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A Legacy at Risk: How the new Ministry of Culture in Brazil reversed its digital agenda

March 14, 2011 by

Former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has become a prominent figure in the political world. When he completed his second and last term last December, 87% of Brazilians approved his government, an unprecedented high rate. So it is not surprising that his successor Dilma Roussef, the first woman elected president in Brazil, took office with his strong support and the promise of continuity.

However, disappointment about that promise is growing, at least in regard to one of Lula’s landmark policies: his support to the so-called “digital culture” policies. “Digital Culture” is the expression Brazilians use to refer to a broad agenda. It derives from the principle that technology is a crucial tool for cultural policies, especially because it allows the democratization of access, and the production and dissemination of cultural artifacts. It includes also the reform of copyright, especially because the Brazilian copyright has become notoriously restrictive, preventing consumers from uploading their CD´s into an iPod, a library from digitizing an old book for preservation, or a professor from using excerpts of a film in classroom. Finally, the digital culture agenda also includes the support to open licensing models, such as free software or Creative Commons.

These policies were successfully deployed by Gilberto Gil, a popular musician appointed Minister of Culture in 2003. He was profiled as early as 2004 by Wired Magazine as a champion of free culture and free software. Mr. Gil became such a popular politician in the country that some started calling him “the Lula of Lula”, in reference to his high popularity and progressive policies, within an already popular and progressive government.

Mr. Gil’s policies were continued by his successor (and former chief of staff) Juca Ferreira, who was appointed Minister of Culture in 2008 after Gil resigned to devote more time to his music career. One of the most successful policies implemented by Gil/Juca was the creation of the so-called “cultural hotspots”. The program provides resources to grassroots cultural initiatives and organizations to acquire multimedia production equipment and broadband Internet. More than 4,000 hotspots were created, spread over more than 1,000 cities in the country. Many of them in poor areas, rural communities, or favelas (shanty towns).

Mr. Gil described the idea of the hotspots as an “anthropological tao-in”, in reference to the Chinese therapeutic massage that when applied to the right spots of the body, awakens its internal energy. According to his view, with the right incentives, it was possible to energize and foster cultural practices in places often neglected. His view was that every citizen should be considered a producer, and not only a consumer of culture. The hotspots should provide the tools necessary for access, production, and dissemination of local culture, especially for those coming from poor or peripheral areas.

Information technology and the hacker ethic was an integral part of that vision, including incentives for the adoption of free software and Creative Commons, what eventually led to a national discussion about the impact of copyright over cultural production, spurring the the ongoing copyright reform process.

As Mr. Gil put it in his own words in 2005, at a speech he delivered at NYU:

I, Gilberto Gil, Brazilian citizen and citizen of the World, Minister of Culture of Brazil, work with music, at the Ministry, and in all dimensions of my life under the inspiration of the hacker ethic – and concerned with the issues of my world and my time present me, such as the issue of digital inclusion, the issue of free software and the issue of regulation and development of the production and dissemination of audiovisual content by any means, for any purpose.
…
I want indeed for the Ministry of Culture of Brazil to be a laboratory for new ideas, capable of inventing new procedures for the world’s creative industries, and capable of proposing suggestions aimed at overcoming the present dead ends – I did indeed think that my country should dare and not wait for solutions to come from outside, from societies that would tell us Brazilians which path should be followed for our development, as if our future could only be our becoming a nation such as the ones that exist here or in Europe.

Gil´s speech seems now almost lost in a distant time. The reason is that the newly appointed Ministry of Culture, Mrs. Ana de Hollanda, has taken advantage of her first weeks in office to reverse much of what was built in the past 8 years. By way of example, one of her first actions was to remove the Creative Commons license from the Ministry’s website, without any prior note. The license had been used for the past 6 years, and the Ministry of Culture was actually the pioneer in its adoption at the government level. It is worth noting that the CC licenses continue to be used at other government branches, including the official weblog of president Dilma Roussef. Ironically, at the same day the licenses were taken down by the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Planning issued a normative instruction fostering the adoption of open licenses, and expressly mentioning Creative Commons.

This contradiction led prominent politicians in Brazil, including Congress member Paulo Teixeira, to claim that the Ministry of Culture has engaged in policies that conflict with the overall direction of the Federal Government. Mr. Teixeira reminds that during the presidential campaign, president Dilma Roussef met with Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, during an important campaign act. She also publicly committed to go ahead with the copyright reform and the digital culture agenda. Before that, in 2009, both president Lula and Dilma (then his Secretary of State) attended together the International Free Software Forum (FISL 10), one of the largest free software global events, which takes place in the city of Porto Alegre. There, Lula’s speech focused on his support to digital culture, Internet freedom and free software.

