Courts can combat gerrymandering with gerrymandering tools

Gerrymandering -- defining voting districts to favor one party or candidate -- has been with us for years, but it was difficult to do and imprecise. Mapping software using Internet voter data have made it precise and easy.

Gerrymandering is in the news because a panel of federal judges ordered North Carolina to redraw its gerrymandered congressional map.

The panel struck down North Carolina’s congressional map, saying it was unconstitutional because it violates the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection. Judge James A. Wynn Jr., in a biting 191-page opinion, said that Republicans in the North Carolina legislature had been “motivated by invidious partisan intent” as they carried out their obligation in 2016 to divide the state into 13 congressional districts, 10 of which are held by Republicans.

The ruling will be appealed directly to the Supreme Court, which is also hearing Wisconsin and Maryland gerrymandering cases. The Wisconsin and South Carolina cases are both based on the 14th amendment and are pro-Democratic while the Maryland case challenges the redrawing of a single district, is based on the 1st Amendment and is pro-Republican.

Gerrymandering is not new -- Patrick Henry tried to defeat James Madison in 1788 by drawing an anti-federalist district. He failed because he did not have good data and computers, but today's politicians have geographic information system software and the data they need to automate efficient, precise gerrymandering. (The term "gerrymandering" was coined in 1812 when Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry reluctantly approved a map in which one district resembled a salamander).

The Republican party has used Internet-enabled gerrymandering to gain a congressional advantage. The Democratic party might be tempted to fight fire with fire, but that would be slow and undemocratic.

The North Carolina judicial panel has a better solution. They gave the legislature until January 24 to present a “remedial plan” and the court will institute its own map if it finds the new district lines unsatisfactory. If that happens, the court can use use the same sorts of tools and data that have been used to produce gerrymandered districts. Instead of using the technology to optimize in favor of either party, they will seek maps that equalize district populations, minimize geographic perimeters, respect natural boundaries like rivers, maximize racial diversity, etc. In general, courts are more likely to be non-partisan than legislatures.

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Update 1/19/2018

Pennsylvania county results, 2016

The U. S. Supreme Court granted a stay in the court order requiring North Carolina lawmakers to produce a revised congressional voting map within two weeks. This temporary delay probably means the current map will be used in the 2018 election.

In a related case, the Pennsylvania state supreme court is currently hearing a gerrymandering case which could result in the redrawing of their district map in time for the 2018 election.

Republicans won 13 of Pennsylvania's 18 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2016 in spite of the fact that Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by only 44,292 (.75%) votes.


Update 1/30/2018

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has decided that the Republican-drawn district map violates the State Constitution and ordered that it be redrawn by February 9th.

Republicans hold 72% of Pennsylvania's 18 seats in Congress and only carried the state by .75% in the last election. That imbalance raised a red flag, but there are no hard and fast rules for determining whether oddly-shaped districts or disproportional representation are due to intentional gerrymandering or other factors like compliance with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination, or people choosing to live in homogeneous neighborhoods.

A "legitimate" district

In a sense, the judges had to decide the intent of the Republicans in drawing their district map and the following exchange during the hearing may have led them to rule that the intent was to gerrymander:

Justice Max Baer: “if you took the Democratic areas of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and connected them via the Pennsylvania Turnpike, that’s okay?”

Jason Torchinsky, a lawyer representing the Pennsylvania Republican party: "yes.“

That would be an extreme example of "packing" -- putting all of Pennsylvania's urban Democrats into a single, overwhelmingly Democratic district. A Democrat would win the packed district in a landslide, thereby "wasting" many Democratic votes. Our Electoral College voting system also disenfranchises voters in predominantly Republican or Democratic states, thus giving inordinate power to a handful of competitive "swing" states in national elections.

Illinois District four

While the hypothetical Pennsylvania example is blatant, an unusually shaped district could also be the result of compliance with the Voting Rights Act. For example, Illinois District four has two areas connected by an uninhabited stretch of land along Interstate 294, creating a Hispanic-majority district.

