Author: Christopher Parsons

Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.

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Writing

Quick Thoughts on Academics and Policy Impact

I regularly speak with scholars who complain policy makers don’t read their work. 95% of the time that work is either published in books costing hundreds of dollars (in excess of department budgets) or behind a journal paywall that departments lack access to.1

Bluntly, it’s hard to have impact if your work is behind paywalls.

Moreover, in an era of ‘evidence-based policymaking’ dedicated public servants will regularly want to assess some of the references or underlying data in the work in question. They perform due diligence when they read facts, arguments, or policy recommendations.

However, the very work that a scholar is using to develop their arguments or recommendations may, also, lay behind paywalls. Purchasing access to the underlying books and papers that go into writing a paper could run a public servant, or their department, even more hundreds or thousands of dollars. Frankly they’re not likely to spend that amount of money and it’d often be irresponsible for them to do so.

So what are the effect of all these paywalls? Even if the government policymaker can get access to the scholar’s paper they cannot fact-check or assess how it was built. It is thus hard for them to validate conclusions and policy recommendations. This, in turn, means that committed public servants may put important scholarly research into an ‘interesting but not sufficiently evidence-based’ bucket.

Does this mean that academics shouldn’t publish in paywalled journals or books? No, because they have lots of audiences, and publications are the coin of the academic realm. But it does mean that academics who want to have near- or middle-term impacts need to do the work and make their findings, conclusions, and recommendations publicly available.

What to do, then?

Broadly, it is helpful to prepare and publish summaries of research to open-source and public-available outlets. The targets for this are, often, think tanks or venues that let academics write long-form pieces (think maximum of 1,200-1,500 words). Alternately, scholars can just start and maintain a blog and host summaries of their ideas, there, along with an offer to share papers that folks in government might be interested in but to which they lack access.

I can say with some degree of authority from my time in academia that publishing publicly-available reports, or summarising paywalled work, can do a great deal to move the needle in how government policies are developed. But, at the same time, moving that needle requires spending the time and effort. You should not just expect busy government employees to randomly come across your paywalled article, buy it, read it, and take your policy recommendations seriously.

  1. Few government departments have extensive access to academic journals. Indeed, even working at one of the top universities at the world and having access to a wealth of journals, I regularly came across articles that I couldn’t access! ↩︎
Categories
Aside Photography

2023.12.29

University & Richmond, Toronto, 2023

I’ve owned a Leica Q2 for a little over a month so far. I haven’t really used it enough to say what I truly like (or dislike) about it, aside from moving from an APC-C sensor to a full frame sensor has been a fantastic upgrade in the lighting conditions in which I’ve been shooting.

The last day I had actual, honest to god, direct sunlight was on November 19, 2023. Every other day I’ve been out has been cloudy, rainy, or just grey. The larger sensor has meant that I’m reliably able to shoot at 1/500 and at an ISO under 3200. That would have been entirely impossible where I shoot with either my Fuji X100F or the Ricoh GR IIIx.

You can see what I’ve been shooting over at my Glass profile.

Categories
Aside Photography

2023.12.9

Family Outing

For the first time I’ve submitted a trio of photos to a (free) competition being run by Ricoh.

While I can’t picture winning it seems like a real step in my own confidence in the photos that I’m capturing.

Categories
Links

Pulling Back the Curtain on the Appin Cyber Mercenary Organization

Curious about what “cyber mercenaries” do? How they operate and facilitate targeting?

This excellent long-form piece from Reuters exquisitely details the history of Appin, an Indian cyber mercenary outfit, and confirms and publicly reveals many of the operations that it has undertaken.

As an aside, the sourcing in this article is particularly impressive, which is to expected from Satter et al. They keep showing they’re amongst the best in the business!

Moreover, the sidenote concerning the NSA’s awareness of the company, and why, is notable in its own right. The authors write,

The National Security Agency (NSA), which spies on foreigners for the U.S. government, began surveilling the company after watching it hack “high value” Pakistani officials around 2009, one of the sources said. An NSA spokesperson declined to comment.

This showcases that Appin may either have been seen as a source of fourth-party collection (i.e. where an intelligence service takes the collection material, as another service is themselves collecting it from a target) or have endangered the NSA’s own collection or targeting activities, on the basis that Appin could provoke targets to assume heightened cybersecurity practices or otherwise cause them to behave in ways that interfered with the NSA’s own operations.

Categories
Links Photography

A Century Caught on Camera

The Globe and Mail has a terrific photographic series entitled "A century caught on camera." As a Toronto resident I was struck by just how many traditions, rituals, and grievances have stuck with the city–or in the city–for over a century.