Other source of criticism is the proximity of the new Minister of Culture with the copyright collecting societies. By way of example, in her first weeks in office, the Minister agreed to meet with Hildebrando Pontes, a lawyer that works for the collecting societies who has become notorious for arguing that copyright should last forever. At the same time, the Ministry declined to meet with representatives of civil society, including those from the “cultural hotspots” program. She then fired the chief copyright officer who led the reform process for the past 6 years, and appointed Mrs. Marcia Regina Barbosa, a lawyer who worked with Hildebrando Pontes.

Collecting societies are a controversial institution in Brazil. They face strong discontentment from rights holders, who claim they are not paid properly. They also face discontentment from their paying “customers”, who claim their criteria for setting royalty prices are simply obscure. They have also been declared by congress inquiry committees as lacking transparency and clear accounting. One of the goals of the copyright reform initiated by Mr. Gilberto Gil was precisely to implement a minimum set of regulation over the collecting societies. By law they have the monopoly over their business, but unlike other countries, no regulation applies to their activities, which remain excused from any sort of independent assessment. Regulation is also supported by many prominent Brazilian musicians, who have recently become vocal about the issue.

The Ministry of Culture change of policy has drawn the attention of both national and international organizations. Even before the Minister´s inauguration, an open letter subscribed by more that 1,500 representatives of civil society organizations in Brazil was posted online expressing concern with the possible change of direction. Folha de São Paulo, the largest newspaper in the country, wrote a piece about the letter. The Minister, however, declined to provide any comments to the journalist. To this date, the letter has not been replied or even acknowledged by the Minister or her staff.

The Minister´s actions, together with the absence of clear statements justifying her decisions, have generated considerable uproar. A public campaign called Sou MinCC (“I am MinCC”) emerged (MinC is the acronym for Ministry of Culture – MinCC is the result of MinC + CC, in reference to the Creative Commons licenses). Besides that, the Commons Strategies Group, an international NGO, prepared an open letter (led by Silke Helfrich at the World Social Forum in Dakar) to President Dilma, also expressing concern about the new policies. The letter was released on February, 21st, and gathered the support of organizations such as Creative Commons, the Free Knowledge Institute (Netherlands), La Quadrature du Net (France), among others.

This is an important moment for the history of cultural policies in Brazil. There is a shared feeling that much of what was built in the past 8 years is at risk. A heated debate took over the Brazilian public sphere, with articles being published by all the major newspapers. The collecting societies and their members have taken the stand to argue in favor of the Minister, claiming that the decisions taken so far are a “sovereign act”, and that the collecting societies should indeed be exempt of any external supervision, and the copyright reform should be halted for good.

But the place where the debate is really developing on a daily basis is the Internet. Bloggers, twittterers and social network members have engaged fiercely in the discussion of the current situation. Many of them were too young to even acknowledge the appointment of Gilberto when he took office. It is a new generation that has risen for the first time to debate the future of culture and technology policies in Brazil. Inadvertently, the new Minister Ana de Hollanda is contributing to the emergence of new generation of voices online. One now can only hope that she will eventually listen to them.

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Seals on NJ voting machines, March 2009

March 7, 2011 by

During the NJ voting-machines trial, both Roger Johnston and I showed different ways of removing all the seals from voting machines and putting them back without evidence of tampering. The significance of this is that one can then install fraudulent vote-stealing software in the computer.

The State responded by switching seals yet again, right in the middle of the trial! They replaced the white vinyl adhesive-tape seal with a red tape seal that has an extremely soft and sticky adhesive. In addition, they proposed something really wacky: they would squirt superglue into the blue padlock seal and into the security screw cap.

Nothing better illustrates the State’s “band-aid approach, where serious security vulnerabilities can be covered over with ad hoc fixes” (as Roger characterizes it) than this. The superglue will interfere with the ability for election workers to (legitimately) remove the seal to maintain the machine. The superglue will make it more difficult to detect tampering, because it goes on in such a variable way that the inspector doesn’t know what’s supposed to be “normal.” And the extremely soft adhesive on the tape seal is extremely difficult to clean up, when the election worker (legitimately) removes it to maintain the machine. Of course, one must clean up all the old adhesive before resealing the voting machine.

