In Plain Sight: The Alliance for an Affordable Internet: Discussion Summation
The below has been adapted from the original blogpost (with very extensive links/referencing) at: https://gurstein.wordpress.com/2016/04/05/the-a4ai-discussion-a-summation/ As some of you will know I recently published a blogpost which presents a detailed critique of the A4AI (the Alliance for an Affordable Internet) "Best Practices" document; and a second blogpost which presents a detailed alternative set of "Best Practices". These have generated quite a lengthy and sometimes heated discussion on some broader e-lists of interest to the Internet policy community (specifically governa...@lists.igcaucus.org, the e-list for civil society in Internet Governance; and internetpol...@elists.isoc.org , the policy e-list for the Internet Society (ISOC). Overall the discussion has generated some 200 or so individual posts with some continuing to be posted. I'm biased of course, but as the discussion progressed and as it forced me to go deeper into the background for the Alliance a few things became very, even startlingly, clear: 1. The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) describes itself as "the world's broadest technology sector coalition" with a variety of very heavy corporate (Google, Facebook, Intel etc.), civil society (WWF, ISOC) and US aligned governmental interests (US State Department, US AID, UK AID etc.) participating. So what the A4AI says and does is not trivial. 2. While the A4AI appears to be doing useful research and advocacy work on the ground (their annual Affordability reports) the explicitly stated fundamental objective and priority of the Alliance is to rework via its "Best Practices" document, the policies and regulations of the participating Less Developed Countries (LDCs) thus: "A4AI has a laser focus on. regulatory and policy change". 3. The "Best Practices" document would appear to have been produced by Hillary Clinton's US State Department in conjunction with Google and bears little or no real relationship to actual best practices (for enhancing Internet access particularly for the un/underserved) as observed by experienced practitioners in the area. 4. The "Best Practices" document is at its core an ideological, market fundamentalist/neo-liberal document and is looking to have LDC's implement market fundamentalist policies as the fundamental structure for Internet governance, policies and regulations at the national level including fully open markets, prohibition of government involvement to support broader access, full (international) corporate involvement in deployment of Universal Services Funds (often in the $100's of millions of dollars--huge sums for LDCs) among others. 5. The "Best Practices" document is meant to bring LDC's into alignment with the preferred policies of the USG and its corporate allies irrespective of the fact that it is in direct contradiction with the current domestic actions and policy directions of most Developed Country jurisdictions (USA, Canada, Australia) which recognize the necessary role of governments in supporting the provision of service to the un/underserved. 6. The continued participation by the various CS organizations among others (Worldwide Web Foundation, Internet Society, APC etc.) means that they are complicit in the A4AI's (I think it really should be renamed as the Alliance for an American Internet) neo-liberal agenda for remaking the policy and regulatory framework of LDC's. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
On 04/06/2016 07:17 AM, Florian Cramer wrote: The Cold War has taught us to be suspicious about NGO activity and possible governmental agendas behind them. But Florian, don't you think we're at antipodes from the Cold War? And how much suspicion is really needed to understand those agendas? The elites behind the ICIJ - Ford Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Rockefeller Family Fund, Stanley Foundation and McArthur Fund - are all affiliates of the Democratic party and primarily concerned with social reproduction. Their agenda is obvious. The capacity of the Democratic party to govern is threatened in at least three ways: By lack of funds, by the overweening power of the billionaire class, and by populist revolts due to the collapse of life prospects for the majority of the population. Since 2008 the federal government has consistently decried its inability to collect taxes (from Apple, etc) and yesterday, Obama's off-the-cuff remarks about the Panama Papers were to the effect that the problem is, most of these tax havens are legal. There's a reason for that. For forty years the US capitalist class has promoted the idea that government should be shrunk to the point where you can drown it in a bathtub, and the centerpiece of their strategy was and remains tax cuts. As a master of suspicion I find nothing on which to exercise my powers here. These elites desperately need money in order to promote a reform program - and they need much more money than the foundations have in their coffers. They also need to push back at some intractable oppoosition. The world in which our critique even mattered is now very fragile. For years I have been saying this is a major crisis that will change the system, and that too is now obvious. There is a keen and widely shared awareness among intellectuals and even just those who read the news that the so-called democratic societies are at their short-term limits, even as middle and long-term problems grow to vast proportions. At such moments one does not blindly support the status quo ante, for sure - that's what produced the problem - but I do think one has to critically take sides and develop some constructive positions. I have been to Panama City. The towering skyline that emerged over the last ten years is half-empty: it was made by speculative real estate money that has established similar operational bases around the world, to profit from global networks and stateless capital flows. The Panamanians themselves are wonderful people, but the city the TCC has built is particularly dark, the nastiest side of power, drugs, arms, dictators, skullduggery. By comparison, the Caymans, the British Virgin Islands are - quintessentially European. A polite, dignified, tasteful knife in the back with hit squads ordered from Panama. This is very different from the Cold War where two rationalized power blocs confronted each other in a managed growth dynamic. Global capitalism is now evolving chaotically, toward a state of pure unorganized competition between increasingly powerful actors who may be able to protect themselves (and hide their money) over the short term, but who can do nothing to support the reproduction of society. Either there is a collective effort to curb the powers of the Transnational Capitalist Class, and in parallel, to create new powers of governance, or the outcome of these chaotic trends is highly predictable. thoughtfully yours, Brian # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