For a funny and informative discussion of the difficulty of drawing fair district maps and another blatant example of partisan bias, watch the following video, but be forewarned that it includes some adult content.

Update 2/12/2018

Last Friday, Pennsylvania Republicans submitted their proposed district map to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The governor says he will review the map and decide whether or not to recommend that the Court accept it by February 15th. If he rejects the map, the Court will impose its own map on February 19, in time for primary elections.

In rejecting the current map, the Court noted that in the three elections held after the last redistricting, Democrats won the same five seats and Republicans won the remaining 13 seats every year, in spite of the fact that the Democrats won between 46 and 51 percent of the statewide popular vote in each election. Furthermore, in 2016, Democrats won their House seats with an average of 75 percent of the vote, while the Republicans' victory margin averaged only 62 percent. The Court concluded that the Democrats had been packed into five districts, "wasting 25 percent of their votes," and the Republicans were spread out among the remaining 13 districts.

This map shows the packing of the seventh district:

Source

The Court found that the evolution of the district from a compact, contiguous region at the time of the 83rd Congress (1953-5) to today's map indicated illegal gerrymandering:

Source

The stakes are high. If redistricted, Pennsylvania might end up with nine Republican and nine Democratic representatives and that could make the difference between Democratic or Republican control of the US House of Representatives.

Update 3/24/2018

Map redrawn by the Supreme Court

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected the redrawn map submitted by the Legislature, substituting the map shown here which has:

• 10 Trump 2016 districts
• 8 Clinton 2016 districts
• 1908 district border miles
• 13 county splits

As compared to the old map which had:

• 12 Trump 2016 districts
• 6 Clinton 2016 districts
• 3047 district border miles
• 28 county splits

A dozen Republican members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives have filed impeachment resolutions against the five Supreme Court judges who are Democrats, arguing that they had violated the State Constitution.

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a Republican, released a statement calling the impeachment resolution "an attack upon an independent judiciary."

Two New York Times staff members drew the following map to demonstrate the ease with which partisan redistricting is achieved using mapping software with data available on the Internet. They did it using Dave's Redistricting Service -- you can try it for yourself.

A blatantly partisan, hypothetical district map drawn using an Internet service

It is easier to spot gerrymandering and state the problem than it is to come up with an equitable, constitutional solution, but we should do our best to keep partisan politics out of the process and legislators are nearly all members of a party. Having courts draw up maps, as was done in Pennsylvania, or allowing states to establish independent redistricting commissions like the one in California seem like imperfect steps in the right direction.

Update 9/3/2018

In June, the Supreme Court sidestepped the question of when extreme partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional on technical grounds. They acknowledge that gerrymandering is a threat to democracy, but seem uncertain on technical issues like the lack of an operational definition of gerrymandering, deciding whether a political party or a voter is harmed by gerrymandering, whether challenges have to be to a specific district map rather than an entire state, etc. They have left the door open for future action.

Last month, a Federal Court found that North Carolina’s congressional districts were unconstitutionally gerrymandered to favor Republicans over Democrats and said it may require new districts before the November elections; however, it now appears there will not be time to redistrict the state. This will taint the outcome of the election and could conceivably determine the Congressional majority.

This article presents analysis showing that the current districts are stacked in favor of Republicans and, lest one conclude that this was a fluke, quotes State Representative David Lewis as saying: "I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”

In the Federal Court ruling, we read that when Dr. Thomas Hofeller was engaged to draw new districts Mr. Lewis and State Senator Robert Rucho instructed him to “to create as many districts as possible in which GOP candidates would be able to successfully compete for office.” Dr. Hofeller testified that he complied, seeking “to minimize the number of districts in which Democrats would have an opportunity to elect a Democratic candidate.”

How do these people sleep at night?

