Setec Astronomy!

The recent revelation of Project Auroragold by the NSA revealed the agency’s plans to use the telecommunication network to have the ability to tap any cellphone in the world. While this is yet another PR disaster for the NSA after Snowden et al, this doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Any intelligence agency, be it the NSA, MI6, or the KGB, should take steps to enhance its capability and reach around the world. Through it, theoretically, it can protect the national interests of its nation. Intelligence agencies all over the world are already listening and eavesdropping. In the words of Bernard Kouchner, French foreign minister:

“Let’s be honest, we eavesdrop too. Everyone is listening to everyone else. We don’t have the same means as the United States — which makes us jealous.”

What the NSA is undertaking is a natural consequence of the powers afforded to it by the nation’s leaders. Just last month, the senate failed to pass the legislation targeted at curtailing NSA’s intelligence operations. The NSA like any other agency is acting like it should it is the requisite responsibility on the elected leaders to ensure that the agency does not violate its powers. One cannot expect an intelligence agency to be transparent, however, the lack of clarity and outright lies about its surveillance program is what is troubling. And the consequence of being the intelligence agency of the sole superpower makes the NSA an easy target. People like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are driven by a sense of righteousness and purpose to right a wrong. These modern day Guy Fawkes’ are a natural outcome of the recent revelations about NSA’s surveillance program and its perception of the Goliath.

We cannot live in a world envisioned by Julian Assange of no secrets and complete transparency. In the words of Jaron Lanier:

“a free flow of digital information enables two diametrically opposed patterns:  low-commitment anarchy on the one hand and absolute secrecy married to total ambition on the other”

Certain information has to be safeguarded by the governments to maintain order in the society. On the other hand, we cannot have too many secrets where vigilantes will arise to break the code. (Yes I watched Sneakers for the umpteenth time!)

As the US continues to serve as the sole superpower (despite the economic rise of China), the world needs a responsible and organized NSA. Dissidents, leaks, and cyber attacks are a consequence of its status and current perception. Perhaps the NSA can draw a page from a tiny-island nation of Singapore and its deployment of a PRISM-type infrastructure.

Data Driven Election Campaigns: Need for Context

For political campaigns, there are two primary goals:

1. Get as many people as possible to support you
2. Get these supporters to come out and vote for you

If the above two are done successfully, then theoretically you should win the popular vote (though sometimes that is not enough). However, conducting political campaigns requires financial backing and staff. Like any true economic model, there is scarcity: you cannot have unlimited campaign finance money and you cannot have unlimited staff to conduct outreach efforts. Thus an outreach strategy that allocates scarce resources for maximal output is the critical third but unstated goal of any campaign.

3. Have an outreach strategy that efficiently deploys campaign finance & resources

Campaigns have time and again utilized technologies and methods to enhance their efficiency. The recent advent of Big Data has made data-driven decision making a reality. Starting from the Howard Dean’s campaign to the recent midterm elections in the US, data-driven election campaigns are commonplace. Using historic data from publicly available demographic profiles (census), past voting records, voter registration records, and aggregate profile of a locality, campaigns are able to build a picture of the target constituency – Project Narwhal of the Obama campaign is a relevant example. However it is not about reaching everyone in the target constituency – as there are likely to be supporters of the opponent as well and efforts to mobilize them could be counterproductive. Targeted and precise outreach efforts are necessary for supporters who are [1] likely to become supporters and [2] come out and vote. For this purpose individual outreach efforts through volunteers and staff are effective but expensive. This is where Big Data and associated analytics can help.

Nickerson and Rogers in their paper – Political Campaigns and Big Data discuss the predictive models campaigns use to plan their outreach strategies and their effectiveness. These models measure three salient outcomes among others: behavior scores (whether the citizen is likely to engage in a political activity), support scores (historic data to understand the targeted citizen’s voting preference), and responsive scores (will the citizen be receptive to the targeted campaign). Using these predictive models, the Obama campaign (both 2008 and 2012) rallied individual voters to its cause. By maximizing the outcomes gained from individual targeted outreach efforts, the Obama showed the power of the use of data and grassroots mobilization of supporters. Success of the Obama campaign hasn’t gone unnoticed and campaigns around the world have adopted data-driven election campaigns.

