The TikTok ban in context

The TikTok affair is unimportant when compared to Trump's general tariffs and high-cost trade war against Huawei.What is our long-run goal with respect to China?

Donald Trump recently issued an executive order banning TikTok on the grounds that it was necessary to deal with the national emergency he had declared in an earlier executive order. He says he is concerned that TikTok might turn user's "information such as location data and browsing and search histories" over to the Chinese government.

Trump does not site evidence of TikTok having shared data with China and TikTok says they have never shared user data with the Chinese government or censored content at its request. Furthermore, Kevin Meyer, CEO of TikTok and COO of its parent company Byte Dance, is an American, and TikTok US user data is not stored in China.

TikTok publishes a transparency report on government information requests and the report ending the second half of 2019 shows that the US government made 100 requests for information on 107 accounts, and 82% of those resulted in the transfer of data. Only India, with 302 requests on 408 accounts 90% of which made data transfers, requested more than the US. (Facebook received 51,121 US requests during the same period).

The format of the data TikTok reports to the police is shown below and its terms of service note that the company may also send law enforcement logs of a user's videos, comments, and interactions (source) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security actively monitored TikTok for signs of unrest during the George Floyd protests. It seems they are cooperating with the US government.

This background and Trump's track record convince me that the TikTok ban was politically motivated -- he wants to seem "tough" on China and get revenge for the way TikTok users tricked his campaign into projecting huge crowds for his disastrous Tulsa campaign rally.

Regardless, let's zoom out.

The TikTok affair is unimportant when compared to Trump's general tariffs and high-cost trade war against Huawei. What is his goal for US-China relations in general and for the Internet in particular? Is he seeking total self-sufficiency and independence from China? A bifurcated Internet?

When one considers the cost of reciprocal tariffs, the supply chains for manufactured goods, and the Chinese market for US goods like iPhones, it is clear that financial and industrial disengagement from China would be an economic disaster for both China and the US. 

The Internet is already bifurcating.  China already has more Internet users than the US, Russia, Mexico, Germany, UK, France, and Canada combined, and the US trade war on Chinese technology has accelerated its push toward self-reliance. China is also innovating --  Huawei, Tencent, and Xiaomi are among Derwent's  top 100 innovators and China has passed the US as the top scientific publishing nation in the world.

The Internet was conceived of and has served as a tool for collaboration, and existential global threats of economic inequality, climate change, pandemics and biological and other weapons require global collaboration. We need them and they need us.

Let me be clear -- there are no good guys here. China bans Facebook and Twitter, plays dirty tricks on the Internet, and imprisons and surveils citizens, but we seem to be caught in a prisoner's dilemma game in which both sides have defected and that could be fatal. 

There may not be a way out of our dilemma, but our recent relations with Cuba suggest a strategy worth considering. President Obama published a new Cuba policy and began rapprochement negotiations. He visited Cuba and made several Internet-related announcements, but the response was disappointing while Raúl Castro was in charge. His successor, Miguel Díaz-Canel, is a pro-Internet engineer and there may have been an opportunity for change when he replaced Castro if Trump had continued President Obama's policy, but that did not happen. Trump has made no substantive Internet-related policy changes regarding Cuba, but his politically-motivated rhetoric and Cuba Internet Task Force have assured continued hostility. 

We will never know how Díaz-Canel would have reacted had Trump continued President Obama's policy, but the outcome could not have been worse for the Cuban people or better for the expansion of China's Digital Silk Road. 

Whether we try the sort of engagement Obama tried with Cuba or something else, we cannot do it alone -- we must work with like-minded allies, which is surely not Trump's way. 

It's time for a change.

Update 8/26/2020

TikTok has answered Trump's executive ban and filed a law suit challenging it on the grounds that they were denied due process. They say they have never shared data with the Chinese, opened their publishing algorithm to show there has been no censorship, employ many Americans, provide a platform that is used by Americans for expression and income, and more.

While the suit asserts that TikTok was banned without due process -- claiming that the Administration has "ignored their extensive efforts to address its concerns," I wonder about the First Amendement guarantee of press freedom. TikTok is a publisher. What is the essential difference between banning TikTok without presenting evidence that it posed a threat to national security and banning the Washington Post because it had publishhed or might one day publish fake news that undermined national security?

In another twist, it turns out that Microsoft had been negotiating to purchase TikTok, and shortly before issuing the ban, Trump said the U.S. Treasury should collect a “very substantial” portion of the sale price. That sounds like a mob shakedown -- if you don't sell your company and give me cut I will shut it down leaving you with nothing. I can see the tweet -- "I got the Chinese to sell their company to Microsoft, created THOUSANDS of American jobs, stopped espionage and got a cut for the taxpayers as well."

Update 5/27/2021

Comparatech Editor Paul Bischoff points out that Trump’s executive order set a deadline of 45 days, but it was largely ignored and is techcally still in play. He reports that US national security officials are in talks with TikTok's parent company ByteDance about data security and preventing US user data from being accessed by the Chinese government.

In the meantime, TikTok was the most downloaded app in the first quarter of 2021 and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee unanimously passed a bill that would ban U.S. federal workers from downloading the TikTok onto U.S. government devices.

This puts President Biden in a political bind. Young voters like TikTok but the President is concerned about China's economic and political power. That being said, TikTok is insignificant in the long run -- we need to learn to cooperate and coexist with China in the face of global challenges like climate change, epidemics and economic inequality.