Update 9/6 2018

The same panel of judges that opened the possibility of redistricting before the November election has concluded that the current, radically gerrymandered map must be used this year because there is not enough time to revise it before the election. The citizens of North Carolina have been denied democracy for the last three elections. Let's hope that the fourth time will be the last.

The effect of gerrymandering in North Carolina (source)

Update 10/10/2019

Last June, the US Supreme Court decided that states, not the federal government, were responsible for legislative maps. This week a North Carolina state court effectively threw out the state’s map of congressional districts on Monday, saying critics were poised to show “beyond a reasonable doubt” that it was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander favoring Republicans. Furthermore, the judges said they were prepared to postpone primary elections should that prove necessary to further litigate the case or draw new House districts, so we can almost certainly anticipate that there will be more than three Democratic representatives from North Carolina next year.

For more on North Carolina gerrymandering see this post.

Censorship and being skeptical of things posted online -- an example for my class

This morning my Google Plus feed included a link to a video posted by Moshe Vardi on Chinese Internet censorship during the run up to the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations.

I am going to use it in class as an example of government censorship, but, more important, to illustrate the need to be skeptical of things one finds online.

Internet censorship in China is not exactly news, but I still wanted to check the provenance of the video. The video was produced by Vocativ.com. Going to their Chinese news page, I noted that the general tenure of the posts is negative, perhaps indicating some bias:

The Vocativ.com video presents a number of "man in the street" interviews showing people who are apathetic about or unaware of the 1989 demonstrations. At the 1:27 point in the video, a reportedly censored post from Weibo, China's version of Twitter, is displayed. The deleted post had allegedly contained a link to a Tiananmen democracy rally announcement at http://bit.ly/1kn6p3V, a URL shortened using the bitly.com service.

Following the link, I found a Weibo page with a bunch of posts, none of which seem to have anything to do with Tiananmen Square (thanks Google translate).

But, I noticed something strange. Normally, when you go to a URL shortened by bitly.com, it displays the original full-length URL in the address bar, but in this case, it displayed the shortened version, http://bit.ly/1kn6p3V.

When I refreshed that page, it went first to http://us.weibo.com/gb then redirected back to http://bit.ly/1kn6p3V.

This strange behavior indicates some sort of trickery, lending credence to the assertion that a rally announcement had been deleted.

One can not be sure, but I now have more confidence in the video, it's interview clips and the claim that over 50 people were arrested in the run up to the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen.

Shifting gears -- it was interesting to compare the Weibo site to Twitter. It is a lot busier, more colorful and loaded with ads, including animated GIFs. Definitely not a US style site.

Not only does Weibo have more ads, it has greater information density. I checked a 102 Chinese character "tweet" and Google translated it into 335 latin letters -- well over the Twitter limit. (We can re-take the advantage by attaching images of printed pages to our tweets).

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Here is the video:



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Update 2/25/2015

This is an 80 minute talk Chinese censorship of the Internet by Gary King, of the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science:



King reports that China has over half a million people working on Internet censorship and that their goal is not to suppress criticism, but to head off action. (Criticism is valuable information).

The scope and methodology of this study is interesting -- big data social science – made possible by the Internet.

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Update 5/25/2016

Gary King and his colleagues have published a study in which they estimate that Chinese government workers fabricate about 488 million social media posts annually.

The workers write these posts in addition to their regular jobs and send copies to a government propaganda office.

King estimates that about one in every 178 comments on Chinese social media sites is fabricated by the government, but they are not distributed uniformly over time. As shown below, their strategy is to increase post frequency in response to specific threats or events and nearly stop at other times.

Internet censorship is a cat and mouse game, and there are many mice

When the Turkish government decided to "obliterate" Twitter, they got a court order allowing them to delete the IP address corresponding to twitter.com from the domain name servers (DNS) used by Turkish ISPs. Twitter.com became an unknown host name.

But the DNS your ISP uses is not the only one on the Internet -- there are many. If you knew the IP address of an alternative DNS, you could continue accessing Twitter.