Data and poles don’t win elections, people win elections!

However, technologies like Big Data and predictive modeling can only get campaigns so far. The real battle is of context: policies, the gravitas and charisma of the candidate, and the political conditions for the elections. As the popular statement goes: data and poles don’t win elections, people do. As witnessed by the recent midterm elections, all the data driven outreach and grassroots mobilization of voters is useless if the political conditions are against the incumbent.

As a Pakistani-American, I try to stay abreast with the developments and political climate in Pakistan.  Last year’s election in Pakistan were momentous for many reasons. One of them was the emergence of a third-option – Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party led by the charismatic Imran Khan (cricket turned philanthropist turned politician). PTI utilized campaign strategies reminiscent of the Obama 2007 campaign – Tabdeeli (urdu for Change), Hope, and Naya Pakistan (New Pakistan). Much like the Obama campaign, PTI mobilized grassroots level campaigning – signing up new voters, getting the youth to support the cause,

PTI and Imran Khan Election 2013 Campaign Poster

and neighborhood volunteer efforts to get out the vote. Imran Khan and PTI became the darling of the public and news media; election win seemed inevitable – but Imran and PTI lost. All the analytics and grassroots campaigning failed to take into account the context and conditions of the country. PTI was a popular candidate in urban metropolises of the country but they constitute mere 38% of the total population. The rural areas with limited infrastructure, education, and media reach, were still voting for the established and ingrained parties: PML and PPP. Add to the fact that there were cases of election rigging and lack of transparency, PTI was never going to challenge the established parties. Data, analytics, and localized electioneering can only get you that far.

Silent revolution of news media

As a Generation X’er, I am one of the rare individuals (besides faculty and mid-careers) at MIT and Harvard who happen to remember the time before the commercial internet. This was a time where the majority still subscribed to the daily print newspaper. I clearly remember how i eagerly looked for the next issue of Young World weekly magazine published by Dawn Newspaper (now online at dawn.com). There was no way for me to get the latest articles or stories unless they were published.  This ecosystem of news media followed a linear pattern, from journalists reporting the news, news institutions publishing them, and consumers like us consuming them. The pre-internet age certainly feels like the prehistoric age when; internet has changed the way we create, consume, and share this information. News and print media organizations are still operating as the pre-internet age dinosaurs. Unless they adapt to this tectonic shift, they risk getting extinct much like our predecessors on this planet.

Print-media or Dinosaurs?

In their seminal piece “Post-Industrial Journalism”, Shirky, Anderson, and Bell highlight the changing landscape of the news industry brought about by the internet and communication technologies. The simplest of smartphones in the market now comes equipped with a voice & video recorder, camera, and powered by internet. These digital probes supported by web 2.0 software provide the digital horsepower that was once the purview of news and media professionals in the pre-internet age (or dinosaur era, you pick). The traditional linear ecosystem of news has been redefined.  Using these tools anyone, anyplace, and anytime can tweet, share, and report an incident in their surrounding as witnessed by the live-tweeting of Sohaib Athar of the most secretive of military strikes in recent memory. In the current ecosystem, no longer do we have to wait for the news to be delivered to us, instead we are actively seeking it, and sharing it on social media. This paradigm shift has changed the way Journalists, News-Media, and Authorities operate. The traditional business models that drove the growth of print media are obsolete.

Traditionally, print papers and news-media served as the primary source for the news . This opened the possibilities of advertising based business model for news organizations. Classified, pages on news-papers were sold as prime property. This roughly translated to the web in the form of CPM structure based on views or clicks per 1000 views. But in the new model no longer are people bound to the news organizations for news. The traditional click and view based advertising schemes do not work. Shrky, Anderson, and Bell offer suggestions for Journalists, News-Media, and Authorities to embrace the new technologies, make collaboration key to their reporting, and build an ecosystem that takes advantage of the internet rather than shuns it.

