The “Strassman for Mayor” Website
I ran my campaign by talking
to reporters and putting materials—text, audio, and video—up on my
website. The website was built and
maintained by Raymond Steding, president of the Linux Public Broadcasting Network (LPBN) (http://www.lpbn.org),
where the site was hosted.
The only media outlets that
posted the campaign site’s URL were
NetPulse (http://netpulse.politicsonline.com/content.asp?sname=IN+THE+STATES&issue_id=6.18),
Wired.com (http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,55911,00.html),
and Telephony magazine (http://currentissue.telephonyonline.com/ar/telecom_talk_broadband_economy_25/).
The Daily News and the Los
Angeles Times, enjoying a duopoly of coverage in the Valley and the City of
Los Angeles, refused to include the URL of my campaign site (or that of any other
candidate) in any of the many articles about the secession election that they
published.
The League of Women
Voters/Smart Voter site did include a link to my campaign site on its own site,
at http://www.smartvoter.org/2002/11/05/ca/la/vote/strassman_m/.
Since most people got most of their information about the
campaign from these two papers (the local radio and television “news” stations,
private and public, were fastidious in not covering the San Fernando Valley
Reorganization Area Mayor’s race), my multimedia website was like the
proverbial tree falling in the forest.
With no one knowing where the site was, all the text and audio and video
ceased to exist, at least as a source of communications.
But I’ll include the URL here, so you can see what most
voters missed:
http://sfm.lpbn.org
I’ll also include a copy of website itself:
Here’s how I did:
Official Results in San Fernando Valley Reorganization Area
Mayor’s Race
(November 26, 2002)
http://rrccmain.co.la.ca.us/0022_LocalContest_Frame.htm
LA-SFV AREA REORG - MAYOR
|
Candidate
|
|
Votes
|
Percent
|
|
KEITH S RICHMAN
|
|
91,865
|
52.6
|
|
BENITO B BERNAL
|
|
20,186
|
11.56
|
|
D R HERNANDEZ JR
|
|
16,139
|
9.24
|
|
LEONARD SHAPIRO
|
|
15,015
|
8.6
|
|
MEL WILSON
|
|
12,009
|
6.88
|
|
BRUCE JOHN BOYER
|
|
4,350
|
2.49
|
|
HENRY DUKE DIVINA
|
|
4,316
|
2.47
|
|
MARC STRASSMAN
|
|
4,132
|
2.37
|
|
GREGORY E ROBERTS
|
|
3,647
|
2.09
|
|
JIM SUMMERS
|
|
2,978
|
1.71
|
|
Registration
|
563,857
|
|
Precincts Reporting
|
681
|
|
Total Precincts
|
681
|
|
% Precincts Reporting
|
100
|
Remember, you need to refresh this page to ensure that
you have the latest results.
Last Updated: 10:38 11/26/2002
November
5, 2002 - Los Angeles County General Election
One title
I’ve held for a while now is “Contributing Editor” at NetPulse, an online
newsletter about e-politics and e-government maintained by PoliticsOnline (http://netpulse.politicsonline.com/). After the Valley Secession Election I checked
to see what I’d sent them over the years.
Here’s a copy of it.
Contributions to and Coverage
by NetPulse
(February
2, 1999 to November 8, 2002)
Search Results
Your
search returned 18 articles.
- POL CONTRIBUTING EDITOR FIRES UP THE WEB OUT WEST
Note: From Issue
6.18, section "IN THE STATES".
Contributing Editor Marc Strassman has
been making a stir out West online lately. A mayoral candidate for the
unsuccessful Valley City
(the vote for secession was beaten out on Election Day), Strassman ran on
a platform that focused on technology and ran an exclusively online
campaign. Good try, Marc. Read on for more.
- CALIFORNIA CANDIDATE MAKES TECHNOLOGY HIS CAMPAIGN PLATFORM
Note: From Issue
6.15, section "IN THE STATES".
Contributing Editor Marc Strassman has
an interesting campaign going in the Golden
State. Strassman is running
for Mayor of the currently fictitious Valley
City. (It will be created if
the San Fernando Valley is allowed to secede from Los
Angeles.) He is calling for the creation of the
most wired jurisdiction anywhere. But better yet, he is running the entire
campaign online. No staff, no volunteers, just he and his trusty laptop.
Very interesting...
- EU ONLINE VOTING
Note: From Issue
5.16, section "THE WORLD'S WIDE WEB".
Contributing editor Marc Strassman reports that while Internet voting is
battered in the U.S.,
Europeans have invested about $3 million to build a continent-wide system
for online voting from PCs and mobile phones. More: EUCybervote.
- E-GOV BILL
Note: From Issue
5.14, section "MODEM-OCRACY".
During a July 11 hearing, Senate Republicans were skeptical of Sen. Joe
Lieberman's blueprint for building an electronic government. According to
Federal Computer Week, Lieberman said his E-Government Act of 2001 would
harness information technology to make the federal government better
deliver services to citizens, improve accountability and cut costs. More: USA Today. In
a related development, Los Angeles-based Contributing Editor and President
of Citizens United for Excellence in E-Government Marc Strassman was
invited by Senate Government Affairs committee staff to submit testimony
on S. 803, the "E-Government Act of 2001." You can get a PDF
copy of his testimony and access links to a copy of the bill, other
witnesses' testimony, the official analysis of the bill, and an article on
the status and benefits of e-government worldwide by following this link.
- INTERNET CZAR
Note: From Issue
5.12, section "DC CONNECTION".
Contributing editor Marc Strassman forwarded a Bush Administration press
release in which the Office of Management and Budget named Mark A. Forman
to serve as associate director of OMB for Information Technology and
E-Government. In his role, "Mr. Forman will work to fulfill the
President's vision of using the Internet to create a citizen-centric
government."
- ILLINOIS
Note: From Issue
5.04, section "IN THE STATES".
Contributing editor Marc Strassman of the Smart Initiatives Project says
the state of Illinois is
moving aggressively to provide up to 1 million of its citizens with
digital certificates, which would make it easier for a wide array of
secure government e-services, initiatives, petitions and more. To read
more, go to: http://www.fcw.com/
- ONLINE INITIATIVES
Note: From Issue
4.17, section "NETPULSE BRIEFS".
Los Angeles-based contributing editor Marc Strassman reports he recently
submitted a request to California Attorney General Bill Lockyer to allow
his Smart Initiatives Project to begin collecting the 420,260 signatures
it needs to be put on the March 2002 ballot. According to Strassman,
"The Smart Initiatives movement is working to give all citizens the
right and the means to sign initiative and other official petitions
online, with binding legal effect, using free digital certificates issued
by state governments. Our slogan is 'Political Reform through Internet
Power'." For details, visit the Smart Initiatives
Project website. Other news: Strassman will be addressing the PKI
Forum's annual meeting in Montreal, Quebec,
Canada, on Sept. 12, 2000, on the subject
of "Ubiquitous E-Democracy Powered by a Universal PKI."
- ONLINE VOTING GARNERS MORE ATTENTION
Note: From Issue
3.24, section "NETPULSE BRIEFS".
More states are considering using online voting to boost turnout, USA Today reported
Dec. 7. Wired outlined in a Dec. 9
report how Arizona, Alaska,
California and other states
are seriously looking at the medium’s potential. Contributing editor Marc
Strassman of the Campaign for Digital Democracy is a big booster of online
voting. He says the results are in for the first Internet Presidential
Primary Election. Take a look: Politics.com.
- NATIONAL ONLINE PRIMARY STARTS FRIDAY
Note: From Issue
3.23, section "NETPULSE BRIEFS".
What's being billed as the first online U.S.
presidential primary starts Dec. 3 and continues through Dec. 8, according
to Business Wire. "The mock primary will allow all eligible Americans
to make history by voting online and getting a glimpse of the future of
the voting process, according to Politics.com and Votation.com," the
two companies sponsoring the online primary. Results will be announced
Dec. 9. In other online voting news, the University
of California at Davis
tested online voting in
November in an attempt to increase turnout, according to contributing
editor Marc Strassman.
- BEATTY WATCH
Note: From Issue
3.18, section "THE WHITE HOUSE HORSE RACE".
Contributing editor Marc Strassman, who lives close to Hollywood in
California, says he’s been having fun watching the emergence of the online
“Beatty for President effort. “Anyone interested in watching or helping
Clyde Barrow-John Reed-Mickey One-Dick Tracy-Bugsy Siegel-Bulworth in an
extensive audition for the role of American President should visit
http://www.beatty2000.com/ and/or join the fun at: beatty4pres-subscribe@onelist.com,”
he writes.
- VOTE NOTES
Note: From Issue
3.17, section "NETPULSE BRIEFS".
Swarthmore political science professor Rick Valelly argued online voting would
be a big mistake in the new issue of The
New Republic. Online voting, he says, will foster even more apathy.
Absentee voting, for example, has long been an option for people who
couldn’t make it to the ballot box on election day. “The problem is that
e-voting will transform voting, an inherently public activity, into a
private one,” he writes. “If our era is a time of citizen disengagement,
of staring at screens and passing in and out of our gated communities or
apartment fortresses as we wave to private security personnel, then
e-voting from home is all too congruent with the spirit of the age. Far
from enriching democracy, e-voting pushes us toward political anomie.” As
NetPulse readers would expect, Valelly’s comments raised the ire of
contributing editor and e-voting proponent Marc Strassman, who fired off a
letter to the editor of The New Republic. In the letter, he countered that
the virtual community wasn’t a sheltered, lonely place. Instead, it is a
lively community “in which almost every form of political activity except
voting is taking place with increasing breadth
and intensity as we speak….Adding the right to vote over the Internet is,
in the most profound sense, giving these communities and the people that
live in them the right to vote where they live.” The debate continues.
- GETTING GOOEY
Note: From Issue
3.16, section "NEAT IDEA".
EGooey is a free Web/chat tool that
allows users to post little electronic yellow notes and “talk” with others
who are simultaneously using a Web site. Says contributing editor Marc
Strassman: "This is either the latest way to waste a lot of time
online, or a valuable tool for building community among like-minded
Netizens."
- ONLINE VOTING ROUNDUP
Note: From Issue
3.13, section "NETPULSE BRIEFS".
In recent days, stories about online voting whirled through the Web.
Here's a summary of the top news:
- Military voting
muscle. The U.S. Department of Defense is leading the way for online
voting through a pilot program in five states. The DOD's Federal Voting
Assistance Program will allow service members in Florida,
Missouri, Texas,
South Carolina and Utah
to vote online by absentee ballot in the 2000 presidential election. In
1996, about one quarter of service members said they did not vote in
elections because their ballots did not arrive in time to be counted,
according to a report by the American Forces Press Service.
- Global referenda.
IBM Chairman and CEO Lou Gerstner told a congressional committee in June
that technological developments in the infant information age have the
potential to have worldwide impact on political systems with innovations
like global referenda, according to a CNN report . "Why not envision
a day when we vote with much greater convenience - - from our home or
workplace - - or a day beyond that when issues are presented to all the
people of the world and we vote as a global statement of individual
preference without regard for conventions like political parties or
national borders?" Gerstner asked at a hearing on Capitol Hill.
- Changing
everything. Contributing editor Marc Strassman says online voting may
empower people in a June 17 column in Intellectual Capital. "It may
become practical to allow voters to aggregate themselves in new and
creative ways. Voters can achieve representation in ways they consider
more meaningful than the current geographically-based system," he
says. He also encourages people to visit his online voting site,
VoteSite.
- Louisiana
says no to online caucus. Louisiana Republicans cast aside a plan to allow
members of the state GOP vote online in next year's presidential caucus.
Full story: The New York Times.
- VOTESITE.COM
Note: From Issue
3.12, section "WEB SITES".
Contributing editor Marc Strassman's newest project is VoteSite.com, an
online effort that's being launched to win the right to vote over the
Internet. The site, a project of Strassman's Campaign for Digital
Democracy, is starting its efforts in California.
Strassman says the site isn't fully operational but he invites readers to
take a look and offer comments.
- POLLSTERS THREATENED
Note: From Issue
3.10, section "NETPULSE BRIEFS".
ONLINE VOTING UPDATE Contributing editor Marc Strassman has been making
media waves in pushing online voting. "Internet voting and its
cousin, digital signatures on initiative petitions, are now seen by many
observers as inevitable steps in a national effort to get people back to
the polls or, more accurately, to get the polls out to the people,"
he wrote in a May 6 article in Intellectual Capital. Also on May 6,
Strassman was interviewed by IBM's Institute for Electronic Governance.
The conversation is available online at: ieg.ibm.com.
- ONLINE CONFERENCE
Note: From Issue
3.09, section "THE ELECTRONIC ADVOCATE".
The Initiative and Referendum Institute is a non-profit organization that
exists to educate people about the initiative and referendum processes as
political options. On May 6th-8th, it will be conducting "A Century
of Citizen Lawmaking: Initiative and Referendum in America."
Visit the Institute site to
learn more about the Institute. Contributing editor Marc Strassman will
participate 4 p.m. EDT May 7.
The forum will be webcast by D.C. Orbit.
- GOLDEN STATE CARPE DIEM
Note: From Issue
3.05, section "NETPULSE BRIEFS".
In California, elections in
seven cities around Los Angeles
have been cancelled because of a lack of competition. Two Internet
political activists (both NetPulse contributing editors) believe the new
media can change that. On Feb. 22, Marc Strassman of the Campaign for
Digital Democracy wrote, “Perhaps allowing people to vote over the
Internet would solve both the problem of diminishing participation and the
problem of paying so much to conduct the elections.” The following day,
Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation opined, “Three of the
seven cities that cancelled their elections don’t even have a municipal Web
site. The Internet is the best place to begin addressing these
problems…Given that there is no master list of municipal elections in California
available on the Internet, CVF hopes to compile one soon that at the least
can inform voters that there is a local election going on in their
area."
- ONLINE ELECTIONS SOON
Note: From Issue 3.03,
section "NETPULSE BRIEFS".
A recent article in Governing magazine suggests that some voters in November
2000 will vote online. “The era of Internet voting will inch closer this
spring when a mock election is held in Cyberspace,” Christopher Swope
reported in November. “Dozens of U.S.
military personnel stationed overseas will send ballots over the Internet
using specially developed encryption software.” Also, Florida
is considering using Internet technology in elections. And contributing
editor Marc Strassman of the Campaign for Digital Democracy reports that Washington
State has moved to the front
lines of providing online elections with the recent introduction of House
Bill 1594. There is draft legislation that is being drafted for
consideration in California
that Strassman offers a view at: http://www.suresite.com/ca/e/elelbill.
Says Strassman, “The current fiasco in Washington
has convinced millions of citizens that either some new ways of governing
ourselves have to be found or many more people will just opt out of the
self-governance process entirely. Electronic elections, including Internet
voting and electronic initiatives, may offer a way out of the current
crisis of (non-) participation.
My complaint, broadcast by NPR
station KPCC on Halloween Day, 2001, that the government, reluctant to allow
the use of computer and Internet technology for political empowerment, was
chomping at the bit to use it for surveillance and monitoring, seemed to be
corroborated when word hit the media that DARPA, the same Pentagon agency which
had helped create the Internet, had embarked on a program of “Total Information
Awareness,” which aimed to harness the same dual use tools I’d been
recommending on behalf of democracy for purposes possibly far more sinister.
So I wrote a series of three articles about this.
Transparency: Seeing It Through, or
A Dozen Things Excellent Transparency
Should Be
By Marc Strassman
November 28, 2002
Copyright © 2002 by
Marc Strassman. All rights reserved.
Now that “transparency” is all the rage for governments and
corporations, it’s important to take a minute to delineate just what’s involved
in making an institution truly transparent, easily visible, not camouflaged, or
directly knowable by normal citizens and reporters who want to scrutinize it or
just know exactly what it’s up to.
To help provide a basis upon which to judge the transparency
of a city government or a big corporation, here are a dozen characteristics
that any institution aspiring to transparency ought to exhibit. The information provided by an organization
to establish its transparency should be:
1. Accurate
Unless the information
provided is truthful and correct, it doesn’t contribute much to transparency.
2.
Timely, if not Instantaneous
Data delayed is knowledge
denied. To the greatest extent possible,
data needs to be captured, added to the transparency data base, and made
available for viewing as it is generated.
This is “real-time transparency.”
3, Complete
Partial information may be worse
than no information at all, especially when it creates an inaccurate picture of
an important context or all the implications of some isolated facts.
4. Accessible
If citizens and the media don’t
have convenient, no-cost, readily-available access to the information that is
supposed to make an organization transparent, then that organization isn’t transparent. Universal broadband
connectivity is the best way to provide this level of accessibility to
transparency data.
5. Comprehensible
Presenting data in
incomprehensible formats, or legal jargon, or accounting jargon, or other
private languages designed to keep laypeople from understanding what’s going on
is the opposite of transparency. If
necessary, organizations need to commit substantial resources to translating
the records of their operations into language (and non-English languages) that
citizens and the general circulation media can readily understand.
6.
Correctable
When citizens or media people know
that such-and-such a vote went a different way than official records purport it
did, or consumers know that some product never performed as stated by the
corporation that made it, there needs to be a mechanism in place for them to
submit their proposed corrections and for these submissions to be seriously
considered by the organization and, if valid, to have the data changed.
7.
Evolving
As times and conditions and
technology change, the means for collecting, correlating, data mining, storing
and distributing the information in transparency data bases need to keep pace,
so that the latest information and the latest means of communicating it are
made available to everyone who wants to know.
8.
Open Source
Open source software refers to
computer operating systems and applications where the actual software code that
makes them run is available to people for examination and improvement. Using open source software to support
transparency makes it harder to hide important data. Also, the open source model, involving the collective
involvement of users rather than their passive receipt of mysteriously-prepared
finished products that exclude their participation, provides a constructive way
of approaching the transparency process itself.
9.
Cumulative and Comprehensive
Transparency databases need to go
back to the origins of the organization that wants to make itself
transparent. The minutes of the first
meeting need to be as readily available as those of the latest, as well as
records of everything that happened in between.
10.
Pro-Active
Transparency needs to be at the
top of an organization’s agenda. The
transparent institution should take the initiative in making information about
itself available to its constituents, rather than relegate the transparency
process to an obscure and lowly corner of its operations, merely providing
“pro-forma transparency” that puts the data in a “virtual basement” or “virtual
attic” where interested parties need to search long and hard to find it. Passive, or passive-aggressive, transparency is
no transparency at all.
11.
Free
Charging people for information
designed to make a government agency or a corporation transparent contradicts
the very idea of making this information easily accessible to all. Making itself transparent is a cost of doing
business that needs to be borne by the agency or company itself and not imposed
on its constituents.
12.
Good-natured
Transparency is a right enjoyed by
the constituents (citizens, customers, community members) of an organization,
not a privilege to be reluctantly and
stingily doled out on its own timetable and in a manner that it feels
best suits its own needs. Corporations
and government organizations should willingly and enthusiastically “go
transparent” because the citizens and customers that make their existence
possible and whom they exist to serve deserve it.