Trump's "would/wouldn't" comment on Russian meddling in context

Whether he meant to say "would" or "wouldn't," trump clumsily tried to dodge the question of Russian interference in our election by falsely attacking the FBI and taking a shot at Hillary Clinton and a "Pakistani gentleman."

The news has focused on Trump's response when Associated Press reporter Jonathan Lemire asked whether he believed Putin or "every U. S. intelligence agency" on the question of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump and the media have focused on this quote:

I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server.

The next day, Trump claimed to have misspoken, that he meant to say "wouldn't" instead of "would," but let's look at that sentence in context. It turns out he tried to artfully dodge the question by attacking the FBI. Here is his answer:

So let me just say that we have two thoughts. You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven’t they taken the server? Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee? I’ve been wondering that. I’ve been asking that for months and months, and I’ve been tweeting it out and calling it out on social media. Where is the server? I want to know, where is the server? And what is the server saying?

With that being said, all I can do is ask the question. My people came to me — Dan Coats came to me and some others — they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia.

I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. But I have — I have confidence in both parties. I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC? Where are those servers? They’re missing. Where are they? What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails? Thirty-three thousand emails gone — just gone. I think, in Russia, they wouldn’t be gone so easily. I think it’s a disgrace that we can’t get Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 emails. (Source).

He used the word "server" nine times and managed to attack Hillary Clinton and a "Pakistani gentleman" along with the FBI.

We know what he was getting at when he mentioned Hillary Clinton and "the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC," but what about the server?

I listened to the press conference live and was struck by his rambling reference to servers. I didn't know what servers he was talking about and also wondered whether he knew what a server is. (It turns out he repeated the word nine times).

I did a quick search and it turns out that the fact-checking site Politifact has concluded that "Donald Trump's 'missing' server comments get all of the details wrong" and the Pakistani gentleman is Imran Awan, who emigrated from Pakistan as a youth, has been a U.S. citizen since 2004 and did not work for the DNC.

The Trump administration -- it's lies all the way down

Browsing the Politifact site convinces one that all politicians, including the Clintons, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Polisi, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, lie, but Trump, his administration, and their supporting media have taken it to a new level

I teach a class on the applications, implications, and technology of the Internet and we spent time on the impact of the Internet on politics during the 2016 election. One of the things we noted was that Donald Trump had lied much more frequently than Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders or President Obama. I went back to the fact-checking service, Politifact, and it turns out that Trump is lying as frequently now as he did during the election season:

That is not surprising, but it seems to have set the standard for others in the administration, as illustrated by last week's announcement of the termination of the DACA policy by Jeff Sessions. Politifact found several statements that were one-sided or incomplete during Sessions' announcement.

Slate's Mark Joseph Stern also found a number of lies in Sessions' announcement and, in this 7-minute interview, he spoke of the way lies are picked up and propagated by Fox, Breitbart and other right-wing media outlets.

Browsing the Politifact site convinces one that all politicians, including the Clintons, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Polisi, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, lie, but Trump, his administration, and their supporting media have taken it to a new level.

Update 9/3/2018

From time to time, I revisit Politifact.com to see if Trump's rate of lying (making statements that are rated either "false" or "pants on fire") has changed. As shown below, Politifact finds him lying a little less than a year ago on the statements they chose to fact-check and they are checking more of his statements.

The Washington Post also does extensive fact checking and they find that Trump's rate of lying increased slowly until last June:

Source

The Internet speeds politics up and we are suffering are suffering from attention-deficit disorder.

He spent over a third of the speech attacking the "dishonest", "crooked", "fake" media -- 3,215 out of a total of 8,833 words. That is frightening.

Trump gave a speech yesterday in Phoenix and this morning, the transcript was online. In less than an hour, I was able to read it and do a little analysis.

The 77-minute speech included 105 pauses for applause and 13 interruptions for booing the media and others -- Trump was energized by the enthusiastic crowd. It was a typical campaign speech in which he assailed Obama care, illegal immigrants, Democrats, trade deals, the Senate; praised tough law enforcement and the wall and bragged about creating jobs, stopping crime, etc. Here is a particularly hyperbolic example:

Can you imagine, in this day and age -- in this day and age in this country, we are liberating towns. This is like from a different age. We are taking these people. They don't shoot people because it's too fast and not painful. They cut them up into little pieces. These are animals. We are getting them out of here. We're throwing them in jails, and we're throwing them out of the country. We're liberating our towns.

But two things stood out for me. He spent over a third of the speech attacking the "dishonest", "crooked", "fake" media -- 3,215 out of a total of 8,833 words. That is frightening.

He also devoted 409 words to the "absolutely necessary" border wall. (When he turned to the topic, the crowd applauded and chanted "Build that wall! Build that wall! Build that wall!"). He called out the Democratic obstructionists and threatened to shut down the government in order fund the wall. Mexico paying for the wall is evidently off the table after his embarrassing call to the Mexican President.

That was evidently the start of a wall building campaign/distraction because I got an email from
contact@victory.donaldtrump.com this morning asking me to sign a petition calling on the Senate to fund the wall:

Naturally, I "signed" the petition (using the name "Jim Jones" -- they do not check) and was redirected to https://action.donaldjtrump.com/, where I was asked for a contribution.

I cannot say that surprised me since I receive an average of more than one Trump contribution solicitation per day.