Journalists and reporters must embrace new technologies, be tech savvy, understand the tools that take advantage of the internet and foremost learn to collaborate. A nytimes reporter could have collaborated with Sohaib Athar and published the ‘exclusive’ news of the Osama Bin Laden raid in Abbottabad. In the current model, anyone can be a source of news, journalists must learn to take advantage and collaborate. Newsmedia and Institutions must serve as the enablers in their transformation as a modern news agency. They must provide the framework or the content management system (CMS) through which reports, news, and statistics can be reported quickly and shared on social networks. Like journalists, they must embrace the new technologies and use them for their advantage.

News-Media: must combine new with the old!

Startups and organizations such as VOX and Quartz are couple of examples of media organizations that are attempting to use technology and the new paradigm for their advantage. They are not available in print, embrace social, embrace the mobile-phone culture, encourage collaboration and sharing of their news, and take advantage of the business models afforded to them. Using online advertising, paywalls, and the long-tail, VOX and Quartz are the few news-media organizations that report news, garner web-traffic, and stay profitable. In many ways they embody the modern day news-media organizations that are rebellious enough to embrace new technologies and paradigms necessary to survive and traditional enough to carry forward the news-media industry.

Incident Reporting on Wikipedia

Living in an urban environment, we witness everyday events or occurrences that may warrant an action or response but are not considered important enough to require such action. Such incidents could be a broken street lamp making the street dark and presumably unsafe, a leaking gas/water pipe, or even a wrongly parked car in a designated bike lane. We rarely respond to such ‘incidents’ unless it directly impacts us; most of the time we choose to walk past these ‘incident’. Contrast this to our response to cases that are deemed emergencies or one that lead to us calling ‘911’ emergency response services (112 in EU and Asia). Situations that require urgent emergency response are (thankfully) rare and should stay that way. However, the ‘low’ priority incidents occur almost daily and there are limited sources for citizens to report these incidents. When these incidents are not reported, they are not logged, and thus do not lead to a corrective action from responsible parties.

The field of ‘Incident Reporting’ is new but gathering momentum. Startups, non-profits, and community organizations are adopting technological tools to allow citizens to report these events and create data on them. Open source tools such as Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS have been adopted for incident reporting in Kenya, Malaysia, Egypt, and Pakistan. My work on crowdSOS also deals with building an incident reporting platform for citizen activism.

On Wikipedia, this concept of ‘Incident Reporting’ is present in the form of Confidential Incident Reporting and Incident Report.

1. Confidential Incident Reporting article is specific to safety-critical fields where individuals are encouraged to report incidents in confidence to ensure constant vigilance – the talk page for the entry identifies this entry within the fields of Aviation, Railways, Medicine, and Transport. The current stub was entered in May 2014 and there has been limited talk or revision on the subject.
2. Incident Report article refers to an accident report logged by medical staff for unplanned or unusual events at a medical facility. It is recorded by medical staff as an incident or accident report. The article was last updated in November 2010 and the talk page specifically calls out for expansion of the topic to include other relevant fields.

I believe the two entries on Wikipedia are too narrow in their focus and need to be expanded to include the broader field of work on Incident Reporting. ‘Confidential Incident Reporting’ should be a subsection within the ‘Incident Reporting’ topic. Confidentiality is a feature within the larger topic of incident reporting and does not warrant an entry on its own. Similarly, the Incident Report article should be expanded to include fields of work beyond medical and healthcare sector.

The field of Incident Reporting and Incident Reports is vast and must be reflected as such on the medium that we use daily as our source of information.

On net neutrality, filter bubble, and open source architecture

Two years ago I started working on a project called crowdSOS. In 140 characters or less: crowdSOS crowdsources safety and security allowing users to report local incidents, visualize the reports, and derive insights helping them make smarter decisions on safety.

You can read more about crowdSOS app here. The app was developed both for the Apple iPhone and Android platforms and is available on the app store and google play.

As an app that relies on a collaborative model, network effects, and serving as a platform for users to engage in reporting behavior, crowdSOS is the quintessential web 2.0 software as described by Tim O’Reilly. Additionally, when designing and building the app, we did not foresee this to be an open source project, at least not immediately. But we took steps to make it collaborative for our own ease of development and maintenance – modular design, APIs, and putting code on github. Our goal was to make it easy for our developers to work together and create features that can be easily integrated into the crowdSOS system and built upon it – in essence making it a platform for collaborative work. This architecture of participation emerged naturally, much like the web2.0’ness of the crowdSOS app. The current architecture and workings of the web and demand from the users naturally push developers to adopt these basic web2.0 tenets. This design also helped us turn crowdSOS into an open source project which we made available publicly on github.

