Order in the Court

Kate Bladow of ProBono.net showed some of her group's projects designed to make court procedures more transparent to low-income clients. Although Bladow might not have been the most polished of Ignite style speakers, she made a powerful argument about access to legal services in a time in which more citizens are choosing to represent themselves in court. She described how court forms continue to be the most important documents in justice system processes. (For more about e-government, access to forms, and Weberian bureaucracy, see the great work on the "virtual state" done a decade ago by Jane Fountain.) Bladow explained how "online interactive interviews" could solve some of the problems created by incorrectly filled out forms and showed several examples from LawHelp Interactive and discussed how materials could be retasked and crowdsourced for low-cost efficiency. So far the system has generated over 12,000 correct and legible forms in the New York area alone. In areas such as Kentucky and Oklahoma, courts are experimenting with eliminating confusing forms altogether.

A New Game in Town

Now that "Justices Take Case on Video Game Law," it will be interesting to see how the Supreme Court understands the limits of free speech with respect to representations of violence. Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association, which involves a California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors, will be heard by the court in Fall. (See coverage of the 9th Circuit decision on Virtualpolitik here.) It's difficult to predict the outcome. Recently, in a decision on so-called "crush videos," United States v. Stevens, the court ruled in favor of free speech, even in a case involving violent entertainment. I've also said in some choice words about Leland Yee that I don't have much respect for the author of the original bill or his rigor as a conscientious policy maker. But it is called a "conservative court" for a reason, which might be more enthusiastic in defending hunting as recreation, which was an issue of concern in the Stevens ruling, than in defending playing videogames.

Texty Cop

In City of Ontario, California, et al., Petitioners v. Jeff Quon, et al the Supreme Court is taking up the tricky questions of privacy involved in employers who snoop on the personal electronic communications of their employees. The appeal of a SWAT officer, his wife, his girlfriend, and his friend complains of privacy violations, because prolifically produced and sometimes sexually explicit text messages to and from Officer Jeff Quon were examined and found inappropriate by his bosses. The Ninth Circuit is known for its free speech liberalism when it comes to computer-mediated communication, and their decision that both upholds and reverses the disciplinary action of Quon's employers will give the high court more than it may know what to do with, given Chief Justice Roberts apparent befuddlement with high-tech electronic devices. For more information about the case, you can check out coverage on Scotus Blog and The Volokh Conspiracy.

Because Quon is a public employee, any precedent set by the case may be limited, but a recent study on Teens and Mobile Phones by Amanda Lenhart indicates that more texters will soon be entering the workforce.

Neutral No More

Of course the big digital politics story today is the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision against network neutrality in Comcast v. Federal Communications Commission. There are a number of factors involved, which include prevailing attitudes about the FCC's authority to regulate the Internet and cultural skepticism about the value of file-sharing technologies that are seen as infringing upon copyright in the company's attempt to restrict BitTorrent use among their customers. As the EFF explains in "Court Rejects FCC Authority Over the Internet," the issue is likely to be bounced back to the legislature.

Here's the problem: Congress has never given the FCC any authority to regulate the Internet for the purpose of ensuring net neutrality. In place of explicit congressional authority, the FCC decided to rely on its "ancillary jurisdiction," a catchall source of authority that amounts to “we can regulate without waiting for Congress so long a the regulations are related to something else that Congress told us to do.” Of course, this line of reasoning could translate into carte blanche authority for unelected bureaucrats to regulate the Internet long after Chairman Genachowski has moved on.

Champions of network neutrality Save the Internet argue in "The Courts Can’t Take Away Our Internet" that the issue shouldn't stay within the judicial branch. They are encouraging supporters to reclassify broadband as follows:

There’s an easy fix here: The FCC can change broadband back to a “communications service,” which is where it should have been in the first place. By reclassifying broadband, all of these questions about authority will fall away and the FCC can pick up where it left off – protecting the Internet for the public and bridging the digital divide.

Supporters of network neutrality are urged to sign this online petition during a rapidly shrinking 72-hour comment period. This YouTube video with motion graphics champions network neutrality to the unconverted.