For better or worse, the Internet gives us machine-readable access to presidential speeches (and tweets), allowing us to quickly analyze and digest them. The downside is that they distract us from more mundane news about meaningful actions like changes in enforcement of immigration and drug laws or environmental regulation. We are suffering from attention-deficit disorder.

Annals of sleazy political fundraising

This morning, contact@victory.donaldtrump.com sent me an email offering a chance to enter a lottery for a trip to a Trump rally:

The email greeted me as "friend" and was signed by Trump himself. Trump said the winner would be flown to the rally and have his or her picture taken with him. (He did not say anything about per diem or a stay at a Trump hotel. I wonder if it would be a business class flight.)

I clicked on the Enter Now button and was taken to the solicitation page at https://donate.donaldjtrump.com:

I checked, and it turns out that the domain name donaldjtrump.com belongs to "THE TRUMP ORGANIZATION" (their caps).

I wonder how the receipts for those contributions are divided up.

-----
Update 8/17/2017

I just got another offer to enter the raffle for a trip to a rally. This one is telling me I better hurry to donate because the deadline for entering the drawing is drawing near: "All it takes is ANY CONTRIBUTION before 11:59 PM, Friday, August 18, 2017, to be entered to win this once-in-a-lifetime chance".

Trump is shameless.

------
10/7/2017

I get these offers every day since I am on Trump's email list, but this one stands out. It came from Trump Headquarters and is addressed to friend.

Trump HQ says that "Just like before the election, we don’t trust the approval polls of President Trump that the media continue to put out ... Instead, we want to hear straight from you (italics in the original).

The poll asks only one question (there is a textbox for an optional comment).

I submitted an empty form -- no vote and no comment -- but I was still thanked and asked to contribute a suggested amount between $25 and $2,700 one time or, optionally, on a monthly recurring basis. The old $1 option has been replaced by "other" -- evidently, too many people were only giving a cheesy $1.

Does anyone believe this is an unbiased poll? Does Trump think his supporters are dumb enough to consider this a legitimate poll? I guess the answers must be "yes" or they would not keep sending this sort of thing out.

Are all politicians this blatant and all contributors this naive?

Last Saturday, Newt Gingrich sent me an email inviting me to the President's Trust. Newt said I had to act quickly because the membership list was being sent to the White House at midnight. Here's the invitation:

When I clicked on the link to join the Trust, Newt asked me for a donation. He suggested amounts a lot higher than $1 and offered me the chance to make it a recurring donation:

The next day, I got an invitation to take a survey to show the liberal fake news outlets how out of touch with the truth they were on immigration.

I took the survey and, when I submitted it, got another request for a donation. It looked a lot like Newt's.

This is my first experience with a political mailing list and I have a couple questions:

• Is this typical -- have other presidents requested donations this frequently and this early in their terms?
• If so, is the childish deception in these offers typical?
• Outside of Trump's base "base," are people naove enough to fall for this sort of thing?
• Who actually gets the money?

The long memory of the Internet -- Trump then and now

The Internet has a long memory -- check for yourself by googling "early Trump interviews" and filtering for videos.

In the early days of the Intenet, we naively expected its political impact to be rosy -- leading to informed, intelligent discussion and a flowering of democracy. Many of us held on to that vision as we watched the use of the Internet during the "Arab Spring," but our optimism has eroded steadily since that time. Terrorist recruiting, fake news and lying politicians have dominated recent discussion of the political impact of the Internet, but I have some good news -- the Internet has a long, albeit imperfect, memory.

This was driven home for me by a recent segment on John Oliver's TV show Last Week Tonight. After Donald Trump fired FBI Directory James Comey, he tweeted that he might have recordings of their three previous meetings. Oliver showed and commented on a Fox News interview of Trump after he admitted that he had not recorded the meetings.

Watching the interview, I was amazed by the incoherence of Trump's speech and his dull expression and tone. His wife, who was standing beside, him seemed frozen. I was so impressed by his incoherence that I searched for the clip online and downloaded and transcribed it.

Oliver introduced the interview segment by stating that:

You may remember back in May Trump suggested on Twitter that he may have tapes of his conversations with deposed FBI director James Comey. Well, on Thursday, Trump finally admitted that he had no such tapes and offered this rationale for his claim.

Here is the Transcript of Trump's explanation:

Trump: Well, if I didn't tape him you'd never know what's happening when you see that the Obama administration and perhaps longer than that was doing all of this unmasking and surveillance that you read all about it and I've been reading about it for the last couple of months about the seriousness of the and the horrible situation with surveillance all over the place and you've been hearing the word unmasking, a word you probably never heard before, so you never know what's out there, but I didn't tape and I don't have any tape and I didn't tape.

(Oliver jokes)

Trump continues:When he found out that uh I you know that there may be tapes out there, whether its government tapes or anything else and who knows, I think his story may have changed. I mean you'll have to take a look at that because then he has to tell what actually took place at the events and my story didn't change, my story was always a straight story. My story was always the truth, but you have to determine for yourself whether or not his story changed, but i did not take.

Interviewer: That was a smart way to make sure he stayed honest in his hearings.

Trump: Well, uh, it wasn't uh it wasn't very stupid I can tell you that.

