Transparency, again

In this post, I introduced two variations on a definition of transparency:

• How are decisions arrived at? Who has the decision authority? What is the basis of a decision? How may the decision be appealed?
• Authority and responsibility must lie at the same locus.

But depending on the context, transparency also means a few other things. With respect to commercial activities, transparency means that you get what
you pay for and it is known to you what you are paying for it. Seen from this standpoint, surprisingly, one of the more transparent transactions in which you will ever engage is the purchase of gasoline. They put the price on a great big sign out front; the price even includes all federal and state taxes; and you control the trade at every step. You could argue that it is less than transparent since the amounts explicitly going to the state and feds are not usually spelled out. But since everyone in the local area has the same burden built in, what difference does it make where it goes? It's the cost to you that matters.

The opposite of this might be the purchase of a house: first you negotiate with the previous owner, then you negotiate with the bank, then you have to pay title insurance, mortgage insurance, transaction fees, flood insurance, and possibly a few other things before you take possession. Later, you find that there are tax advantages and disadvantages (depending on where you live). Other complex deals are comparable: the purchase of a cell phone with a plan and a car with financing involve bundling, hidden costs, fees, taxes, and so on.

For the most part, though, purchasing stuff in a modern economy has become so much more transparent than it was here in the past, or the rest of the world even now. Most of my daily transactions are closer to the gasoline. They post a price, you select the standardized product, you swipe your debit card, your bank transfers the exact amount to their bank, and everyone is happy. Quite different from the bazaar trade in which you weren't sure of the price or the quality/quantity you were getting, and it was risky just carrying your cash on you.

On the other hand, the modern world has made such transactions the opposite of transparent when looked at from another angle: you don't really have any idea what you are getting or how it got here. How much Nigerian or other blood was spilled bringing that gasoline to market? Were those khakis sewn by kidnapped children in India? How many pesticides and effluent went into the production of your spinach? I'm not going to link examples to each of these or the many other stories we hear on a daily basis. You know them as well as I, perhaps better.

I just thought it was worth pointing out that modern crypto has made the money part of our transactions incredibly secure, so secure that we may soon be able to carry on large swaths of economic activity in cyberspace and outside the surveillance of our insect overlords. However, the actual creation and transport of matter, of things in meatspace, cannot be secured with the intelligent application of prime numbers and collision-free hash algorithms. So, how does one create transparency in the creation of hardware?

There are a few open source hardware movements. The Economist just highlighted some of them (may be a $ link). In it, they mention the Chumby, the Neuros OSD, the RepRap (not mentioned in the article, a comparable project is Fab @ Home), the Tuxphone, OpenMoko, GumStix, and Eric von Hippel's book, Democratizing Innovation. Additionally, I have come across a large number of open source Wi-Fi projects, including this mobile hotspot (but the parts are not OS), this solar-powered grid project to bring the tubes to kids in the developing world (an idea complementary to the $100 laptop), and especially the Linksys WRT54G router. And let's not forget open source automobile projects Oscar, Society for Sustainable Mobility, and c,mm,n (I proposed a framework for how an open source car project might work here).

When you can fire up the matter compiler and build your own car after paying for the matter with a secure transaction, the world is going to be a very different place.

PS: I ran into this article in Wired immediately after posting.

Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that's one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.

Food for thought.

Transparency

So one of the outcomes of the unfortunate series of events from my last post has been a discovery of Stephen Schneier's excellent blog, Schneier on Security, and a subsequent gaffe on my part. In one of his posts, he linked to an article written by Naomi Klein for Rolling Stone in which she warns of the panopticon currently being built in China with technology being developed by defense contractors in the US. My gaffe was to react to the author's identity and to scan the article for the earmarks of a Naomi Klein piece: half-truths and wild assertions. I found my quarry: first, in that she refers to China, a police state if there ever was one, as an example of a free market, and second, that the alarmist article is riddled with examples of ongoing criminal activities in this totalitarian world, a paradox or irony which she fails to note. Besides those two drawbacks, I find that her alarmism may not be without foundation.

Which is one of the reasons why I find comments like Bernard Yomtov's comment in this thread so meaningless. Yes, there are probably libertarians (Kevin Carson's "vulgar" libertarians) who are more interested in lower taxes and repeal of motorcycle helmet laws than they are in issues like indefinite incarceration on the basis of secret evidence. But the libertarian community with which I am most familiar (a) does not suffer from that affliction, and (b) is more likely to see civil rights as a continuum in which the differences are of degree as well as of kind [1]. Tune in to Radley Balko's blog for a few weeks, see kids arrested and choked for skateboarding, see no-knock drug-war raids turn into murder of innocents, see kids taken from their parents on the slightest pretexts (see below).

In related articles, I see that Kevin has a similar reaction to Naomi in this essay reviewing her The Shock Doctrine [2], and I also see where Schneier makes a good point regarding transparency in this article in which he reviewed David Brin's The Transparent Society, revived on its 10th anniversary. He says,

If I disclose information to you, your power with respect to me increases. One way to address this power imbalance is for you to similarly disclose information to me. We both have less privacy, but the balance of power is maintained. But this mechanism fails utterly if you and I have different power levels to begin with.