A few years ago, Google decided to run a DNS as a public service in order to improve Internet security and speed. Word quickly got out that one could change the DNS address supplied by their ISP to Google's: 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4:

The government ploy may have worked a few years ago, but people are now more computer savvy and those who wished to continue using Twitter quickly switched to Google's public DNS.

The government countered by blocking traffic to/from Twitter's IP address, but Turks could circumvent that by using proxy servers, which hide the fact that they are communicating with Twitter.com:

As the government learns the IP addresses of the various proxy servers around the Internet, they can block them, but there are many available and new ones come online when old ones are discovered.

Twitter also posted a tweet showing how to post using SMS rather than the Internet:

This cat and mouse game has been going on since the time of the 1991 Soviet coup attempt, when the network operators abandoned their office for the anonymity of their laptops at home:

At that time, there were only a handful of citizen journalists; today there are millions.
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Update 3/24/2014

More on the ability of the Net to route around censorship.
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Update 3/26/2014

Turkey will hold municipal and regional elections on March 30, and Reporters without Borders just published a post on the “Toxic climate for media a week ahead of elections.” The post links to several other posts from this month and last. While focused primarily on television and print, the posts also address electronic media. Check, for example “Blocking of Twitter -- worthy of the most repressive regimes,” which offers a tutorial on four ways to remain in contact with Twitter.
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Update 3/30/2014

Turkey blocked YouTube after a recording of a top-secret military meeting was posted, but the recording has been copied to Dropbox and circulated online -- you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube once its out. Their attempt to block Twitter earlier in the week resulted in silencing regime loyalists, but not critics. Twitter now has posts mocking the prime minister’s high voice and the failed attempt to block Twitter.
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Update 3/30/2014

The cat fights back -- the Turkish government has blocked access to Google's public DNS -- Turks using 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 will now be using a fake domain name server.
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Update 4/17/2014

Turkey is now blurring (pixelating) offensive tweets. Is that for real? Do they automate the process? Is Twitter cooperating? Is April Fools Day on the 17th in Turkey?

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Update 10/3/2014

The Turkish Constitutional Court has ruled that Turkey's telecommunication authority does not have the right to close websites on grounds of protecting national security. The court also ruled against their authority to store internet data for up to two years. (They had been granted these powers when parliament passed amendments to the Internet Law on September 10).

Freedom House report -- "Freedom on the Net, 2013"

Freedom House publishes an annual report on Internet freedom and Freedom on the Net 2013 was published last week.

The report "headline" is an Internet freedom score for each of 60 nations. The score is based on:

• Obstacles to Access—including infrastructural and economic barriers to access, legal and ownership control over internet service providers (ISPs), and independence of regulatory bodies;
• Limits on Content—including legal regulations on content, technical filtering and blocking of websites, self-censorship, the vibrancy/diversity of online news media, and the use of ICTs for civic mobilization;
• Violations of User Rights—including surveillance, privacy, and repercussions for online activity, such as imprisonment, extralegal harassment, or cyber attacks.

Here are the controls in effect in the top and bottom five scoring nations:

The USA rank will probably drop next year, reflecting the ongoing revelations of the extent of NSA Internet surveillance. (For the full list of national controls click here).

While the index is interesting, the meat of the report is in essays on the state of the Internet in the various nations. These are concise and well referenced. They focus on developments during the year, but are a good starting point to understanding the Internet in a nation.

The report also includes graphic presentations of the data, for example, an interactive map in which data is displayed when the cursor hovers over a nation:

Global Voices and The Guardian review the Arab Spring

Global Voices has posted an extensive retrospective of the Arab Spring.

They've pulled together their coverage of the events in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and the protests in Bahrain, Morocco, Syria and Yemen.

The retrospective includes pictures from and overview articles on each country and links to hundreds of chronologically organized posts that appeared on Global Voices during the year.

Global Voices is an international community of over 500 bloggers and translators who report on blogs and citizen media from around the world. Founded at Harvard in 2005, they emphasize content that is not ordinarily seen in international mainstream media.

