Baker spoke about Katrina and said that they now realized that they needed two things: an ebay for givers and recipients of gifts as well as a 911-service for SMS, since this requires less functionality than real-time telephony. The DHS is working with this.

He then spoke about biological warfare. He said that one theory about the Anthrax-episode ws that an insider did it, to warn us. But that it went out of hand. (Much like the first Morris-worm of the net). The sophistication of bio-warfare is increasing quickly, doubling every year. With routinely available equipment you can generate moderate but scary viruses. The reason that this is not happening yet may well be that this is so scary. The spirit of this field is a lot like the spirit of the Internet - but people are working with very dangerous projects (the mouse-pox-example).

The take-away? That it is really hard to shield identity online. And that sometimes it may not even be worth the effort - better to hide oneself the way Nietzsche recommends: viel von sich selbst reden ist auch ein Weg sich zu verstecken.

The Institute has studied campaign elections and contributions, and as former campaign law expert, Darr is amazed at the opportunities this would open for anyone who wants to circumvent the existing campaign finance law. It is only a matter of time before foreign interests realize this and start to finance different Internet initiatives that coincide with their own. The opportunities are endless: a fundamentalist muslim might finance a democrat that promises to withdraw from Iraq, a foreign oil potentate might finance a republican who promises not to drill in Alaska...And the candidates might not even know this.

The interesting thing about online fundraising is that it reaches an entirely new clientel. More than 50 percent, Barko Germany points out, of the people who contributed online in the 2004 elections were people who had not contributed at all before to a political campaign. And of the 10 percent that were below 30, almost all choose the web as their contribution channel. It is expected that they will keep doing so, and that this will change the pattern of all campaign contributions.

When it comes to bloggers and their impact on politics, the question becomes even more complicated. One issue is whether or not they should be regarded as contributing to a campaign they are supporting or not. This has now been partly resolved, Darr says, and it seems as if bloggers can invest their own time and money in blogging for a candidate without this being seen as a contribution. But the perhaps most interesting question is what impact bloggers have on the polarization of politics. As has been mentioned before, the Pew Internet and American Life project has shown that bloggers are better at accurately representing the opposing view, but the question is if this extends to their surfing habits. What is the proportion of left-wing/right-wing blog in a right-wing-readers RSS-stream? Recent studies suggest, but this is not finalized or published yet, that it is 70 pro/30 against the point of view that the individual has. At first sight this may seem depressing, but compare with newspapers! How many people read editorials they do not agree with? I would guess that 80/20 would be more accurate in that case.

The Institute is also developing an interesting body of work on what they call e-fluentials - influential people who decide what way others actully vote. The theory builds on a work, Influentials, that claims that one of every ten americans decide how the rest vote. (This theory is shaky at best, but if it is true it would mean that the capacity for change in the political system is far greater than is usually expected. Change the mind of one of the influentials and you change an enormous amount of actual votes.

The candidate controlling the influentials/e-fluentials will win out, if this is true. The rise of the e-fluentials is more evident with blogs and other forms of new media - and perhaps the power of this subset of people can be leveraged more effectively in the digital world. We will see a lot more evidence for either development in this years election as well as in 2008, says Darr.

Julie Barko Germany says that the technology is not only used to communicate message. Besides being used to float ideas and form policy, it is also used to spread scurrilous rumours and more interestingly, for logistic purposes. The Bush-campaign, in the last election, had portable devices outside most polling places, and asked the people exiting where they lived, if they had been contacted or not prior to coming. With this information they could in real-time decide what areas to call to mobilize their voters. Mapping areas that had not been subject of recent contact sweeps, they could maximize voter turnout. That kind of technology use - use for political logistics - is extremely interesting and promising.

What will the Swedish parties do?

On the Foundation's website, the interested will find an enormous amount of material from both Humanity 3000-seminars and other interesting seminars touch on future issues. Kistler is also invoved in private space travel and really stands out as an engaged citizen when it comes to future studies.

I will try to write more about the FoF soon.

Much of the research on patents today needs to be bracketed with this as a prerequisite.

Anita Ramasastry is a well known columnist and legal scholar, andhere academic work she focuses on payments and payment mechanisms. The work she does is quite interesting, and she may easily be one of the most knowledgeable American scholars (and European) when it comes to the so-called e-money directive. In her columnist work she focuses on privacy issues, and all her columns are interesting and often thought-provoking.

She is one of the founders of the Center of Law, Commerce and Technology at the UoW, and she works with trying to make sure that ICT-issues are discussed horizontally in legal education. This is, sadly, rare today - in both the US and in the EU.

