The usual trade-off of, for example, the Manila Principle was between the government’s overstepping of a ministerial correction order versus a private sector company over-censorship, as in the case of NetzDG.
These two, I’m not saying that they are not working well. They’re working somewhat well. However, they take more liberties from the public, centralized to one of the first or second – that is to say, public or private – sectors.
Your approach empowers the social sector and the academia. I think that is to be commended.
I know. I wrote quite a few of those. Also, I was working with the Siri team. [laughs]
I worked with one of the earlier cypherpunks communities. I worked on the translation of the Freenet project, as well as being part of a group that translated the word “blog” to Mandarin.
When we did that work, which is in the days of Indymedia and friends, our main philosophy is not of cyberspace independence, but rather cyberspace interdependence. I’m very happy that it’s now an official UN policy, as of this year.
Interdependence means that we have to share reliable data with everybody else so that the checks and balances are not only between state and their citizens, but across the international norms and different practices.
So that we can reliably say that, by the end of this month, I think, when the Singapore model comes online, and the Taiwan model, which came online last month, we can quantitatively show which model works better on which parts of the state-sponsored disruptions, disinformation campaigns, and things like that.
Without such comparable quantitative data, it’s all anecdotes. It’s very difficult for you, actually, because you have to change with every revision of jurisdiction and the jurisdictional administrative orders, for a lack of better term.
I think the norm-first architecture is much better than a law-mandated market that determines the architecture, to use Lawrence Lessig’s theory. Starting with a social norm, but the data powers that norm. I think that is a much better direction.
On a more concrete level, I’ve been talking with telecommunication company representatives, such as, I think, Orange, Vodafone, and a team of researchers. For example, Alex Pentland, “Sandy,” from MIT, as well as the broader UN research system.
They have a design that’s called Open Algorithms. It’s a little bit of technical, so I apologize for speaking Greek.
Well, we will have a transcript.
The idea of open data, as you succinctly put, stops with privacy. Anything that you consider a disclosure of privacy is not to be published as open data. Hashed identities may be your delineation, beyond which there is no access. I applaud this point.
It is true that with only these data and a different format for each jurisdiction, because of jurisdictional orders, it makes it impossible for academics to have a comparable quantitative analysis of any kind, really, on that.
What the open algorithm movement is advocating is the flip of open data. It is the researchers writing, using a mocked or synthesized data, which is purely not reflecting any raw data at all. It could be just random rolling dices that you publish to establish your data storage schema, which is the structure of your data, but not any of the content.
The academics would write some code that do a different analysis that produce statistics, aggregates, or some other output that is impossible to reverse into the identities or any private materials. In the end, what the academics cares about is the result.
It’s not in their interest to peek into their peers’ personal, private tweets. It’s their interest to show that there is a trend growing and what that trend constitutes, and if they publish this code in just academic peer review fashion.
We invite the cyber security community, the mathematics community to inspect the algorithm and show conclusively that it cannot actually compromise privacy. Then the operators, such as the telecom operators take the same code packaged in a container, run it in their data center, and only publish the end result.
This framework is called open algorithms, because it’s not any personal data that’s disclosed. It is actually the statistics algorithm which may be very advanced is published.
That’s right. As you said, the distributed ledger, which is the part of the blockchain that concerns our discussion, because we’re definitely not talking about Telegram ICOs.
Not right now. The ledger part of the blockchain. Because storage gets cheaper as data is produced, so perpetuity is actually maybe a very accurate term to describe that. We wondered if copyright is also for perpetuity, but we are glad to have been proved wrong recently. [laughs]
That’s right. My take is twofold. First, if the ledger is built by the citizens, by the social sector, as in Taiwan, people measure air pollution levels by themselves and water pollution level by themselves.
If they are individual citizen accounts, there’s no accountability as a private citizen to offer anything like that. They just upload their real-time measurements through NB-IoT, LoRa, or any Zero-G network protocols into a distributed ledger.
That has two effects. The first one is that they collectively ensure the accountability of the data they measure. Basically, they cannot go back and change it. The second is that it forces, in Taiwan, the government to adopt a, “We cannot beat them, so we must join them,” approach.
Even with our national high-speed computing center, we cannot modify the numbers of that ledger. We have to commit and say, “Oh, you want to measure industrial parks?” Private property, they cannot enter into.
“Well, we own the lamps, so we will hang your device on the lamps within the industrial parks and join your ledger, rather than building one’s own ourselves.” That has always been our idea of social innovation, which is initiated by the social sector and always for the public good.