For another year-end overview of the Arab Spring, check out this interactive timeline from The Gaurdian.

The Internet was an important tool during the Arab Spring, but politically oriented citizen journalism has been with us for many years. Perhaps the first example was the during the 1991 Soviet coup attempt, which was reported in real-time on Usenet. Before the Twitter revolution, there was the Usenet revolution.

Get a free copy of Twitter for Good -- a how-to for organizations with social goals

When Twitter started up, its prompt question was "What are you doing?" A lot of early traffic was simple answers to that question -- interesting to your friends perhaps, but not particularly significant.

The prompt today is "what's happening?," which solicits a broader class of comment.

There are many stories of inventions that came to be used in ways their creators did not envision, and Twitter is one of those. In the preface of Twitter for Good, co-founder Biz Stone tells the story of James Buck, a photo journalist covering Egyptian demonstrations. When Buck was arrested during a demonstration he tweeted one word -- "arrested." The word spread via Twitter to his colleagues and diplomats, and within hours he tweeted again -- "free."

It is now clear that Twitter can be used for more than telling friends what you are doing. It has been used for disaster relief, political organizing, live reporting of events, as a broadcast medium for popular figures like athletes, actors, politicians and journalists, even, sadly, for coordination of terrorist activity.

Twitter for Good is a how-to book with tips and case studies for organizations and individuals that want to use Twitter for good. It's oriented toward social action, but many of the recommendations are also relevant to any organization that wants to use Twitter for public relations, marketing, and customer or community relationship management.

I have only skimmed the book, so cannot write a full, critical review, but, if it sounds interesting, you can get a free copy. Starting at 12:00 AM (midnight) on Tuesday, September 6, 2011 an electronic version of the book will be available for download at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Click on the Kindle (Amazon) or Nook (B&N) edition, then purchase them for free. The B&N version is in ebook format.

The offer is good for 24 hours. If you miss the free copy, all is not lost -- you can enter to win a copy here.

Recommended podcast: Maajid Nawaz on radical's use of the Internet

Maajid Nawaz

At first we naively expected the Internet and other communication technology to favor democracy over dictatorship. In a 1998 report on the Internet in Cuba, I wrote of

the 'dictator's dilemma' -- the desire to have the benefits of the Internet without the threat of political instability. How do you give people access to information for health care, education, and commerce while keeping them from political information?

Today, we have a more nuanced view of the Internet as a force for democracy -- we see that it is not only used by democrats, but by dictators and even terrorists, as illustrated by the use of Google Earth to plan missile attacks.

al-Aqsa commander in Gaza

Maajid Nawaz, presents a vivid picture of the use of the Internet by radical Islamists in his Ted Talk A global culture to fight extremism. Nawaz feels that extremists -- whether Islamists or white power advocates -- make better use of the Internet than democracy advocates. He speaks with authority, having used the Internet as a propagandist and recruiter for the global Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir for 13 years, including five years in an Egyptian prison for attempting to overthrow the government. He describes the use of the Net by extremists, asks why they have succeeded across borders and goes on to argue for a countervailing grass roots, youth-led movement to advocate for a democratic culture.

The Net is back up in Syria -- why did they take it down? Why reconnect?

As shown in this graph from Renesys. Syria, like Egypt in January, was disconnected from the Internet for 28 hours, but is now back online.

Why did they take it down? Why did they reconnect it?

I am sure the takedown was under consideration and debated internally for some time. The deciding factor may have been the world wide revulsion at the YouTube video showing the tortured and mutilated body of 13-year old Hamza Ali al-Khateeb. (A good place to read about that is David Brooks' commentary on it in the New York Times. If you want to see the video itself, you can find it on YouTube. I've not watched it -- Brooks' description was sufficient for me.)