(Oliver jokes)

You can see interview (2:47) along with Oliver's commentary here:

Trump's self-defeating incoherence led me to wonder if he might be mentally impaired, so I searched for other examples online and it turns out that Trump's speech patterns today are strikingly different than when he was younger. For example this survey article compares clips of Trump's earlier interview responses with those of today. Experts interviewed for the article agree that Trump's speech has deteriorated, but all qualified their observations by pointing out that one could not determine the cause without clinical examination -- it could be the onset of dementia, but it could also be explained by normal healthy aging, being tired, stress and pressure, or it might even be a strategic appeal to relatively uneducated voters. I'd throw in narcissism and obsession with Obama as well.

Regardless, the Internet has a long memory -- check for yourself by googling "early Trump interviews" and filtering for videos.

-----
update 7/4/2017

An article in the Atlantic Monthly posits another possible reason for Trump's mental decline, citing research showing that power can lead to a leader's loss of mental capacity -- a phenomenon one researcher refers to as "hubris syndrome."

I experienced this personally when I spent a year and a half as a consultant to the CEO of a large corporation. I was in many meetings with the CEO and various managers and vendors. People jockeyed to sit next to him around a conference table and seldom disagreed with anything he said. It was a status symbol to refer to him by his first name. I had the strong impression that being in a status bubble all day for years had made him somewhat narcissistic and overconfident.

Similarly, Trump is the boss in business and a fan of his cheering, enthusiastic base at political rallies. Perhaps he cannot conceive of being wrong, resulting in flustered incoherence when he is criticized or asked a probing question. Few people would have a sufficiently strong character, sense of purpose or justice not to be affected by being surrounded by "yes people" for years.

The political implications of the Internet, with an emphasis on the last election

I teach a class on Internet applications, implications, and technology and last semester one of our foci was the impact of the Internet on the election. I recently gave a two-hour lecture on the topic, pulling together material we had covered chronologically during the semester. These are the topics covered in the lecture:

• Historical context
• Lying
• Fact checking
• Fake news for money
• Fake news for politics
• Fake images
• Trump dominated social media
• More historical context - disillusion
• Non-political consequences
• Hacking USA
• The Internet is ephemeral
• Breitbart – “alt right” press
• Money behind the scenes
• Europe
• (Imperfect) fixes
• Future fake media

I created a PowerPoint deck for the lecture. The slides are fairly simple -- typically a mnemonic image, a few words and perhaps a food-for-thought question (as illustrated below) -- but they also have notes and links to sources for those wishing to study the material further.

Trump's latest email solicitation is tacky, but is it fraudulent?

You've missed the boat -- it's too late to become a special 100-day member. Yesterday, DonaldJTrump.com sent email soliciting donations saying that "tonight also marks your last chance to go down in the earliest records of our presidency as a special 100-Day Member."

The minimum contribution is $1, but one can contribute up to $2,500 with a single mouse click and even make it a "monthly recurring donation."

In addition to your contribution, you must provide Trump with some information so he can update your mailing-list profile:

(The form says you must provide a true email address, but it does not check).

There is no indication of who is actually getting the money for your "membership" or what organization you are becoming a member of. Who owns the mailing list(s) this solicitation was sent to? Who owns the 100-day club -- the Republican Party? Trump's campaign? Trump? Ivanka or Jared? (DonaldJTrump.com is registered by THE TRUMP ORGANIZATION, located in Trump Tower). Follow the money.

This feels tacky -- reminiscent of radio/TV/tent preachers asking for contributions -- but it is no surprise from the man who owns domain names like TrumpFraud.org, TrumpScam.com, TrumpNetworkPyramidScheme.com and TrumpNetworkPonziScheme.com and founded Trump University.

Is there presidential precedent for this sort of thing? Would the Federal Trade Commission consider it fraudulent or misleading? Can you imagine President Obama soliciting funds for membership in a mailing-list club?

Presentation on the implications of the Internet for politics

I teach a class on the applications, implications and technology of the Internet and we look at relevant current events each week. Last semester there were many current events dealing with the election and I accumulated a large, chronologically ordered, PowerPoint slide deck on the political implications of the Internet.

Last week I substituted for a faculty colleague and gave two 75-minute lectures on the topic, using selected slides from the full deck. The selected slides are not chronological, but organized as follows:

• Historical context
• Lying
• Fact checking
• Fake news for money
• Fake news for politics
• Fake images
• Trump dominated social media
• More historical context - disillusion
• Real world consequences
• Hacking
• The Internet is ephemeral
• Breitbart – “alt right” press
• Money behind the scenes
• (Imperfect) fixes
• Future fake media

There are over 100 selected slides with mnemonic images, few words, links to supporting material and notes. (I use annotated slides in lieu of a textbook). Here are thumbnails of a few of them:

Why we need the Washington Post, New York Times et al

We can easily afford to lose publishers like Gawker Media, but not papers like the Washington Post and the "failing" New York Times.

Donald Trump's choices to head the Energy and Interior departments and the Environmental Protection Agency are climate-change "skeptics" and they support and are supported by the oil industry. This has led some climate scientists to initiate projects to back up climate-sicence research and data.

The Washington Post published a well researched article on the concern of the climate scientists with links to many supporting articles. Donald Trump routinely denigrates the "mainstream media," but this article is a terrific example of what the press can and must do.

The Internet has disrupted the business model of newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times and the Trump administration poses another threat.