The current democratic nature of the internet allows many social entrepreneurs, like myself, freedom to pursue projects that give us a platform to speak. We can take advantage of the internet to reach to billions of people on the internet. With enough drive (and luck) we can start a movement that can rival the biggest of conglomerates or authoritarian governments. The recent debate about net neutrality threatens to take away these freedoms. With no net neutrality rules, we will create an autocratic internet where the big players get bigger ‘pipes’ of bandwidth because of their financial muscle. If net neutrality is taken away, apps like crowdSOS will be buried deep in the abyss because sites like netflix, google, and facebook will hog the bandwidth. Forget crowdSOS, a free site like wikipedia will wither away because the wikimedia foundation cannot afford to compete with large conglomerates and corporations. Net neutrality guarantees the tenets of the freedom of information act and must be maintained and fought at all costs.

Another trend, the filter bubble, also threatens the democratic nature of the internet. In essence, when you use Google, Yahoo, or Bing (seriously!?) the search results are filtered on the basis of 57 indicators that uniquely define you. So what you see on the internet search is catered for you alone. While this may seem relevant, it implies that Google is making decisions on what they believe you want to see. The results can be easily tweaked to reveal what Google or any other entity wants you to read or believe and even feel. The recent reveal offacebook experiment is a case in point. No matter if the organization’s motto is not to be evil, such concentration of power is dangerous.

While i do believe that resistance is futile when it comes to privacy in this hyperconnected world, we can take steps to maintain the democratic nature of the internet and keep it relevant for us and future generations. Until next time.

Is resistance futile?

Like it or not, you are already a cloud consumer. The services being offered through the cloud are growing exponentially – from using email (gmail) for communications, to interacting with family, friends, and colleagues through social media (facebook, twitter, and linkedin). Online cloud storage services (dropbox, g-drive, cloud drive) offer you a chance to store all your documents online nullifying the risk of losing them and making them accessible from anywhere in the world. Both Google and Apple provide automated backup of your data to the cloud from pictures you take through your phone to the emails you send. It is a great time to be a cloud consumer but this convenience comes at a cost.

With all this data being stored online the fundamental question that we ask is who owns the personal information once it is uploaded to the ether? Does the cloud service provider have any rights to this data?

Terms of service stated by Facebook and Google recognize the ultimate ownership of data by the consumer:

Facebook:  “You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings.”

Google: “Google does not claim any ownership in any of the content, including any text, data, information, images, photographs, music, sound, video, or other material, that you upload, transmit or store in your Gmail account. We will not use any of your content for any purpose except to provide you with the Service.”

On the face of it, this seems like a reasonable guarantee of privacy of your personal data. However, the fact remains that the privacy boundaries for these two giants and countless other cloud service providers have never been properly tested or explored.

The recent revelations of PRISM and the powers afforded through the Patriot Act nullify any false hope of security. When the former CIA Director and 4-star general of the US Army can be implicated through cyber investigations, what chance do all of us pawns have? While we may not be truly living in an Orwellian world, the fact remains that the Big Brother is watching and any attempts to escape will only arouse further scrutiny – case in point provided by the users of the TOR browser who became high priority targets for the NSA – full article here

Picard couldn’t resist! How can we?

So the question is, is there is any way to safeguard our privacy in the ever-changing and evolving landscape afforded by the cloud? Or is any resistance to this a futile attempt at a false sense of security?

While the escape from government maybe futile, the risks from rogue enterprises or institutions that can use your data for nefarious purposes can be countered

Advent of Web 2.0 and Growth of Collective Action

Earlier this week I read the first few (6) chapters of Clay Shirky’s book – Here Comes Everybody. In 140 characters or less: Web 2.0 has transformed the way we produce, consume, and react to media content. And key driver of it is the science of collective action.