Marc Strassman is President, Etopia; Executive Director,
Coalition for HRX and Citizens United for Excellence in E-Government; host of
Etopia Talk, a web-based talk show; and the losing high-tech candidate for
Mayor of the San Fernando Valley in the recent failed
secession election in the City of Los Angeles. He is also the author of “A Dozen Things that
Excellent E-Government Should Be,” attached.
He’s transparent himself, and accessible by e-mail at: hrx@adelphia.net.
Informational Asymmetry, Power, Privacy,
and Transparency
By Marc Strassman
President, Etopia
hrx@adelphia.net
November 30, 2002
Copyright © 2002 by
Marc Strassman. All rights reserved.
HAMLET, Act 2 Scene 2
... : what have you, my good friends,
deserved at the hands of fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?
GUILDENSTERN Prison, my lord!
HAMLET Denmark's
a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ Then is the world one.
HAMLET A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards and
dungeons, Denmark
being one o' the worst...
When politicians commission polls and convene focus groups
to find out what voters look for in campaign slogans, and then use this
knowledge to spoon feed these same voters their preferred slogans as a sign of
their “leadership,” while keeping secret the means and methods they use to get
themselves elected, they are leveraging informational asymmetry to their own
advantage.
When the “merchants of cool” at MTV arrange to position VPs
of marketing casually on the bedroom floors of typical teens to hear the
intimate details for their preferences in clothes, CDs, and sex, without
letting the teens sit in on their own strategic planning and marketing
meetings, then use what they’ve learned under cover of their own secrecy to
launch marketing campaigns to sell teens low self-esteem/coolness and selected
garments, recordings, beverages, and the lifestyles made up of same, they are
using informational asymmetry to expand their gross revenues and power.
When the United States Government undertakes to collect,
store, correlate, and data mine every person’s banking, shopping, credit,
media, medical, working, and recreational habits and transactions, while
holding this data secret, while instigating secret wiretaps authorized in
secret judicial proceedings, but refuses to allow citizens or media access to
the overall principles or specific facts of these operations, it is most certainly
building its power by taking advantage of the informational asymmetry it has
established, as a matter of law, and justified in the name of
counter-terrorism, as it once justified similar, but less extensive,
informational intrusions in the name of anti-communism and “national security.”
The English Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham and the French
Deconstructionist Michel Foucault have, in a sense, collaborated across time
and space to instruct us on the philosophical underpinnings of the power and
the danger of this “informational asymmetry.”
The Panopticon
The Panopticon of Jeremy
Bentham is an architectural figure which "incorporates a tower central to
an annular building that is divided into cells, each cell extending the entire
thickness of the building to allow inner and outer windows. The occupants of
the cells . . . are thus backlit, isolated from one another by walls, and
subject to scrutiny both collectively and individually by an observer in the
tower who remains unseen. Toward this end, Bentham envisioned not only venetian
blinds on the tower observation ports but also mazelike connections among tower
rooms to avoid glints of light or noise that might betray the presence of an
observer."
The Panopticon thus allows seeing without being seen. 'Such asymmetry of seeing-without-being-seen
is, in fact, the very essence of power for Foucault because
ultimately, the power to dominate rests on the differential possession
of knowledge'"("Subject"
223).
"According to Foucault, the new visibility or surveillance afforded by the
Panopticon was of two types: The synoptic and the analytic. The
Panopticon, in other words, was designed to ensure a 'surveillance which would
be both global and individualizing'"
(Power/Knowledge 148)
From Barton and Barton, "Modes of Power"
(139-41).
In short, to be seen by unseen eyes is to be disempowered to
the extent of that seeing, while the unseen seer is similarly and reciprocally
empowered by that transaction/relationship.
This was certainly shown to be true in the recent case of
the Washington area sniper, who
himself expressed his perception of how putting people into his cross-hairs
prior to murdering them made him feel: as he wrote on the back of a tarot card
which he left for the police to find: “I
am God.”
For architectural drawings and more on Foucault’s
explanation of the how the Panopticon is supposed to work, see:
http://cartome.org/panopticon1.htm
For David Engberg’s conception of a “Virtual Panopticon,”
see:
http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/impact/f96/Projects/dengberg/
For an historical/technical/deconstructionist proposal for
“reverse engineering the Panopticon,” by Deborah Natsios, see:
http://cartome.org/reverse-panopticon.htm
The technology to build a specific and concrete Panopticon
existed when Bentham first proposed it as a model for prisons in 1791. The Panopticon as a metaphor for a
“total-surveillance society,” was intelligible in 1975 when Foucault published “Discipline and punish: the birth of the
prison,” which contains his analysis and elaboration of Bentham’s ideas about
this conceptual structure.
But it is only now,
when the technology has become advanced enough and the perceived need for
self-protection has become great enough to fund its development, acquisition,
and deployment that the possibility of actually building and operating an all-seeing,
all-knowing, all-pervading, all-encompassing Omni-opticon has arisen.
The technology
necessary to monitor everyone, collect all the data they generate, store it,
analyze it and prepare it for consideration by the data overlords is dual-use
technology. It can be used by the people
to watch the government; and it can be used by the government to watch the
people (or both). Computer and Internet
technology is of the essence in this discussion.
Last Halloween, I
had a chance to comment on the dual-use dichotomy of information technology on
a local radio show:
… I’ve been working since about 1995 to
convince the government to use the Internet and related technologies to empower
people, so they could vote over the Internet, so they could sign initiative
petitions over the Internet. These were
designed to take money out of politics and give more power to the people to
decide how their government would make policy.
I’ve been recently working on trying to convince the City government to
provide websites for all the Neighborhood Councils in Los
Angeles. I’ve
spent almost ten days trying to get an e-mail through to the Office of Homeland
Security, which doesn’t seem to have a phone number or a web address, to
convince it that it should build websites in all of the counties in the country
to provide a means for people to get authoritative and up-to-date information
about things that bother them. I haven’t heard from them.
On the other hand, we see here that the
Government, [through] Carnivore and related systems, they’re poised, they’re
ready, they’ve been prepared, they’re taking advantage of the situation to
implement systems to use technology to surveil people, to sort of disempower
them. And I’d like to get more listeners’ comments on this paradox: that the Internet is not viable, it is not
acceptable to use to empower people but it is acceptable for the government to
use it to disempower people.
Recorded October 31, 2001, on “Talk of the City” with Kittie Felde
on KPCC, 89.3 FM, Pasadena, California
All of these takes
on the Panopticon idea highlight how transparency and privacy are reciprocal
values. To make oneself (or to be forced
to become) transparent is to lose just that much privacy. The issue to be decided (or not) politically
is who or what is to be transparent and who will retain their privacy.
The dozen things
that excellent transparency should be, about which I recently wrote, are
intended to set a standard for corporate and government institutions. Corporate and governmental transparency
dictates that, as institutions, these organizations need to give up some of
their privacy.
For their part,
corporations and governments, through the programs of surveillance and data
collection and analysis they undertake, strive to make individuals transparent
to them, by peeling away layers of their privacy.
Science fiction writer and social commentator
David Brin argues that the answer to this confrontation is for everything to be
transparent, both the activities of the citizens and the surveillance and
monitoring by the government:
http://www.privacyfoundation.org/privacywatch/report.asp?id=79&action=0
It might help all
sides in the coming debate over reciprocal vs. uni-directional transparency if
they could add a certain understanding of the historical context and
philosophical underpinnings of this issue to their own demands for
consideration solely of what they perceive to be their own immediate self
interest. An examination of the ideas
included in, and pointed at, in this essay may be helpful in doing so.
Prologue to the Surveillance Coming On
By Marc Strassman
President, Etopia
hrx@adelphia.net
December 1, 2002
Copyright © 2002 by
Marc Strassman. All rights reserved.
…And even the like precurse
of fierce events,
As harbingers preceding still the fates
And prologue to the omen coming on…
From Act I, Scene 1 of
“Hamlet,” lines 121-123
We all know how much fun filmmaker and social critic Michael
Moore, and, eventually, his audience, had due to his going around the US
trying to embarrass gun users, gun lobbyists, and gun sellers. I thought I could have almost as much fun
doing the same with those people and organizations that will participate and
profit from the upcoming Surveillance
State sought by the Bush
Administration and authorized by the United States Congress.
Where will the data to be mined by the Total Information
Awareness team come from? Willie Sutton
said he robbed banks because “that’s where the money was.” It’s only logical to assume that the data
miners working for convicted felon and inveterate pipe smoker John Poindexter
will go looking “where the data is.”
This should include banks, credit reporting agencies, insurance
companies, medical records, retailers, police records, legal files, and, if
they want to really track troublemakers and terrorists to their lair, the chat
rooms of AOL, Yahoo!, and MSN, the Microsoft Network.
I figured I’d start with the least fortified of these data
sources, the chat rooms. I called Yahoo!
but haven’t yet heard back from Fleishman-Hillard, the public relations agency
they use to stay opaque to the public and media. I got a lot further with Microsoft,
owner-operator of MSN, the chat “community” represented in the media by the guy
in the butterfly suit.
Microsoft, now already on extremely good terms with the Bush
Administration after the almost-complete resolution, on terms very acceptable
to the Redmond Administration, of the anti-trust lawsuit originally brought
against Bill’s Software Trust by the Clinton Administration, told me to talk to
the people at Waggener Edstrom, their opaquing front-end.
I contacted Waggener Edstrom and asked if they had any
comment about transmission to the Total Information Awareness team of the
content and metadata of the chats going on in the MSN chat rooms. Here, in its entirety, is their response,
which arrived in my office by e-mail on November 27 , 2002:
Hi Marc,
Thank you again for your call yesterday. Unfortunately, we
just don't have anything to provide for your story at this time, but thank you
for giving us this opportunity.
Happy Thanksgiving to you,
Erica
I’m looking forward to hearing from Yahoo!.
(Note: as of December
6th, I hadn’t)
In late August, 2001,
I created the EuronaCUEE mailing list.
Here’s its mission statement:
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Description
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Category: Campaigns and Elections
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EuronaCUEE (Euro-North American)
Citizens United for Excellence in E-Government is an educational and advocacy
group working to develop and spread ideas and implementations of leading-edge
e-government and e-democracy systems and practices in the European Union (EU)
and Canada, the United States, and Mexico.
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Here are its addresses:
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Group Email
Addresses
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Post message:
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EuronaCUEE@yahoogroups.com
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Subscribe:
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EuronaCUEE-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
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Unsubscribe:
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EuronaCUEE-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
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List owner:
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EuronaCUEE-owner@yahoogroups.com
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I used it to send
notices, articles, and casual exhortations to a small but select group of
e-government enthusiasts in the US, the UK, and Scandinavia. Below are copies of the materials I sent out
to the list between late August, 2001 and the end of 2002.
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From: virtualorange@yahoo.com
Date: Wed Aug 29, 2001 2:02 pm
Subject: The Emerging "E-Gov/E-Dem Gap"
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Dear EuronaCUEE subscriber,
One of the reasons President Kennedy was elected
President in 1960 was
his constant harping on the "missile
gap" between the US and the USSR,
which was said to threaten the national security
of the US. As it
turned out, there wasn't really much of one.
Now, 40 years later, another "gap," with
possibly severe consequences
for the US, is emerging. This is the "e-government/e-democracy
gap"
between the US and the European Union. Take a look at some of what
they are up to (at public expense) in Europe right
now:
EUROpean CITIes platform for online transaction
services (EURO-CITI)
http://www.euro-citi.org/home.html
A European project to allow Internet voting in a
highly secure and
verifiable way by using PC and palm computers, by
using mobile phones
(CyberVote):
http://www.eucybervote.org/index.html
Compare that to what they are up to in the US:
S. 803, The E-Government Act of 2001
http://www.ombwatch.org/info/2001/sb803.html
This bill, now pending in the US Senate, would
provide money for an
innovation fund to research interesting new
e-government ideas. But
most of the discussion so far about this
legislation has focused on
whether a new federal Chief Information Officer
(CIO) should report
to the head of the Office of Management and Budget
or directly to the
President. While Europe builds, the
US bickers.
Equal Protection of Voting Rights Act of 2001
(I tried, and failed, three times to get a link to
this bill, but the
antiquated and inadequate House server would not
allow it. If you are
committed to finding it, go to:
http://thomas.loc.gov/
and enter H.R. 1170 in the search box there.
This bill, now pending in the US House of
Representatives, would
provide certain new protections to voters. It may,
or may not,
include provisions that will move the transition
to Internet voting
forward. While Europe is
researching and testing continent-wide
electronic systems for voting, the US wallows in "chadgate" and falls
further behind.
While Europe is moving ahead to equip its cities and citizens for
advanced versions of e-gov and e-dem, the main
activities in these
areas in the US are bickering and inaction, if you can call inaction
an activity.
This disparity is among the reasons for the
formation of EuronaCUEE.
The rationale behind this list is to share and
synergize ideas and
projects from both sides of the Atlantic and
elsewhere. Right now,
that may mean learning more about what's happening
in the EU and
trying to educate US policymakers about these
developments, warn them
of the impending "e-gov/e-dem gap," and
organize a movement to lobby
them to bring the US
up to speed, as compared with our European
counterparts.
If you're a member of this list, your own
contributions to it are most
welcome, be they news or opinion, long and
complicated or short and to
the point. Please send your contributions to this
discussion of
e-government and e-democracy to:
EuronaCUEE@yahoogroups.com
Contributions from those of you living or working
outside of the North
Atlantic area are also very welcome, since the
transition to
e-gov/e-dem is obviously a worldwide, not just a
Euro/North American,
phenomenon. Perhaps we will soon change the name
of this group to
CUEEWorldwide.
Also, we want to grow our list, so if you have
friends, co-workers,
family members or mere acquaintances who you think
might benefit from
membership in the group, please ask them to join,
by sending a blank
e-mail to:
EuronaCUEE-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Thanks for your participation.
Sincerely,
Marc Strassman
Founder
EuronaCUEE
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From: virtualorange@yahoo.com
Date: Mon Sep 3, 2001 4:28 pm
Subject: Cyber Stamps Now!
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Cyber Stamps Now!
By Marc Strassman
August 31,
2001
Copyright © 2001 by Marc Strassman
All rights reserved.
The economy is hovering extremely close to
recession. The Dow
has dropped below 10,000 for the first time in
months. Layoffs
abound, accelerate, threaten to multiply. Unbought
computers gather
dust in gloomy warehouses. There is no joy in Silicon Valley, the
mighty New Economy has struck out.
But wait. When dairy farmers overestimated future
demand for
cheddar, and blocks of the curdled stuff were
gathering dust in gloomy
refrigerators, their politically powerful
Representatives and Senators
stepped in. Using their clout, they created the
idea of FOOD STAMPS,
and got a program embodying this concept passed by
the Congress,
signed by the President, and enacted into law.
Food stamps, given with abandon to the
calorie-challenged, did
what they promised: they put food on the tables of
hungry people and
they cleared out those piles of surplus cheese.
Now, faced with the New Economy's version of too
much brie,
it's time for the still-politically powerful
Representatives and
Senators from Palo Alto, Cambridge,
Research Triangle Park, Seattle,
and so on to do no less for the device-challenged
masses and the
overstocked producers than did their agricultural
counterparts in
distant days past.
COMPUTER STAMPS and INTERNET STAMPS (hereinafter,
jointly,
CYBER STAMPS) offer the best way out of the
current doldrums being
experienced by the high-tech sector, and, indeed,
the entire economy,
wagged as it has become by the Silicon Sector.
Furthermore, by
providing those on the wrong side of the digital
divide with the means
to acquire the hardware, software, training, and
Internet connections
they need to join the highly-productive high-tech
sector, the entire
economy will be invigorated, as millions of new
people begin to use
e-mail, chat, surf, shop, learn, commute, and
generally mess around
online.
Every additional person who comes online with
sufficient
digital identification and the means to
authenticate him- or herself
means one more person who can officially transact
business with his or
her local, state, and the federal government.
Every time a citizen
can do that, not only has his or her life been
made easier, but the
government agency with which they've transacted
their business has
saved at least 80 per cent of their costs in doing
that business.
Further, the data generated by the e-transaction
can then be
automatically entered into the relevant databases,
saving more time
and more money, as compared with the tedious,
time-consuming, and
expensive manual alternative.
And beyond that, once EVERY eligible voter has a
computer, a smart
card, and a digital certificate with which to
securely and verifiably
identify and authenticate him- or herself online,
the way will be
paved for universal remote Internet voting and the
remote signing of
Smart Initiatives, thereby tremendously increasing
the ease and
convenience for citizens wanting to participate
directly in making the
laws and rules by which they are governed.
Many programs already exist to bring some
part of the unwired
population online. The Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation has just
donated 85 million dollars to bring people
in Mexico online. This is
a humanitarian gesture, and it is also a shrewd
move to create more
customers for Microsoft.
Providing EVERYONE who wants it with a decent
computer and an
adequate connection to the Internet is similarly a
humanitarian
gesture and also a shrewd way of meaningfully
upgrading the national
average level of computer literacy and network
access, something that
will immediately and for a long time pay big
dividends in e-learning,
e-commerce, e-learning, e-government, and
e-democracy.
And don't forget how happy it will make the
management,
employees, and investors in the companies that
created those surplus
piles of cheese, uh, I mean, computers. With
inventories cleared,
they'll have more money to invest in more R &
D and start creating
some REALLY hot products to power the NEW New
Economy.
Marc Strassman is President of Etopia and the
Founder of the
European-North American Citizens United for
Excellence in E-Government
(Eurona), the mailing list of which can be joined
by sending a blank
e-mail to: EuronaCUEE-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
Mr. Strassman can
be reached at etopia@pacificnet.net.
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From: virtualorange@yahoo.com
Date: Mon Sep 3, 2001 8:31 pm
Subject: A Frog-Based System of Pollsite Electronic Voting
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Dear EuronaCUEE subscriber,
Ron Rivest (the "R" in RSA Security) and
two colleagues have developed
an extremely clever scheme for creating electronic
pollsite (but not
remote) voting systems using what they call
"frogs."
Learn more about this (and any number of other
interesting subjects in
cryptography and related subjects) at Professor
Rivest's website at:
http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/publications.html
Regards,
Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
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From: virtualorange@yahoo.com
Date: Tue Sep 4, 2001 5:29 pm
Subject: City of Cambridge,
England, Government and E-Government Through the Ages
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Dear EuronaCUEE subscriber,
For a wee bit of e-government fun (and
perspective), I'd recommend a
visit to the website of the City of Cambridge,
England, U.K.
On its homepage you'll see, within less than an
inch of each other, a
link to the city charters being celebrated during
the town's
octocentenary and a link to an explanation of how
the town, along with
the rest of Great Britain, is working to put all
of its
anciently-derived/modernly-configured government
online by 2005.
Maybe in 2801 there'll be a website commemorating
what we all did to
create a universal virtual democratic governmental
system.