An example will make this clearer. You're stopped by a police officer, who demands to see identification. Divulging your identity will give the officer enormous power over you: He or she can search police databases using the information on your ID; he or she can create a police record attached to your name; he or she can put you on this or that secret terrorist watch list. Asking to see the officer's ID in return gives you no comparable power over him or her. The power imbalance is too great, and mutual disclosure does not make it OK.

Which brings me to one of the points of interest I have had with respect not only to corporate security policy, but to large organizations in general: one of the basic problems is the establishment and maintenance of transparency. How are decisions arrived at? Who has the decision authority? What is the basis of a decision? How may the decision be appealed?

This is the genius of Open Source: you don't like it, ultimately, you could change it yourself. But more importantly, Open Source embraces Eric Raymond's reformulation of Claude Shannon's reformulation of Kerckhoffs' principle: a system that is based on the assumption that the enemy -- who could be MegaSoft or the state -- has the code (but not the key) because the code is freely accessible (and therefore subject to close scrutiny) is more secure than a system whose operation is a closely held secret. This same principle would seem to apply to anything that someone would want to do, whether a company or a state, whether developing code or a new chemical or passing a farm bill or budget.

Another aspect of transparency: authority and responsibility must lie at the same locus. Remove one and leave the other and you end up with an irresponsible despot and/or powerless bureaucrat. Most large organizations are filled with both, sometimes the same person acting at different times in different capacities. That is what lies at the bottom of one of the threads undertaken in this post: a mistake by a parent leads to the detention of the child even though everyone at every stage acknowledges it is the wrong thing to do (original story here). In that case, the system is transparent to neither the victims nor to the perpetrators, the latter who don't even know how to appeal a decision they would like to appeal but nevertheless feel compelled to enforce.

Transparency seems more easily achievable in smaller organizations and in less hierarchical organizations. It isn't a slam dunk: presenting a grievance to a single individual with authority may get you further at less cost than attempting to convince the majority of a democratic body. This was the subject of Madison's Federalist X essay: the tension between the need to thwart the "violence of faction" while maintaining some semblance of democracy. It is also the basis of the Public Choice theory in The Calculus of Consent. Given the arguments I made in Local, Action: Issues of Scale, I am claiming a close correlation between transparency and communication and the difficulties of achieving either in large social structures.

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[1] As to the difference in kind: some civil rights are undermined in reaction to criminals who harm others, while others are undermined in reaction to citizens who might harm themselves. But it seems to me that each side of the spectrum likes to take their favorite pet peeve of the latter type and turn it into one of the former. Thus, for Bill O'Reilly, drugs should be illegal for adults because they eventually end up abusing their children because of the drugs. For the anti-smoking crowd, Second-Hand Tobacco Smoke was a godsend. And now, global warming is the trump card.

It makes sense that if we do not want the police state that we have, then the first laws we should get rid of are those that purport to defend us from ourselves. If we can't even take these off the books, how can anyone believe that we will be able to take laws off the books (or practices off the table) that supposedly protect us from supposedly bad men? Both repeals would require an admission that the state cannot protect us from all risks. After all, they will point out, 19 men with box cutters very nearly managed to kill tens of thousands of people rather than "just" 3000, and going back to that state of affairs invites another such disaster.

Note that that argument is not my argument, but rather the argument you're going to get from the "protect the kids" crowd. It isn't easy to dismiss since it appeals to our sense of personal security; its most recent manifestation was not a Bush speech, but Hillary's "3 AM call" campaign ads. I would argue that we are no better off under the new state of affairs, under which the FBI and TSA are effectively committing a low level type of terrorism. Yes, they may be catching some bad guys and preventing some bad things in the near-term, but they are creating more terrorists abroad. As they keep pointing out to us, preventing acts of terror is a matter of dismal statistics; the bad guys only have to get lucky once, while the "good" guys have to get lucky every time. Creating more future terrorists who only have to get lucky once seems like more rather than less risk, but the alternative is to have an adult conversation with the public about terror.

The Left punted on that. They chose instead to accuse the Bush Admin of "failing to connect the dots" and being "asleep at the switch". Those accusations contributed to the overwrought response and subsequent invasion of Iraq. They should have asserted that this was an unfortunate event requiring in-depth analysis rather than bold action. But the problem is that winning debate points is far more important to the Left than preventing the growth of the police state, which they rather enjoy when they control it.

[2] I cannot follow Kevin down the pro-Chavista path. Not only has Chavez shown autocratic tendencies (extending his own power, shutting down dissenting media), but if the FARC cache is authentic, he has shown a willingness to support violence to undermine neighboring democracies. Yes, Colombia's democracy is tenuous and questionable, but no less than Chavez' own. When Kevin says,

Quite frankly, if my only choices are corporate liberalism and social democracy, and a banana republic on the neoliberal model, I'll take the former any day. If I get to choose between the paternalism of Brave New World and the jackboot in my face of 1984, it won't take me long to decide. I'm not ashamed to say that if my only choices are the welfare statist and neoliberal versions of statism, I'll take the kind of statism whose yoke weighs less heavily on my own back.

he is, by his own tacit admission ("if my choices are ..."), offering a false choice. Let us hope we have at least a third choice.