But the overall observation after meeting with a few different law schools in the US is even more interesting: here they train lawyers. We - at least in Sweden - train judges. This is a fundamental - yes - flaw in our system. We need more of the rhetoric and argument, and less of the make-believe reasonable balancing in our legal education.

Professor Levy has been a part of this process in different capacities for some time. He did his PhD at Stanford in artificial intelligence, but after this he went to London to learn calligraphy and bookbinding. He then went back to Palo Alto and worked within what might be one of the most important technological think tanks ever, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center – Xerox PARC. After two long periods at this institution (credited with such innovations as the laser printer, graphical user interfaces and the computer mouse) he came to Seattle. Here, at the Information School, he teaches something different, however – he teaches the need for leisure.

The course he is giving – on contemplation and technology – is a course that uses Josef Piepers ”Leisure as the basis of culture” (1947) as a starting point. Piepers essay, Levy explains, is fundamentally against all kinds of rush culture, arguing that those who are too preoccupied in fact accomplish nothing lasting. Overwork is nothing else than idleness – since it leads to nothing. What we need instead, Pieper claims, is leisure – time to contemplate, think and develop. (And no – professor Levy says – that does not mean golfing or working out in the gym).

Professor Levy recently finished a workshop – in the form of a retreat – where he developed the theme of silence and sanctuary further with an aikido sensei, a calligrapher and a zen abbott. Aikido – for those of you who do not know this – is a martial art focusing on harmony and peace. What on earth does this have to do with technology? Professor Levy answers calmly that it is obvious: these three arts are about mindfulness, and the theme for the workshop/retreat was mindfulness, work and technology.

Mindfulness has developed – under that name – as a stress management technique drawing heavily on buddhist meditation but devoid of any religious overtones. In books like ”Whereever you go there you are” researchers and philosophers have explored what it means to actually be present in the present, and how this affects you – mentally, neurolgically and spirtually. Mindful technology...that sounds nice – but is it possible to design mindful technologies? Are not all technologies efficient, productive and in a deep sense mechanizing? Perhaps, says Levy, but he rejects any idea of qualities as inherent in technology. It is, in the end, more about how we use technology, and how we allow it to use us.

*

The information society knows no luddites. This is, in itself, a fascinating fact. There are no groups that wish to destroy technology or wreck machines (excepting the occasional lust to do so when somebody answers their mobile phone the umpteenth time on your commute back home) any more. The original luddites and the original techno-sceptics were for abstaining from the use of technology. They wanted an option to drop out of the industrial society. There seems to be no, or few, examples of groups that think this possible today.

The counter-revolutions of the information society are actually adaptive strategies rather than opposing strategies. ”Life hacking” is one fascinating example of this. Life hackers mix heavily from several different sources and end up with a productivity-focused, anti-procrastinator and tool-happy movement that incarnates in blogs and seminars all over the country. Life hacker have assembled their particular adaptive strategies from three sources: they use and rely heavily on Dave Allens Getting Things Done – a system for task management that turns everything into an item an an inbox that then is handled with a simple algorithm. They also rely on technology of different kinds – tools and tricks – to increase their productivity. Some of them experiment with drugs, sleep deprivation and...mindfulness to create an environment where they can produce more. The life hackers refuse to become victims in the information society stress war, so they become collaborators instead. In a sense life hacking is about adapting to the machine's way of life – by sorting and searching through the inbox in an extremely mechanistic fashion.

Well, it works. It works splendidly for those that try, but there are of course...lapses. People do well for a while and then they return to the disorganised, messy life they led before they successfully started to imitate simple machines. They become biological systems again, and ”fail” in applying the different rigorous systems developed by productivity experts and computers.

Life hackers want it all: they want peace of mind and they want maximum productivity. You cannoy fault them for ambition, but what are the actual results? The believers will tell you, as believers are wont to do, that they succeed very well, thank you. But the truth is that they succeed only if they maim their fuzzy, blurry and disorganised biological nature.

The other adaptive movement is the slow movement. Slow food, slow reading, slow travelling, slow sex...All of this is celebrated as the modern individuals answer to ever more speed. If the Life hackers try to adapt fully, the slow movement at least resists one component in the information society – the speed, the rate of change. Against fast food and other atrocities, they suggest that we consume time more fully and do one thing at a time. Slowly. But how slow? And should it be uniformly slow? No – obviously not: even slowers – let us call them that – will move quickly when they need to, and their ”counter-revolution” is little else than a wish to signal that they need small remissions from the current rate of change. They ask not that development over all changes or slows down – they ask for slow...well, hobbies (if sex can be a hobby).

