thought you owned taken away from you but you could find just like software gets updated. Content can become a quote unquote updated. So if I am somebody that's talked about in someone else's book and I have a problem with it I think it's defamatory or maybe it infringes my copyright or something. The only real remedy I would have in the traditional world is one of suing them and getting some money out of it and that could be a real remedy. But it doesn't change the fact that everybody already has the book who bought the book. Now it would be trivial to say not only do I want you to find court that this is defamatory but I would like you to reach into every copy of the book that's out there

and fix it. You should change page 87 to strike the offending passage or insert the word not here and it's not even clear people would know. That's a form of information control that does have characteristics that one would find in 1084 and that is a great example of. A dystopian feature bumbled along with all the good features that come from our products turning into services. How much does it concern you that there is the potential for Amazon for the government whoever to change page 87 and make it a not or to change a paragraph about you or omit that paragraph so that in essence you you might argue that maybe no copies of the original exist I mean at least in a book burning if you hide the book. You know if somebody has some copy of it somewhere it continues on but if nobody has any copies of it and they can reach in every copy Does that

worry you. It does as we more and more abandon print because we have these easy digital alternatives it's not like you'll be able to run to your local library that happens to warehouse a print copy of the book that just vanished from your Kindle. It's something that really requires systematic attention. And it's exactly the kind of attention that the market itself might not give. If you're Amazon there's no particular percentage in it for you as a rational market actor to preserving pristine copies of works for the coming bad years. You know that something maybe a library would do. But you were just in the business of offering these services and that's why I think even as we see a lot of the traditional roles of libraries and universities disrupted this is a function that they vitally can and should serve over the longer term. And there are a couple neat projects one of which is called Lux L O C K S S. It stands for lots of copies keeps stuff safe and it's a way for libraries to archive a digital version of something each of them

has a copy and every so often they compare their copies with one another to see if they remain identical. And if somebody is fussed with one of them but not all the rest that discrepancy would be automatically noted. And that's exactly the kind of insurance policy that in a world of Kindle and Google Books. Both of which are about centrally controlled content and updatable in a very insidious way. It's exactly the kind of remedy I think we need to start implementing now. When we actually saw not too long ago Jonah Lehrer people may remember him he fabricated quote famously Bob Dylan quotes a well-known writer and his books once. Once he was found to have been somebody who fabricated content some of his material just essentially vanished from the internet. Yes and some would say and a good thing too because they were plagiarized or otherwise wrongfully made. But I think we should keep a really good distinction between stuff that is wrong that

is reprehensible and stuff that needs to go into the memory hole. It should be as if it never existed. And there may be stuff that fits into that second category. If somebody releases a trove of Social Security numbers. Other things that would facilitate identity theft or possibly child abuse images we can come up with stuff that's bad enough that we might be looking for remedies of the sort to really try to put the cat back in the bag. But for wrongs of the sort that approximate copyright infringement or arguments about defamation there are just too many historical examples of things that the authorities have seen fit to ban that only because somebody was able to keep a couple copies away from the censors. Did those copies exist today and were so much the richer for it. Voltaire. I mean you know the works of Voltaire might not be available if there were technologies to so cleanly get rid of them. I'm Carol Miller. This is innovation help We're talking with Jonathan Zittrain a professor at

Harvard Law School and the author of among other books. Access Denied and the future of the Internet and how to stop it. So we've been talking about private companies so far but do you see the government getting into the act here on potentially reaching out and sort of having a long arm and taking things back that are out there are ready and changing things. Absolutely. And we've seen in Apple's App Store there's not just one app store. There's an App Store for roughly every jurisdiction so there's one for Chinese iPhone users that's different from the one for American iPhone users. And. China might ask Apple not to allow certain things in that store because those things violate Chinese law. And why should Apple think itself to be beyond the authority of a government. And so that means that anything a company can do it can be asked to do by a regulator that can apply pressure to it. And that's either because the company has engineers on the ground in the jurisdiction in question

or bank accounts or sales they want to make there. All of these things mean that those companies could be called to heel. Do you see that happening let's take China for a minute I mean you have people who might argue look this is a big country it has opened up to the world. The government can only impose censorship for so long. And and you know obviously Google's had to they mostly are in Hong Kong. But can that kind of censorship actually go on and on even in an economic powerhouse like China. Well that's the $64000 question and I can tell you here are factors that go in each direction on it. On the plus side of plus means less censorship. Every day there are more and more things available on the Internet as stuff gets digitized and more and more activities move online and there are more and more apps and ways to get online. And it just feels like there's more you can do and more you