Why did they reconnect to the Internet? Perhaps they realized the futility of stopping the flow of information into and out of the country, as illustrated by this tweet:

@MadeInSyria Dial up access for #Syria: +46850009990 +492317299993 +4953160941030 user:telecomix password:telecomix, 11 hours ago

Perhaps it was the dictator's dilemma -- Syrian economic institutions had grown too dependent upon the Net to cut it off. Regardless, it is back up and the Twitter stream for #syria is again reporting on the situation, for example:

@MalathAumran: Hama reports tens of tanks gathering about 60 at the southern entrance of the city #Syria, 1 hour ago

@jenanmoussa: Ten dead as helicopter opens fire in #syria(n) city of #Edleb: al arabiya, 2 hours ago

@weddady: 63 peaceful protesters killed yesterday by the regime of Bashar Al-Assad in #Syria.. in other news, the world is watching.., 2 hours ago

@MalathAumran: Idleb: Military helicopters are shooting randomly on Jisr Alshghour city for half an hour now. more details @ http://j.mp/j2wR3s #Syria, 2 hours ago

@guardian: Syrian forces kill 70 protesters http://gu.com/p/2ph93/tw #Syria
2 hours ago

@FlashNewsPlus, #Syria: extremely disturbing report from witnesses that wounded are being taken from Al Badr hospital in #Hama and killed. via @MalathAumran, 8 hours ago

Messages like these are being read by government leaders and citizens around the world, and they cannot easily be ignored. They are also important for the people in Syria who can know what is going on in cities other than their own.

The Syrian government would like to suppress this news, but they cannot. Do they now wish they had reined in the Internet from the beginning, as, for example, Cuba did and continues doing? Cuba has paid a price for that decision, but it may have helped prolong Castro's regime.

The Dictator's Dilemma

Ethan Zuckerman

I am not sure, but I may have been first to use the term "dictator's dilemma" in a 1997 report on the Internet in Cuba:

This presents a "dictator's dilemma" -- the desire to have the benefits of the Internet without the threat of political instability. How do you give people access to information for health care, education, and commerce while keeping them from political information?

I was naive at the time, and imagined the Internet as a force for democracy, but my view is more balanced these days. It is clear that dictators use the Internet as well as democrats -- they restrict access, block sites and people, and conduct surveillance. Terrorists use the Net for propaganda and recruiting, planning and logistics. Furthermore, happy, well fed citizens (for example in China) are relatively complacent in their attitudes toward Internet openness -- see this report and this interview.
With recent events in North Africa and the Middle East, the dictator's dilemma is back in the news. Hillary Clinton talked about it in a recent speech, and I wrote a post on current developments in Cuba, but the best discussion I have heard lately was on the radio show On The Media. On February 18th, they broadcast an excellent discussion of the topic with Ethan Zuckerman from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. If you are interested in the role of the Internet in politics and democracy, check it out. You can listen to the 19-minute discussion or read the transcript.

Before the Twitter revolutions, there was the Usenet revolution

Polina Antonova and Eugene Peskin operating Kremvax, the link between
Relcom and the West

The first example of relatively large-scale citizen journalism online was during the August 1991 coup attempt by eight high-level Soviet officials. There were two days of confrontation between demonstrators and troops, during which all Russian media except Usenet news groups were shut down by the authorities. Usenet, a precursor of today's Internet discussion forums, carried traffic into, out of and within Russia (70 cities) during the days of the coup attempt.

One of the quotes from that time foreshadows subsequent attempts to shut the Internet down. Polina Antonova of RELCOM, the Unix distributor that operated the network wrote:

They try to close all mass media, they stopped CNN an hour ago, and Soviet TV transmits opera and old movies. But, thank Heaven, they don't consider RELCOM mass media or they simply forgot about it. Now we transmit information enough to put us in prison for the rest of our life.

After two tense days, the coup failed and president Mikhail Gorbachev was restored to power. For more on the role of the network during the coup attempt, see:

• The role of the network during the coup attempt (Internet Society)
• Description of RELCOM (CACM)
• Archive of all network traffic and other material (David Bozak, SUNY)
• List of quotes from the network traffic (ACM Risks Forum)
• More quotes (EFF)

The following video clip (3:13) was part of a documentary on the Internet. (It includes a short interview of me at the time -- no white hair :-).