Ironically, the website for the district appeals court deciding the fate of the Internet is still "powered by IBM Lotus Workplace Web Content Management," while the FCC seems to be trying to improve its digital rhetoric at FCC Reboot. Maybe they won't actual win a Foley Award this year.

Feds on Facebook

The concept of social surveillance as it is practiced on Twitter takes on a new significance when law enforcement becomes involved. "When tweets can make you a jailbird" describes how a fraudulent businessman on the lam in Mexico was caught by his own disclosures on the popular microblogging site.

Law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, even going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that surfaced in a lawsuit.

The document shows that U.S. agents are logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target's friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs and video clips.

Among the purposes: Investigators can check suspects' alibis by comparing stories told to police with tweets sent at the same time about their whereabouts. Online photos from a suspicious spending spree — people posing with jewelry, guns or fancy cars — can link suspects or their friends to crime.

Apparently the Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained this 300+ page document, which described current law enforcement practices.

A Black Eye for Open Access

Note how coverage of the murderous University of Alabama biologist Amy Bishop at the New York Times in "A Case for Tenure That Some See as Falling Short" implies that online journals would not be likely to be peer-reviewed and would be unlikely to strengthen a tenure case.

The publications include a recent paper in The International Journal of General Medicine, published electronically by Dovepress, essentially a scientific vanity press. Dr. Bishop’s paper in that journal, on nerve cells grown in the laboratory and exposed to drugs used to treat depression, lists her school-age children as the first three authors. The fourth author is herself, and the fifth is her husband, who is identified as being at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, although he does not have a position there.

Differentiating legitimate online journals from vanity press publications would seem to be important, given the unsustainability of current print models for academic publishing.

On its home page, the journal claims to be indexed in the large legitimate medical database PubMed, which many biological sciences students use, and posts a link that seems to affiliate itself with the open content initiative OCLC. It also includes the following description of its rigor:

An international, peer-reviewed, Open Access journal that focuses on general and internal medicine, pathogenesis, epidemiology, diagnosis, monitoring and treatment protocols. The journal is characterized by the rapid reporting of reviews, original research and clinical studies across all disease areas.

Report Cards

Virtualpolitik friend David Folkenflik is covering an interesting story about access to educational records in "Prosecutor Turns on Crusading Journalism School" about the journalism course taught by David Protess and its links to The Innocence Project, which has launched investigations of the cases of Death Row inmates that has led to the exoneration of almost a dozen wrongly convicted people.

Now, the chief prosecutor for the Chicago region is turning the tables. She is demanding unusual evidence of her own from the professor and his students: their grades, e-mails, notes and course evaluations from a project in which they're championing the cause of yet another murder convict.

The prosecuting state attorney for Cook County, Anita Alvarez, worries that in their eagerness to gain good grades, students may have been motivated to find witnesses willing to fabricate stories in exchange for money and other benefits. According to the NPR story, "Protess says he is adamant he will never give up the grades, the notes, the e-mails or anything else," because the students are "acting as journalists" and should not be required to reveal their sources. Because both students' grades and instructors' course evaluations are being requested, the implication of Alvarez's inquiry seems to be that both parties in the pedagogical situation could be faulted.

The inclusion of e-mail is also interesting, since many faculty members complain about how time-consuming electronic communication with students has become. Managing and responding to the volume of e-mail involved in a typical course has become a praise-worthy attribute for any instructor.

I was interested to go to the website for The Innocence Project and consider the digital rhetoric that the initiative itself models. In addition to its blog, the project has links to Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, which it describes as the conduits to its "online communities," where supporters describe as the "best places to join the discussion about wrongful convictions and critical reforms to prevent injustice" without any privacy disclaimers. It is interesting that the page about how to "Build a Class Presentation" doesn't mention PowerPoint, despite its widespread use in both the classroom and the courtroom. As these instructions demonstrate, The Innocence Project has a liberal intellectual property policy that encourages remixing and reuse.

If you chose a case with an interview on our YouTube page, you may want to show that video to your class. If you chose another case, you can show your class the video "Freed by DNA" about Marvin Anderson's case and the need for access to DNA testing. You can copy any of them from our website or YouTube.