Further, the way in which the images have been captured has changed substantially over time as a result of the technical capacity of camera equipment, along with the interests or preferences of the photographers at different times. Images in the past decade or two, as an example, clearly draw more commonly from celebrity or artistic portraiture than 50 years ago. Moreover, it’s pretty impressive just how much photographers have done with their equipment over the past century and this, generally, speaks to how easy street and documentary photographers have it today as compared to when our compatriots were using slow lenses and film.

It may take you quite a while to get through all the images but I found the process to be exceedingly worthwhile. Though I admit that the first decade during which the Globe used colour images probably ranks as my least favourite period in the galleries that the paper has published.

Categories
Aside

2023.11.6

I was summoned for jury duty this week but we were all let out after just a few hours. While I admit I didn’t want to be stuck in a trial for up to a few weeks, I had hoped for a little more time to get through a massive backlog of reading that’s built up over the past 3-4 months. Still, I managed to read, annotate, and close over 100 Safari tabs so I’ll call it a win!

Categories
Aside Photography

Incoming Leica Q2

For the past several years I’ve kept looking at the Leica Q2 as the next step in the camera I want to use. To be clear, I think I’m pretty proficient with the Fuji X100F but I’ve also been in situations where it hasn’t been able to perform, either due to weather or extreme low light. And as much as I like it there are things I find less than ideal about the Fuji, including the zone focusing system.

When I was in Quebec, recently, I held the Q2 for the first time, and got to play with it bit, and it convinced me that this was the next device I wanted to use to make photos. I don’t know that I’ll actually use it to make 28mm images and suspect I’ll crop to 35mm (equiv), but regardless I’m looking forward to using it when it arrives in the next week or so!

Categories
Writing

The Changing Utility of Social Media

Several years ago I was speaking with a special advisor to President Bush Jr. He was, also, an academic and in the summer he had returned to his university to teach some of international relations courses. This was during the time when the US had a force stationed in Iraq, and his students regularly had more up to date information on what was happening on the ground than he did, notwithstanding having a broad security clearance and access to top US intelligence. How was this possible?

His students were on Twitter.

Another story: when I was doing my PhD there was an instance where it was clear that the Iranian government had managed to access information that should have been encrypted while in transit between using Google products from Iran. After figuring this out I shared information on Twitter and the infosec community subsequently went to work to rectify the situation.

There are lots of similar stories of how social media has been good for individuals in their personal and professional lives. But, equally (or more so ), there are stories where social media services have fed serious and life threatening problems. The Myanmar genocide. Undermining young women’s sense of self-confidence and leading to thoughts of self-harm. Enabling a former President to accelerate an irregular political and policy environment, often with harmful effects to members of government, residents of the United States, and the world more broadly.

The Future of Social Media

But the social media services that enable the positive and negative network effects of the past are significantly different, today, than just 5 years ago. What does this mean for the future of social media services?

First, we need to assess the extents to which the services remain well situated for their purposes. For the sharing of popular news, as an example, some companies to moving away from doing so partially or entirely in response to economics or emerging law or regulations. What does it mean when a core driver of some hardcore users — journalists, academics, some in government — no longer see the same utility in engaging online? What does this mean for the affordances of new services?

Second, to what extent are the emerging services really able to address the harms and problems of the old services? How can these services be made ‘safe to use’ and promote equity and avoid generating harms to some individuals and communities? I think there is a valid open question around whether you can ever create a real-time communications platform that enables mass broadcast, and which does not amplify historical harms and dangerous social effects.

Third, to what extent have these services outlived some of their utility? While individuals used to share information broadly on social media networks they can now retreat to large chat groups or online chat services (i.e., the next generation of AOL chat is here!). These more private experience still enable the formation of community without the exposure to some of the harmful or disquieting content or messages that existed on the more public social media sites.1

There has, also, been an explosion of new-Twitter competitors (along with those competing with other networks, including Instagram and popular/corporate chat services). While this has the benefit of reducing some of the aggregated harms that can arise, just in the sense that individuals are spread out between services and cannot mass against one another as they could previously, it also means that content which is published may lack the same kind of reach as in the past. Whereas once you may have had thousands of Twitter or Instagram or Facebook followers who you could alert to pressing issues of social injustice, now this same population is scattered across a bevy of different services and platforms. The dispersion effect makes it hard to have the same kind of thought leader status as may have been possible, even in the relatively recent past.

One of the solutions to these problems, writ large, is to facilitate a ‘Post Once (on your own) Site, Syndicate Everywhere’ (POSSE) situation, where you can post on one service and then syndicate it to all the other services. Promoters of this maintain that you can then have a single ‘identity’ or location, put all your content there, and then share it around the world.