Usenet played a relatively significant role during the Soviet coup attempt, but there was also some Usenet traffic during the 1989 Tienanmen Square protests. Everyone is familiar with the heroic image of the unidentified man stopping a column of tanks on June 6 1989 -- the day after troops had opened fire on protesters.

But, there was some Usenet traffic as well. Olivier Crepin-Leblond has saved a description of the situation that was posted by a Sun Microsystems employee on May 23. It describes the optimistic time before the storm, beginning with:

The situation here seems getting better and better. All army members are blocked outside Beijing city. The people’s life in the city looks as normal as usual.

Here is a movie clip of the tank man at Tiananmen Square:



This clip was not on the Internet at the time, but it is today -- providing a dramatic view of a heroic act and illustrating the futility of China's attempt to erase the memory of the event.

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Update 8/20/2016

Slate has published a relatively long post entitled "An act of courage on the Soviet Internet" on RELCOM's role during the Soviet Coup attempt of 1991. The article describes my involvement at the time, but fails to link to the archive of the network traffic and other material, which is available to historians and others interested in the event.

I believe this was the first example of active citizen journalism involving the Internet. The Internet has given us a means of documenting historical events in detail -- "big data" for historians. We need a mechanism for discovering and preserving such archives.

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Update 1/12/2017

Mark Graham, who relayed news over the Sovam Teleport link during the Soviet coup attempt, just sent me an article on their activity at the time. Unfortunately, the data they transmitted and received has been lost. Our archive is still online at the State University of New York site mentioned above and, even better, it is online at the Internet Archive.

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Update 7/7/2018

For an excellent article on the role of RELCOM in the Soviet Coup attempt, click here.

Mumbai terrorist attack: the 21-hour evolution of a co-authored document.

We discuss writing for the Internet, including co-authroing composite and co-authored documents and collaborative writing by small and very large groups.

The Mumbai terrorist attack provides an illustration of a co-authored document with many authors. The Wikipedia page on the attack was started at 18:20, 26 November 2008 by a user named Kensplanet. The initial posting consisted of two sentences:

The 26 November 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks were a series of attacks by terrorists in Mumbai, India. 25 are injured and 2 killed.

Kensplanet revised his initial post 5 times during the next ten minutes, then others began to contribute. By 15:44, 27 November 2008, the article was 4,780 words long with many links. During this time, there had been 942 edits. Of those, 149 were anonymous (IP address only), 199 people made only one, and 93 authors could not be identified. Two contributors had made over 50 edits. Kensplanet, who started the article, had made 57.

The organization of the article also evolved during this period. While it began as two sentences, 21 hours later it was organized into 6 major sections with 5 sub-sections:

For the story of the evolution of another Wikipedia page, see this most interesting screencast by Jon Udell.

Anyone might be a reporter with Twitter

We have seen that portable Internet access devices capable of streaming live video are becoming available. Video cameras are not yet ubiqutous, but portable devices capable of micro-blogging with Twitter are now quite common.

Here is a sad example of the use of Twitter during the terrorist attack in Mumbai.

What would be the implications for news reporting, police work and security if most people carried location-aware, mobile Internet access devices capable of Twittering, uploading pictures and streaming video?

The Chiniese Internet and the dictator's dilemma

We have discussed the "dictator's dilemma" -- the desire to have the benefits of the Internet without the threat of political instability. How do you give people access to information for health care, education, science, entertainment, commerce, etc. while blocking political and culturally sensitive information? In this interview excerpt, former NPR China Correspondent Rob Gifford describes the Chinese Internet. Gifford feels the people who are economically well enough off to use the Internet are unlikely to use it against the regime.

This excerpt was taken from an Moira Gunn's interview of Gifford.