Peter Theil is a member of the Trump transition team and a very rich Silicon Valley investor. Gawker Media alienated him by publishing the fact that he was gayand Theil retaliated by secretly financing a law suit for Hulk Hogan who had also been embarrassed by Gawker. The suit bankrupted Gawker Media.

Donald Trump frequently threatens to sue adversaries. Can we imagine him or a supporter like Theil suing the Washington Post?

Maybe, maybe not, but he will surely continue using his "bully pulpit" for ad hominem attacks against publications that fact-check and criticize him. For example, consider these tweets about the "failing" New York Times:

Trump nicknames -- lying, little ... now failing Source

In 2013, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, purchasted the Washington Post from the Graham family for $250 million -- a lot of money for you and me, but not much for Donald Trump or Peter Theil.

Trump has has threatened Bezos, saying he has "a huge antitrust problem because he's controlling so much, Amazon is controlling so much of what they are doing." He added that Bezos is "using The Washington Post, which is peanuts, he's using that for political purposes to save Amazon in terms of taxes and in terms of antitrust."

The Internet has cost newspapers dearly and the Graham family might have been vulnerable to an attack by Trump if they had not sold it. At the time Bezos bought the Washington Post, there was a lot of speculation as to his motivation. I don't know why he bought it, but I am glad he did, because he can afford to defend it.

We can easily afford to lose publishers like Gawker Media, but not papers like the Washington Post and the "failing" New York Times.

Backing up climate-science data

It is nearly inconceivable that Trump would order the deletion of climate-science data -- a modern book burning -- but one can imagine large budget cuts for climate-science research, making it impossible to maintain and update this sort of public data.

Climate scientists have kicked off at least two projects to create backup copies of their research and data.

One is Climate Mirror, which is part of an ad-hoc project to mirror public climate datasets before the Trump Administration takes office -- to make sure these datasets remain freely and broadly accessible.

Another is a hackathon that will be hosted on December 17th at the University of Toronto in collaboration with the Internet Archive End of Term project, which seeks to archive the federal online pages and data that are in danger of disappearing during the Trump administration. (Note that they have done the same for earlier administrations).

For example, NASA recently released data showing how temperature and rainfall patterns worldwide may change through the year 2100 because of growing concentrations of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere.

The post announcing the dataset states:

The dataset, which is available to the public, shows projected changes worldwide on a regional level in response to different scenarios of increasing carbon dioxide simulated by 21 climate models. The high-resolution data, which can be viewed on a daily timescale at the scale of individual cities and towns, will help scientists and planners conduct climate risk assessments to better understand local and global effects of hazards, such as severe drought, floods, heat waves and losses in agriculture productivity.

"NASA is in the business of taking what we’ve learned about our planet from space and creating new products that help us all safeguard our future,” said Ellen Stofan, NASA chief scientist. “With this new global dataset, people around the world have a valuable new tool to use in planning how to cope with a warming planet.

The climate-science community is obviously alarmed by Donald Trump's appointments of Ryan Zinke, who characterizes climate change as “unsettled science," as Secretary of the Interior, Rick Perry, who once could not recall the name of the department, but remembered that he did want to eliminate it, as Secretary of Energy and Scott Pruitt, who consistently opposes regulation, to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

These men are all supporters of and supported by the oil industry.

The Trump transition team also requested a list of the names of Energy Department people (contractors and employees) who have worked on climate science and the professional society memberships of lab workers.

It is nearly inconceivable that Trump would order the deletion of climate-science data -- a modern book burning -- but one can imagine large budget cuts for climate-science research, making it impossible to maintain and update this sort of public data.

-----
Update 12/29/2016

Check out this excellent, short (5:14) interview of Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. The interview begins with climate scientist Eric Holthaus talking about the effort to archive climate research, then Khale goes on to say more about how and why they archive government (.gov and .mil) Web sites when a new administration takes over.

He said 83% of the .pdf files on government sites were deleted between 2008 and 2012. In addition to Web pages, they will be archiving virtual machine versions of interactive government services and databases. (As noted above, those are vulnerable to defunding).

When asked for an example of the value of the archive, Khale mentioned the press release announcing George Bush's ironically famous "Mission Accomplished" speech on the deck of an aircraft carrier. As shown below, the headline reads "President bush announces combat operations in Iraq have ended" and the first sentence qualifies the headline by saying "major" combat operations have ended. Khale said that a couple of weeks later "major" was added to the title and a couple months later, the press release was deleted.

Excerpt from press release on "Mission Accomplished" speech

The Internet is potential providing raw data for historians -- it should be complete and accurate.

If you would like to see a video of the entire speech, the Internet Archive has preserved that as well:




-----
Update 12/30/2016

The following is a transcript of Bob Garfield, co-host of the podcast On The Media, interviewing Brewster Khale, founder of the Internet archive and a partner in the End-of-term Project with a lead-in question for on climate-science research Eric Holthaus of Slate Magazine.

Bob: Meanwhile a small army of volunteer archivists, scientists and advocates have been working to save the government climate change research that already exists

Eric: at NASA and NOA that takes the temperature of the planet from weather stations from satellites from ocean buoys.

Bob: Meteorologist Eric Holthaus spoke to NPR about his effort to save government climate data.