For papers, you can use the photo that appears with the full case profile on our website, or any images from our multimedia slideshows. You can also use any of the charts and graphs that appear on the Innocence Project website or in the hour-long multimedia presentation. (Permission is granted to use this material, provided you specifically state that the material was created by the Innocence Project.)

Thanks to Vivian Folkenflik for the link!

Give the People What They Want

The Obama administration has been talking a lot about potential mash-ups made possible by their commitment to transparency and how iPhone customers can see where economic stimulus money is being spent or how airport flight times are being calculated. But they fail to mention that the most popular application that takes government data and combines it with locational mobile phone technology is the application for locating sex offenders in a given neighborhood. See this ABC News story for more.

The Barricades

Social network sites are featuring images of conflict on campuses in the public university system, as the state of California's fiscal crisis continues to take a toll on higher education. Dramatic video is being circulated of UCLA students protesting a regents meeting at which fee hikes and budget cuts are going into effect, and the video below shows a student on my own UC Irvine campus on the wrong end of an altercation with police.

Code Blue

I could write an entire book chapter about the LAPD's YouTube channel. Usually their online videos garner almost no views, because they usually feature press conferences, messages from the chief, and visits to local stations, where one can see things like the Nicole Parker Foundation's creepy mural room in the Topanga Station.

Now their viral video style and their iWATCH anti-terrorism program is being mocked by Reason and Boing Boing. Of course, those who know the longer history know that the LAPD has had a long history of screw-ups involving computational media, including some disastrous attempts at providing online digital maps of Muslim neighborhoods and famously inaccurate crime-plotting.

Weeding Out

A Los Angeles Times mapping info-graphic called "Where's the weed?" built on Google maps shows the location of marijuana dispensaries. Of course, this map could be used by two separate groups of viewerships: those who want to pursue citizen law enforcement in the name of not-in-my-backyard wholesomeness and those who might be looking for the product themselves. Note the absence of dispensaries in liberal Santa Monica, which has allowed for head shops to open in the past.

Oyez Vey

The collaboration between literacy theorist James Paul Gee and former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has led to some interesting reflections about the project that have been captured in interviews with both Gee and O'Connor. O'Connor, who gave the keynote address at this year's Games for Change conference also sat down with a reporter for an item in Wired magazine called "Sandra Day O'Connor: Game Designer."

The game "lets students engage in real issues and real problems," O’Connor said. It will allow them to "step into the shoes of a judge, a legislator, an executive — teach them how to think through and analyze problems, take action and voice opinions to their elected representatives."

An early exercise in the game will likely deal with educating students about their First Amendment rights, using examples like Tinker v. Des Moines and the "Bong Hits For Jesus" case.

O’Connor said that she is "encouraged" to see young people becoming involved in political campaigns through the net. "E-mailing, blogging, networking on Facebook — they can take leadership, make their voices heard through tools that belong to their generation. We need to give them ownership to allow them to interact with the material," she said.

I spent some time with the two Flash games currently posted on the website for Our Courts. Supreme Decision was more like an online tutorial with long video clips than an actual game, and Do I Have a Right? used a Diner Dash style format to convey the fast pace of a law office specializing in Constitutional issues without the kind of original game mechanic that would lead to longer time periods engaged in play.

That said, these two games were actually much more interesting in their content than many serious games, in that they attempted to show how relatively complex debates about balancing rights and responsibilities could be staged in ways other than simple liberal vs. conservative arguments. As a well-known swing vote on the court, it was interesting to see O'Connor dramatize the possibility of being the deciding voice.

However, I might argue that these games could have been just as satisfying played as traditional role-playing games for the following four reasons.