Join the fun at:
http://www.cambridge.gov.uk/cambridge.htm
Cheers,
Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
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From: AlanKotok@cs.com
Date: Thu Sep 6, 2001 5:49 pm
Subject: Analysis of E-Government Act of 2001
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The U.S. Techno-Politics page on Suite 101.com has a new column
on the
E-Government Act of 2001, calling it the 'sleeper in the Senate' because of
its potential long-term impact. Read the column at
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/10818/79163.
Alan Kotok
AlanKotok@cs.com
http://www.technewslit.com/
Editor, <E*Business*Standards Today/>, http://www.disa.org/dailywire/
Editor, Techno-Politics,
http://www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/us_techno_politics
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From: virtualorange@yahoo.com
Date: Mon Sep 10, 2001 7:44 pm
Subject: Three UK e-government URLs
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Dear EuronaCUEE subscriber,
After <hotmail.com>, the most common e-mail
address domain on our list
is <gov.uk>.
It's great that so many people in the British
government are on this
list, and it's great that that government is doing
so much in the
field of e-government.
To recognize that fact, and to better acquaint the
non-UK members of
our list with more of what's happening in
e-Britain, I'm sending you
three URLs from the UK e-government space:
http://www10.org/program/society/sladen/detr.htm
Socially Inclusive e-Government?
Excerpt:
The UK Department of the Environment, Transport
and the Regions (DETR)
aims to improve the quality of life of British
citizens. But how can
it really achieve this through the Internet? The
combination of
ambitious electronic service delivery targets and
a social inclusion
policy, illustrate how government wrestles with
potentially
contradictory aims. Can the Internet be socially inclusive?
What
relationship can government have with this
powerful medium?
http://www.isaware.org.uk/textonly/subsection.asp?ID=45
This page on the ISaware site is full of links to
many of the British
organizations that are leading the way towards
providing all
government services online to everyone in Britain by 2008 (or 2005, as
others seem to think).
Excerpt:
e-government is concerned with the delivery of
public services in the
Information Age. It focuses on better services for
citizens and
businesses and more effective use of the
Government's information
resources. The UK Government aims to be a global
exemplar in its use
of information and communication technologies and
in the Modernising
Government White Paper it set targets for 100% of
Government services
to be delivered electronically by 2008.
http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/
This one is the last link on the ISaware page, but
I wanted to call
special attention to it because it's an important
site, not least of
which because it's run by the British national
government.
Excerpt:
This section of the site will contain a list of
the subject areas
within the e-Government agenda that are relevant
to getting the UK
Online by 2005. Our intention is to create
internet communities of
interested stakeholders around each subject area
to inform the
development of policy. These areas will include:
Broadband
Transactions
e-Charter
e-Democracy
Life Episodes
Channels
Security in the Information Age
Change of Address
While the United States Senate is preparing to
spend weeks debating to
whom the Chief Information Officer of the United
States should report,
the British Government is moving ahead in areas as
profound as
"e-Democracy" and as mundane, but still
important as "Change of
Address."
In 1765, ten years before he delivered his
"give me liberty or give me
death" speech, the Virginia
patriot and orator Patrick Henry said:
Cæsar had his Brutus; Charles the First, his
Cromwell; and George the
Third ["Treason!" cried the Speaker]-may
profit by their example. If
this be treason, make the most of it.
Profiting from examples can be a two-way, trans-Atlantic street. We
in North
America should make the most of the
current British example,
in both those specifics that can be adapted and
used here and the
overall approach of this nationwide effort. We
should also consider
emulating the way the British are making the
transition to
e-government an explicit national priority.
Cheers,
Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
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From: virtualorange@yahoo.com
Date: Tue Sep 25, 2001 1:59 pm
Subject: A Simple New Reason for Adopting E-Government and
E-Democracy
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Dear EuronaCUEE subscriber,
If I knew what to say about September 11th, I
would. I still think we
should be looking for ways to use technology, in
conjunction with good
ideas, to make the world safer, freer, and more
democratic. I hope we
can. What we should do here is try.
Sincerely,
Marc Strassman
A Simple New Reason for Adopting E-Government and
E-Democracy
By Marc Strassman
September
25, 2001
A few nights ago, one of the major network news
shows ran a
segment about how the Federal Government is in for
some big trouble
over the next ten years as the baby boomer core of
its administrative
worker force retires. Another one of the major
networks promised a
story tomorrow night on the impeding disaster
facing the entire
country as all the baby boomers retire.
As someone who looks at all news stories for what
support they
can give my ongoing efforts to persuade the media,
the population, and
the decision-makers that instituting e-government
and e-democracy is a
great idea, it didn't take me long to see how this
inexorable
development offers a concise, simple, persuasive
additional reason for
moving in the direction of deploying such
electronic networks.
Take voting. Most of the fevered discussion of the
voting
process that followed in the wake of last fall's
debacle in Florida
has focused on how to replace the Chad-O-Matic
voting systems with
higher-tech upgrades and how to pay for doing so.
Some, but not much,
attention has been paid to the subject of how to
recruit and deploy
the poll workers who need to be at the polling
stations whatever the
technology employed.
It's difficult to generalize about this, but my
own experience
tells me that most poll workers are taken from the
upper reaches of
the age spectrum, if for no other reason than as
the age cohort with
the highest percentage of retirees, this group
has, as a rule, more
time for such activities. Also, this age cohort
came of age at a time
when civic duty was not considered an oxymoronic
concept.
I'm not certain what the current stereotypes are
for boomers long
characterized as self-indulgent or their younger
X-ian counterparts
often derided as slackers, but I'm not sure either
group is likely to
show the same commitment to the political process
that their elders
have demonstrated by staffing polling places
during the recent past.
This means that remote Internet voting, with its
minimal need for
humans on the ground, as well as its lower per
voter costs, will look
increasingly attractive.
Voting is just one area where government and
citizens meet and
interact. Social Security is another. Tonight's
television segment
on the looming crisis in Washington made the
obvious point that just
at the time when tens of millions of boomers will
need to contact the
government to find out about their Social Security
checks, the
seasoned and experienced workers who might have
been able to help them
will have gone, having themselves retired.
To someone who's been arguing for years that
putting
government functions on the Web offers a way to
lower government
costs, increase citizen convenience, reduce error
rates, and generally
upgrade and re-engineer government and elections,
this new crisis
seems like just another, and maybe the best yet,
argument for doing
just that.
Of course, it's equally essential that everyone be
able to
access these electronic transaction systems, from
devices like PCs,
handhelds, cellular phones, or kiosks. And that
they know how to use
these networked access devices.
I've made the related point recently (in
"Cyber Stamps Now!")
that one way to respond simultaneously and
effectively to the current
economic downturn and the ongoing existence of a
serious digital
divide is to have the Federal Government issue
Computer Stamps and
Internet Access Stamps (collectively, Cyber
Stamps) in order to speed
the process of putting everyone online. The exact
means are not
important, but providing everyone in the country
with the means to
access and interact with the Internet, in order to
involve everyone in
solving these intertwined problems of recession,
the digital divide,
and the looming boomer retirement crisis, is.
The alternative may be having to wait on hold for
several days
before getting to talk to one of the few human
staffers still at work,
in either the government or private sector.
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From: virtualorange@yahoo.com
Date: Tue Sep 25, 2001 2:04 pm
Subject: Replacing Secession with E-Government and E-Democracy
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Dear EuronaCUEE subscriber,
Here in Los Angeles, secession of large parts of the city is a major
political issue. Separatist movements are not
prominent in other US
cities, but they certainly are in many countries
around the world.
Maybe the same principles that govern municipal
split-ups also apply
to national ones, and maybe many countries around
the world could help
prevent their own break-ups by
moving expeditiously to implement
e-government and e-democracy systems within their
(current) borders.
Sincerely,
Marc Strassman
Replacing Secession with E-Government and
E-Democracy
By Marc Strassman
September 25, 2001
Taken together, the implementation of e-government
to deliver
information and services to citizens rapidly,
inexpensively, and
efficiently, along with the introduction of
e-democracy to allow
citizens a REAL role in their own government,
would go a long way
towards making Los Angeles a much better place for
everyone who lives
here and could go most of the way towards
undermining the large and
growing movement to break up the
City.
As one means of thwarting secession, the City of Los Angeles has
already launched a program of neighborhood
councils, designed to more
fully involve local residents in lobbying for the
interests of their
own local areas. Like the plan for decentralizing
the school
district, this effort to somewhat disperse the
city administration is
still "a work in progress."
But the kind of civic participation offered by
neighborhood councils
may not be nearly enough to satisfy Valley, Hollywood, and
Harbor
residents looking for even more local control. Put
most simply, many
people in the Valley, in Hollywood, and in the
Harbor Area want to
secede because they feel alienated, distant,
cut-off, and ignored by
City government downtown. They feel SO alienated
that they are
willing to go through years of political
aggravation to avoid the
greater aggravation they think will never end if
they remain as part
of Los Angeles.
Decentralizing the City might alleviate these
feelings. Secession
might alleviate them, too. But so could
implementing meaningful
systems of e-government and e-democracy, which
might greatly enhance
the quality of the city while avoiding the need to
break it up.
Lack of good communication between government and
citizens is at the
heart of the secessionist's complaints.
Given the realities of traveling in Los Angeles, who wants to spend
half a day getting to a counter to fill out a form
that can be more
easily filled out online?
E-government would allow Angelinos to fill out
city forms from their
desktops (or laptops, or PDAs, or, soon, smart
phones) in a few
minutes, then digitally sign them with a smart
card and digital
certificate. This not only makes life easier for
each citizen, but,
by drastically reducing the total number of daily
automobile trips
needed, makes life easier for everyone else as
well.
Multiply this by millions, and you can see the
time, trouble, fuel,
and frustration avoided by putting citizens
"online, not in line."
Civic apathy is widespread and is demonstrated
constantly by low
turnout rates in City elections. Even though the
recent voting
resulted in the election of an unusually
distinguished group of
intelligent, energetic, and reform-minded people
to serve in City
Hall, they were nonetheless elected in a process
involving only
one-third of the REGISTERED voters, which is
itself only a portion of
the total ELIGIBLE voters.
Many of the races were close, with the winner
capturing barely more
than 50% of the votes. On average then, this new
crop of politicians
has been elected by one-half of one-third of the
registered voters.
One out of ten citizens voted for their
"representative." This is not
democracy, but "oligarchy by apathy."
Contrast this with e-democracy, a system of
Internet-mediated surveys,
initiatives, and elections that gives every
citizen a chance to have
his or her voice heard, and, beyond that, to
actually participate in
political decisions that affect him or her. Giving
all people the
means to access the Internet and through it a real
say in their own
self-governance would remove the basic motivation
now driving the
secession movements throughout the city.
The choice we face could be as absolute as
e-government/e-democracy or
secession/break-up. The
immediate implementation of e-government and
e-democracy, along with genuine decentralization,
is not only the best
way to prevent the break-up of Los Angeles. It is also the best way
to make it worth keeping together.
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From: virtualorange@yahoo.com
Date: Thu Sep 27, 2001 4:45 pm
Subject: Security Portal Network
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One way to put the Internet to work in pursuit of
domestic
security is to build a "Security Portal
Network" (SPN). Such a
system, which could be built and run by the
newly-formed Office of
Homeland Security, might consist of 3,000 or so
double-layered
e-government portals, one in each county of the United States.
The first layer would provide a means for
officials and agencies to
communicate with each other and coordinate their
anti-terrorism
strategies. The second layer would provide all
residents of the
county with accurate and up-to-date information
that would help them
prepare for and protect themselves against the
ravages of terrorism
and other kinds of emergencies.
The first, officials', layer would be heavily
secured, by smart cards,
digital certificates, tokens, encryption and the
like, in order to
limit access to the discussions and information
there to those
properly allowed to participate. Among the
agencies that would be
involved might be, at the federal level, the
Department of Defense,
the CIA, the White House, the US Department of
Justice, the Food and
Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention,
and the Federal Emergency Management Agency; at
the state level,
governors' offices, state departments of justice,
state police
agencies, and state emergency management agencies;
and at the local
level county executives, county boards of
supervisors, mayors, city
councils, police and sheriff's departments, local
health agencies, and
local emergency preparedness agencies.
Using chat rooms, document exchange systems, white
boards, and other
tools for discussion, data storage and retrieval
in this layer of the
SPN, government officials could conveniently and
securely educate each
other about security principles and practices in
each particular
county and work together to develop comprehensive
and effective
strategies for preventing and, if necessary,
responding to, threats to
the population within each particular
jurisdiction.
Using similar and possibly additional digital
communications tools in
the more open and accessible second, public, layer
of the SPN
websites, residents of each community would be
able to ask questions
of themselves and the experts in the officials'
layer, discuss their
concerns with others, find out the latest in rules
and regulations
being promulgated by national, state, and local
authorities, express
their views, and get up-to-date information about
security-related
conditions at airports, on roads, and in specific
parts of each
county.
Each layer could facilitate the performance of
important tasks
necessary for building a more security-conscious
society. Working in
tandem, they can synergistically enhance both the
work of officials
and the participation of citizens in this common
task.
A Security Portal Network can enhance our security
while
protecting our freedom. We ought to begin discussing
whether, when,
and how to build and deploy it.
If you have any comments on this proposal, or
ideas of your own about
how the Internet could be used to respond to the
present crisis,
please send them to EuronaCUEE@yahoogroups.com
and they'll be
forwarded to the rest of the EuronaCUEE list.
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From: virtualorange@yahoo.com
Date: Tue Oct 2, 2001 9:07 pm
Subject: If It's Good Enough for Wall Street, It's Good Enough
for Me
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Dear EuronaCUEE subscriber,
This may be preaching to the choir, but I wanted
to briefly share with
you an idea I had this evening relating to the
right of people to use
the Internet to transact political business, such
as voting and
signing official initiative petitions.
The inspiration for the idea was a preview on
television of a Public
Broadcasting System program about how the billions
of dollars flowing
in and out of Wall Street are largely virtual, or
electronic. This is
because most stock and bond trades are done
online. Thousands, or
millions, or billions of dollars are transferred,
instantaneously,
from London to New York to Hong Kong and back,
and there's no paper
involved.
No one needs to fill out a piece of paper, sign it
with a pen, put it
in an envelope, find a stamp, find a carrier, and
wait days to see if
the transaction has gone through. Doing that, or
asking about doing
that, would be ridiculous today. Financial
transactions, large and
small, are conducted online.
Which matters more to the future of a community,
the vote of one of
its residents in a local election, or the
decisions of countless
investors, analysts, and corporate officers in a
company that may or
may not locate in that community or may leave or
may lay off thousands
of workers?
Of course, it's the business decisions and
transactions, not the
political transactions, that will affect more
lives more deeply.
Those buying and selling stock in a company can
conduct their
transactions online in real time utilizing the
power and reach of
computers and various networks. Those affected by
decisions made
about and by that company, in their role as
citizens, cannot. They
get to vote once a year, using paper, pen-and-ink
signatures, and
lists printed out from ancient mainframes.
Investors can vote as
often as they want, everyday, using the best and
latest in computers
and networks.
And yet allowing citizens to sign petitions
online, or vote online, or
complete forms to run for office online, is
strictly prohibited, on
the grounds that the electoral process is too
sacred, too important,
too crucial to be subjected to the whims and risks
associated with
online transactions.
But billions of dollars are trusted to that
medium, and who can deny
that the impact of the constant sloshing of this
money around the
world is far more consequential than the mere
election returns from
almost any jurisdiction you might care to mention.
Need it be spelled out more starkly that
electronic financial
transactions are allowed and electronic political
transactions are not
because money talks and politics walks?
Not coincidentally, the power to determine the
voting rules resides in
those incumbents who have ridden the existing
rules into office.
Ridden them, of course, under the colors of the
same individuals and
organizations that have full use of computer and
network power to make
their own financial dealings as convenient and
practical and
remunerative as they can.
Only when we citizens realize that the arguments
used to block the
advent of electronic democracy but not the ongoing
hegemony of
electronic finance are hypocritical shams standing
in the way of real
democracy and commit ourselves to repudiating
these arguments and
providing ourselves with the means of formulating
and implementing our
collective political will online will this
imbalance be righted and
the proper relationship between human rights and
financial rights be
established.
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From: virtualorange@yahoo.com
Date: Sat Oct 13, 2001 11:33 am
Subject: Boston Review article
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Dear EuronaCUEE subscriber,
A piece I wrote for the Boston Review a few months
ago has finally hit
the virtual newsstands and can be accessed at:
http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR26.5/strassman.html
If you've got a minute, give it a look, and, if
you'd like, check out
the rest of the issue as well.
Sincerely,
Marc Strassman
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From: virtualorange@yahoo.com
Date: Sun Nov 4, 2001 2:50 pm
Subject: Community, Democracy, Politics
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Dear EuronaCUEE subscriber,
Writing theoretical papers about e-government is
one thing. Trying to
implement e-government and e-democracies in
jurisdictions full of
apathetic and/or cynical citizens, ignorant and
anti-technological
bureaucrats, and entrenched politicians eager to
protect their
privileges at all cost is something else.
Below is a piece I just wrote that combines a bit
of narrative with a
bit of analysis in an effort to make sense of my
recent political
efforts in Los Angeles and some of the anomalies these efforts have
surfaced. I hope it will be both entertaining and
instructive.
This latest set of rebuffs from the powers-that-be
has caused me to
wonder if I might be better spending my
transformative energy
elsewhere, specifically on projects in places
outside the US where the
objective conditions for using the Internet to
upgrade democracy are
less bleak. Wondering how I might do so, I
realized immediately the
answer: the Internet. Organizationally, I think it
might be
practical to mobilize the members of this list
(and others we could
recruit) to focus on a few specific places and
projects where
our individual and collective knowledge,
experience and contacts could
play a positive role in bringing about
change in the areas of
e-government and e-democracy.
Not only would such efforts bring real
benefits to those impacted by
these projects, but we would also be able to
provide a concrete
demonstration of the power of Internet-mediated
and
globally-dispersed communities such as ours to
make a difference.
Think of it as an "e-democracy/e-government
virtual strike force,"
swooping down from cyberspace to do good in an
interesting way, then
returning to our home bases, deep within the
network. Is there a
television series or feature film here?
In any case, please look at this essay and send
any comments you have
to:
EuronaCUEE@yahoogroups.com
I will approve your comments and send them on to
the rest of the list.
You could also submit the names, URLs, and some
information about any
e-government or e-democracy projects, anywhere in
the world, that you
think might be worthy of our group's time and
attention.
Thanks for your time.
Sincerely,
Marc Strassman
Founder
EuronaCUEE
Community, Democracy, Politics
By Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
etopia@pacificnet.net
November 3,
2001
Copyright, 2001, by Marc Strassman, all rights
reserved.
What I want to briefly do
here is tie together two of my recent
experiences with the Los Angeles municipal bureaucracy, both of which
involve the three terms in the title of this
essay: community,
democracy and politics.
I spent most of the first three weeks of October,
2001, standing out
in front of Gelson's upscale supermarket in Valley
Village and in
front of K-mart's downscale store in Sunland
collecting the signatures
of registered voters living in the 2nd City
Council District, in order
to qualify for the special election in that
jurisdiction to serve out
the last year of departed Councilmember Joel
Wachs, who represented
some version of that district for 30 years.