can see and I think that feeling is accurate. On the other hand the trends of the way in which the Internet is used information is stored there. People accessing all of these trends are generally in the direction of centralization. It used to be that the web was extraordinarily distributed. When you jump from one website to another you'd be jumping from the server in one basement to another. Who knows where around the world it's one click to you but it might be Iceland or Europe or Africa that you might be accessing more and more however for a variety of reasons all the websites might share a common basement call it Amazon Web Services Amazon in addition to selling anything under the sun offers wholesale hosting services to anybody that doesn't want to have to put a server in a basement. And what that means is you end up with kind of just a few handfuls of companies. Through which there are points of control. But I'm using my iPhone. Apple gets

a say on what apps will appear on that phone. They get a say over what content will appear in their newsstand and that is an opportunity for censorship that the earlier version of the web just did not have routinely available. Now it may be that if you are a political dissident and you are bound and determined to try to get a message out or to try to read information that the authorities don't want you to see you'll have ways of configuring your internet experience so that you can do it. But as my colleague Larry Lessig says small fences can keep in large mammals. And I think we all know that if you're on Facebook or using a website and suddenly you just click on something and you're waiting 15 20 seconds. Well who needs this. You just move on to the next link and that low of a speed bump could end up determining whether something goes viral or not whether a big audience sees it or not. So maybe it's that for the point of view of insular and determined communities of dissidents it's a freer Internet

than it was before. Only with worries about surveillance that might not have been possible before for the population at large. It may turn out that the internet experience they see may be technically quite broad but in reality it's just a handful of sites and gatekeepers that they're experiencing. That's a little concerning that you know that. The Amazons the Googles the yahoos you know pick pick five companies could have such a powerful effect on millions of websites and it might be in effect that they themselves would come to rue. There's all sorts of reasons that they would want that kind of control to be more competitive to try to move into new industries. I mean if you're Apple you're delighted to take a 30 percent cut of any content sold through your platform something Bill Gates never dreamed of with Microsoft Windows that he would get a cut of independent software sold to run on the Windows platform at least until

Windows 8 came along. So I think. You might think that good is the company until you realize that supply creates demand and there may be more and more times that your door is knocked upon by regulators trying to get you into the policing business that you never quite wanted and figuring out ways to keep that Wolf properly at bay. I think it's a very important challenge for a number of these companies. I'm Karen Miller. This is innovation hub and we're talking with Jonathan Zittrain from Harvard Law School. So I want to ask you a little bit here about your own privacy sort of about personal privacy. Do you worry or if somebody if somebody came up to you and said you know how worried should I be about the stuff that I put on Facebook. Let's say the relative privacy of it. What would you say. I'm worried that if I put something online. Somebody else may get mitts on it and then leak it or otherwise exploit it in a way that neither I nor Facebook or Google or whoever else intended. And I think there are

worries about phishing and viruses I'll bet most listeners have had personal direct experience with a computer being taken over because they just happened to click on the wrong thing at the wrong time. That's a problem that needs to be solved. Secondarily there's the issue of I trusted Facebook or whoever with this information and then it was used in unexpected ways that I just didn't realize. And that's then not a security incident but truly a privacy incident. And I think there does need to be rather constant scrutiny and pressure applied to those companies that develop a pretty thorough portfolio's about us in part because we're happily offering up information about ourselves to make sure they're not using it in ways to which we would object. And I think there's a lot of work that could be done there. But beyond those examples of security and privacy the real worry I have when we think of innovation in this is that. It doesn't take a Facebook anymore to aggregate and

disseminate lots of personal information. More and more whether it's with Google Glass or with a number of other products you can get. You can go about your daily life and document pretty much everything you can have a bird's eye view from the top of your head perched on a hat or a pair of glasses filming everything and possibly even doing facial recognition. And when you put that online even if it's not through Facebook you might be invading the privacy of others. And now if those others object their problem isn't with Facebook it's with you. You know we actually talked to David Pogue recently formerly of The New York Times now at Yahoo. And he talked to us about exactly what you're saying about Google Glass and that it raises a host of privacy concerns. Let's listen to what he had to say. Google Glass especially. It really violates some social rules you know when you're talking to somebody who's wearing Google Glass. There's a certain unspoken smugness on the part of the wearer there's a certain superiority because