Resistance, the Borg are fond of noting, is futile. Well – the resistance to the information society is not only futile, it is half-hearted. Mellow. Cooly uninterested and collaborative.

*

Professor Levy, however, is not half-hearted in any sense of the word. He has just begun what might become one of the more interesting projects in the field of informatics: he is working on finding new technologies that are open to mindful use in different ways. One small thing, he notes, that could have large effects is if we could change the everyday working posture of people working on computers. Hunched over the keyboard, cramped, these people – you and I included – look as if they have been crippled and crooked and bent by a cruel master. Speech recognition, sensors, new displays may actually allow us to stand and straighten up, to actually acquire a proud posture while working.

Who knows what could happen in the future if we would work as free men and not crippled slaves...

The moderator started with a provocative question: ”Why do you think you deserve any privacy?” Answers varied, but most people pointed to the law:
”The US Supreme Court has interpreted the constitution to bestow some measure of privacy.”
”It's the law.”
He then went on to say that he had no feeling of privacy himself at all, and analysed today's situation as one where we have no privacy because the databases needed to destroy our privacy are readily available. But we accept this, because we buy convenience with loss of privacy.We buy security with loss of privacy.

(The question, of course, should be why the state deserves to know about me. But we never ask this.)

Computer image recognition and pattern matching is growing quickly, he then told us. He also noted that these developments are being pushed by unusual research areas – such as oceanography – where the need for image recognition is great. RFID was identified as another new technology that forces us to do a cost/benefit-analysis in privacy issues.

The thought that privacy is a balance you strike between convenience, security and trust and the private sphere is becoming more and more popular, but is it true? Can we have ”some” prvacy – or is it far more digital than that? If privacy comes in degrees, it seems reasonable to suspect that we could estimate the level of privacy we have today – but how could we do this? How do we retain ”some” privacy? Is there such a thing as a little privacy? It is easy to map someone with many small pieces of data – and the erosion of privacy is accumulative.

The speakers included lawyers, the chief information security officer of the university of Washington, a prosecutor, a marketing firm and a computer security analyst.

Kirk Bailey – CISO of the University of Washington

Bailey recommended a website called www.privacyrights.org that catalogues data breaches, and said that he found it hard to understand the apathy of people who seem not to care very much about protecting privacy (as opposed to caring about privacy as such). He then went on to criticize different data brokers, listing what they actually sell – and noted that they even sell DNA-identification! He also retold the ChoicePoint fiasco, where 143 000 Americans saw their data sold to criminals. But ChoicePoint is still not liable for the use and identity theft resulting from this deal, since there is no such liability in American law – yet.

The website, privacyrights.org, includes more than a 160 instances resulting in letters to more than 55 million Americans. 200 000 personal records are exposed twice a week, and this never makes the news.

Bailey also discussed what the solution to the privacy problem should be. He told the audience that he asked the NY Times to map him, and they did – legally for $100 dollars – and they got an enormous amount of information, birth records and performance audits from previous jobs and a lot of other materials. When it was printed in the New York Times it was revealed – from the birth cerificate – that his mother had a C-section, and this really made her angry. ”I didn't eat well at my mothers house for quite some time.” He asked what can be done to prevent this and noted that there seem to be few options.

Leaving the decision about privacy to the marketplace is a very bad choice, he said. We need more legislation – technology, he finished, will not solve this problem.

Ivan Orten, Senior Deputy Proesecuting Attorney, fraud division. Is it not strange, he said, that we call the most natural mode of accessing the Internet for the web? That is, as far as science understands, a trap, where you are poisoned and eaten. Quite appropriate, he noted.

Orten noted that data can be created, disseminated, by you, others, collected and linked or acquired by unauthorized persons. Then it is used for criminal purposes. We control – for ourselves – only creation and dissemination – but we are liable for it all! You should not bear the inconvenience costs for that which you do not creat nor disseminate? The costs are not allocated this way, he said, and this must be wrong. A fair allocation of the costs must by stopped by some barrier? Why?

And then he basically recommended the liability model tried by the European data protection directive. He also recommended that there be a liability for those that accept data – wrongly – to create identification.

Why is this not happening? There is no organized lobby, Orten said. And this makes it possible for credit card companies to open application online in five minutes. A free market, he said, would assign liabilities for this. The onus for fraud and identity theft should rest squarely on those accepting false data as a basis for different identification procedures.

Why are we not seeing class actions on privacy? Because the costs are basically individual, and it is hard to do, Orten explained. This also leads to a sort of tragedy of the commons – people do not care about the costs that are inflicted on the individual who has to clean up the aftermath of identity theft.