Eric: Sometimes these data sets are only stored in United States government servers so there hasn't really been an effort to catalog those in other countries because we haven't thought it was necessary before

Bob: The Internet Archive on the other hand has given a lot of thought to what gets lost in presidential transitions. Every week the archive tapes three hundred million Web pages and every four years it enlists a bunch of volunteers to make copies of government Web sites as a hedge against what the next administration may choose to delete. It's called The End-of-term web archive and for some reason this year the organizers are getting a lot more offers of help. Brewster Kahle founder of the Internet Archive says that this year his team also is backing up its data to Canada

Brewster: When the election went the way that it did, it was a bit of a surprise, so we looked through the television archive at what President-elect Trump said about freedom of the press and about the Internet and what we found was shocking. He wanted to close up parts of the Internet that there was mocking of freedom of the press. This was kind of a wake-up call and we said let's make sure we have a copy in some other location.

Bob: What are your priorities? How does it work?

Brewster: So the Internet Archive works with the Library of Congress, University of North Texas -- now a growing list of groups to try to do as best we can to record the information that's available on the Web sites and now the web services that have been made available on .gov and .mil Web sites. We found in 2008, 83 percent of the PDFs that were available back then are no longer available even by 2012. So with an 83 percent loss rate when the Obama administration came on board we're likely to see something like it maybe even more with the Trump administration.

So we're coordinating activities to go and archive web pages and we're reaching out to federal webmasters to go and see if we can keep whole services up and running. Can we take virtual machine versions of the databases that they're running and be able to run them in snapshot form so that we can keep these services going as they were in 2016 in the future?

Bob:Give me some examples of when the federal web archive has come in handy. Was there something that you and disappeared that you were super glad to have archived?

Brewster: Oh the anecdotes go on and on. Example -- there is a press release from the White House during the George W. Bush administration when he stood on an aircraft carrier and declared “mission accomplished.” And the headline of that press release was combat operations in Iraq had ceased but a couple of weeks later they changed the headline and said major combat operations had ceased with no notice that it had changed. The only reason why we know is because we had archived both versions. And then a couple of months later the press release went away completely from the web. You know what is more Orwellian is it changing a press release that's in the past or is it disappearing completely?

Bob: What are you most worried is going to disappear in a Trump administration?

Brewster: Frankly we have no idea. This upcoming administration is very aware of the power of the Internet and how it can be manipulated -- how you can go and push things out in the middle of the night and use the journalist system in ways that are really pretty blatant. So let's at least keep a record of it.

Bob: We have just experienced the interference in a political campaign by outsiders. Is this archive secure -- I mean really secure against hacking, against intrusion?

Brewster: The history of libraries is a history of loss. Libraries are burned. That's what happened in the Library of Alexandria. It'll be what happens to us -- just don't know when. So let's design for it. Let's go and make copies in other places. Let's make sure people want universal access to all knowledge, that they want education based on facts. Let's go and make sure that there is an environment that supports libraries. That's the only way that in the long term we're going to survive. And the copies that are maybe now unique at the Internet Archive will survive based on all sorts of changes whether it's earthquakes or institutional failure or law changes.

Bob: Brewster as always many thanks.

Brewster: Thank you very much.

Bob: Mr. Khale is the founder of the Internet Archive and a partner on the End-of-term Project.

Khale's interview was part of longer podcast episode called Hurry Up. They discussed other steps President Obama could take during the last weeks of his term. The suggestions included disclosing information on contributions by government contractors, surveillance and the drone program, closing Guantanamo and clemency. The episode ends with a discussion of the nature of time by science writer James Gleick.

Finally, I created the interview transcript using a nifty service called PopUpArchive. You simply upload a sound file and wait for the text version to be posted ready for download. It takes a little proofreading and editing, but it is a lot faster than manual transcription and as this Microsoft Research report shows, we can look forward to more accurate speech recognition in the future.

Trump's China tweets -- data for historians, political scientists, journalists and us

Trump's tweets and other posts provide us with an unprecedented stream of current information and data for political scientists, journalists and future historians.

The New York Times has published a thorough analysis of Donald Trump's recent phone conversation with the president of Taiwan. It takes a multifaceted look at the call, asking whether it was a "diplomatic gaffe or a calculated new start" in our relationship with China.

Only Trump, his advisors and perhaps some of the people he has been interviewing for Secretary of State can answer that question, but we can get clues as to Trump's thinking by looking at his Twitter stream.

A search of his Twitter stream for the word Taiwan, returned only four tweets:

The two October tweets are anti-Obama campaign statements.

The tweet announcing the call says "CALLED ME" in caps. Was that Trump crowing about his stature or was it intentionally saying he had not initiated the call? I cannot know, but I am certain that this was not a casual call -- it was planned and scheduled by both sides in advance.

The latest tweet justifies the call and serves as a message to China and Trump's constituency. (I have to reluctantly admit that I agree -- pretending that Taiwan does not exist is absurd).

Trump's tweets do not provide definitive answers, but they do give us more information about what is going on than we are used to.

"China" tweets

Since Trump is focusing on China, I searched of his Twitter stream for the word China. Twitter returned 276 tweets -- here are the earliest four:

Trump has been posting anti-China tweets for nearly six years. The first had little engagement -- one reply, 73 retweets and 26 likes -- while the latest one has had 22k replies, 39k retweets and 122k likes so far. He was already campaigning at the time of the first tweet, which refers to a site called shouldtrumprun.com. (Today that site contains only a copy of a statement by the Federal Election Commission saying he was eligible to run).