Furthermore, Roger demonstrated for the Court that all these seals can still be defeated, with or without the superglue. Here’s the judge’s summary of his testimony about all these seals:


New Jersey is proposing to add six different kinds of seals in nine different locations to the voting machines. Johnston testified he has never witnessed this many seals applied to a system. At most, Johnston has seen three seals applied to high-level security applications such as nuclear safeguards. According to Johnston, there is recognition among security professionals that the effective use of a seal requires an extensive use protocol. Thus, it becomes impractical to have a large number of seals installed and inspected. He testified that the use of a large number of seals substantially decreases security, because attention cannot be focused for a very long time on any one of the seals, and it requires a great deal more complexity for these seal-use protocols and for training.

For more details and pictures of these seals, see “Seal Regime #4” in this paper.

Filed Under: Other Topics, Privacy & Security Tagged With: ,

Do corporations have a "personal privacy" right?

March 1, 2011 by

Today, the Supreme Court released its unanimous opinion in Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T Inc., No. 09-1279 (U.S. Mar. 1, 2011)

At issue was the question, “Does a corporation have a “personal privacy” right under the Freedom of Information Act?” In this decision, the United States Supreme Court said “no.” The decision was 8-0 with Associate Justice Kagan not participating in the decision.

What was the case about? A trade association sought disclosure of documents that AT&T had submitted to the FCC during an investigation. AT&T argued that the documents were exempt under FOIA Exemption 7(C), which prohibited disclosure of law enforcement records if the disclosure “could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit accepted AT&T’s argument, and held that a corporation could have a “personal privacy” right because a corporation was a “person” under FOIA.

The Supreme Court disagreed. Looking at the express text of FOIA as well as the common meaning of words, Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the Court, held that, absent an express definition of “personal” in FOIA, that word refers to individuals and not corporate entities.

It should be noted that corporations are, for various purposes, considered “persons” under constitutional and common law. However, at issue was a question of statutory interpretation.

The Court even got in a good zinger at the end, noting that, “We trust that AT&T will not take it personally.”

Filed Under: Privacy & Security Tagged With:

What are the Constitutional Limits on Online Tracking Regulations?

March 1, 2011 by

As the conceptual contours of Do Not Track are being worked out, an interesting question to consider is whether such a regulation—if promulgated—would survive a First Amendment challenge. Could Do Not Track be an unconstitutional restriction on the commercial speech of online tracking entities? The answer would of course depend on what restrictions a potential regulation would specify. However, it may also depend heavily on the outcome of a case currently in front of the Supreme Court—Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc.—that challenges the constitutionality of a Vermont medical privacy law.

The privacy law at issue would restrict pharmacies from selling prescription drug records to data mining companies for marketing purposes without the prescribing doctor’s consent. These drug records each contain extensive details about the doctor-patient relationship, including “the prescriber’s name and address, the name, dosage and quantity of the drug, the date and place the prescription is filled and the patient’s age and gender.” A doctor’s prescription record can be tracked very accurately over time, and while patient names are redacted, each patient is assigned a unique identifier so their prescription histories may also be tracked. Pharmacies have been selling these records to commercial data miners, who in turn aggregate the data and sell compilations to pharmaceutical companies, who then engage in direct marketing back to individual doctors using a practice known as “detailing.” Sound familiar yet? It’s essentially brick-and-mortar behavioral advertising, and a Do Not Track choice mechanism, for prescription drugs.

The Second Circuit recently struck down the Vermont law on First Amendment grounds, ruling first that the law is a regulation of commercial speech and second that the law’s restrictions fall on the wrong side of the Central Hudson test—the four-step analysis used to determine the constitutionality of commercial speech restrictions. This ruling clashes explicitly with two previous decisions in the First Circuit, in Ayotte and Mills, which deemed that similar medical privacy laws in Maine and New Hampshire were constitutional. As such, the Supreme Court decided in January to take the case and resolve the disagreement, and the oral argument is set for April 26th.

I’m not a lawyer, but it seems like the outcome of Sorrell could have a wide-ranging impact on current and future information privacy laws, including possible Do Not Track regulations. Indeed, the petitioners recognize the potentially broad implications of their case. From the petition:

“Information technology has created new and unprecedented opportunities for data mining companies to obtain, monitor, transfer, and use personal information. Indeed, one of the defining traits of the so-called “Information Age” is this ability to amass information about individuals. Computers have made the flow of data concerning everything from personal purchasing habits to real estate records easier to collect than ever before.”