I have written elsewhere about what it's like to
be rudely ignored and
insulted by people who hate politics and
politicians so much that they
would apparently rather have sex with a decaying
corpse than even
consider taking a minute or two to contribute one
of the hundreds of
signatures required by potential candidates in
order to get on the
ballot to "represent" them. There were
also those people, many more
at Gelson's than at K-mart, whose contempt went
beyond even that and
who would not for a second interrupt their lives
of cell phones,
gourmet coffee, high fashion, and shopping to
acknowledge my mere
existence.
But that's not today's subject. Today's subject is
jurisdictional
boundaries and how the city determines them.
Before collecting a signature, before even asking
for it, I would
"qualify" my prospects by asking them if
they were registered voters,
since only registered voters were entitled to sign
the nomination
petitions potential candidates need to submit to
get on the ballot.
If they said they were registered voters, I would
follow-up by asking
them if they lived in the 2nd Council District,
since only bona fide
residents of the 2nd Council District were entitled
to sign the
nomination petitions potential candidates need to
submit to get on the
ballot.
A few, a very few, people knew they lived in the
2nd Council District
(or in the 4th, immediately adjacent to the 2nd).
This testifies to
the low salience of Council Districts in the lives
of most people.
These people, and a few more, whom I collectively
regard as the
"politicized intelligentsia" of the
area, knew that Joe Wachs had been
"their" councilman before leaving for New York City to become the
Director of the Andy Warhol Foundation. (A few
thought he still WAS
their Councilmember.)
For everyone else, I had to run through additional
tests. I'd ask
where they lived. I'd ask if they lived in "Valley Village, North
Hollywood, Arleta, selected parts of Van Nuys, and certain parts of
Studio City below Dona Pagita." If they said Valley Village or North
Hollywood, I'd sign them up without further ado. If they said Studio
City, I'd worry, and ask them, "Where in Studio City?"
But the map showing the boundaries of the 2nd
District that I'd been
given by the City was way too big to handle easily
in public and not
wanting to miss out, I let people living almost
anyplace in Studio
City sign the petitions, saying, "If you're not in the
District,
they'll just throw your signature out." I
thought I'd be able to get
enough signatures overall so that it wouldn't
matter.
There were similar problems in front of the K-mart
in Sunland. Many
residents of La Crescenta shop at that store and
were willing to sign
my petition, but La Crescenta isn't even in the
City of Los Angeles,
so their signatures wouldn't have been valid, and
I wouldn't let them
sign.
Let me now make explicit the obvious point that
the 2nd Council
District has very little relationship to
"communities of interest" or
even shopping patterns. Like all the City's
Council Districts (and
the State of California's Assembly and Senate
Districts, and the state
legislative districts in other states, and the
federal Congressional
districts), its boundaries are set by incumbent
politicians and their
parties in order to maximize their electoral
market share and the
lavish contributions they can attract as a
consequence.
The 2nd Council District, especially, is a
mish-mash of scattered
blocks and neighborhoods stretching all over hell
and back, grabbing
Van Nuys Airport here, crawling a bit up into the
hills there,
sprawling over the vacant acres of Sunland-Tujunga
there. Of course
it has to sprawl, and so do all the other Council
Districts, because
there are only 15 Council Districts for the whole
468 square miles and
3,800,000 people in the City. These 200,000 person
districts are
about half the size of a basic US Congressional
District.
Why doesn't Los Angeles have many more much smaller Council Districts
so that communities of interest could be reflected
in them, citizens
could know which one they lived in, Councilmembers
could be accessible
to those they represent, and we wouldn't need to
have Neighborhood
Councils to remedy all the ills that huge and
unwieldy Council
Districts generate? Guess.
A Los Angeles of 150 Council Districts (Chicago has
50 for a
population of under 3 million.) would mean both
less power and
influence for Councilmembers and more trouble for
"community leaders"
wanting to exert control over the direction of
city affairs. Keeping
the legislative power concentrated in the hands of
barely more than a
dozen people makes things more convenient all
around.
Enough analysis. Let's get back to my sordid little
political
adventures.
So, for the reasons just outlined, it's hard to
know where one Council
District ends and the next one begins. At least it
was for me,
running my Council campaign on a zero budget. I
did manage to scrape
together the $300 filing fee required by the City.
I made my way
through anti-terrorist barricades and armed guards
on Saturday,
October 20th, and took my completed nomination
papers to the Office of
the City Clerk, Election Division. They counted
the 648 signatures
I'd gathered (which included 25 gathered by my
sole volunteer) and
took my $300.00. I needed 500 good signatures to
qualify.
A few days later they notified me that 290 of the
signatures were
disqualified on account of the signers residing
outside the district.
I guess this was my comeuppance for not screening
those Studio City
residents more carefully. Of course, I always felt
fortunate to have
the presence and attention of my signers for as
long as I did, and
trying to pin down their residency within the district
might have been
more than many of them could bear, but that's not
the problem of the
City Clerk's Office.
I was out of the race.
But I had an ace-in-the-hole, in terms of public
service in my
community: Neighborhood Councils.
Neighborhood Councils, like the open seat in the
2nd District, were
the legacy of the recently-departed Joel Wachs.
Thinking he could
ride the idea of community-based councils into the
Mayor's Office,
Wachs and his allies saw to their inclusion in the
New City Charter
that was adopted by a smattering of Angelenos in
1999 (17% of
registered voters bothered to vote, meaning about
10% of eligible
voters participated, and I can't find the split in
the vote on the
City Clerk's site.)
Wachs ran for Mayor in 2001 as the person who
could best implement his
brainchild, Neighborhood Councils. He lost in the primary. But his
legacy, Neighborhood Councils, lives on. In fact,
his former Chief of
Staff, Greg Nelson, was recently appointed General
Manager of the
Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, the city
agency responsible
for implementing the Neighborhood Council
provisions of the New City
Charter.
I attended the first (and only) organizational
meeting of my local
Neighborhood Council on September 12, 2001. It was run by people from
the Valley Village Homeowners Association. I was
very skeptical going
in that NCs were anything more than sham fronts to
involve people in
pointless begging of City Councilmembers under the
guise of giving
"the community" a "voice." Homeowner
associations already had as much
of a voice as they could get, cajoling and
threatening incumbents with
the granting or withholding of their approval,
endorsements,
volunteers, and money.
The theory, to the extent there was one, seemed to
be that the NC
would allow conflicting and excluded interests to
be locally
reconciled and the resulting consensus positions
passed on to the
rulers/elected officials who would then, would
then what? Do what the
reconciled and conciliated community members wanted
done? Or
graciously accept their recommendations and then
do whatever they and
their contributors and the real "community
leaders" wanted done?
I raised these issues at the meeting, or tried to,
but the Homeowner
"leadership" wasn't interested. Nor were
they interested in my
suggestion that the complaints raised by attendees
about insufficient
copies of proposed by-laws, last-minute
distribution of flyers, and
lack of public notice in the print media could all
be effectively and
elegantly addressed by using the Internet. The
core response was
"What's the Internet?"
After being disqualified for the 2nd District
Council race, my
attention turned back to my local NC, as a
possible focus for the
issues of e-government and Internet democracy that
had been
well-received during my short-lived campaign for
Council. I called
the local DONE office and asked when the next VVNC
meeting was going
to take place. "Nothing's scheduled,"
they told me. I called again
last week. "Nothing's scheduled," they
re-iterated. "In fact," they
added, "nothing's scheduled until next
year."
"Two months from now?" I asked.
"That's right. They're taking off
for the holidays."
I decided to organize my own NC for VV. I
downloaded the
Certification Form. It said I needed to provide a
description of the
boundaries of the proposed NC. Thinking that I had
perhaps
over-reached with my effort to
electronically-democratize all 200,000
people in the 2nd Council District, I vowed to
focus like a laser beam
on the one-tenth as many people living in Valley Village.
A word to the uninitiated: Valley Village is a
name for that part of
the City formerly known as North Hollywood where
the homeowners,
frightened of both the physical threat and the
concomitant decline in
property values engendered by the elevation of
their "community" to a
very high ranking among the most violent and
dangerous areas in the
country, appealed to the City for relief and, for
their trouble, were
rewarded by the posting of signs on lamp posts
declaring them to now
be residing, not in the forlorn district of North
Hollywood but in the
bright and shining district of "Valley Village."
So I was going to focus solely on Valley Village. I needed the
boundaries. I wanted a nice digital map setting them
out for me to
use and for all to see. On Friday, November 2, 2001, I called the
Department of Neighborhood Empowerment and asked
for one.
The DONE bureaucrat didn't have one, but she
suggested I try the
"Community Planning Bureau." They sent
me to the "Mapping Section."
The people there mentioned a "Valley Village
Specific Plan." Two
other people were in charge of that, but one was
out because she was
on a 10x4 work schedule, and the other wasn't in
at all.
From there it was off to "Building and Safety,"
where I got nothing.
Next was the City Clerk's Office, where the woman
I spoke to asked me
"What city is Valley Village in?" This amazed even me. I gave her an
abbreviated version of the origin story above. She sent me to
"Engineering," from where I was directed
to "Public Works," where the
numbers I was given to call were fax numbers, even
more useless than
all the other sounds so far.
When I was referred, after 40 minutes of this, to
"the Planning
Department," I admitted defeat and gave up.
There is a satisfying and ironic twist to all
this, however. Today,
Saturday, I went to the DONE Workshop that was
being held at Loyola
Marymount University. I noticed that Greg Nelson, General Manager of
DONE, was holding forth with two empowered citizens.
I cautiously
approached and asked about the appropriateness of
creating a "second
layer" NC in Valley Village to be built
around the Internet, on the
order of a cell phone area code overlay, in order
to deal with the
hostility to the Internet, not to mention the
non-presence of, the
Valley Village Homeowner Association's proposed
NC.
Mr. Nelson found this approach unacceptable,
agreeing with my analogy
that, like nation states, only one NC could occupy
any particular
geographic area at any one time. But the real fun
came when I
complained to him about my recent inability to get
a map of Valley
Village from his department.
After telling me he could easily remedy that
problem if he only had
the time, he explained to me that THERE WAS NO MAP
OF VALLEY VILLAGE.
All the NC areas, he explained, are fluid, open,
indeterminate
entities. They emerge out of the community
unconscious (my phrase,
not his) and cannot be pinned down to anything as
mundane, rigid and
unchanging as say (my point again) City Council
Districts.
By now we were outside, and surrounded by a few
other empowerees, who
listened in and joined in as General Manager
Nelson and I discussed
the metaphysical underpinnings of NC boundaries.
He twice accused me
of wanting them to be defined in a
"top-down" way. Twice I rejected
his accusation and vigorously asserted that I was
a "bottom-up"
person.
Thinking I was in a crowd where self-confident
self-deprecation
counted for something, I rhetorically suggested
that my efforts to get
a map of Valley Village from DONE had been a "fool's errand." This
brought agreement and snickers from the crowd. Then I set Greg up
by
asking how these boundaries should be determined.
"Common sense," he
triumphantly crowed. The crowd went wild. One
woman smirked, "It's
called democracy."
I left thinking I'd somehow been outflanked, or
refuted on some
important point, or just mocked and abused. But as
I thought over Mr.
Nelson's point of view and compared it with my
recent experience of
being excluded from the 2nd Council District race
I realized there was
a real ideological bonanza here.
In fact, as I hope I've made clear already in this
essay, there is a
very interesting set of interlocking factors
relating to
self-government in Los Angeles involved here. Not least of which is
the fact that Greg Nelson, the man who knows more
about NCs than
anyone in the world, was formerly Chief of Staff
to Joel Wachs, who
spearheaded the campaign to put NCs into the New
City Charter.
Here are the core propositions:
The City enforces precise, strict and rigid rules
regarding signatures
for City Council races.
The City refuses to enforce any rules regarding
community boundaries
for Neighborhood Council "districts"
Why is this?
Common sense tells us that the City Council seats
count and the
Neighborhood Councils don't.
Since Council Districts are laid out to maximize
the concentration of
political power in a few hands, it's important
that their boundaries,
however gerrymandered and bizarre they are, be
established and
enforced with the utmost rigor and attention to
precise, if confusing
and obscure, detail.
Preserving or integrating whatever
"communities of interest" may exist
in neighborhoods or larger contiguous areas is not
a goal for the
Council Districting process. In fact, the
inclusion or synergizing of
communities of interest within a Council District
could conceivably
upset the status quo and so may need to be
actively opposed, for
example by breaking up
possible communities of interest across
multiple Council Districts.
Neighborhood Council boundaries, on the other
hand, can and should be
nebulous, constantly shifting, and indeterminate,
as Greg Nelson told
me, because the NCs aren't going to have any real
power and so who
cares if communities of interest can actually
organize themselves
coherently in the form of NCs?
Two alternate approaches could conceivably
actually empower
individuals and communities. One, mentioned above,
would be to build
City Council districts on the model being used for
Neighborhood
Councils and in similar numbers. In short, to let
communities and
individuals aggregate themselves into 150 or so
Council Units with
nebulous, constantly shifting, and indeterminate
boundaries and have
these entities elect City Councilmembers to
represent them at the
citywide level.
There would then be no need for Neighborhood
Councils, which will have
turned into City Council Districts.
A second approach is to take this model one step
further and, making
full use of the Internet and other communications
tools, let
registered voters (and possibly others) aggregate
themselves in a
creative and fluid way across the city in whatever
way they find most
appropriate and useful.
What this specifically would mean is that members
of a
particular religious affiliation, or a gender, or
a sexual
orientation, or shared age range, income or
education level, height,
ethnicity or whatever could create their own
"virtual caucus" and
elect as many representatives to the citywide
representative body as
their numbers entitle them, on a proportional
basis.
Perhaps the City should have a bi-cameral
legislature, with one house
elected according to the 150 or so
geographically-determined districts
and the other elected by the various virtual
caucuses of aggregated
individuals.
This might work by letting whomever represents a
certain number of
people cast that many votes in the citywide body.
Of course, with the
perfection of the technology and the universality
of Internet access,
we might be able to dispense with the
representative aspect
partially or entirely and let everyone vote
directly on the matters at
hand. Or a direct vote might only appear in the
context of vetoing
legislation passed by the representative body.
Other fluid and
constantly-evolving methods and processes should
be sought, developed
and used to give citizens the same power and
choices they have in
other areas of their lives.
New technology will enable the same flexibility in
politics and public
decision-making that we now see in manufacturing,
e-commerce,
entertainment, business and almost every aspect of
contemporary life
except politics.
Of course, letting all "people"
participate in this system rather than
all "registered voters" raises in
another form the same dichotomy
between the rules governing City Council elections
and the creation of
Neighborhood Councils.
A fully inclusive system of democracy would
include people who are not
registered to vote, who live in the City but are
not citizens, who
live in the City without the permission of the US
Government, or are
under 18. Purists may cringe at the idea of
allowing such people to
participate in public decisions affecting anyone,
let alone the
purists. Let me mention anecdotally the many
"people" I encountered
while collecting signatures who, when I asked them
if they were
registered to vote, proudly snapped an aggressive
and self-assured,
"NO!" After hearing this over and over
again, I asked a few of them
if they'd mind if their right to vote were
revoked. None of them
objected to this suggestion. If they don't want to
participate, maybe
we should let some of those currently excluded
from the municipal
democratic process participate in their place.
Remember that the New City Charter under which we
are being governed,
and which mandates the creation of the
Neighborhood Councils, was
approved by fewer than one in ten of us. To say
that high school
students or foreign nationals should be excluded
from the municipal
decision-making process because including them
would undermine our
"democracy" is ludicrous. What
democracy?
Students and foreign nationals are fully included
in the consumption
and production processes. What makes the political
process different?
The Internet is fully utilized in the consumption
and production
processes. What makes the political process
different?
Including everyone and using the best technology
we have in the
process of self-government are essential if real
democracy is to be
preserved and extended. We forget at our peril
that the enormous
material progress and success enjoyed by the
people in this country
have come about because of social openness,
political inclusion, and
vigorously exercised civil liberties. If we forget
that and try to
have the fruits of these virtues without
practicing them, we will be
in for some unpleasant surprises, however we
define the boundaries of
the units we use to govern ourselves.
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From: virtualorange@yahoo.com
Date: Mon Nov 5, 2001 11:38 am
Subject: Neighborhood Watch, Neighborhood Councils, Security
Portal Network
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From: AlanKotok@cs.com
Date: Mon Nov 5, 2001 7:34am
Subject: RE: [EuronaCUEE] Community, Democracy,
Politics
Marc, et al:
That's some good first-person reporting of your
experiences. Many
thanks for sharing those experiences with us.
I saw an article this weekend (I believe New York
Times) that
neighborhood watches are being revived to keep a
watch on potential
terror threats. This could be a function for the
neighborhood
councils in Los Angeles that you described.
A new study by the Congress Online project shows
that (are you sitting
down?), the public wants more relevance and
substance in Congressional
Web sites. My reporting on this study is found on
at:
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/10818/84062.
Best regards.
Alan Kotok
AlanKotok@c...
http://www.technewslit.com/
Editor, <E-Business*Standards*Today/>, http://www.disa.org/dailywire/
Editor, Techno-Politics:
http://www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/us_techno_politics
To Alan and Everyone Else,
Not only could neighborhood watch programs be
integrated into on- and
off-line Neighborhood Council operations, but so
could community
policing, after school programs, protection for
students on the way to
school, and ongoing physical clean-up, anti-drug,
anti-gang, and
other neighborhood-specific upgrade projects.
I've already proposed to the Office of Homeland
Security that they
create a "Security Portal Network" of
localized websites in each of
the country's 3,066 counties and use this network
to mediate
discussions among all the federal agencies
involved with security and
all the local agencies with responsibility for
related functions in
each particular area.
These discussions would be secure and not available
to the general
public. But a second part of each of these 3,066
websites would be
open to the public, and would contain the latest
and most accurate
data from federal and local authorities on issues
of concern in the
security area.
Of course these Security Portal Websites could be
directly linked to
the Neighborhood Council sites, giving residents
an obvious and
reliable place to turn to for all the
security-related information
they need, customized for their own specific area.
Sincerely,
Marc Strassman
Founder
EuronaCUEE
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From: virtualorange@yahoo.com
Date: Wed Nov 21, 2001 11:27 pm
Subject: When Does Institutionalized Conflict of Interest Slide
Into Fascism?
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Dear EuronaCUEE mailing list subscriber,
I've been working since 1994 to create an
e-Congress of distributed
representatives living in the districts they
represent, since 1996 to
allow remote Internet voting, since 2000 to
introduce Smart
Initiatives legally signable over the Internet,
and since the
beginning of this year to give citizens better
self-government through
e-government.
Whether dismissed as "visionary but
premature" or "provocative but
impractical," elected officials and
bureaucrats have uniformly and
consistently refused to take any of these ideas
seriously or to put
them into practice.