Obviously this approach has some initial appeal. And for many individuals or groups they may prefer this approach. But a POSSE ‘solution’ to the disintermediation of social media fails to take into account the value of having discrete online identities.

As just one example, I have a website for professional materials, use a service to share and circulate my photographs, blog less formally here, circulate interesting news articles using an RSS feed, share short thoughts about professional topics on LinkedIn, and then have a sequence of chat applications for yet other conversations. Bringing all these together into a single space would be problematic by merit of diluting the deliberateness that each space is imbued with. Put differently, I don’t want the materials that might get me a job linked to my street photography or ruminations, on the basis that it could impede my ability to find the right kind(s) of gainful employment.

As I contemplate the state of social media and identity, today, I guess I’m left with the ongoing recognition that classic media organizations played a key role in identifying what was more or less important to pay attention to, especially when the information sources I cultivated over the past decade have quickly and suddenly changed. The social media that was so useful in aggregating information even intelligence services lacked, as well as that was used to respond to information security issues, is now long past.

Social media as it was is dead. Long live socialized media.

  1. With the caveat that some groups retreat to these more private spaces to share harmful or disturbing content without worry their actions are likely to be detected and stopped. ↩︎
Categories
Links Writing

Generative AI Technologies and Emerging Wicked Policy Problems

While some emerging generative technologies may positively affect various domains (e.g., certain aspects of drug discovery and biological research, efficient translation between certain languages, speeding up certain administrative tasks, etc) they are, also, enabling new forms of harmful activities. Case in point, some individuals and groups are using generative technologies to generate child sexual abuse or exploitation materials:

Sexton says criminals are using older versions of AI models and fine-tuning them to create illegal material of children. This involves feeding a model existing abuse images or photos of people’s faces, allowing the AI to create images of specific individuals. “We’re seeing fine-tuned models which create new imagery of existing victims,” Sexton says. Perpetrators are “exchanging hundreds of new images of existing victims” and making requests about individuals, he says. Some threads on dark web forums share sets of faces of victims, the research says, and one thread was called: “Photo Resources for AI and Deepfaking Specific Girls.”

…

… realism also presents potential problems for investigators who spend hours trawling through abuse images to classify them and help identify victims. Analysts at the IWF, according to the organization’s new report, say the quality has improved quickly—although there are still some simple signs that images may not be real, such as extra fingers or incorrect lighting. “I am also concerned that future images may be of such good quality that we won’t even notice,” says one unnamed analyst quoted in the report.

The ability to produce generative child abuse content is becoming a wicked problem with few (if any) “good” solutions. It will be imperative for policy professionals to learn from past situations where technologies were found to sometimes facilitate child abuse related harms. In doing so, these professionals will need to draw lessons concerning what kinds of responses demonstrate necessity and proportionality with respect to the emergent harms of the day.

As just one example, we will have to carefully consider how generative AI-created child sexual abuse content is similar to, and distinctive from, past policy debates on the policing of online child sexual abuse content. Such care in developing policy responses will be needed to address these harms and to avoid undertaking performative actions that do little to address the underlying issues that drive this kind of behaviour.

Relatedly, we must also beware the promise that past (ineffective) solutions will somehow address the newest wicked problem. Novel solutions that are custom built to generative systems may be needed, and these solutions must simultaneously protect our privacy, Charter, and human rights while mitigating harms. Doing anything less will, at best, “merely” exchange one class of emergent harms for others.

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Links

Addressing Disinformation and Other Harms Using Generative DRM

The ideas behind this initiative—that a metadata-powered glyph will appear above or around content produced by generative AI technologies to inform individuals of the providence of content they come across—depend on a number of somewhat improbable things.

  1. A whole computing infrastructure based on tracking metadata reliably and then presenting it to users in ways they understand and care about, and which is adopted by the masses.
  2. That generative outputs will need to remain the exception as opposed to the norm: when generative image manipulation (not full image creation) is normal then how much will this glyph help to notify people of ‘fake’ imagery or other content?
  3. That there are sufficiently low benefits to offering metadata-stripping or content-modification or content-creation systems that there are no widespread or easy-to-adopt ways of removing the identifying metadata from generative content.

Finally, where the intent behind fraudulent media is to intimidate, embarrass, or harass (e.g., non-consensual deepfake pornographic content, violence content), then what will the glyph in question do to allay these harms? I suspect very little unless it is, also, used to identify individuals who create content for the purposes of addressing criminal or civil offences. And, if that’s the case, then the outputs would constitute a form of data that are designed to deliberately enable state intervention in private life, which could raise a series of separate, unique, and difficult to address problems.