Who is the intended audience for these tweets? No doubt, the early tweets were intended for Trump supporters -- Breitbart readers and Limbaugh listeners -- but future tweets might also be for the general public and the Chinese government.

I have no doubt that both our State Department and the Chinese Foreign Service are well aware of the issues on which our nations co-depend and where we have conflicts, but discussions of such things are traditionally held in private. Whatever you think of Trump, he is providing us with a degree of transparency we are not used to in our politicians and civil servants.

Listening to a fireside chat

New media are mastered by new politicians and Trump's use of social media is reminiscent of the fireside chats President Roosevelt used to communicate with the American people and others when radio became ubiquitous.

If I were a political scientist, I would begin looking at these and Trump's other tweets and posts as research data, ripe for content analysis and fact-checking. They will also be data for historians one day. (The archive of network traffic during the 1991 Soviet coup attempt might be the earliest example of historical data online).

One thing is for sure -- I hope he keeps tweeting after becoming president.

I hope Trump keeps tweeting

I hope Trump keeps up his tweeting. They say our eyes are windows to our souls, his late-night tweets are a window to his.

Since I have a blog on the Internet in Cuba, I took a look at Trump's tweets, hoping to learn something about his likely Cuba policy. I searched his Twitter stream for tweets with the words Cuba or Cuban and Twitter returned 27 results, but only three were what I was looking for.

I was surprised to see that 20 of the tweets were about Mark Cuban, an entrepreneur, business man and outspoken Trump critic and four related to President Obama. What do those tweets reveal about Trump?

Two of the tweets illustrate his competitive nature.

In this tweet, he brags (with reason) that his reality TV show, The Apprentice, was a bigger hit than one Cuban was on, The Shark Tank.

(NBC later severed relations with Trump because of his remarks during the campaign).

This tweet refers to the Dallas Mavericks, a professional basketball team owned by Cuban:

The next tweet illustrates Trump's proclivity for personal, ad hominem attacks:

(Trump's physique has also been ridiculed).

Three of trump's Cuba tweets were shots taken at President Obama during the campaign, for example these:

An earlier tweet about President Obama was as goofy as Trump's "birther" campaign:

It turned out that only three of the tweets pertained to my initial question:

They give us a clue as to his posture on Cuba during and after the campaign, but I suspect his hard line will be tempered by practical economic and political factors. Regardless, Trump's tweets reveal more about him than about his Cuba policy.

I plan to repeat my Twitter search "Cuba from:realdonaldtrump" from time to time to see how his views evolve. I hope Trump keeps up his tweeting. They say our eyes are windows to our souls, his late-night tweets are a window to his.

Teaching slides on the political impact of the Internet

I teach a class on the applications, technology and implications of the Internet and we begin each week with a discussion of current events relevant to the class. This semester many of those discussions have included material on the implications of the Internet for politics.

I've gone through my discussion slides for this term and put those that deal with the political impact of the Internet in a single, annotated PowerPoint file.

The slides focus on the current election, but also establish context by covering the use of then-new media in earlier elections, starting with radio, and other disappointing political uses of the Internet.

The slides are in chronological order as we have gone through the semester. If you are teaching a related class -- perhaps in political science -- you might find something useful. (I will continue adding new material -- suggestions welcome).

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Update 12/1/2016

I've added new slides dealing with the outing of fake news purveyors, truth versus freedom of speech, risk-limiting audits, a Stanford study of junior high, high school and college students reading of Internet news and the possibility that the Internet might become a "vast wasteland."

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Update 12/14/2016

I've added new slides dealing with National Security Advisor nominee General Mike Flynn's tweets concerning fake news. He later deleted one of the embarrassing tweets, but it had already been cached by the Internet archive.

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Update 12/17/2016

I've added slides dealing with General Flynn, European fake news, Tiananmen Square, the consequences of fake news, good journalism, Trump's continuing post-election lies and Facebook's effort to identify fake news.

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Update 12/20/2016

I've added slides on "Alt Right" gaming of Google search and Google's effort to thwart them.

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Update 12/21/2016

I've added new slides on "Alt Right" gaming of Google (and Bing) search, Google's effort to thwart them and a Pew Research survey on the public's view of fake news.

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Update 12/23/2016

I've added new slides on fantasy versus reality (examples from Trump and Bill Clinton) and whether they matter and Facebook's moves to combat fake news after first dismissing their role.

Update 12/27/2016

I've added new slides on the possibility of real-world consequences to fake news and Russian political hacking in Germany, Italy and the US.

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Update 1/6/2017

I've added new slides about the Panama Papers and what they reveal about Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson. (Collaborative analysis of the Panama Papers by journalists is a positive application of the Internet in politics).

The new slides are located here.

The cumulative slide deck is located here.

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Update 1/9/2017

I've added new slides tracing the impact of a single fake story on the Breitbart News Web site along with some background on Breitbart's Steve Bannon.

The new slides are located here.

The cumulative slide deck is located here.

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Update 1/16/2017

I've added new slides dealing with Trump's writing style on Twitter and his reaction to his briefing on Russian hacking by intelligence agencies. (His response also provides an illustration of his Twitter writing style.

The new slides are located here.

The cumulative slide deck is located here.

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Update 1/17/2017

I've added new slides dealing with Facebook's efforts to flag fake news in the US and Germany and possible fact-checking collaboration.

The new slides are located here.

The cumulative slide deck is located here.