On 5 Apr 2016, at 9:17, Patrice Riemens wrote: 7. Leaks have become unquestionable. With earlier disclosures, the authenticity of documents leaked could always be credibly disputed. Nowadays the authenticity of materials obtained thru electronic leaks, due to its sheer magnitude and the one to one nature of a digital reproduction, is much more difficult to question. For now, maybe, but that won't last long. On the contrary, I think they'll quickly become *precisely* questionable, plagued with questions about agendas within agendas, the provenance and 'curation' of documents, and so on. It may sound strange to use language associated with connoisseurship in this context, but it isn't; on the contrary, this increasingly leaky world will be defined more and more deeply in aesthetic ways -- because leaks involve *media*. I'll start with one example, an argument I first heard Florian Schneider make, although aspects of it connect to a wider range of work -- for example, Eyal Weizman's forensis initiative and Rabih Mroue's meditations on visuality of confrontation. The basic idea involves a drastic change in the aesthetics of 'authority.' High resolution, precision, stability, and controlled framing used to be the dominant meta qualities of visual 'truths,' but they've given way to a counter-aesthetic: pixelated, chaotic, fragmentary, indeterminate. The more fucked-up a video, the more authentic it seems; and, conversely, the more 'produced' a video, the more artificial it seems. This isn't entirely new (but nothing ever is entirely new): we can find prehistories in the enigmatic blurring in photos of disappeared kommissars, the umpteenth-generation photocopies that of cultural arcana that circulated with punk and experimental music, older films like Coppola's _The Conversation_ and Antonioni's _Blow-up_, and newer ones like _The Blair Witch Project_. But some of it is new: the way that blocky pixelation and portrait framing suggest a phone camera and precious video uploaded against al odds, buffers of audio without video, the sounds of hardware being jostled and scraped. But those very qualities are easy -- maybe the easiest -- to forge. The other extreme is a very different aesthetic, but one that will be much harder to identify as such because it'll be scattered across seemingly disparate artifacts in many media -- 'declassified' documents with their distinctive blackouts, phone-size screenshots of text messages and supposed deleted social-media profiles and posts, and soon enough voice and video recordings. Again, these techniques have lots of precedents, real and imaginary -- in books (say, novels by people like Le Carre but going back to volume 2 of _Don Quixote_), in film (F for Fake, The Prisoner, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Truman Show). But these won't just be forged documents or even dossiers, they'll be 'distributed' in ways that are really boggling. Many of the constituent technics needed t generate and drive projects like this are already commodified: botnets and troll armies planting Markov-generated noise, hardware and networks subverted to perform ever-more subtle man-in-the-middle and replay attacks, and digital signal processing technologies (the most recent that I've seen involves real-time facial motion capture mapped onto archival video -- i.e., using a live actor to control 'old' footage). The pieces of this puzzle have been coming together for decades: transmedia 419 scams, social engineering > phishing > catfishing and spearphishing, 'overidentification' activist projects like the Yes Men. Call it 'just-in-time conspiratorialism.' But beneath all that detail, my point is simple: leaks will be precisely questionable -- and much of the questioning will shift from away from the supposed substance (who? what? when? where? etc) and toward a sort of forensic appreciation. and the scale of material won't be a bug, it'll be a feature. On 5 Apr 2016, at 14:42, Florian Cramer forwarded: Panama Papers â not the Scoop but the Flop of the Century Florian, I'm pretty confident that Jens Berger's eruption won't age hold up very well, and I really wonder why you bothered to forward such a load of bollocks. And to follow that up with intimations that most of the major foundations are behind the fact that no US citizens have been named in the first 36 hours? I'm under no illusions about the many roles that the upper echelons of US civil society have played in shaping (some would say distorting) the world for decades, but Berger's tantrum and your follow-up would be very much at home on Fox News. And... On 5 Apr 2016, at 19:11, morlockel...@yahoo.com wrote: Maybe I'm missing something, but the mere notion that something that 3-400 people have access to (more likely thousands, with associates, managers, etc.) is a tight secret is ... mind boggling. And then when the logistics of distributing all these tera
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