A good definition of Web 2.0 was provided by Tim O’Reilly. He describes seven key principles of this phenomenon namely web as a platform, rich user experience, software as a service, growth and use of data, ubiquitous software, leveraging long-tail, and harnessing collective intelligence. These principles are what drive the Web 2.0 and are key to the concepts Shirky discusses in his book as well.

Shirky discusses case studies that illustrate the characteristics of Web 2.0. The case for the stolen sidekick describes how one driven individual used Web 2.0 technologies – shared forum, social media, and user-generated content – to mobilize a movement, involve NYPD, have NYPD revise its own doctrine, and retrieve a lost phone (sidekick) all within 10 days (details here). While the story of the lost sidekick highlights how a driven individual can mobilize a crowd (especially through social media), the case of Wikipedia is more illustrative of the power of collective action yielding a net positive impact on society.

Wikipedia is built on a simple technological tool – a wiki. A platform that allows users to collaboratively produce, edit, and curate content. A wiki, in my opinion, is the microcosm of the characteristics of Web 2.0. It is a web platform that can be easily implemented on any web-enabled hardware, designed for user collaboration and content creation, and is easily adaptable to the needs. (Perhaps the DPI-659 class website should be a wiki to house past content, FAQ, and require student input!).

Shirky discusses some key aspects pertaining to Wikipedia and its growth. Since its launch in January 2001 Wikipedia has had monumental growth making it the 6^th most popular website in the world (history of Wikipedia). Wikipedia operates solely on the basis of its users contributing, editing, and curating content. With no monetary benefit, what drives these individuals to contribute? Three things according to Shirky – vanity (having their name associated with an entry), utilizing available skill and time, and drive to do a good thing. Wikipedia inherently operates on the concept called the 80-20 rule – 20% of the contributors produce 80% of the content. Wikipedia’s community of contributors has the drive and will to curate the content and weed out attempts at vandalism within minutes. This philosophy keeps Wikipedia functional and avoids the age-old free-rider problem (tragedy of the commons).

I am a frequent visitor/user for a site called reddit. Reddit, is another example of a Web 2.0 tool that allows users to post news stories or general content within an area of interest. There are channels pertaining to specific subject areas (called subreddits) and users either up-vote or down-vote a posting. Like a mini democratic system, postings with the most up-votes rise to the top of the site.

Yesterday I came across a story on reddit that could easily be a case in Shirky’s book. In a subreddit titled TIFU (today I f***ed up), a system administrator posted his story of accidentally deleting a contact/mailing list that his company had spent hours and thousands of $ building. As the name prescribes, this subreddit pertains to people sharing their stories of failure or mistakes, it does not normally lead to action from readers besides sympathies. However, after posting the story on reddit, a user asked the Original Poster (OP) about how can he/she signup for the mailing list and help him out. The OP shared the link to signup for the mailing list and within 9 hours, the mailing list had more subscribers than the company had originally lost. Remember that the company spent a month building interest and attracting users for this mailing list, but with the power afforded by Reddit and its user community, the ‘failure’ of the Op turned into an opportunity.

“Here comes everybody” to save my mailing list!

The figure illustrates the growth in the list. The original story can be found here.

We are living in a more connected and smaller world than just a decade ago. The Web 2.0 technologies and advent of sharing tools such as Reddit and Wikipedia have made it easier for communities to organize, share information, and achieve collective action. Next week, I will continue the discussion to include the ongoing debate on net neutrality, social networking, and the filter bubble. Stay tuned.

Hello World!

Yes, this is my first foray into official blogger word. Partly thanks to DPI-659 at HKS making it a requirement. This blog will serve as the placeholder for my macro thoughts on everything ranging from Science, Technology, and Policy and everything in between.

My professional bio and resume can be found here on my LinkedIn page.

My personal bio is below:
I am currently a graduate student at MIT (SDM) and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (MPA). I am interested in exploring the science of collective action and how technological tools can enable broader civic engagement for the collective social good of the society.

In technical terms, I experiment with crowdsourcing tools and techniques to gauge their efficacy and determine how they can be used for more data driven policy design and strengthening democratic apparatus. To do this, I do most of my technical research at the MIT Media Lab and explore policy implications at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Ali