One central question in the case is whether a restriction on access to these data for marketing purposes is a restriction on legitimate commercial speech. The Second Circuit believes it is, reasoning that even “dry information” sold for profit—and already in the hands of a private actor—is entitled to First Amendment protection. In contrast, the First Circuit in Ayotte posited that the information being exchanged has “itself become a commodity,” not unlike beef jerky, so such restrictions are only a limitation on commercial conduct—not speech—and therefore do not implicate any First Amendment concerns.

A major factual difference here, as compared to online privacy and tracking, is that pharmacies are required by many state and federal laws to collect and maintain prescription drug records, so there may be more compelling reasons for the state to restrict access to this information.

In the case of online privacy, it could be argued that Internet users are voluntarily supplying information to the tracking servers, even though many users probably don’t intend to do this, nor do they expect that this is occurring. Judge Livingston, in her circuit dissent in Sorrell, notes that different considerations apply where the government is “prohibiting a speaker from conveying information that the speaker already possesses,” distinguishing that from situations where the government restricts access to the information itself. In applying this to online communications, at what point does the server “possess” the user’s data—when the packets are received and are sitting in a buffer or when the packets are re-assembled and the data permanently stored? Is there a constitutional difference between restrictions on collection versus restrictions on use? The Supreme Court in 1965 in Zemel v. Rusk stated that “the right to speak and publish does not carry with it the unrestrained right to gather information.” To what extent does this apply to government restrictions of online tracking?

The constitutionality of state and federal information privacy laws have historically and consistently been called into question, and things would be no different if—and it’s a big if— Congress grants the FTC authority over online tracking. When considering technical standards and what “tracking” means, it’s worth keeping in mind the possible constitutional challenges insofar as state action may be involved, as some desirable options to curb online tracking may only be possible within a voluntary or self-regulatory framework. Where that line is drawn will depend on how the Supreme Court comes down in Sorrell and how broadly they decide the case.

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A public service rant: please fix your bibliography

February 25, 2011 by

Like many academics, I spend a lot of time reading and reviewing technical papers. I find myself continually surprised at the things that show up in the bibliography, so I thought it might be worth writing this down all in one place so that future conferences and whatnot might just hyperlink to this essay and say “Do That.”

Do not use BibTeX entries that are auto-generated from Citeseer, DBLP, the ACM Digital Library, or any other such thing. It’s stunning how many errors these contain. One glaring example: papers that appeared in the Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP) often turn out as citations to ACM Operating Systems Review. While that’s not incorrect, it’s also not the proper way to cite the paper. Another common error is that auto-generated citations inevitably have the wrong address, if they have it at all. (Hint: the ACM’s headquarters are in New York but almost all of their conferences are elsewhere. If you have “New York” anywhere in your bib file, there’s a good chance it should be something else.)

Leave out LNCS volume numbers and such for conferences. Many, many conferences have their proceedings appear as LNCS volumes. That’s nice, but it consumes unnecessary space in your bibliography. All I need to know is that we’re looking at CRYPTO ’86. I don’t need to know that it’s also LNCS vol. 263.

For most any paper, leave out the editors. I need to know who wrote the paper, not who was the program chair of the conference or editor of the journal.

For most any conference paper, leave out the publisher or organization. I don’t need to see Springer-Verlag, USENIX Association, or ACM Press. For journal papers, you need to use your discretion. Sometimes the name of the association is part of the journal name, so there’s no real need to repeat it. The only places where I regularly include organization names are technical reports, technical manuals and documentation, and published books.

Be consistent with how you cite any conference. For space reasons, you may wish to contract a conference name, only listing “SOSP ’03” rather than “Proceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP ’03)”. That’s fine, at least for big conferences like SOSP where everybody should have heard of it, but use the same contraction throughout your bibliography. If you say “SOSP ’03” in one place and “Proceedings of SOSP ’03” somewhere else, that’s really annoying. Top tip: if you’re space constrained, the easiest thing to nuke is the string “Proceedings of”.

Make sure you have the right author list and with the proper initials. When you use BibTeX and you plug in “D.S. Wallach”, what comes out is “D. Wallach” since there’s no whitespace before the “S”. It’s damn near impossible to catch these things in your source file by eye, so you should do a regular-expression search ([A-Z].[A-Z].) or proofread the resulting bibliography. I’ve sometimes seen citations to papers where there were co-authors missing. Please double-check this sort of thing, often by visiting the authors’ home pages or conference home pages.