On 04/06/2016 02:17 PM, Florian Cramer wrote: >On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 11:34 AM, Felix Stalder wrote: > >> > Some crucial questions remain unanswered: Why is there no notable US >> > American citizen among the "accused"? >> >> But not for this reason. Much more important, as Brian pointed out, >> is at the US themselves have become the largest tax haven, globally. > >Exactly. But then we have to ask about the possible political agenda >behind the Panama Papers, particularly if you consider the funders of >The Center for Public Integrity that's behind 'The International >Consortium of Investigative Journalists' (ICIJ). They not only include >Soros, but also the Ford Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, >Rockefeller Family Fund, Stanley Foundation and McArthur Fund, to name >only a few > >(https://www.publicintegrity.org/about/our-work/supporters). > >The Cold War has taught us to be suspicious about NGO activity and >possible governmental agendas behind them. >-F Hi Florian, Could you make your suspicions a bit more explicit? What would the explicit agenda of ICIJ be? Do you have more reasons to be suspicious? I think their work in the past has been really quite solid. Best, Niels -- Niels ten Oever Head of Digital Article 19 www.article19.org PGP fingerprint8D9F C567 BEE4 A431 56C4 678B 08B5 A0F2 636D 68E9 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 11:34 AM, Felix Stalder wrote: > > Some crucial questions remain unanswered: Why is there no notable US > > American citizen among the "accused"? > > But not for this reason. Much more important, as Brian pointed out, > is at the US themselves have become the largest tax haven, globally. Exactly. But then we have to ask about the possible political agenda behind the Panama Papers, particularly if you consider the funders of The Center for Public Integrity that's behind 'The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' (ICIJ). They not only include Soros, but also the Ford Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Rockefeller Family Fund, Stanley Foundation and McArthur Fund, to name only a few (https://www.publicintegrity.org/about/our-work/supporters). The Cold War has taught us to be suspicious about NGO activity and possible governmental agendas behind them. -F # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
On 2016-04-05 23:01, Geert Lovink wrote: > Thanks, Florian. Very interesting. What’s confusing is that the > mainstream media (radio, TV, newspaper) that report about the Panama This is interesting, even crucial, because now other tax authorities may obtain the data from the Australian Taxation Office, and if these requests emanate from 'rule of law', 'democratic' states (as opposed to dictatorships, bent on destroying their political opponents), there is no reason for the Australian government not to oblige. > Papers themselves replicate the myth that the papers are somehow > publicly accessible, searchable etc. There is one exception that I > know of, from what has been reported here. Apparantly the Australian > Taxation Office has a full copy of the entire data set, as became > known yesterday, apart from the 370 investigative journalists that > have worked on the case: > > http://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/panama-papers-ato-investigating-more-than-800-australian-clients-of-mossack-fonseca-20160403-gnxgu8.html # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
§I like these points (yours I guess? As you could have got them form someone-else by a simple cut & paste) On 5 Apr 2016, at 15:17, Patrice Riemens wrote: 7. Leaks have become unquestionable. With earlier disclosures, the authenticity of documents leaked could always be credibly disputed. Nowadays the authenticity of materials obtained thru electronic leaks, due to its sheer magnitude and the one to one nature of a digital reproduction, is much more difficult to question. Hence my disagreement with point 7. There are - in my view - as many options to fake, as there are to scrutinise the origin of digital data... The old adagios of 'theft' of ideas or identity hold. When I was reading awhile ago Valentin Groebner. Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe. New York: Zone Books, 2007. 349 pp. the pleasure of it was of course how well situations from a far away past could be imagined in our present. Especially where there is a bulk of data, one could slip in easy say 5% of fake documents... which would really hurt someone who is publicly exposed as part of a data set that for 95% is true. This is in itself an example how of why I do not agree with your "unquestionable" leak idea. For the rest of the point... I like them. tjebbe # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Ten Theses on the Panama Papers
On 2016-04-05 20:42, Florian Cramer wrote: > So what the Panama Papers really are is a warning to whisteblowers > not to "exclusively" give sensitive data to media companies, but to > use whisteblower platforms like Wikileaks instead. Agreed. > Some crucial questions remain unanswered: Why is there no notable US > American citizen among the "accused"? But not for this reason. Much more important, as Brian pointed out, is at the US themselves have become the largest tax haven, globally. Why run to Panama (which could get invaded or strong-armed at any point anyway) when you can go to Delware, Nevada or South Dakota? Well before the Panama Papers, even Bloomberg already run headline like "The World’s Favorite New Tax Haven Is the United States" [1]. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-27/the-world-s-favorite-n ew-tax-haven-is-the-united-states > Sure, it's never bad when stories about the international financial > system's obfuscation machinery get out, provoking a political debate > for -- at least -- a couple of days. That these debate have no > political consequences, is part of the choreography. In the short term, yes, but I think what we are seeing here -- and in a myriad of other cases -- is the continuation of the slow but deep de-legitimization of an entire socio-political regime, basically, neoliberalism. This has already gotten so bad, that the only remaining selling-point is fear. And change in the status quo is fought against not with a promise (as was the case up from about 1975 to 2005) but with a threat. Most dramatically, it was on display in Greece last summer where the choice was: torture or end-of-the-world. But the more the de-legitimization goes on, the more people become willing to take risks, to make the jump into the unknown, precisely because it's unknown rather then well-know hell of living within a rotten carcass. At the moment, this opens the way for all kinds of rightwing demagogues, from Trump to LePen and beyond, and for left-wing nostalgia, a la Corbyn and Sanders. But it also fuels much more interesting movements, like the rebel cities in Spain, which are working towards a new re-regionalization within a united Europe, which, as Alex Foti pointed out a couple of days ago, seems one of few vectors of the left that point forward. - -- | http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: 056C E7D3 9B25 CAE1 336D 6D2F 0BBB 5B95 0C9F F2AC # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