IT Lawyer John Christiansen, the next speaker, focused on the history of privacy and information protection standards of care. (Computational power of Apollo 11 is now available in a Furby, he also noted). Technology has become cute – he noted – with examples of ruberduck-USB-memories, and this is in itself something that has numbed us. 1999 the US had the Privacy Act and HIPAA – two small patches for protection of privacy, nothing else. The patchwork continued with EU safe harbors, Gramm-Leach, E-commerce Consumer Protection cases, State notification laws on identity theft, SOX and now class actions and Common law cases are coming. This is a patchwork, he said, and not a good one at that.

I have written an article about this meeting and long futures in general that will feature in the next issue of Neo.

Meanwhile, copyright fights and privacy issues become more and more complex in the EU and the existing EFF-affiliated organizations (EFF does no franchising so anyone is free to start their own EFF - Italy has four!) seem sometimes to be to weak to actually offer the qualified and legal resistance the is so badly needed to suggestions that will inhibit and destroy civili liberties on the Net. What is needed is more legal activism, the EFF thinks, and less discussion lists.

This is probably true. We will have to look at this again soon.

Meieran also had the kindness to show us around the Museum at Intel, showing us how wafer production has developed and how new fabs are being constructed. The display there is fabulous, and also celebrates one of the founders of Intel, Robert Noyce. One qoute from Noyce is replicated at several different places in the building (and the building also bears his name). The quote is: ”Don't be encumbered by history. Go off and do something wonderful”. A great thought.

The current semester, however, finds Dr Friedman teaching a course on legal systems very different from ours. In this course he discusses Cherokee indians, Gipsies and other legal systems (such as the Icelandic which he knows better than perhaps any other American scholar) and the interesting thing, he explains, is that these legal systems often contain irrationalities that reveal the irrationalities of our own system. It should not be forgotten that our system of law is far from rid of it's stranger qualities. In the common law system, for example, it is still possible to forfeit an item that was involved in a crime, even if you had nothing to do with that crime at all: in one horrendous case that Dr Friedman mentions, a woman was deprived of her half of the family car, because the husband had used it to pick up a prostitute. The car – being instrumental to the crime – was seized and proclaimed forfeit.

On the issues facing the information society Dr Friedman has a lot of interesting points to make. When I ask him about David Brins vision of a transparent society, he immediately points out that Brin – in sketching a society in which all citizens are transparent to the state and vice versa – has missed the fundamental fact that the power-relationship between the state and a single citizen is assymetrical. Well, this is true – and Brin lacks a good motivation for this as far as I can see – but it is also true that there is some substance left to Brins argument even after ceding this: Brins is not trying to abolish privacy, he merely assumes that the battle for privacy is lost, and that we had better figure out how to construct rights in a post-privacy society. Brins suggestion, then, is that we create rights of access to data, where all citizens have the right to know everything about everybody else. Again, Dr Friedman points out that what we can actually do with that knowledge varies according to our position in society. The state can, for example, use the data to force citizens to act a certain way, but the citizens lack the means to do the same thing to the state. Again a good point. But still, the question seems to be, I maintain, if this is not already the case today? The state has more power than the citizen, and more access rights to the data collected. Would increasing the citizens access rights not actually be an improvement over today's situation – all other things being equal? Dr Friedman agrees that this may be the case (he is in no way convinced), but says that the only real important issue in privacy is where it will be strongest: in virtual worlds or in the real world. His answer is that it will evidently be stronger in the virtual world, which creates a clear incentive for all the suspicious things – legal and illegal – that people engage in to move to the virtual realm. The issue of privacy now becomes an issue of how to protect ones virtual identity. We thus end up in a situation that closely monitors the one in Vernor Vinges famous novel True Names – where power equals knowing an avatars troe name, since that enables you to coerce him or her by the use of physical force.

Our discussion jumps into the exciting and growing world of virtual worlds, and to the game World of Warcraft. Dr Friedman is an avid player – with three characters – and he is quite enthusiastic about the game from both a personal (all his family members play) and professional point of view. Professionally he notes that social scientists now, finally, have been given the laboratory they so badly need.

By creating a hundred characters and examining how one and the same behaviour is treated, social scientists can now test out basic rules of social science in a virtual laboratory. It is not even necessary to change parameters in the game by contacting the publisher or programmers – it is quite possible to do good social science all on your own by experimenting with different characters in a similiar environment.

And these environments also seem interesting places for the development of legal systems, or rather, systems of norms (that are indeed enforceable in some sense). Future legal sociology might be happening in a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game next to you...

Wrote a Swedish text today about my meeting with professor John McCarthy. WIll put that up later.