1) Computers are computational machines

Many years ago I played an early variant of the game Oregon Trail in fifth grade in the pre-digital era with a team of other girls, but we all died before we made it to the West Coast. Because the final challenge involved a difficult chance operation, most of the would-be settlers in our class reached an untimely demise rather than the promised land of transcontinental migration. When my own children played the game, they had much more satisfaction with the play experience, and not only because they had a parent who had recently read Jim Houston's historical novel Snow Mountain Passage and had figured out that simply doing the opposite of what the Donner Party did could result in a successful voyage. They enjoyed the game because it wasn't necessary to rely too much on chance operations to get variable outcomes, because the computer could calculate the results of all the choices made in making provisions and planning for the journey. Horses, oxen, or mules? Combining the consequences of this choice with another one like oats or potatoes used to be difficult for K-12 teachers to calculate. But an online game can easily work with a number of factors with aggregatable mathematical values.

Unfortunately, Our Courts does little to use the computational power of the computer to handle many operations simultaneously, which may be forgivable given the interpretive rather than quantitative character of the rules that govern the law.

2) Computers are multimedia machines

Ignoring this category in Our Courts seems to be a much more obvious oversight. The Flash software that makes these games function can easily display lush video and a rich set of multimedia resources about the justice system. Instead we get stylized and slow-loading animation that does little to convey how courtrooms function as symbolic spaces or how subtle paralinguistic clues can be important for conveying the sympathies of judicial stakeholders.


3) Computers are communication machines

Earlier role-playing games allow more ways for communication between players to function and more forms of emergent discourse. Because of anxieties about how kids in K-12 environments use computers as communication machines, in light of moral panics about sexual predators or cyberbullying, it is unlikely that any school-sponsored game would facilitate communication with parties outside the classroom. Unfortunately, that makes communication in the games seem like highly-scripted one-way communication. Certain the use of one-to-many media formats like the newspaper does little to encourage particpatory culture. (And "prestige" may be a form of cultural capital that few students can relate to.)

4) Computers are synchronization machines

Finally, we come to how computer games can create excitement by generating outputs in response to inputs much faster than human reaction time. Unfortunately, not only does this game often interrupt the action with long loading bars, but pokey music and sizable wait times between actions make player decisions feel inconsequential with the sluggish pacing of the games.

Behind Bars

Visitors to the current version of the federal website for the Department of Homeland Security who notice trends in web design layout might take notice of the way that the "threat level" of the security advisory system has been relegated to the bottom of the page, although it once was featured more prominently.

Given the recent coverage of former DHS secretary Tom Ridge's revelation that there were political pressures to elevate the threat level in the Bush White House, it is interesting to see how this visual icon has been deemphasized in the current incarnation of the virtual state. Although it became more modest in size eventually during the Bush administration, it continued to top web pages for the federal government, even those only tangentially related to national security.

However, it's hard to see the evolution of the DHS website over the course of its full history, since before 2007 the site owner prohibited the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine from archiving the contents of the site by using robots.txt.

Most Taunted

Desperate to collect child support payments to keep as many women as possible off the welfare rolls, the County of Los Angeles has resorted to creating a "Most Wanted List" for men who are refusing to honor judgments that require them to pay to support their offspring. Websites about criminal offenders that feature photographs generally serve three purposes: apprehension, surveillance, and shame. The FBI's Most Wanted posters, which have now largely migrated to the web, is a classic example of the first genre. The websites that feature sexual offenders who have been released into the community nominally serve the second purpose but often serve the third as well. How this site will function in making these men community reprobates has yet to be firmly established, although radio and print outlets are triumphing its success.

The Fugitive

In "Hacker’s Extradition to U.S. More Likely," the New York Times explains that British citizen Gary McKinnon is losing his three-year fight to avoid trial in the United States for hacking into military computers. McKinnon has responded that he did little damage, that much of the most sensitive data wasn't even password protected, and that he was only looking for evidence of UFO landings and research on free clean energy sources. Rockers Chrissie Hynde and Bob Geldorf have been taking McKinnon's side and are promoting a musical anthem to prevent what they see as a miscarriage of justice. The tune, "Chicago - Change the World," will soon be released. Meanwhile you can check out McKinnon's own song on YouTube.

Searchlight

In April of this year, the Los Angeles Times began to notice problems with the interactive online version of the official crime map put out by the LAPD. First, there was an item called "Highest crime rate in L.A.? No, just an LAPD map glitch" in the newspaper, and this month they pointed out that "LAPD's public database omits nearly 40% of this year's crimes."