Fed up with this, I decided to become an elected
official myself. I
entered the race for the vacant Second District
seat on the Los
Angeles City Council. My campaign slogan was
"Technology, Ecology,
Empowerment" and my agenda was to use my
position on the 15-person
City Council to help build a city centered around
sustainability and
the broadest possible use of the Internet and related technologies to
empower people and make the city bureaucracy work
more efficiently.
I got a surprising amount of support from people I
talked to, many of
whom enthusiastically supported my goal of
building a wired ecotopia.
The only problem was that I didn't have enough
money to run a viable
campaign and was forced to withdraw a few weeks
after I began.
One of my opponents, though, had plenty of money.
He'd raised more
than half a million dollars in his last campaign
for the California
State Assembly. He was prohibited by the state
term limits law from
running for a fourth two-year term in 2002, so he
contemplated a run
for Secretary of State, raising $600,000 while he
thought it over.
He finally decided to run for City Council. He's
still running, and
he's got plenty of money to run with.
I did some research on the Net to find out where
he was getting his
money. The results of this research, some thoughts
on the
implications of what I found, and links allowing
you to follow in my
virtual footsteps are included in the article
below, which is called,
"When Does Institutionalized Conflict of
Interest Slide Into Fascism?"
The electro-democratization of politics and
government that the
Internet makes possible must necessarily be
carried out under the
terms and conditions imposed by the existing
systems of politics and
government. So many millions of people who, like
me, realize how much
better we could govern ourselves using the tools
I'm using to
communicate with you now, also feel that the
existing political system
is antiquated, corrupt, boring, and irrelevant,
and these perceptions
drive many away from politics in any form,
including efforts to
implement better, electronically-upgraded forms of
politics,
elections, and government.
As a result, we have a continuing upward curve for
performance,
results, and satisfaction for spreadsheets, video
games, and
programming languages, but an equally steady
decline in the
accessibility, responsiveness, efficiency, and
performance of politics
and government. The relative pleasure we get from
hedonistic
electronic toys and unresponsive non-electronic
government leads many
logical people to spend more time gaming and less
time politicking,
which is absolutely fine with the small elite that
controls the
government.
These people, their agents, and their companies
have no problem making
money from selling video games or tv shows or
movies about vast
conspiracies directed from secret agencies that
exercise universal
control. In fact, these themes are increasingly
the stock content of
video games, tv shows, and movies. As long as the
real distribution
of power is not disturbed those in control are
happy to tighten their
control by accumulating more money by selling
games whose
simulated worlds grotesquely parody a social and
political reality
that may be all too true, and increasingly so.
If we are to break out of
this trap, we need to know its dimensions
and more about the flow of money and power within
it. The article
below is intended to spark some discussion about
the nature of our
imprisonment and incite some brainstorming
about how we might break
out.
Further inspiration may perhaps be found in Act
II, Scene 2 of Hamlet:
HAMLET Denmark's a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ Then is the world one.
HAMLET A goodly one; in which there are many
confines, wards and
dungeons, Denmark being one o' the worst.
Our current situation is perhaps no worse than
that faced by Prince
Hamlet. Let us strive, therefore, to achieve a
more satisfactory
outcome to our predicament than he was able to
forge.
All of you are vigorously invited to submit
responses, long or short,
attacking, praising, or otherwise commenting on
this article, for the
perusal of other list members.
Please send your text to: EuronaCUEE@yahoogroups.com
Those of you living in what appear to me sitting
here on the Western
Edge of North America as the less-benighted realms
of the European
Union are especially invited to submit material
comparing and
contrasting the prospects for electronic political
evolution and
transformation and how they are effected by
campaign contributions and
other anti-democratic forces at work in your own
countries and in the
EU generally.
Thank you all,
Marc Strassman
Moderator
European-North American Citizens United for
Excellence in E-Government
When Does Institutionalized Conflict of Interest
Slide Into Fascism?
By Marc Strassman
President, Etopia
etopia@pacificnet.net
November
21, 2001
Copyright © 2001 by Marc Strassman. All rights
reserved.
The text for today's sermon comes from a comment
made by one lawyer to
another on Steven Bochco's fictional-but-realistic
new television
drama, "Philly." They're talking about
how a new judge, played by
Veronica Hamel, got her job.
"I guess she made the necessary
pay-off." Pause. "I mean
contribution."
Just as one person's "terrorist" may be
another's "freedom fighter,"
to some people what others, including the
government made up of
recipients of them, call a
"contribution" is, to them, actually a
"bribe."
This semantic conflict is central to the
discussion which follows.
None of the calls I made to the Indian tribes
which each gave Tony
Cardenas $25,000 for his last Assembly campaign
were returned. I
re-called the Agua Caliente Tribe, and was told by
the secretary to
the Chairman, Richard Milanovich, that, "We
don't make comments about
how we spend our money or how other people spend
theirs."
Using Google on the Internet, I was able to track
down Barry Brokaw,
former California Legislature staffer and now a
lobbyist who
represents the same Agua Caliente Tribe that
wouldn't talk to me. He
argued against the proposition that Tony Cardenas
is a
"rent-a-politician" on the payroll and
under the control of the Agua
Caliente. Citing what he said was Cardenas'
"strong support" for
Indians, Brokaw claimed that the Assemblyman's
work on behalf of his
(Brokaw's) clients began before Cardenas had
received any money from
them at all.
He further argued that the Indians were merely
helping their friend
and supporter. Asked about the possibility of
dubious relationships
arising in cases where private organizations give
large sums of money
to elected officials and these officials act in
ways beneficial to
their interests, Brokaw asserted that, "It's
legal conduct." This
made me think of how the tobacco companies,
through their lobbyists,
are always pointing out that selling tobacco is
also lawful behavior.
Possibly his phrasing had the same effect on
Brokaw himself, because
he immediately added, presumably as further
support for his argument,
that the next step down this slippery slope would
be the regulation of
"fat content."
According to Brokaw, then, the money Cardenas gets
from the Indians is
a reward for his previous service, not an
incentive to continue
delivering the goods. Let's ignore the most
fundamental principle of
behaviorist psychology, namely, that if you
reinforce a behavior, you
get more of it, and move on.
This dynamic, or at least this argument, obviously
can be applied to
the whole universe of privately-funded elections,
at the local, state,
and especially the federal, levels, where the most
money is at stake.
When House Members and Senators, mostly Democrats,
suggest that it may
be excessive to turn over hundreds of billions of
dollars to rich
people and big corporations, other House Members
and Senators,
generally Republicans and often Trent Lott or Phil
Gramm, generally
respond by accusing their colleagues from the
other side of the aisle
of conducting "class warfare."
This dispassionate term, presumably Marxist in
origin and most clearly
exemplified in the history of the last century in
the execution by the
Bolsheviks of the Russian Czar and his family in a
Siberian basement
and the dumping of their bodies down a well, can
apparently be used
without irony by Republican leaders to excoriate
anyone daring to
argue against the massive transfers of money and
influence to the top
few percent of American families under the Reagan,
Bush, and Bush
administrations, which administrations were, not
incidentally, brought
to power in campaigns fueled by the
"contributions" of these same
rich and the corporations they run and control.
The class-based and government-spearheaded
re-distribution of wealth
favored and implemented by succeeding Republican
administrations and
legislatures is NOT class-warfare, but a
"carefully-targeted
investment incentive program," designed to
stimulate the economy, or
fight terrorism, or get things moving again.
Arguing against it on
the grounds that it will do nothing to stimulate
the economy, fight
terrorism, or get anything moving again is, in the
eyes and words of
the Republicans, "class warfare,"
presumably on the order of what was
done to the Romanovs.
While the immediate results of essentially
stealing from the poor to
give to the rich are bad enough, if we go back to
Tony Cardenas and
his relations with the Indians and compare his
situation with that of
elected representatives in general, we arrive at a
far more terrifying
prospect. Sorry, a far more ominous prospect.
We already have a government of the rich, by the
rich, and for the
rich. This is because they use the money they have
to buy politicians
who will, acting in their official capacities, and
under the cover of
a money laundering system that converts bribes to
contributions by the
simple expedient (some would say magical act) of
posting numbers on
the Web, give them a very respectable return on
their investments.
Now, with this system in place, and the horrendous
and tragic events
of September 9th as a background and an excuse,
Bush and the
Republicans are attempting a second coup as a
follow-up to the theft
of the 2000 election. In this one, hundreds of
billions of dollars,
including the utterly shameless rebating of tens
of billions of
dollars in Minimum Alternative Tax payments to
major corporations,
enough money is being turned over to a small
enough proportion of the
population that it will have no trouble at all,
operating under the
current campaign finance laws, using this
additional income to elect
more Republican Representatives, Senators, and
Presidents to ensure
both the continuation or the gutting of campaign
finance laws and the
passage of laws turning over more and more of the
nation's wealth to
the wealthy benefactors whose completely legal
financial support of
those whose passion and disinterested commitment
to the highest
possible principles and values makes this further
concentration of
wealth possible.
Combine this with the Bush-Ashcroft plan for the
gutting of civil
liberties in the name of patriotism and security,
the publics' avid
support for this plan, and the further wave of
support for the
President likely to be occasioned by the
"victory" in Eastasia (sorry,
I meant Afghanistan) and even the mildly-paranoid
could start to
believe that there might soon be something out
there that we might
not, eventually, like.
Vis a vis the willingness of Americans to
sacrifice civil liberties in
general as long as they don't believe doing so
will cause them any
personal pain beyond longer waits in airports, I
usually like to cite
the statement of a pre-World War II German
intellectual who lamented,
"When they came for the Communists, I was not
a Communist, so I did
nothing….And when they came for me, there was no
one left to help me."
But I think it would be more pertinent at this
point to quote the
statement Winston Smith, the protagonist of
Orwell's 1984, used to
prevent his torturer from releasing a huge rat
upon his immobilized
face: "Do it to her," he screamed.
"Do it to her."
Republicans in Washington want to give hundreds of billions of dollars
to the people and organizations (the rich and the
corporations they
control) about whom they care most deeply,
passionate and sincerely.
Possibly, like Tony Cardenas, many members of the
US Congress worked
very hard for the interests of their present
benefactors even before
they received a single dollar of their campaign
contributions.
I haven't checked, but I'd guess that more than a
few Republican
Congressmembers worked tirelessly and without pay
as members and
officers of their college Republican organizations
and the Young
Republican organization and the Republican Party
itself. In fact,
these organizations are essentially the farm teams
from which
potential Congressmembers are recruited, not
incidentally on the basis
of their perceived ability to articulate and
manipulate on behalf of
the Republican agenda, whatever it currently is.
At every stage in their pre-contribution-receiving
careers, these
politicians spoke out on family values
(anti-feminism), energy
security (cheap oil), and a lean government (no
subsidies to
non-Republicans). When the pick of the litter had
been picked,
however, they DID get their contributions. Under
the current system
of campaign finance, getting their contributions
is the core, and the
end-all and be-all, of running for office.
Now that they are in office (where they have
approximately 90 % chance
of being re-elected), incumbent Representatives
regularly and without
much comment, receive massive contributions from
people and companies
whose bidding they do from day to day. In fact,
that is the essence
of what they do. They get money from people and
companies with
business before them as the elected government of
the country, and
they give (or try to give) these people whatever
they ask for or want
("give them their money's worth").
Democrats are not fundamentally different from
Republicans in this
regard. Many rich people are Democrats and many
corporations hedge
their bets by giving pay-off (sorry again,
contributions) to both
parties and candidates in both parties, so they'll
have "access" to
the winner whoever he or she is.
It may be argued that there is no alternative to
this arrangement.
Campaigns cost millions of dollars. We can't have
the government
paying for it because then ALL the incumbents will
be re-elected.
Television advertising costs a lot. Running a
campaign to get your
message out to the people costs a lot. Etc.
Political campaigns cost a lot for several
reasons. I'd say the two
biggest ones are the high cost of television
adverting and the growing
apathy of the public when it comes to politics,
which is largely
fueled by the public's view that politics is
deeply corrupt and that
the main source of that corruption is the system
of campaign finance
that claims its legitimacy from the need to break through
the
encrusted apathy that it is itself largely
responsible for.
As for television advertising, while this is not
true for cable,
broadcast stations are private corporations making money through
the
monopoly control of spectrum space granted them by
and from the
public, through its government. If it weren't for
incumbents' fear
that providing free television time to all
candidates might undermine
their own incumbency, arrangements would have been
made long ago for
such a use of the public airwaves. You can be sure
that in the
science-fictiony event that Congressional
elections were being won by
90% of challengers instead of 90% of incumbents,
the rationale and
reality concerning free airspace would change 180
degrees faster than
you could say, "Edward R. Murrow."
Of course, there's always the fact that hardly
anyone is complaining
about any of this. I found in an informal poll I
recently took that
most of the people flying American flags on their
cars (including SUVs
which contribute so much to eliminating the need
for carpet bombings
to defeat enemies partly financed by petro-dollars
provided in
abundance by their drivers) to show their
patriotism are proud to be
Americans but feel very strongly that politics and
politicians are
blood-sucking perverts we'd all be better off
without. Most people
not flying American flags, incidentally, felt the
same way.
George W. Bush is no Mussolini, let alone Fuhrer,
but a country of
frightened people who believe in their country
above all else but
despise and loath the political class are nothing
if not a classic
soil for the planting of the seeds of fascism.
I'm hesitant to invoke the so often-cited
admonition, "If we do
such-and-such, then the terrorists will win."
But even some members
of the Bush administration, whose titular head has
characterized Osama
bin Ladin, al-Queda, and all their ilk as
"the most evil people there
are" have acknowledged their skill and
cunning in carrying out their
murderous activities. I could be wrong, but I
suspect their abilities
and perceptiveness go beyond mere cunning.
Maybe they knew consciously or maybe only
unconsciously, but someone
these killers must have known that given the
fundamental nature of
American society and the values and loyalties of
its leaders (bin
Ladin had, after all, been a partner of the
President-to-be [#43] in
the Arbusto oil company) that a monstrous attack
on America might be
able to push it over the brink into
fascism. That indeed would be a
satisfying victory for a theocratic fascist whose
most-sought-after
legacy has for some time been "the man who
destroyed America."
As we all know from countless horror films,
vampires and zombies can
retain the outward appearance of who they once
were, even after
becoming transformed or dead within. An America
festooned ten layers
deep in red, white, and blue pieces of cloth,
where a few families own
everything worth owning, where the poor are
snacks, and what was once
the middle class can hang onto its gadgets and
rituals only at the
whim of Unaccountable Power might still seem to
those lobotomized by
television and the omnipresent iconic image of
Brittany Spears'
mammaries to be the real thing, but like the
actual, as opposed to the
mythical, Statue of Liberty, such an existence
would be hollow to the
core. The clanging of the wretched within would be
an echo of the
emptiness in our hearts and the death knell of
democracy reverberating
into a long future history that will sorely miss
what we will have
destroyed.
Coda
What was once and famously said by an American
military commander of a
certain village in Vietnam, "We had to destroy it to save it" was
self-serving gibberish when it was spoken in the
60s and would be just
as ominously silly if the "it"
referenced in it referred to American
democracy itself. But karma is karma and what goes
around comes
around. So we ought to remember that little
village when we consider
burning down our own country at the suggestion of
the spiritual
descendents of those who ordered the thatch-roofed
huts in a distant
land obliterated with fire from the earth and fire
from the sky.
|
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From: AlanKotok@cs.com
Date: Thu Nov 22, 2001 5:57 am
Subject: Re: [EuronaCUEE] When Does Institutionalized Conflict
of Interest Slide Into ...
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Marc, et al.
A little practical note here: the House of Representatives is eight
signatures shy of the 218 needed for a discharge petition to bring the Shays-Meehan
bill (campaign finance reform) to the floor, bypassing the committee and
Speaker that have bottled up the legislation. The Senate has already
passed the bill, known there as McCain-Feingold, and there is little
likelihood that President Bush would veto it if it passed.
Americans now have a choice: you can light a candle or curse the
darkness. This opportunity to make a fundamental change in the way
campaigns are financed and conducted may not come again for many years. Now
is the time to get busy and let your members of Congress know how you feel.
Better send faxes or e-mail; they're a little nervous about postal mail
these days.
Alan Kotok
AlanKotok@cs.com
http://www.technewslit.com/
Editor, <E*Business*Standards Today/>, http://www.disa.org/dailywire/
Editor, Techno-Politics,
http://www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/us_techno_politics
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From: virtualorange@yahoo.com
Date: Mon Nov 26, 2001 11:17 pm
Subject: Let's Incorporate "Civic Space" into
E-Government Worldwide
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Dear EuronaCUEE subscriber,
After all the talking I've done about using modern
interactive
technology to facilitate the democratic process,
it was very
gratifying to see that San Francisco public
television station KQED
has just carried out a public event focused on the
subject of how
interactive and Internet-based tools can help
build an informed and
involved public.
You can learn more about it at:
http://www.kqed.org/insidekqed/civicspace/eventone/summary.html
Let's work to implement and propagate such
empowering tools worldwide.
Sincerely,
Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
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From: virtualorange@yahoo.com
Date: Fri Nov 30, 2001 2:31 pm
Subject: Empowerment vs. Disempowerment via Government Use of
the Internet
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Dear EuronaCUEE subscriber,
A few weeks ago I had a chance to appear as a
call-in guest on the
local National Public Radio station's public
affairs program, "Talk of
the City." I recorded my moment on audio
tape, re-recorded it to a
MiniDisc player, processed it in RealNetwork's
RealProducer, and
uploaded it to a web site, from which you can
download it by clicking
on the link below:
http://64.70.255.231/users/thebook/KPCCcarn.html
It focuses on the contradiction between ruling out
use of the Internet
as a tool for political empowerment while
proposing to use it as a
means of political surveillance.
Sincerely,
Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
|
Here’s the text of this audio segment:
… I’ve been working since about 1995 to convince the
government to use the Internet and related technologies to empower people, so
they could vote over the Internet, so they could sign initiative petitions over
the Internet. These were designed to
take money out of politics and give more power to the people to decide how
their government would make policy. I’ve
been recently working on trying to convince the City government to provide
websites for all the Neighborhood Councils in Los Angeles. I’ve spent almost ten days trying to get an
e-mail through to the Office of Homeland Security, which doesn’t seem to have a
phone number or a web address, to convince it that it should build websites in
all of the counties in the country to provide a means for people to get
authoritative and up-to-date information about things that bother them. I
haven’t heard from them. It’s been very
difficult.
On the other hand, we see here that the Government,
[through] Carnivore and related systems, they’re poised, they’re ready, they’ve
been prepared, they’re taking advantage of the situation to implement systems
to use technology to surveil people, to sort of disempower them. And I’d like
to get more listeners’ comments on this paradox: that the Internet is not viable, it is not acceptable
to use to empower people but it is acceptable for the government to use it to
disempower people.
Recorded October
31, 2001, on “Talk of the City” with Kittie Felde on KPCC, 89.3 FM,
Pasadena, California
|
From: Virtual Orange <virtualorange@yahoo.com>
Date: Fri Nov 30, 2001 11:49 pm
Subject: DSF Plus Proposal for IT at DONE
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Dear Etopia Group list subscriber,
Ricardo Reyes is the IT director at the Department
of
Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE), the Los Angeles city
agency responsible for facilitating the creation
and
operation of the City's Neighborhood Councils.