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Update 1/19/2017

I've added new slides dealing with the Internet Archive and others in archiving Internet content that might be deleted or altered for political purposes.

The new slides are located here.

The cumulative slide deck is located here.

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Update 9/15/2017

The campaign is over and Trump is president, but I've gone back and added a couple of new slides -- one on Trump's continued lying and another on recent revelations about Facebook. They are part of a collection of lecture slides I used during the campaign. A subset used in another lecture may be found here. I've added the new slides to both decks.

A real-names domain-registration policy would discourage political lying.

I've discussed the role of the Internet in creating and propagating lies in a previous post, noting that Donald Trump lied more frequently than Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders during the campaign.

Now let's look at fake news like the claim that Pope Francis had endorsed Trump. The fake post features the following image and includes a "statement" by the Pope in which he explains his decision.

The post evidently origniated on the Web site of a fake news station, WTOE 5. Avarice, not politics, seems to be the motivation for the site since it is covered with ads and links to other “stories” that attack both Clinton and Trump.

WTOE 5 states that it is a satirical site on their about page, but how many readers see that? Other sites do not claim satire. For example, the Christian Times about page says nothing about satire, but does assert that they are not responsible for any action taken by a reader:

Christian Times Newspaper is your premier online source for news, commentary, opinion, and theories. Christian Times Newspaper does not take responsibility for any of our readers' actions that may result from reading our stories. We do our best to provide accurate, updated news and information

The Christian Times "editorial" policy is similar to that of WTOE 5 -- they published pre-election news stories on thousands of dead people voting in Florida, hacking of voter systems by the Clinton campaign, Black Panthers patrolling election sites, etc. As soon as the election was over, they informed us that Hillary Clinton had filed for divorce. Don't believe it? Here is their evidence:

Given the WTOE 5 claim to be satire or the Christian Times eschewing responsibilty for actions taken by readers, I suspect that unliess Pope Francis or Hillary Clinton sues, there is no legal recourse.

The dirty tricks during this election remind me of the Watergate burglary, but, unlike Watergate, it is not clear that a law has been broken. In the Watergate case, a crime was committed and the burglars were convicted and sent to prison in 1973. In 1974 investigators were able to establish a White House connection to the burglary and, under threat of impeachment, President Nixon resigned.

Would it be possible to establish a connection between a Web site like "WTOE 5 News" and the Trump campaign?

A Whois query shows us that the domain name Wto5news.com was registered by DomainsByProxy.com. We can see the address, contact information and names of people at DomainsByProxy.com, but the identity of the person or organization registering the domain name is private.

I also checked the Whois record for the Christian Times. It turns out that DomainsByProxy.com is also the registrar for Christiantimesnewspaper.com and the registration is also private.

I am not a lawyer, but I suspect that a request for a subpoena to get the contact information of a long list of people registering domain names for misleading Web sites would be seen as a "fishing expedition" by the courts.

I understand the wish to protect the privacy of a person or organization registering a domain name, but there is also a public interest in discouraging sites like Wto5news.com. A verifiable, real-names policy for domain registration would discourage this sort of thing. The WELL, an early community bulletin board system, adopted such a policy years ago. Their slogan is "own your own words" and it serves to keep discussion civil, stop bullying and lying, etc.

Trump supporters seem to worry a lot about voter fraud. They advocate easing mechanisms for challenging a voter's registration and encourage strict requirements for proof of identity and residence. There is more evidence of demonstrably fraudulent political information on the Internet than fraudulent voting. If their concern is genuine, they should support a real-names policy for domain registration.

If warrants will not pass legal muster and a real-names policy is unrealistic, someone might be tempted to follow the example of the Trump supporters who hacked the Democratic National Committee and resort to hacking registrars to get contact information of their private clients. Maybe Julian Assange could distribute what they find on WikiLeaks.

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Update 11/17/2016

I received some comments on this post from an attorney.

For a start, he said labeling something as "satire" was irrelevant because the defense would be 1st amendment free speech. He said there might be a slight chance for the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" argument, but he and this Atlantic Monthly article agree that that is a long shot. He also said there might be a remote chance of a false advertising claim succeeding, especially if it were against a person working on the Turmp campaign like Steve Bannon of Breitbart or Sean Hannity with his popular radio and TV shows. Regardless, it would be necessary to show that their behavior had altered the election result (for president or "down ballot" contests).

I agree that it would be nearly impossible to show that a single site or lie had provided the margin for Trump's victory, but I do believe that rigorous survey research by a reputable organization could demonstrate that the marginal impact of fake sites and posts in the aggregate was sufficient to elect Trump and I hope that such research is conducted.

Regardless, a true-names policy would help investigators looking for possible connections between the Trump campaign and intentional, systematic Internet misinformation. The revelation of the White House role in Nixon's "dirty tricks' was what mattered, not the conviction of the burglars.

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Update 11/18/2016

The attorney who commented on this post (above) suggested that it would be relevant if Breitbart published a lying article.

After Khizr Khan spoke at the Democratic convention, Breitbart published a story saying he had deep ties to the government of Saudi Arabia, international Islamist investors, controversial immigration programs that wealthy foreigners can use to essentially buy their way into the United States and the “Clinton Cash” narrative through the Clinton Foundation.

That is a lot of deep ties, but it turns out the post was false.

The Breitbart story has had 167,000 Facebook engagements and the refutation has been shared 32,600 times on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Reddit, by email and shared links combined.