they could be filming you or taking pictures of you and yeah I wouldn't know it. It's a very uncomfortable feeling if you're the non wearer and you know already they're being banned right and left I mean you won't be able to wear these in theaters in restaurants in courtrooms in schools because of you know privacy and cheating and all kinds of other things. Tenth is that trend. Do you share David Pogue's concern about this sort of new generation of wearable technology. I do. And I see that some of the things David was talking about well there's a big social backlash against it. This is just the first minute of what's going to be in hours days weeks months years long deployment of these kinds of technologies. And if we know anything from the past it's that we can habituate rightly or wrongly to all sorts of things that our forebears would have thought of as an incredible invasion of privacy. I mean there was a time when caller ID was thought of as the end of the world for privacy and the ACLU was up in arms over the imposition of

caller ID just so people could know who was calling them. And now I think we take it as a matter of course so. I do wonder if those kinds of cheap sensors whether it's sound video there will be all sorts of uses of them that will become salutary they'll become profitable they'll become life saving. They'll be an incident something like the Boston Marathon bombing of a bunch of people had Google Glass how much more quickly could the investigation of honed in on who the suspects were. There will be those uses for which it will start to feel like how could you not go around the world wearing a pair of these. And that will I think Flip a lot of the conventions. Well you've also talked about this new app for iPhones which I have to say I did not know about this app but it continuously records. And if you decide yeah I want to keep that. You can say I want to go to something that was five minutes ago and I want to keep that so

it's just recording all the time and I guess every once in a while sort of dumping the stuff. But if you realize I just had a conversation with somebody and it would be helpful if I could use that conversation later. You can keep what you just recorded. Yes it's the black box theory from an aircraft that's just keep it constantly recording tape over the old stuff if you don't have enough room. But of course we know there's going to be more and more room. And then if you want to go back and rewind the tape and see what you missed you'll have it available. And I could see again that becoming just a commonplace and it will mean that. It's so funny people in public I think tend to think of themselves still in private in that they are anonymous that whatever they say will evaporate as soon as they say it. And I can imagine it leading to a much more polite society. If your actions could be reviewed and held against you at any time it could also lead to a society that feels less free and less spontaneous because of this near

constant monitoring made possible not by Big Brother but by one's own little siblings each with a recording going on. Yeah well I mean you can imagine all sorts of implications for anything from divorce proceedings to sort of office gossip all sorts of things in which having recording what somebody else just said might be awfully helpful depending on what you're trying to accomplish. Yes and I should say Charlie Brooker in the UK has done a series called Black Mirror which is a series of independent television episodes about dystopian technologies and he did one particular episode of Black Mirror about exactly this what happens if you could document anything and go back to that treasured or not so treasured moment. And it may be through our art that we can best appreciate some of the implications whether or not we would be tempted to try to head off some of the futures that could result I don't know.

Go back for one minute to the Boston marathon bombings which you mentioned. We've seen all sorts of ways in which cities our daily lives are much more on camera and much more mapped. You know there was that incident with Google Maps where they were trying to do mapping and it turned out that as they did it they could access what you were doing in your home right. No the websites you were on maybe no the e-mails that you were sending at that very moment. So when you looked at what was happening around the Boston Marathon bombing and you and when you noticed of course that they were using security cameras. Did it concern you. Did you think Boy it's good they have the security cameras how did you can text your lies all that well at the moment that it's happening. I'm wanting to see the perpetrators caught as quickly and thoroughly and definitively as possible. And at that point I'm cheering on every single scrap of evidence that the authorities can gather. And of course any time I think we worry about civil liberties we have to contend with the fact that there

are examples of intrusive measures working. It would just be all too convenient if the things that gave us discomfort for civil liberties also didn't happen to work. I mean there are plenty of examples of that. But we also I think have to embrace sometimes that there will really be a trade off in certain avenues of the use of information or of censors that if we forgo it there will be crimes we can't solve. And we have to be ready to pay that price in the toughest time to pay it is when it comes due when there is that crime you want to solve for that person you want to catch. And I think we just have to embrace that emotional feeling at the time of wanting to catch the person. Even as in more sober times. We think systemically about the level of intrusiveness we really want. Jonathan Zittrain is a professor at Harvard Law School He's the author of Access Denied access controlled and access contested and he's also the author of the future of the

Internet and how to stop it. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. And we're going to put links to Jonathan's a trans writings on censorship on our Web site. Innovation hub dot org. And when we come back the president of Barnard College who also penned the book Wonder Woman joins us to talk about what's keeping so many women out of the innovation economy and what we can do about it. And finally we're going to wrap up this week with a round up of our gadget gurus favorite holiday picks. Remember that you can always hear our show on iTunes or SoundCloud and you can get more information about our guests including pictures of all our gadget gurus picks on our website innovation Hobb dot org. I'm Carol Miller and this is innovation. Now. I. Want. To know. What. You want oh it's.

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