Today I sent him the e-mail below, in hopes that
he
will work with us to provide web sites for all the
aspiring and certified Neighborhood Councils.
Stay tuned.
Regards,
Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
Dear Mr. Reyes,
I'm the Chair of the Electronic Outreach
Subcommittee
of the Outreach Committee of the Valley Village
Neighborhood Council Organizing Committee.
My company, Etopia, is an Authorized Re-seller of
Dynamic Site Framework software from PPT, Inc., of
Lancaster, Pennsylvania. DSF software is a packaging
of the tools PPT used to build the State of
Pennsylvania's web portal.
You can visit Pennsylvania's PAPowerPort at:
http://www.state.pa.us/PAPower/
You can learn more about DSF at:
http://www.dsfsolutions.com/dsfsolutions/site/default.asp
Etopia is integrating JeevesONE into the DSF
system,
in order to provide users with the ability to
easily
access all the information at the site through
questions asked in normal language.
We are also integrating Vivarto into the DSF
system,
which will provide survey, discussion, and voting
functionality for stakeholders/users, to
complement
the chatroom capabilities already built into DSF
itself.
Etopia has been working with Gemplus and Online
Assessment Corporation, of Silicon Valley and
Australia, respectively, to integrate smart cards and
digital certificates with online surveying and
voting.
Adding the combined capabilities of these
companies'
products would allow Angelenos to securely vote on
issues of interest to them.
All of this could be provided for less than what
it
now costs for the City to duplicate and mail the
2,500
paper flyers it is now authorized to spend per
Neighborhood Council in two months.
If we want to empower our neighborhoods and the
"stakeholders" in them, we should do so,
using the
best tools available. The integrated Etopia Suite
of
E-Government Tools outlined above would be a way
of
doing this.
I hope we can speak soon about mustering the
political
will to move ahead expeditiously in this
direction.
Sincerely,
Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
|
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From: Virtual Orange <virtualorange@yahoo.com>
Date: Sat Dec 1, 2001 4:48 pm
Subject: Let's Move All of the Neighborhood Councils into the
21st Century, While Saving Postage
|
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Dear Etopia Group subscriber,
Below is my latest effort to convince the City of
Los
Angeles to equip their Neighborhood Councils with
the
tools they need to do the empowerment the City
says
it's trying to create.
I'm sending copies of this piece to you, to all
the
City Council members' offices, four City newspapers,
one television station, and the IT director of the
Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE).
I hope they get the message.
Regards,
Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
Let's Move All the Neighborhood Councils into the
21st
Century, While Saving
Postage
By Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
etopia@pacificnet.net
December 1, 2001
Copyright, 2001, by Marc Strassman, all rights
reserved.
Last Thursday night, at the second meeting of the
Valley Village Neighborhood Council Organizing
Committee, one of the organizers addressed herself
to
Matthew Fitzgerald, Project Coordinator with the
Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE), the
city agency responsible for facilitating and
financing
the Neighborhood Councils. She said she wanted to
produce and distribute a flyer for purposes of
"outreach," one of the core requirements
and
priorities in the certification process. She
assumed
that DONE would pay for the production and mailing
of
2,500 flyers.
Her statement occurred within the context of an
unanswered question: what level of response does
the
City require from those outreached to? Is a good
faith effort to outreach to people, businesses,
and
organizations sufficient or is a certain level of
response from those outreached to necessary? What
about underrepresented groups?
After the meeting, I approached Mr. Fitzgerald to
get
more specific and definite information about the
level
of support the City is providing for
not-yet-certified
groups in their efforts to do the required
community
outreach by means of flyer mailing. He told me
that
DONE indeed had a policy of accepting flyers from
emerging groups, making 2,500 copies of them, and
mailing them to a list of specified addressees,
all at
no cost to the group, as long as the master flyer
was
received at least three weeks before the event
being
promoted on the flyer.
I asked how much doing this costs the City. Mr.
Fitzgerald didn't know. I asked how often the City
was prepared to do this for the organizing groups.
He
said once a month. I suggested to him, as I have
so
many times before, that spending the same amount
of
money now going to flyers, most of which had no
impact
at all, on building and promoting a web site for
each
group, might be a more cost-effective way to do
outreach and, subsequently, facilitate the
operation
of the NCs and empower citizens.
He wished me luck in getting the City to do this.
Later that night I called Kinko's to get an
estimate
of the cost of printing 2,500 one-sided flyers on
colored paper. They gave me a figure of $182.00.
Not
counting the cost of stuffing the envelopes, the
cost
of mailing 2,500 flyers at $0.34/each comes to
$850.00. So printing and mailing 2,500 flyers will
cost the City a bit more than $1,000. Mr.
Fitzgerald
has said that the City is prepared and willing to
spend $1,000 per month for every emerging
Neighborhood
Council in the City to help them do
outreach-by-mail.
My company, Etopia, has it on good authority from
PPT
of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that they could
provide
the City with the means of constructing 150
state-of-the-art web sites using their DSF
technology
and getting them operational, including training
content managers and site administrators to run
them
properly, for $250,000. This comes to, rounding
upward, $1700 per site, for functionality for each
NC
roughly equivalent to that now enjoyed by the
State of
Pennsylvania on its web portal, at:
http://www.state.pa.us/PAPower/
This represents less than two months of flyers, at
the
rate the City has already publicly acknowledged it
is
willing to pay, and has paid already.
For an additional cost, it would also be possible
to
add the "Ask Jeeves" functionality of
natural language
question asking to each and all of the NC sites.
This
would be provided by the JeevesONE product in a
manner
now on display on the State of Washington's web
portal, with its "Ask George" system,
at:
http://access.wa.gov/
In brief, for less that $2,500 (two-and-a-half months
of flyers) each Neighborhood Council could have,
for
its exclusive use, a web portal equivalent to the
State of Pennsylvania's and an automated query
engine
similar to that now being used to popular acclaim
by
the State of Washington.
And it could use these tools both to organize
itself
towards Certification and to operate for years
afterwards as it carries on its work, constantly
building its information resources and
capabilities,
through e-mail lists, chat rooms, archives of past
meetings, links to local businesses, and possibly
advertising revenue, not to mention the
possibilities
of doing additional outreach and community-based
education through streaming audio and streaming
video.
These are not within the capability of even
two-sided
flyers, of any color.
I haven't seen any of the lists to which these
paper
flyers are being mailed, but it's my guess that
2200
or 2300 of them end up in wastebaskets, unread,
and
that very few of the others will move their
recipients
to action. Given the flood of paper most people
receive in the mail, most of it junk mail, sending
out
pieces of paper announcing meetings is not a very
effective way to "outreach" to anyone
about anything,
especially given the rampant negativity regarding
any
form of political activity that is currently so
widespread and which the NC project is now
attempting
to overcome.
On the other hand, the individuals and groups who
are
most likely to get involved in an effort such as
organizing a Neighborhood Council for their
locality
or participating in one once it's been certified
are
demonstrably those who tend to be online, to use
email, to visit web sites and to be interested in
exchanging political information through the
Internet.
Spending $2,000 or even $2,500 of City money to
build
a website for an emerging NC and to publicize its
URL
on City sites and through earned and paid media is
therefore a much more cost-effective and powerful
way
of doing outreach and it will also, as discussed
above, give the NC and its members powerful tools
for
carrying out other functions for their group.
Of course, if the point is to go through the
motions,
and to simply be able to say, "We sent out
2,500
flyers, so we must be doing outreach," then
there's
not much incentive to use a method that can
actually
find and involve community members in the real
work of
building an NC. The choice between using 19th
Century
"handbills" (flyers) or 21st Century
URLs is therefore
a choice between wasting money on show or spending
it
carefully on something with real impact.
What about communities with low or very low
Internet
penetration rates? One way to manage such areas is
to simply send out flyers and not bother to build
a
web site for local residents. But mailed paper
flyers
are no more likely to be effective in a low-income
area than in a high-income area, and it's possible
they'd be even less successful. Constructing a web
site as a means of politically organizing
residents of
low-income, low Internet penetration, can focus
attention, inside and outside the area, on the
need to
increase Internet diffusion in that area.
It can also serve as a wake-up call to encourage
Internet usage at schools, public offices, and
other
community-based public spaces and to increase
Internet
penetration and usage throughout the area through
public expenditures, private contributions, and
other
community-based efforts.
Leveraging increased Internet accessibility in
order
to facilitate the creation and operation of NCs
can
serve to improve not just the political status of
community members, but their personal,
educational,
and economic access, thus benefiting an area in
multiple ways.
The Citywide Alliance of Neighborhood Councils is
an
organization that describes its mission as:
"to foster
communication between the diverse array of groups
forming and operating Neighborhood Councils across
the
far flung communities of Los Angeles." You can find
it at:
http://www.allncs.org/
It currently features a list of communities that
have
already filed their Certification papers and
another
list of what it calls "forming Neighborhood
Councils
around LA." Most, but not all, of the NCs on
either
of these two lists appear on both of them.
Some of the sites are pretty impressive. Some have
very little information. And seven of them, more
than
a third, were built using Neighborhood Link, a
rudimentary piece of free software that lets users
establish a web presence but not do much more.
Some simple facts emerge from an overall
examination
of these sites. One, people organizing NCs know
that
a web site on the Internet is a powerful tool for
building and operating their Neighborhood Council.
Two, left to their own devices, without government
support, people in well-to-do areas will provide
themselves with cool tools and people in less
well-to-do areas will have to make do with cheap
substitutes or nothing at all.
An article in the October 9, 2001, edition of the
Metropolitan News-Enterprise says:
More than 100 advisory councils may eventually
seek
certification and, with it, city funding and
administrative support. Most are believed to be in
the
earliest stages of organizing, but at least a dozen
were expected to file this fall.
Read the whole article at:
http://www.metnews.com/articles/nchx100901.htm
I haven't heard anything said by anyone in or out
of
government about one the functions of Neighborhood
Councils being to reduce the drastic inequalities
between some parts of Los Angeles and others. But it
seems like simple common sense that DONE ought to
be
assuring that residents in every part of the City
at
least have access to the same tools for organizing
themselves into Neighborhood Councils.
If the City of Los Angeles, through DONE, were to
provide every one of the hundred or more groups
organizing, or trying to organize, their
communities
into Neighborhood Councils for the purpose of
empowering themselves and giving themselves a
voice in
City affairs, with the means and training to use
its
own web site for these purposes, it would have
gone a
good part of the way towards fulfilling its
mandate.
And saved a lot of postage as well.
|
|
From: Virtual Orange <virtualorange@yahoo.com>
Date: Sun Dec 16, 2001 1:52 pm
Subject: Internet Voting Redux and the First Global Meeting of
EuronaCUEE
|
|
Dear EuronaCUEE subscriber,
Attached please find (in PDF format) my latest
effort
to build a case for Internet voting. If you don't
already have the free Adobe Acrobat Reader that
you
need to read this document, you can download it
at:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
On a more practical note, I have recently become
associated with a company that provides web-based
voice conferencing services. I am in the process
of
convincing them to let me use their system to convene
the First Global Meeting of the EuronaCUEE.
For more information about this company, Anywhere
Web
Conferencing, go to:
http://www.anywherewc.com/
For more information about the company that makes
the
web conferencing platform we'd be using, go to:
http://www.centra.com/corporate/index.asp
I am writing to invite you to this meeting. To
determine when we convene it, I am asking you to
send
me e-mail listing the dates and times that would
work
best for you. I expect 30-60 minutes should be
enough
for this first meeting.
Please convert your preferred local times to
Pacific
Standard Time, which is what we use here in Los
Angeles. I will aggregate the responses and try to
pick a date and a time that is best for the most
people ("optimized
cyber-utilitarianism"). I hope we
can convene this event as soon as possible, so
please
submit the earliest time you can conveniently
attend.
When I've done that, I will notify each of you of
the
selected date and time and also send you the user
name
and password you'll need to gain entrance to the
meeting. When we meet, we can talk about whatever
you
like, hopefully including a bit about e-government
where you are, who you are, and other topics of
mutual
interest. In fact, when you send in your preferred
date and time, why don't you list two or three
local
and/or global topics you'd like us to consider.
Please send your e-mail stating preferred date(s)
and
time(s) to me at:
etopia@pacificnet.net
This might also be a good time for you to reach
out to
friends, co-workers, or neighbors whom you think
might
be interested in joining our group. Tell them to
send
an empty e-mail to:
EuronaCUEE-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
If they sign up, we'll be glad to include them in
our
first meeting. Ask the ones who do join to send
e-mails to me with their preferred meeting times
and
dates, as well as subjects they'd like us to
discuss.
I believe that this and other web conferencing
tools
can do a lot to speed the adoption and practice of
e-government and e-democracy, as well to provide
distance learning and related opportunities. I
hope
that if you feel that way too you will work with
me to
introduce this technology wherever you are
involved
with e-government, e-democracy, e-education, or
even
e-entertainment.
I would be interested in working with you to make
its
introduction into your city or country a matter of
profit for you as well as using it to develop the
infrastructure and practice of e-democracy at
every
level. If you are already interested, or become
interested after you've participated in our web
conferencing demonstration, in working with me on
either the business or government side of this, or
both, please contact me at etopia@pacificnet.net.
What I'd really like to build with you is a global
network of activist-entrepreneurs doing good by
virtualizing and expanding democratic
participation in
government while doing well by providing the tools
for
this participation to the governments and other
organizations in a position to buy and deploy
them. I
hope we can talk about this at our upcoming
meeting.
Regards,
Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
|
23
Internet Voting Redux--Yet Another Modest Proposal to Revive an Etopian Dream
from the Last Century.pdf
|
From: "virtualorange" <virtualorange@yahoo.com>
Date: Sat Jan 26, 2002 11:50 pm
Subject: Moving Legislatures Into Cyberspace to Protect Them in
the Age of Terror
|
|
Moving Legislatures Into Cyberspace
to Protect Them in the Age of Terror
By Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
etopia@pacificnet.net
January 26,
2002
Copyright, 2001, by Marc Strassman, all rights
reserved.
Eight years ago, on January 2, 1994, I spoke to the National
Information Infrastructure Task Force, meeting at
the University of
Southern California, and said:
"Why can't the members of Congress vote from
their home districts
while watching the debate on C-SPAN? Why can't
they participate in
the debate from their home districts, or any other
place in the world,
through video teleconferencing? Why can't
constituents throughout a
congressional district participate in
digitally-mediated town halls
and instruct their representative on how to cast
his or her vote on
the Virtual House Floor? Why can't the people vote
on the issues
before the country directly?"
Shortly after September 9, 2001, I concluded that
it would be a good
idea to build a network of websites in every US
county, as a place for
federal, state, and local co-operation in anti-terrorist
planning and
as a one-stop spot for county residents to get
up-to-the-minute and
authoritative anti-terrorist information. No one
was interested,
least of all the Office of Homeland Security run
by Tom Ridge.
But then US Senators were locked out of their
offices in the Hart
Senate Building for weeks because of anthrax-laden letters sent to
offices there. Legislators moved to makeshift
quarters all over
Capitol Hill. Disarray ensured.
Now that President Bush has announced his desire
to spend tens of
billions of additional dollars for anti-terrorist
planning and
protection, I think some of that money should be
spent to build a
fall-back “e-legislature” capability for the
federal Congress, for
every state legislature, and for local city
councils and county boards
of supervisors.
The purpose of these e-legislatures should be to
make it possible to
instantly convene legislatures in cyberspace,
letting members of an
elected assembly meet online from anywhere they
are that has an
Internet connection, dial-up or broadband,
mobile or land-based.
These e-legislature platforms, using Web
conferencing software for
interactive meetings, digital certificates and
smart cards to
authenticate members as entitled to participate in
these meetings, web
site building programs such as Dynamic Site
Framework to generate
multiple individual web sites for members and
committees, and advanced
storage systems to preserve and make accessible
records of all
legislative transactions, would provide all the
functionality enjoyed
now by legislatures meeting in physical space,
and, conceivably, a lot
more.
Incidentally, the current possibilities for
maintaining and enhancing
the democratic legislative process by creating
e-legislatures in
cyberspace, based on the best possible technologies
now available,
will pale in comparison to the possibilities
available to us as
broadband becomes ubiquitous, processors attain 2gigahertz speeds,
mobile and wireless networks expand, and “the
Internet” and
“computers” are integrated into and disappear
behind all manner of
everyday objects.
Of course, putting legislatures into cyberspace in
order to maintain
their seamless operation in the event of some
terrorist attack or the
well-founded fear of a terrorist attack will make
it much easier to
transmit the day-to-day operations of the body to
the citizens, who
will be able to access them over the Internet.
Although I’m reluctant to mention this, putting
legislatures in
cyberspace will also make it much easier for
common, ordinary
citizens, even those who don’t use auditors, to
participate in these
bodies’ deliberations, should the elected
representatives decide that
they are willing to allow common, ordinary
citizens, even those who’ve
demonstrated their disdain for democracy by not
making any “campaign
contributions” to any of the elected officials who
“represent” them,
to participate in their own self-governance.
Further, having a Plan B for the operation of
every state legislature
and local council should give additional pause to
potential terrorists
who might hope to destroy democracy by rendering
the physical space
where it is enacted uninhabitable. Knowing that
legislatures will be
able, without missing a beat, to carry on the work
of democracy over a
network first developed to allow the national
government to function
in the event of nuclear war, should give all such
miscreants serious
pause and all of us an additional measure of
protection, as well as
reassurance.
|
|
From: "virtualorange" <virtualorange@yahoo.com>
Date: Sun Jan 27, 2002 8:07 pm
Subject: Who Should Provision the Future?
|
|
Who Should Provision the Future?
By Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
etopia@pacificnet.net
January 27,
2002
Copyright, 2001, by Marc Strassman, all rights
reserved.
Imagine that all our roads disappear. Interstates,
highways, byways.
How would we get around? Do business? Get stuck in
traffic? Or
imagine that all our roads are privatized, and we
need to pay a toll
to drive across town or up the coast, or wherever.
Few people, except
those who own the roads, would be very happy with
that situation either.
Closing, or privatizing, our roads would be such a
big disaster
because they are absolutely essential to the way
we live and do
business. So let’s ask some basic questions about
these critical
paths between and among the places we have to be.
1.
Who builds and maintains the roads?
2.
Who owns the roads?
3.
Who benefits from their existence?
4.
Who profits most from their existence?
To give equally short and direct answers to these
questions, we can say:
1.
With rare exceptions, roads and built and
maintained by governments.
2.
?The people,? on whose behalf governments rule,
own the roads.
3.
Everyone who drives for free on the roads benefits
from them.
4.
Many businesses profit from the existence of free,
publicly-owned
roads, especially businesses reached by road, and
the oil and
automobile industries, who earn revenues in the
billions for providing
the means for people and businesses to use the
free, publicly-owned
roads to satisfy their own personal and commercial
desires.