The police chief has blamed the vendor and praised the newspaper in his public announcement, although "Bratton says LAPD's crime map will stay online."

LightRay Productions is one of the companies involved in the snafu. Yet it still boasts of its effectiveness creating crime maps for other cities, like Dalton, Georgia and West Vancouver on its company blog. The other vendor who has been named, PSOMAS, seems to be adopting a lower profile, although it does have a portfolio of very different kinds of mapping projects here.

Bratton drew a clear distinction between the public map, which he continued to describe as one of the best in the United States, and the internal CompStat reports used to evaluate trends and guide deployment, which he insisted are of the highest integrity.

The Times discovered the magnitude of the problem while developing its own online map to display LAPD data. While the department's official crime tally recorded more than 52,000 serious crimes from Jan. 1 through June 13 of this year, the public mapping site contained fewer than 33,000 for the same period.

As the Los Angeles Times emphasizes its own Internet mapping efforts in an attempt to improve flagging readership numbers, after several years of disastrous attempts at "interactive content," it is interesting to see how they are situated in the story.

The Tweetest Memories of Her

Librarians are discussing the recent announcement on the Library of Congress's Twitter feed that all the tweets that reference Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor will be collected for posterity, as part of their mission to record the Zeitgeist around her public confirmation hearing. The ABA Journal noted the necessary succinctness of the message, and The Hill's Twitter Room placed the LOC's decision in the context of the widespread adoption of Twitter by legislators in a remarkably short time.

Based on having interviewed archivists at the Library of Congress, I've expressed concern in the past about the scope of the web capture program, given that much social computing involves rich media files rather than plain text and services that make content much harder to scrape. As a text feed, Twitter raises far fewer technical problems, but these kinds of publicity events may also feed into the company's increasingly high-profile attempts to monetize their unsustainable business model through a quick sale to a software giant by getting free advertising for the service from the news media covering fast-breaking stories.

(Thanks to Sean Lawson for the link!)

Facebook for Mugshots

Developers of Facebook applications have now launched a Sex Offender Search, which has already attracted over 40,000 users on the popular social networking site. Mapping services for sex offenders have long been available on a number of government websites and have already been linked to vigilante violence.

Comments on the application's page that are currently posted are generally positive, although developers note that some have registered complaints with their service, which provides mugshots of potential perpetrators on a user's news feed who has provided their zip code of residence.

We've gotten a few anonymous complaints about this being "too much". I disagree; A social site is a great way to allow more people to be aware that such tools exist out there to help protect your families. We've also done some upgrades to the system and hope things are running a bit smoother recently. If you have any problems please send us a message and we'll look into it as soon as possible. :) Thanks ♥

Of course, the offender locator search that it links to could easily encourage harassment of family, friends, neighbors, and bystanders who had nothing to do with any crime, and the category of offender itself can include many who are not pedophiles, as well as those who commit victimless crimes, such as gay men caught in sting operations at public cruising sites.

The Biggest Faker of All

Fellow Harvard Lampoon alumnus Andy Borowitz was surprised to discover his joke story in The Huffington Post, "Gingrich Accuses Sotomayor of Faking Broken Ankle," was circulated as a true description of the actions of the former Speaker of the House by credulous pundits in the blogosphere and was eventually picked up in news feeds. Now commentators from places like the Augusta Daily Gazette are issuing non-apologies like "Sometimes it's good to be wrong." Critics might say that the problem was that the gag about the Supreme Court nominee wasn't funny enough to be taken as humor, but for now Borowitz seems to ba having the last laugh.

Red Light Personals

Being in the Boston area, it's been hard to avoid headlines about the so-called "Craiglist killer" who threatened, robbed, and killed women advertising erotic services on the website. "R. I. official takes aim at Craiglist" shows how two distinct narratives about Internet dangers can come together: one story about predatory victimization and one story about libertine solicitation. In response to concerns about the online advertising service by law enforcement officers and legislators, the EFF has begun to ramp up potential free speech defenses in several states.