The false promise of digital democracy

Public archives: more relevant today than ever - Policy Opinions Politiques – Jennifer Anderson August 13, 2018.
“Public archives represent a democratic vision where all are welcome, ideas circulate, and information is analyzed and diffused for educational purposes. There has been a lot of noise recently about information distortion and its effects on democracy. So what better time to raise the importance of historical literacy and public archives? In gathering and promoting primary source material, archives play an essential role in modelling literacy skills and critical thinking. In analyzing this material and producing modest, reasonable conclusions, researchers aim to understand complex issues and to engage the public in the discussion. These skills are crucial tools in a democracy. For too long archives have been hidden and archivists overlooked. All sorts of unflattering stories have circulated about archives, as if to keep the general public out. Witness the way popular culture has painted the picture: dust, disorder and darkness

Historical thinking – Archives are considerably more nuanced than most people realize. The researchers who use public archives, as well as the staff, have a wide range of backgrounds and interests. Diversity is valued for the fresh ideas it fosters. Pluralism brings new perspectives and new questions to the sources. Working with archives is an exercise in historical thinking where questions about sources, context and cause are central. (Consider the work of the Historical Thinking Project, an educational initiative organized around the questions historians pose of primary sources, aimed at promoting media and information literacy.) Solid archival research requires sources to be validated, corroborated and referenced, so that peers can follow the line of reasoning and further the arguments. As critical thinkers engaged in creating interrelated information pathways, archivists are allergic to binary thinking. They worry about gaps in collections and how to mitigate bias, both historical and contemporary. Behind the scenes, archivists query one another on acquisitions, evaluations and descriptions of archival collections to ensure that the documentary heritage preserved today will enable future generations to understand their own past…”


WASHINGTON, DC (August 13, 2018) – “The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) issues nearly one thousand reports, testimonies and legal decisions each year, all based on non-partisan, fact-based work. And while the headlines quickly fade in today’s fast-paced news cycle, there are still hundreds of thousands of facts buried in GAO’s body of work. So today GAO will begin tweeting a daily fact from its audits and evaluations of programs across the federal government to help raise awareness of this work. Starting this morning, followers of the GAO Twitter account (@usgao) received what we hope will be an interesting, if perhaps overlooked, factual nugget from our #JustFacts initiative. Each tweet will also contain a link to the complete report to facilitate further reading. The first tweet is pictured below. ”By sharing facts from GAO’s work, which transcends the entire breadth of the federal government, I’m hopeful that this initiative will help the public appreciate the knowledge GAO has developed in helping Congress oversee federal spending and performance,” said Gene L. Dodaro, Comptroller General of the United States and head of the GAO. Those interested in following GAO on Twitter can do so at https://www.twitter.com/usgao. “

The Verge – The open-source program is designed for security researchers: “Today, researchers at Trustwave released a new open-source tool called Social Mapper, which uses facial recognition to track subjects across social media networks. Designed for security researchers performing social engineering attacks, the system automatically locates profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other networks based on a name and picture. Those searches can already be performed manually, but the automated process means it can be performed far faster and for many people at once. “Performing intelligence gathering online is a time-consuming process,” Trustwave explained in a post this morning. “What if it could be automated and done on a mass scale with hundreds or thousands of individuals?” Social Mapper doesn’t require API access to social networks, a restriction that has hampered social media tracking tools like Geofeedia. Instead, the system performs automated manual searches in an instrumented browser window, then uses facial recognition to scan through the first 10 to 20 results for a match. The manual searches mean the tool can be quite slow compared to API-based scans. The developer estimates that searching a target list of 1,000 people could take more than 15 hours. The end result is a spreadsheet of confirmed accounts for each name, perfect for targeted phishing campaigns or general intelligence gathering. Trustwave’s emphasis is on ethical hacking — using phishing techniques to highlight vulnerabilities that can then be fixed — but there are few restrictions on who can use the program. Social Mapper is licensed as free software, and it’s freely available on GitHub…”


The false promise of digital democracy

"There is a tendency to turn to technocrats in times of political or economic crisis ... “like Uber, but for politics” is not just a sardonic joke but an accurate insight into the intellectual depth of some digital democracy evangelists." (Inside Story)

Public consultation is everywhere: so, should we worry about the politics?
"There is tension between consultation as an administrative device – there to secure 'evidence-based policymaking' – and its role in politics, testing out what’s acceptable to a wider public. Which of these, we wonder, does more for 'legitimacy'?" (Centre for Public Impact)

US officials quietly saved NATO deal from Trump
"The new agreement has given American national security officials the ability to assure the public, and skittish allies, that the country’s commitment to the alliance remains intact — no matter any anti-NATO tweets or interviews or statements from Mr. Trump." (New York Times)