During 2001, while private, investor-owned utilities
in California
were ratcheting up their prices by orders of
magnitude, imposing
?rolling blackouts? on their customers, and
heading down a steep slope
to bankruptcy, the taxpayers and other residents
of the City of Los
Angeles were enjoying stable energy prices and reliable supplies of
electricity from the publicly-owned and operated
Department of Water
and Power.
The people and elected officials of the City of Los Angeles had
decided to supply themselves with power and water
from a municipal
utility, and that proved to be a wise decision.
There were no cries
of ?socialism? and no calls to privatize the DWP
as it supplied
reliable energy at stable prices to the people of Los Angeles while
all around the state rate-payers ?served? by
private, investor-owned
energy companies were hit with escalating bills
and rolling blackouts.
Outside the United States, for many years, another crucial means of
transportation, airlines, was often handled by the
national
government. Of course, it was often a monopoly as well,
about which
more below. But national governments, charged with
public health,
national defense, the establishment of a legal
system, and the
protection of the currency, proved themselves also
able to establish
and run a modern airline, with on-time, safety,
and profit levels no
worse, and sometimes better, than their private,
investor-owned
competitors.
Another entity that seems to be working quite well
without being owned
by investors is the Internet. This ?network of
networks? is not even
owned by any government agency. It is an
almost-unique institution
that was established and is maintained by a
diffuse network of
individuals and groups that in many ways mirrors
the electronic
network that it supervises. As with a public road,
people and
businesses are not charged for using it. But just
as access to the
road system is restricted to those capable of
paying private companies
for the vehicles and fuel needed to navigate it,
access to the
Internet is mediated by privately-owned and
operated Internet Service
Providers (ISPS) who sell people and companies the
means to enter and
roam the Internet.
Until now, most of that access has been of the
type called ?dial-up.?
Dial-up Internet access is a method by which a
computer user connects
his or her computer to a “Point-of-Presence” (POP)
by “dialing up”
that POP’s phone number, using a built-in or
added-on modem. Most of
today’s dial-up modems connect Internet users at
56kpbs, fast enough
to get and send e-mail and visit most Web sites,
but not fast enough
to get the high-quality multimedia content (such
as streaming video)
that holds so much promise for expanding
education, culture, and the
profits of the companies that produce it.
So a slow rush is on to provision the masses with
“broadband” Internet
connectivity. “Broadband” refers to such
technologies as DSL and
cable modems, methods that, using the telephone
networks and cable
system, respectively, can deliver information from
the Internet at
speeds in excess of 20 times faster than can
dial-up connections.
Great fortunes are at stake in the transition from
dial-up to
broadband. Every large telecommunications company is deploying its
technical, administrative, financial, and
political resources to
capture as large a share of this important market
as it possibly can.
As a result, legislators and regulators in
Washington, D.C., are
endlessly barraged with press releases, calls from
lobbyists, and
campaign contributions, all designed to secure a
regulatory climate
most favorable to those doing the publicity,
lobbying, and contributing.
The results have not been the best. Prices for DSL
hover near the
$50/month level, as do those for cable modem
access. Authentically
humorous commercials have been created and broadcast on
television
urging computer users to sign up with a phone
giant. Color brochures
are designed and mailed by the cable company
offering low rates for
the first three months (to be followed by higher
rates thereafter).
But broadband penetration remains low, and the cornucopia promised for
a world where everyone has broadband
continues to slip further and
further over a constantly vanishing horizon.
Being able to use the broadband
information superhighway is apparently
not as easy as being able to use the regular one.
Maybe that’s because, unlike the asphalt highways,
the government is
not building or maintaining them.
Maybe they should.
Maybe, just as European countries long ran public
airlines, just as
most cities provide water to their citizens as a
matter of course,
just as some cities (like Los Angeles) provide
electricity to theirs,
just as every jurisdiction provides publicly-owned
and freely-useable
roads to drivers, maybe state governments ought to
provide broadband
Internet connectivity to all their citizens.
There are, in fact, entire countries where the
provision of medical
care is handled by the national government. In
some cases, this leads
to inferior care, in others to average levels of
care much higher than
the average level of care in the US. What works and what doesn’t, and
how well it works, are, of course, matters
determined by the complex
interaction of a country’s national character,
history, environmental
conditions, and so on. But publicly-run health
care is an actuality
of many advanced countries (in all of them, in fact,
except the US).
Be all that as it may be, the provision of broadband
access to the
Internet is not as complicated a matter as caring
for the physical and
mental health of people. It is an engineering
project. In
California, for example, CalTrans is a state agency responsible for
spending billions of dollars to build and maintain
the state’s
extensive freeway system. Surely such an
organization, with its
proven ability to plan, build, and maintain a
network of roads as
complex as the one it manages would be equally
able to plan, build and
manage an equally complex but in many ways similar
fiber optic
broadband network.
Here are pre-emptive answers to two obvious
objections:
1.
Won’t dealing with a CalOptics agency be
formidably and depressingly
difficult, given the well-known propensity of
government bureaucracies
to be ridiculously hard to deal with?
2.
With no competition, won’t technology and service
stagnate, while
prices rise?
Answers:
1.
Dealing with the phone company and the cable
companies, with
interminable holding times and non-responsible “customer
care
representatives” can often be indistinguishable
form dealing with a
government bureaucracy.
2.
Letting the state provide broadband
access need not mean that private
companies are put out of business. They can think
of
publicly-provided broadband
access as more competition, something they
claim to thrive on.
Given the realities of “free-market capitalism” as
revealed by the
Enron debacle, is it really fair to say that
services provided by
government (like security checks in airports
provided by U.S. Customs
agents) are necessarily worse than those (like
security checks in
airports provided by unqualified workers whose low
wages allow for
higher stockholder dividends and executive
salaries)?
What should be obvious is that “business” and
“government” are often
very closely linked. The Pentagon orders $20
billion dollars in
”smart bombs” and an aerospace contractor or group
of them builds it,
but only after contributing regularly to the
campaigns of the Senators
and Representatives who legislated the purchase,
after wining and
dining the generals who picked them to build them,
and after spending
millions on advertising to convince the country
that the bombs are
needed at all, maybe in spots featuring the
generals and the politicians.
How is this “private enterprise”? It’s the direct
use of public tax
money to provide technology that the national
elites believe will
maintain their control and, possibly, serve the
public functions in
whose name it has been justified.
It reflects a system based upon the socialization
of risk and the
privatization of profit.
It’s hypocritical to say we can’t spend public
money to build the
world’s best broadband
network and let people use it, paying fair
market prices or no more than they now pay to use
most roads, because
it’s socialism, because it undermines American
competitiveness,
because it interferes unfairly with the workings
of the market, when
billions and billions of public, taxpayer dollars
are spent in ways
that contribute only to the well-being of the
already very well-off,
but contribute nothing, or less than nothing, to
the lives of ordinary
people and millions of private businesses that
would benefit from the
creation of a ubiquitous broadband
network.
It’s as hypocritical as saying we need to refund
hundreds of millions
of dollars to giant corporations like Ford and
Enron from the
”alternative minimum taxes” they’ve paid, having
skillfully dodged the
need to pay anything else on their billions of profit.
It’s as
hypocritical as cutting the taxes of the
super-rich so they can spend
their additional money on the campaigns of
politicians promising to
cut their taxes further, and so on.
Already, high-tech billionaires are lobbying for
massive tax-credits
that will encourage the adoption of broadband more
widely, while
ensuring the profits of corporations long smug and
adamant in their
opposition to “government interference”
(apparently only as long as
this meant “regulation” not “windfalls”). Rather than grant billions
in tax-credits to giant tech corporations, why not
let a government at
least temporarily charged up with a commitment to
public service build
these broadband
networks itself, with a budget on the scale used to
build the Interstate Highway System as a weapon in
the Cold War?
A publicly-built and operated broadband
network would do us all at
least as much good as that network of asphalt ever
did in making this
country a better place to live and defending it
against its enemies.
|
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From: "virtualorange" <virtualorange@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue Jan 29, 2002 6:18 pm
Subject: Making the Case for E-legislatures
|
|
Dear EuronaCUEE subscriber,
As part of my effort to get e-legislatures
adopted, I sent a copy of
the e-mail I sent you all on January 26th to my
Member of Congress,
Henry Waxman, a leader in the effort to call the
Bush Administration
to account in the matter of Energy policy.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'm sending a
copy of that letter
to everyone on this list, along with the slightly
revised version of
the original e-legislatures article.
Incidentally, I am also in the midst of an effort
to create a
worldwide alliance of progressive political
organizations and
individuals who might want to buy as a group and
then share the use of
one or more Web conferencing platforms.
Web conferencing systems (see an example of it at:
http://www.horizonlive.com
or at http://www.interwise.com) can be
used
to run staff meetings, solicit funds, speak to the
public, give
virtual press conferences, and to store and
archive all of the above
for later posting on the Web.
It now costs around $30,000 to get the use of such
a system for one
year. Few of us have that kind of money. But if
each of us put up
$1,000, we'd all have the use of the system, 24/7,
and could easily
arrange for its usage according to who needed it
the most at any
particular time.
Having it would make it much easier to conduct
interesting meetings,
with voice and video, with participants in every
corner of the
Web-connected world.
Major global media conglomerates already have this
capacity, but they
rarely use it in the interesting and provocative
ways we know we could
if we had the chance. For $1,000 each, now we can.
E-mail me at <etopia@pacificnet.net>
if you're interested.
Regards,
Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
Dear Representative Waxman,
I'm writing to ask if would draft and carry a bill
to create a back-up
"e-legislature" capability to provide
continuity for the Congress in
the event that a catastrophic event, or the threat
of such an event,
renders Capitol Hill uninhabitable. Such an
e-legislature platform
would let Representatives and Senators convene
from any
Internet-connected computer anywhere and carry on
the normal business
of the people, only in cyberspace.
Below is an article I recently wrote that
elaborates on this subject.
I hope you can look it over and let me know if we
could work together
to formulate and pass legislation to implement
such a plan.
As it used to do and could do again, California might set the national
agenda on this by proceeding expeditiously to
create such an
e-legislature for itself, leading the way for
other states and the
Federal government to do the same.
Besides preserving and protecting representative
government, my only
interest in this project is to see that my tiny
consulting company,
Etopia, becomes the lead contractor in the
construction of the
California e-legislature and the provider of
similar systems for the
other states and the Federal government, since
this was originally my
idea and, right now, I am the only person in the
world who cares
enough about it to be writing to you or doing
anything else on its behalf.
This is something I hope for even though, unlike
Microsoft, IBM, Sun
Microsystems or Cisco Systems, Etopia cannot
afford and does not have
an army of high-paid lobbyists deployed around the
Capitol, nor do we
spread monetary largesse on both sides of the
aisle come election time
and year-round.
Having not given you (or anyone else, for that
matter) a single penny
in campaign contributions at any time, I hope to
avoid even the
suspicion of a conflict of interest. Thinking back
to a news story I
saw years ago showing how Rep. Thomas Downey found
time both to play
basketball and lobby ferociously on behalf of his
constituent Grumman
to win a fighter plane contract, I can only
conclude that it is
legitimate, legal, and completely proper for
Members to work on behalf
of policies the practical result of which is to
give money to the
businesses owned by their constituents and/or
located in their districts.
I distinguish a situation where a useful idea that
benefits everyone
and some especially is adopted and pursued by a
Representative who has
not been paid off to do so from the usual case
where they have.
One often gets the impression, although not in
rare cases such as
yours, that delivering legislature bonanzas in
exchange for ?campaign
contributions? is fundamentally ALL that
Representatives (and
Senators) do. It is also my impression that they
usually only listen
to and bestir themselves for their campaign
contributors. As someone
who would like to eliminate or reduce this
nefarious dynamic by, among
other things, granting free television time (over
the publicly-owned
and licensed airwaves) and subsidizing Internet
space for all
candidates, I also feel that it should be the
power and utility of an
idea, not the amount of money behind it, that
determines whether or
not it becomes policy.
In fact, if we are to replace money as the
determinant force in
politics and government, which is a dim but
non-zero probability in
light of Enron, we’ll need to replace it with
something else. For
years, I’ve been suggesting that we replace it
with the search for
good ideas and the full empowerment of the people
to consider and
decide on the ideas they prefer, most likely
facilitated by the power
and reach of a ubiquitously deployed and
accessible broadband Internet.
For all these years, only a few were persuaded.
Now, after September
11th, using technology to enhance security has
become an unquestioned
good. My hope now is that we will apply the
technology we already
have to build e-legislatures and simultaneously
protect ourselves
against losing our governments due to the perverse
and diabolical
machinations of our enemies while making possible
all the extensions
and deepening of the democratic process that I
have been seeking to
implement even before these cataclysmic threats
cast a shadow over our
system of government and way of life.
For those reasons and on that basis, I feel
comfortable asking you to
pursue an innovative policy that I stand to
benefit from personally.
Also, in all likelihood, after I have invested a
lot of time and
energy, and many carefully-formulated words (such
as these) in support
of this project, Microsoft and IBM, Sun and Cisco,
or others of their
ilk, will swoop in with their huge staffs and
massive budgets and
capture the profits from an idea they wanted
nothing to do with when I
first proposed it.
If you'd like to discuss this proposal in more detail,
you can contact
me by phone at 818-985-0251 or by e-mail at <etopia@pacificnet.net>.
Sincerely,
Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
Moving Legislatures Into Cyberspace
to Protect Them in the Age of Terror
By Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
etopia@pacificnet.net
January 26,
2002
Copyright, 2001, by Marc Strassman, all rights
reserved.
Eight years ago, on January 2, 1994, I spoke to the National
Information Infrastructure Task Force, meeting at
the University of
Southern California, and said:
"Why can't the members of Congress vote from
their home districts
while watching the debate on C-SPAN? Why can't
they participate in
the debate from their home districts, or any other
place in the world,
through video teleconferencing? Why can't
constituents throughout a
congressional district participate in
digitally-mediated town halls
and instruct their representative on how to cast
his or her vote on
the Virtual House Floor? Why can't the people vote
on the issues
before the country directly?"
Shortly after September 9, 2001, I concluded that
it would be a good
idea to build a network of websites in every US
county, as a place for
federal, state, and local co-operation in
anti-terrorist planning and
as a one-stop spot for county residents to get
up-to-the-minute and
authoritative anti-terrorist information. No one
was interested,
least of all the Office of Homeland Security run
by Tom Ridge.
But then US Senators were locked out of their
offices in the Hart
Senate Building for weeks because of anthrax-laden letters sent to
offices there. Legislators moved to makeshift
quarters all over
Capitol Hill. Moderate disarray reportedly
ensured.
Now that President Bush has announced his desire
to spend tens of
billions of additional dollars for anti-terrorist
planning and
protection, I think some of that money should be
spent to build a
fall-back ?e-legislature? capability for the
federal Congress, for
every state legislature, and for local city
councils and county boards
of supervisors.
The purpose of these e-legislatures should be to
make it possible to
instantly convene legislatures in cyberspace,
letting members of an
elected assembly meet online from anywhere they
are that has an
Internet connection, dial-up or broadband,
mobile or land-based.
These e-legislature platforms, using Web
conferencing software for
interactive meetings, digital certificates and
smart cards to
authenticate members as entitled to participate in
these meetings, web
site building programs such as Dynamic Site
Framework to generate
multiple individual web sites for members and
committees, and advanced
storage systems to preserve and make accessible
records of all
legislative transactions, would provide all the
functionality enjoyed
now by legislatures meeting in physical space,
and, conceivably, a lot
more.
Incidentally, the current possibilities for
maintaining and enhancing
the democratic legislative process by creating
e-legislatures in
cyberspace, based on the best possible
technologies now available,
will pale in comparison to the possibilities
available to us as
broadband becomes ubiquitous, processors attain 2-gigahertz
speeds,
mobile and wireless networks expand, and ?the
Internet? and
?computers? are integrated into and disappear
behind all manner of
everyday objects.
Of course, putting legislatures into cyberspace in
order to maintain
their seamless operation in the event of some
terrorist attack or the
well-founded fear of a terrorist attack will make
it much easier to
transmit the day-to-day operations of the body to
the citizens, who
will be able to access them over the Internet.
Although I?m reluctant to mention this, putting
legislatures in
cyberspace will also make it much easier for
common, ordinary
citizens, even those who don?t use auditors, to
participate in these
bodies? deliberations, should the elected
representatives decide that
they are willing to allow common, ordinary
citizens, even those who?ve
demonstrated their disdain for democracy by not
making any ?campaign
contributions? to any of the elected officials who
?represent? them,
to participate in their own self-governance.
Further, having a Plan B for the operation of
every state legislature
and local council should give additional pause to
potential terrorists
who might hope to destroy democracy by rendering
the physical space
where it is enacted uninhabitable. Knowing that
legislatures will be
able, without missing a beat, to carry on the work
of democracy over a
network first developed to allow the national
government to function
in the event of nuclear war, should give all such
miscreants serious
pause and all of us an additional measure of
protection, as well as
reassurance.
|
|
From: AlanKotok@cs.com
Date: Mon Jan 28, 2002 3:09 pm
Subject: RE: [EuronaCUEE] Who Should Provision the Future?
|
|
Marc, et al.
Excellent points, but let me offer another model
to consider, which may be a little more appropriate than
the highway analogy. The Internet (itself a creation
of government action to a large extent) and the World Wide Web are thriving because of a decentralized approach to its development.
Instead controlling access through
gatekeepers, the Internet and Web set open freely-available
standards that organizations or individuals use as targets for connecting devices and developing services.
Can we apply this model to broadband
connectivity? Rather than assuming a finite
resource for connectivity, establish the performance criteria that would establish additional high-speed capacity. The more we think of
the resource in terms of existing technology, the more
that those parties already controlling that
technology can control it further. If, however, we define the resource in terms of minimum speed and other criteria, then we encourage the
creative juices in our technical and business
communities.
Here is an historical example: when we considered
the telephone as a voice communications device, we had
the centralized AT&T running things. When we began considering the telephone as a device for communicating
information of all kinds, the pressure to
decentralize telecommunications became unstoppable.
Government still has a job however, to keep the
process open and fair.
Government does that job well (when the Enrons of
the world don't get in the way), and we should leave the
development of new and innovative services to the business people who do that stuff well.
Alan Kotok
AlanKotok@cs.com
http://www.technewslit.com/
Editor, <E-Business*Standards*Today/>, http://www.disa.org/dailywire/
Editor, Techno-Politics: http://www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/us_techno_politics
|
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From: "virtualorange" <virtualorange@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue Jan 29, 2002 8:32 pm
Subject: E-Legislatures, Web Conferencing Co-op, and a Speech
from the Last Century
|
|
Dear Subscriber,
The E-Legislatures Project is for those interested
in furthering the
cause of developing and deploying electronic
systems that will allow
Congress and all of the state legislatures to
operate in cyberspace.
To join, send an empty e-mail to:
E-Legislatures-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
The Web Conferencing Cooperative will collect
money from individuals
and groups and use it to provide access for them
to Web conferencing
platforms and related supporting products and
services.