When used this way, this is essentially a trust machine that enables bootstrapping from lower-resource communities that set the governance of that ledger, rather than only large, private sector companies, such as the Libra Alliance, setting the rules of that sector.
It’s not to say that their work is not useful. It’s just, as a user, it’s very difficult to participate in that governance system. In our case, it starts with a citizen governance system. To me, it’s again, whether it’s about a norm-first architecture or whether it’s about a market-led one.
The open algorithm work? We have a Presidential Hackathon, which is an annual event. It runs for three months, and anyone from any sector can propose. Every year is 100 or so cases. We coach the 20 of them, as measured by popular vote.
We use a new voting method called Quadratic Voting that ensures a fair and balanced representation of people’s true will, instead of being divisive online, as you put it. Then the 20, which is very diverse, each has to correspond to a specific sustainable development target, one of the 169.
Then those 20 gets coached to be trilingual, meaning that whichever sector they start from, they must have a regulatory expert from the public sector, a technological expert from the private sector, and a domain coordinator and organizer from the social sector.
They all grow to be trisectoral in the last two months of the competition. By the last day, we have a meeting in the presidential office, choose five teams, and give them trophies by the president herself. When she hands out the trophies, because each team now has public servants in it, we cannot hand them cash. It’s prohibited.
We hand them instead a beautiful trophy with a micro projector as the stand. When you turn it on, it projects the image of the president handing the trophy to you. This is very useful internally, because if their director general say, “Oh, we don’t have the budget to implement open algorithm,” the winner just turns on the projector, and the DG cannot refuse.
Right. It’s the presidential promise that we must roll out something like that for this year. In this year, there is a team using the open algorithm framework. Their social good is for the beneficial ownership information, so that people can use machine learning to learn which corporate entities, like in the Panama Papers, engage in international illicit financial flows.
I think everybody agree, for publicly-listed corporation, that is just something that you don’t do. If you do that, you may actually get…You can flee to a friendly jurisdiction, but the fact that your company are about to do that is actually not private at all.
This, I think, is a great thing to apply open algorithm to. It would require collaboration with all the financial entities worldwide, which we are part of the anti-money laundering and the beneficial ownership movement.
That doesn’t concern Twitter. [laughs] I’m just saying that we’re starting to try out this system.
The trophy represents the presidential promise that whatever it takes – budget, regulation, personnel – their idea, which they co-develop with the society for three months, will be our national policy in the next 12 months.
Thank you.
I am nonpartisan. I care about the fairness of the election and keeping the deliberative nature of the referenda, which is why we moved them to alternating years. [laughs] Hallelujah.
No matter how long you deliberate, like the Swiss model, if it’s the same as the election day, people enter into a polarized mindset. There is just nothing we can do about it to have a representative, deliberative, representative, deliberative tempo, I think, is a much better tempo, personally speaking.
For the upcoming representative election, I think our work is twofold. First is that, on Twitter, there could be sponsored advertisements. Your DC counterpart told me that they work with the social sector to identify the accounts that are upcoming candidates, even before they are formally registered.
That is very important, because actually, a lot of work is already done before they become official candidates on the roster. I wonder if it is at all possible, because we do have civil society organizations – OCF and TAHR knows all of them – that identifies the candidate hopefuls.
They, as you witnessed, has Twitter accounts now. They used to only have clerk accounts, but now, mostly Twitter accounts now. If you can do something like that, that would be very helpful.
Facebook has already rolled out the feature where those potential candidates can declare their own pages as political or socially active advertisements in light of our transparency act in the parliament now that will treat these as campaign donations and subject to the same disclosure.
I look forward to collaborate with you on that. That’s one thing. The second thing is that, if people can show, or any independent investigative journalist or academic can show, that ultimately, the sponsorship come from an extrajurisdictional source, just like campaign donation, it’s actually up to a, I think, 30 NT million dollar fine.
Helping to track that down is also something that Facebook has collaborated very closely with us on. They actually, I think, learned that, from the previous mayoral election, that because our campaign donation law was just changed at that time to be radically open, you can see individual records of political donation.
The usual money came through precision targeting, because this is too open for them. It’s too easy to track the ultimate sources. We’d need to also make this as transparent as this. The legal draft is already in the parliament.
Again, to enable academic and the social sector to tell the narrative, instead of relying on a closed-door, public-private relationship. It’s the so-called Taiwan model.