Be consistent with spelling out names versus using initials. Most bib styles just use initials rather than whole names. However, if you’re using a style that uses whole names, make sure that you’ve got the whole name for every citation in your bibliography. (Or switch styles.)

Always include a URL for blogs, Wikipedia articles, and newspaper articles (or, at least, newspaper articles since the dawn of the web). Stock BibTeX styles don’t know what URLs are, so the easiest solution is to use the “note” field. Make sure you put the url in a url{} environment so it becomes a hyperlink in the resulting PDF. I’m less confident I can advise you to always include a string like “Accessed on 11/08/2010”. But if you do it, do it consistently. Top tip: if you say usepackage{url} urlstyle{sf} in your LaTeX header, you’ll get more compact URLs than the stock typewriter font. See also, urlbst.

Don’t use a citation just to point to a software project. If you need to give credit to a software package you used, just drop a footnote and put the URL there. You only need a citation when you’re citing an actual paper of some sort. However, if there’s a research paper or book that was written by the authors of the software you used, and that paper or book describes the software, then you should cite the paper/book, and possibly include the URL for the software in the citation.

BibTeX sometimes fails when given a long URL in the note field. This manifests itself as a %-character and a newline inserted in the generated bbl file. (Why? I have no idea.) I have a short Perl script that I always work into my Makefile that post-processes the bbl file to fix this. So should you.

Eliminate the string “to appear” from your bibliography. Somebody years from now will look back in time and find these sorts of markers amusing. Worse, you can easily forget you put that in your bib file. It’s odd reading a manuscript in 2011 that cites a paper “to appear” in 2009.

For any conference, include the address, month, and year. And for the month, use three letter codes in your BibTeX (jan, feb, mar, apr, …) without quotation marks. The BibTeX style will deal with expanding those or using proper contractions. For the address, be consistent about how you handle them. Don’t say “Berkeley, CA” in one place and “Berkeley, California” in another. Also, this may be my U.S.-centric bias showing through, but you don’t need to add “U.S.A.” after “Berkeley, CA”. For international addresses, however, you should include the country and the state/region is optional. “Paris, France” is an easy one. I’ll have to defer to my Canadian readers to chime in about whether it’s better to cite “Vancouver, B.C., Canada”, “Vancouver, Canada”, or “Vancouver, B.C.”

But not the page numbers. Back in the old days, I once got razzed by a journal editor for not including page numbers in all my citations. (And you think I’m pedantic!) Given how many conferences are ditching printed proceedings altogether, it’s acceptable to leave these out now, including for old references that you’re far more likely to dig up online than in the printed proceedings.

Double-check any author with accents in their name and try to get it right. BibTeX doesn’t seem to play nicely with Unicode characters, at least for me, so you have to use the LaTeX codes instead. I’m sure David Mazières appreciates it when you spell his name right.

Double-check the capitalization of your paper titles. I tend to use the BibTeX “abbrv” style, which forces lower case for every word in your paper title, excepting the first word. You then have to put curly braces around words that truly need capital letters like BitTorrent or something. Some hand-written bib entries I’ve seen put curly braces around every word because they really, really want the entry with lots of capital letters. Don’t do that. Use a different bib style if you want different behavior, but then make sure your resulting bibliography has consistent capitalization for every entry. I don’t particularly care whether you go with lots of capital letters or not, but please be consistent about it. Also, double check that proper nouns are properly capitalized.

When you post your own papers online, post a bib entry next to them. This might encourage people to cite your paper properly. For your personal web page, you might like the Exhibit API, which can turn BibTeX entries into HTML, dynamically. (See Ben Adida’s page for one example.) If you’re setting up something for your whole lab or department, Drupal Scholar seems pretty good. (See my colleague Lydia Kavraki’s lab page for one example. I’m expecting we will adopt this across our entire CS department.)

And, last but not least, a citation is not a noun. When you cite a paper, it’s grammatically the same as making a parenthetical remark. If you need to refer to a paper as a noun, you need to use the author names (“Alice and Bob [23] showed that the halting problem is hard.”) or the name of the system (“The Chrome web browser [47,48] uses separate processes for each tab to improve fault isolation.”) If there are three or more authors, then you just use the first one with “et al.” (“Alice et al. [24] proved P is not equal to NP.” — note also the lack of italics for “et al.”) For the ACM journal style, there’s something called citeN rather than the usual cite, which is worth using. You can also look into using various additional packages to get similar functionality in any LaTeX paper style like natbib.

Obligatory caveat: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

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