Liminal states

Draft, work in progress. Feedback welcome!

Last updated February 5.

Twitter is an opportunity to engage with communities currently marginalized by the “progressive blogosphere”. Demographically and stylisticly, Twitter is far less male-dominated than the big blogs of the progressive blogosphere …

— Tracy Viselli and Jon Pincus, The #p2 Hashtag and Strategies for Progressives on Twitter, February 2009

Twitter is, quite possibly, the best available medium for this particular kind of protest. The format has a number of features that level a playing field that tends to push women into the outfield.

– How #Mooreandme Worked, Lili Loofbourow, December 2010

Twitter was an instinctive choice for #MooreandMe, because it made the target of the protest accessible and ensured that he could hear us. But I liked it as a medium for #DearJohn too, because it was really equalizing, it wasn’t hierarchical, it ensured that voices and perspectives could influence the conversation regardless of how well-connected or well-known they were, and it was a very visible, trackable way to register dissent.

– Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown, interviewed in where is your line?, January 2011

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It’s been another tough year for the Bill of Rights in the US. We spent Bill of Rights day on the road, opting out of the TSA’s abuse of our rights by driving (not flying) from San Francisco to Seattle — so apologies for the lateness of this post.

The National Archives has a great Twitterized version of the Bill of Rights, where each one is reduced to 140 characters or less.  Here’s the Fourth Amendment, by @swanroad:

Don’t seize me big bro! or search me, without a warrant

Yeah really.  And despite what the Obama Administration wants you to believe, the Fourth Amendment applies at airports too: the naked scanners and enhanced patdowns are unconstitutional. TSA Administrator John Pistole told USA Today that he thinks they’ve pushed the public as far as they can, but I think they’ve miscalculated.

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‘THE net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it.’ This quote from John Gilmore, a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, often appears on the Internet. It reflects its users’ confidence that their electronic world, designed to resist nuclear attack, can also shrug off government regulation. By nature of its global reach and its decentralised design, they believe, it is unpoliceable.

They may be mistaken.

— Christopher Anderson, The Accidental Highway, The Economist, 1995

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

— John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996

Fifteen years later, Barlow is calling the troops to battle: “The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks.”   And Gilmore’s observation once again proved accurate, as hundreds of sites begain mirroring Wikileaks and Twitter briefly functioned as a ‘sneakernet DNS’.   Then Anonymous stepped up, first with denial of service attacks against PayPal, MasterCard and Visa, and now with Operation Leakspin.

Electronic Frontier Foundation, founded by Gilmore and Barlow 20 years ago along with Mitch Kapor, is calling troops to battle as well with their Say No To Online Censorship campaign.  What’s the impact likely to be?  So far, there have been a couple of blog posts: Executive Director Shari Steele’s Call To Action, and Kevin Bankston’s legal analysis Information is the Antidote to Fear, valuable reading for anybody at a web 2.0 or media company.   But they’re clearly capable of a lot more.

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Heading into the busiest shopping time of the year, Amazon is suddenly facing threats of a boycott over censoring Wikileaks.   Seems like a good time to dust off the #amazonfail hashtag.

It started last week, after a hacker took one of Wikileaks’ sites down with a relatively weak attack.  Wikileaks moved their online base to Amazon, which from a technology perspective makes a lot of sense: their services are reliable and very scalable.  So it was all good.  Briefly.

Yesterday, after a public request from Senator Lieberman (and rumors of pressure from DHS), Amazon shut Wikileaks’ sites down for “unspecified violations” of their terms of use.  I think EFF’s Kevin Bankston speaks for a lot of us when he describes it as “disappointing”.

Unsurprisingly, there are calls for a boycott.  From Austria, Kurier has a great screenshot in Wut weil Amazon Wikileaks fallen ließ.  Seattle Weekly has a good roundup including links to the Facebook page and the #amazonfail hashtag.

Hey wait a second.

Where have I heard that before?

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By NMA. Currently at 1500 views…

DRAFT !!!!   Revised version published on I Will Opt Out as What Just Happened?
For more discussion of Opt Out Day and what’s next, please see
We Won’t Fly, Fly With Dignity, I Will Opt Out, and FlyerTalk

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An important clarification on point #2: the goal is not to interfere with other passengers getting to their destinations. As AP’s Ray Henry describes in TSA chief: Resisting scanners just means delays, the government is trying to convince travelers not to exercise their rights. But as We Won’t Fly’s George Donnelly discusses, Opt Out Day could make security lines move faster by reducing the number of people flying and giving travelers better information than the TSA is providing.

Whether or not you’re planning on opting out, it’s important to know your rights — and to know what your options are if something goes wrong. Fortunately, there are a lot of great resources out there. Here’s a quick guide:
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DRAFT!  Please see the revised version on Tales from the Net

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Draft! Please do not link here!

Update, April 20: Rrevised version has been posted on Qworky’s blog, Better Software/Better World

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“The first step that I suggest as a solution is that we Iranians, no matter where we live in the world, strengthen the social ties among ourselves…. This is where the power of our social network resides.”

— Mir Hussein Mousavi, quoted in Ehsan Moghaddasi’s The Green Moharram

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Also posted on The Seminal and Pam’s House Blend

The most recent skirmish on the Patriot Act reauthorization battle ended badly for civil liberties.   Despite passionate speeches all around in the Senate Judiciary Committee public hearings and classified briefings, in the end, only Senators Feingold, Durbin, and Specter stood up for the Constitution. As Marcy Wheeler says, we got rolled.

At the same time, though, the social network activism I discussed in Can Skittles fix the Patriot Act? and on the Get FISA Right blog highlights the opportunity to broaden and recharge the civil liberties community.

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Care2, OFA and other social network sites:

• provide a way to engage with Millennials and other diverse groups of people who care a lot about the Patriot Act — but are not currently involved with civil liberties activism.
• make it easy for people to let their politicians know their feelings — and recruit their friends in the process.
• allow civil liberties organizations to get beyond the media blackout and provide accurate information to everybody.
• complement in-person local campaigns like People’s Campaign for the Constitution’s local ordinances and good ol’ fashioned letters-to-the-editor

It’s a powerful narrative.  Social network sites epitomize the wave of the future, Obama’s strength in 2008, and youth.  They’re overwhelmingly in favor of civil liberties.  And civil liberties supporters are getting organized there.  As we continue to make progress, every political consultant and politician thinking about a primary or general election challenge in 2010 or 2012 will be paying attention.

Social network activism for civil liberties has made great progress so far.  Some simple steps from organizations and bloggers can take things to the next level.  Before getting to the suggestions, though, I’d like to discuss the diversity aspects in a little more detail.
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DRAFT!  Final version published on The Seminal.

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