To join, send an empty e-mail to:
WebConCo-op-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
As an added bonus, so this post doesn’t seem to be
solely a shameless
plug for these two new discussion groups, I’m
attaching a copy of a
speech I made eight years ago, and which I’ve been
citing lately as an
early appeal for the very modern and 21st century
concept of what I’m
now calling “E-Legislatures.”
Read it, and see how far we’ve come in all that
time.
On January 2, 1994, the
National Information Infrastructure Task Force
came to the University of Southern California to address the issue of
universal service. Spokespeople from Pacific Bell
rambled on for
hours about what they were doing in this area.
Professor Tracy
Westen, of the Center for Government Studies, also
spoke at some
length to a panel that notably included Larry Irving,
then the Clinton
Administration's point person on such issues.
During the afternoon
session, as panelists and audience alike were
nodding off, I was given
2 minutes to speak and managed to get part of this
presentation out to
an audience that was paying absolutely no
attention.
Address to the Universal Service Conference at
the University of Southern California, January 2, 1994
My name is Marc Strassman. I'm the President of
Transmedia
Communications, a network content provider. I'm
also a candidate for
the U.S. House of Representatives from the 27th
District of
California, which includes Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, and
the
Foothill Communities to the North. The centerpiece
of my campaign is
a promise to give the 27th District a new identity
as Pacific Hills, a
cybercommunity on the order of Singapore and Northern California's
Smart Valley, where every household is connected through broadband
links to all the electronic and economic resources
promised by the
Information Superhighway. This connection must
extend to every
household, so that the benefits and
responsibilities of civic and
commercial life will belong to everyone in Pacific
Hills.
Some here today have already and others will
continue to make the case
for universal service. I applaud and support their
efforts. But I
want to focus on a special application that
requires universal service
and will be of particular importance for our
future. After the system
is up and running, after everyone has shopped
electronically until
they drop, interacted with every imaginable
hedgehog, plumber, or race
course, studied Greek mythology, macroeconomics,
and Sanskrit at the
Virtual University, and finished a hard day or
night's or afternoon's
work telecommuting or teleputing or whatever we
call it, what will be
left to do with this terrific tool/toy?
There's a hint in the Report of the National
Information
Infrastructure Task Force. The Net, says the
report, can be used to
"access government services" more
easily. Indeed it can; indeed it
should. From filing income tax returns
electronically, to getting
social security payments deposited automatically.
Also, citizens will
be able to use this system to access information
that the government
has generated and holds: materials in the Library of
Congress, census
data, etc. And the information won't only go one
way: the President,
the Vice-President and a few forward-looking
members of Congress have
already made themselves available for input on the
Internet.
But I'm talking about electronic democracy, where
thee tools are used
to create a system where the
citizen-voter-netusers directly make
decisions over the network.
In the 18th century, people and individuals
traveled no faster than
they had in Roman times: at horse speed. One of
the reasons our
Constitution provides for representative, rather
than direct,
democracy, is that it wasn't possible to get
everyone together in one
place in 1789. Representatives of the people met
in Philadelphia and
created a government form that replicated the
representative nature of
their own conclave.
With modern digital communications, everyone can
be in one place at
once. Everyone can express his or her view and it
can be seen, read,
or heard by millions of other people
instantaneously. This idea is
not new. In the late 40's Buckminster Fuller
pointed out that with
television and telephones it was already
theoretically possible to
have direct electronic democracy. Forty-five years
later, CNN and
C-SPAN put the deliberations and the
pronouncements of our political
leaders onto our screens as they happen. The House
of Representatives
now votes by electronic device. Millions of
citizen vote for fat
Elvis or thin Elvis stamps via 900- numbers set up
by tabloid tv
shows. Why can't the members of Congress vote from
their home
districts while watching the debate on C-SPAN? Why
can't they
participate in the debate from their home
districts, or any other
place in the world, through video
teleconferencing? Why can't
constituents throughout a congressional district
participate in
digitally-mediated town halls and instruct their
representative on how
to cast his or her vote on the Virtual House
Floor? Why can't the
people vote on the issues before the country
directly?
These are some of the issues raised by the advent
of technologies that
make electronic democracy possible. Whether
debates open to all and
votes involving the entire electorate will give us
better government
than we have no is not immediately obvious. What
should be obvious is
that the more developed these communications technologies
become, the
more feasible such arrangements will be. In light
of the high-stakes
and on-going struggle among the cable companies,
phone companies,
cable-phone companies, etc., for control of the
Information
Superhighway, it is crucial that we continue to
consider the
possibilities for and the implications of, this
highway as the
backbone and forum for our own self-government.
Because if we end up
using it this way, and in some senses we almost
certainly will, as a
means of deciding who owns what and who gets to
behave how, then we
really have to be aware that whoever owns,
operates, or controls the
Information superhighway is going to be very
interested in how it is
used to decide issues of ownership, operation, and
control of that
system, which, to the extent that the Information
Superhighway becomes
the linchpin and key to our economy, culture, and
politics, will be
tantamount to deciding who own, operates, and
control the world and
our lives within it.
These are important issues, and I thank you for
giving me a chance to
comment upon them here today. Please continue you
very important and
welcome efforts in a crucial area that concerns us
all.
|
|
From: "virtualorange" <virtualorange@yahoo.com>
Date: Thu Jan 31, 2002 1:59 pm
Subject: The Latest on "Smart ID Cards" and Their Role
in Spreading Digital Democracy
|
|
Dear EuronaCUEE subscriber,
Most of my previous efforts to cyberize politics
and government
involved the use of powerful identification technologies,
based on
the use of smart cards and biometrics. All of
these efforts had to
confront arguments about the implausibility of
giving everyone such
tools for identification and online
authentication.
Now banks, the military, and HMOs are in the
process of equipping
their members and clients with just such Smart ID
Cards. How much
longer can they use these technologies for
securing the interests of
giant corporations and other bureaucratic
institutions while arguing
that it's impossible to use these same,
soon-to-be-ubiquitous cards
to empower their holders to participate in
democratic decision-making,
voting, initiative petition-signing and, in their
role as
stockholders, all aspects of corporate governance?
Regards,
Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
PPI | Q & A | January 18, 2002
Frequently Asked Questions about Smart ID Cards
By Shane Ham and Robert D. Atkinson
http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?contentid=250075&knlgAreaID=140&subsecid=290
Here's the article that jump-started the whole
discussion:
PPI | Briefing | June 1, 1999
Jump-Starting the Digital Economy
(with Department of Motor Vehicles-Issued Digital
Certificates)
By Marc Strassman and Robert D. Atkinson
http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?contentid=1369&knlgAreaID=140&subsecid=288
Here are some other current articles on the
subject:
Pentagon Unveils 'Smart' ID Cards
By D. Ian Hopper
AP Technology Writer
Monday, Oct. 29, 2001; 5:37 p.m. EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20011029/aponline173744_000.htm
The same story in Wired News
http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,47971,00.html
Medical and Military Smart Cards
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/healthscience/134382084_idcard23.html
TechWeb, December 26, 2001
http://www.techweb.com/tech/security/20011112_security
Why EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center)
dislikes "National ID Cards"
http://www.epic.org/privacy/id_cards/
Smart Banking Cards
http://www.1.slb.com/smartcards/news/01/sct_lloyds2102.html
|
|
From: Virtual Orange <virtualorange@yahoo.com>
Date: Fri Feb 1, 2002 1:18 pm
Subject: An Omnibus Ubiquitous CyberGovernment Proposal
|
|
Dear EuronaCUEE subscriber,
Attached is a PDF file containing information
about my
Omnibus Ubiquitous CyberGovernment Proposal.
If you don't already have the free Adobe Acrobat
Reader that you need to read this document, you
can
download it at:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
Regards,
Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Great stuff seeking new owners in Yahoo! Auctions!
http://auctions.yahoo.com
|
31 An
Omnibus Ubiquitous CyberGovernment Initiative.pdf
|
From: "virtualorange" <virtualorange@yahoo.com>
Date: Sat Feb 9, 2002 2:20 pm
Subject: Building Cyberstan
|
|
Building Cyberstan
By Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
etopia@pacificnet.net
February 9,
2002
Copyright 2002 by Marc Strassman. All rights
reserved.
In light of the present tremendous need for
infrastructure of all types
in Afghanistan, it seems reasonable to build this
infrastructure from
the inside out, by making the first step in that
country’s
reconstruction the building of a solar-powered,
decentralized,
Internet-based electronic network that can be used
to provide
education, training, medical care, economic
benefits, cultural
distribution, and the construction of a ubiquitous
civic space, all of
which can contribute greatly to the stabilization
and development of
that country.
Funding is available, from OPEC, the World Bank,
the United Nations
Development Programme, and the many generous
donors who recently met
in Tokyo and
pledged 4.5 billion dollars to the re-development effort.
The technology do to this is readily available,
more or less off the
shelf. BP Solar has already built many kilowatts
worth of
photovoltaic mini-generating plants similar to
those necessary to
power such installations in cities, towns, and
villages too remote to
have either telecommunications links or the
electricity needed to run
them. DirecWay satellite systems already provide broadband
Internet
connectivity to computer users in remote locales
and could be
integrated with servers, wireless Local Area
Networks, and
battery-powered laptop computers to bring the
Internet to the most
remote spots.
Any number of manufacturers make laptop computers
that can be powered
by rechargeable batteries. A village powered by
photovoltaics could
build a “batteries en banc” charging station
capable of holding and
recharging multiple batteries simultaneously, even
providing a start
in the high tech business for entrepreneurial
children shuttling
batteries between homes, businesses, and the
central recharger.
Using Web conferencing software, the country’s (or
the world’s) best
teachers in all subjects could interactively
instruct students
countrywide, with their lessons archived and
available at any time to
anyone anywhere. The same would apply to practical
health education,
adult literacy, job training, or any other
subject.
A solar-powered, broadband
Internet system for Afghanistan would
empower individuals to communicate with others
within the country and
many more people outside it. As it already has to
a great extent
everywhere it runs, putting the Internet in Afghanistan would
facilitate contact between people and between
groups, breaking down
stereotypes and facilitating the creation of a
single nation.
Web conferencing software can also be used to
re-create and expand
traditional, participatory Afghan political forms,
allowing for more public
involvement in decision-making and the forging of
a more democratic
civic culture and politics.
Finally, in its role as a quasi-television-like
medium, the
solar-powered, broadband
Internet network could also build community
by making the best of traditional and modern
entertainment available
to a nationwide audience, through the use of live
and archived
streaming video programming.
The telecommunications network needed to deliver broadband
Internet to
even the most remote parts of Afghanistan need not rely solely on
satellites for its delivery. Fiber optic cables,
terrestrial
microwave repeaters and wireless broadband
systems can be also be
utilized and integrated with each other and the
satellite platform to
provide it.
Nor do the solar power stations needed to power
the network in remote
areas be limited to providing power for the
Internet system. Similar,
and more extensive, installations can also be used
to provide the
power needed to refrigerate vaccines, light homes
and businesses, run
water purification plants and medical clinics, and
otherwise provide
essential services for cities, towns,
neighborhoods, and villages long
without them.
Decentralized power generation sources, such as
solar, also have the
advantage of being more stable, and not vulnerable
to the swift and
sudden disabling so easy to achieve against more
centralized power grids.
The benefits spelled out here need not be limited
to one country, such
as Afghanistan. By pioneering the creation of integrated
solar-powered broadband Internet
and other infrastructure systems in
this country, valuable experience will be gained
that could greatly
assist in providing similar installations in other
places where much
of the population lives far from cities, without
power, and often
without hope.
In fact, by making it possible for individuals in
underdeveloped
villages to access the whole world through the
Internet while
remaining in their villages, it’s conceivable that
a solution might be
found for one of the most pressing demographic
challenges of our time,
namely, the mass migration of people from the
countryside to the
cities, where they often massively aggravate the
lack of jobs,
resources, space, and other amenities they may
have migrated to find
in the first place.
By making it possible for villagers to benefit
from the aggregated
knowledge and experience of the entire human race
from the convenience
of their ancestral villages, and by helping them
use this knowledge to
build sustainable, appropriate, renewable, and
decentralized systems
for food production, health care, education,
cultural enrichment, and
civic participation right where they already are,
their living
standards could be raised dramatically, obviating
the need to them to
leave their homes, thereby avoiding so much of the
economic,
ecological, and political turmoil generated in and
by the slums and
favelas created by the waves of internal, or
cross-national,
immigration that have been characteristic of so
much of recent history.
Not only could the creation of one or many such
?cyberstans? set in
motion a virtuous cycle of education, development,
and ecology on the
demographic scale, but providing modern tools to
young people now
lacking them could also mean that individuals with
talent in art, or
music, or science, or literature, now facing
limited opportunities to
develop their talents and even fewer ways to share
the fruits of these
talents with a world hungry for beauty and truth
in all their many
forms, could now join in helping to create the
world’s conversation,
going forward.
The art and the scientific and medical breakthroughs
that might come
out of villages now cold and dark, and cut off
from everything but
their own isolation and despair, might be the
gifts returned to us for
our provision to them of access to our own
extensive but still-limited
intellectual resources.
One often hears, as an echo of the media theorist
Marshall McLuhan, the
phrase “global village,” referring to the way
communications has
brought “all of us” worldwide as close to each other as the
inhabitants of a small village. In many ways this
is true, most
strikingly through the Internet, which can make it
easier to ask
someone half-a-world away a question than to walk
down the hall to get
an answer from a co-worker there.
But in real villages, life is often more
circumscribed than this, and
when the wider world spills over into the very
local one it is too
often either in the shape of men with guns or
one-way transmissions of
radio or television offering no chance for
interaction or authentic
response.
Providing all the people of Afghanistan (and
China, and sub-Saharan
Africa, and the islands of Indonesia, and so on)
with the means not
only to access the terabytes of knowledge
accumulated by our species
over the course of our journey so far but to add
to it themselves, to
have access to distant medical specialists,
teachers, and performers,
to organize themselves democratically, select
their governments, and
directly make public decisions that impact them
and their neighbors,
in short, to make it possible for everyone to hear
and be heard, would
certainly be an effective way to put what we
already know to good use
and maximize our chances of generating additional
valuable knowledge
for our own future benefit.
It might even be worthwhile to consider how we
might bring these
benefits to people who don’t live in villages, to
people living in the
”advanced” and “civilized” parts of the world, far
from the villages
that all our ancestors originally inhabited.
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From: Virtual Orange <virtualorange@yahoo.com>
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2002 2:57 pm
Subject: Proposal for an "Omnibus Ubiquitous Internet
Reform Act of 2002"
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Dear EuronaCUEE subscriber,
Here is a copy of the cover letter I just sent to
California State Senator Richard Alarcon, who
represents the part of Los Angeles where I live in
Sacramento. In it, I suggest that he introduce and
work to pass an “Omnibus Ubiquitous Internet
Reform
Act of 2002.” Attached to this post are the two
PDF
documents referred to in the letter.
You should feel free to adapt and forward copies
of
this letter, along with the attached files, to
your
own local, state, provincial, federal, national,
or
supra-national representatives, and suggest that
they,
too, get to work merging the Internet and
government
in useful ways.
Regards,
Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
Dear Senator Alarcon,
I'm writing as a constituent and a citizen of
California to suggest that you introduce and carry a
bill that would:
1. Provide every California with a Smart State ID card
through DMV
2. Create an e-legislature infrastructure to allow
dispersed operations of the Assembly and Senate,
by
choice or in emergency situations
3. Establish a Public Broadband Authority on the
model
of CalTrans, Los Angeles' DWP, and the TVA to provide
every Californian with affordable and reliable
broadband access to the Internet
4. Establish and fund a State Distance Learning
Network for free or subsidized use by public
educational institutions from pre-school and K-12
through higher education (Community Colleges, State
Universities, and the University of California) and by
private educational institutions at cost or
slightly
above
5. Create a Security/Threat Reduction Portal
Network
of one website in each county to serve as a means
for
officials at all levels to coordinate their
security/emergency preparedness/threat reduction
activities and for all residents of each county to
rely on for up-to-the-minute and authoritative
information about threats to their well-being
6. Create an e-bureaucracy infrastructure to allow
dispersed operations of all state agencies, by
choice
or in emergency situations
7. Create an e-legislature infrastructure to allow
dispersed operations of each and every county Board of
Supervisors and of each and every city council in
California, by choice or in emergency situations
8. Legalize and fund systems for polling place and
remote voting over the Internet in all public
elections in California and allow for voter
registration and the updating of voter
registration
records over the Internet, all using the Smart
State
ID Card
9. Create, operate, and require use of a system
for
the instantaneous reporting and public
availability
over the Internet of all campaign contributions of
all
types relating to any elections at whatever level
within the State of California
10. Legalize Smart Initiatives, under which
registered
voters would be allowed to remotely and digitally
sign
proposed initiatives over the Internet
We might want to call this bill the "Omnibus
Ubiquitous Internet Reform Act of 2002
(OUIRA-02)."
This is only a summary of the issues I'd like to
see
addressed by the Legislature.. To provide you with
some background, I am attaching PDF copies of
"OmniUbi
proposal with Internet Voting" and
"Digital
Identification and Government Initiative (DIGI)
(2000)." The first of these includes some
articles
I've recently written that discuss these issues in
more depth and copies of previous legislation I've
proposed in these areas. The second, a comprehensive
plan for the modernizing of state government by
means
of the Internet in the form of an initiative
proposal
I drafted in 2000 but never circulated, may be
interesting for the ways in which it both tracks
and
differs from this present proposal.
If you don't already have the free Adobe Acrobat
Reader that you need to read these documents, you
can
download it at:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
If you or any of your staff would like to discuss
any
of these matters with me, I can be reached by
e-mail
at <etopia@pacificnet.net>.
Thanks in advance for your time and for your
consideration of these proposals, which are
designed
to put California and Californians at the top of the
IT food chain as it develops in the next few
years.
Sincerely,
Marc Strassman
President
Etopia
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From: Virtual Orange <virtualorange@yahoo.com>
Date: Wed Feb 20, 2002 4:09 pm
Subject: California Internet Bill of Rights (CIBR)
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Dear EuronaCUEE subscriber,
I'm in the process of preparing a "California Internet
Bill of Rights" for circulation,
qualification, and
passage by the voters of our state. I've attached
copies of the CIBR in its current form in both
Word
and PDF formats.
I'm writing to ask if you could take a few minutes
to
critique it from your own perspective and to
provide
any additional items that you think would
preserve,
protect, and extend fundamental civil and privacy
rights into cyberspace. Suggestions that would
protect Internet users from unwanted commercial
solicitations would also be very welcome.
You can contact me by e-mail at
<etopia@pacificnet.net>.
Thanks in advance for your time and any help you
can
provide.
Sincerely,
Marc Strassman
President, Etopia
Executive Director, California Internet Bill of Rights
(CIBR) Association
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34
Request to Office of Legislative Counsel for the Drafting of the Omnibus
Ubiquitous Internet Reform Initiative.pdf
