A little over four years ago, Tad Hirsch, now a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote the code for TXTmob. The service was widely used by demonstrators (as well as reporters and police officers according to the New York Times) during the 2004 Republican National Convention. Hirsch, now completing his dissertation, was subpoenaed by the New York City Law Department in February. The subpoena instructed Hirsch to produce, among a wide-range of materials, text messages sent via TXTmob, information on the senders, when the messages were sent and where they were sent to. Explaining that he has a “moral responsibility” to protect the privacy of TXTmob users, Hirsch has not complied. Here, he discusses the protest in a time of connectivity, his “when, not if” mentality regarding getting subpoenaed, and the dangers of trusting so much information so so few telecommunications service providers.

Make Something Happen: With what has happened with your case, and most recently with this 15-year-old getting summoned to court in the UK for his involvement with Anonymous, it seems that Internet action and organizing can be something of a gamble.

Tad Hirsch: How do you mean?

MSH: I mean that there seems to be no clear precedent for some of these cases and as a result, organizers end up getting in legal trouble accordingly.

Hirsch: I would disagree. These kinds of cases have been handled for a couple of decades, but without the same technology involved. The bigger problem is that there is some reasonable legislation on the books — of course it could be better — but the telecoms don’t challenge any government requests when they come in. When there is a subpoena, it’s like they’re given a date, time to comply, and they just give in. There are some laws that protect 3rd party providers like myself, but there aren’t a lot of examples of companies stepping up and defending the rights of their customers. That is a real challenge for activists.

In my case, I knew that there was the potential of getting subpoenaed; I very much anticipated this. The reason that we chose to make TXTmob was because we had recognized the track record of commercial providers. There was clearly the potential for the government to look into the records of users, so rather than having people use UPOC, we encouraged them to use us to be safe.

MSH: Is there a specific incident that comes to mind which made you wary of corporate communication providers?

Hirsch: The people involved with TXTmob each have long activist histories, myself included. Over the years, we have seen this sort of thing happen regularly. Indymedia servers have been seized all over the world. This behavior is not new. Depending on the kind of potential action that you’re involved with, you have to take precautions. Radical activists talk a great deal about security culture. If you’re planning for a large mobilization and you’re at a meeting, you’ll find that most people don’t use their full names, or even their first names. Activists aren’t naive and within this culture, there is a sometimes-jaded, realistic, hard-nosed understanding.

MSH: So here you are, four years after the convention, and the police come to you. You anticipated this, as you said, but did you expect for it to take so long to come back to you? And does dealing with this sort of thing throw a kink into your dissertation work?

Hirsch: The great irony of it all is that I was sitting in the MIT library and writing my dissertation. I had been writing specifically about TXTmob and about the notion that cops could conceivably come looking for records at some point later. While writing that sentence, my phone rings and my wife tells me that there are cops at the door looking for me. If nothing else, it had taken this theoretical construction and given it a real empirical foundation [laughs]. It hasn’t been a huge impediment. Things like this take a long time to work out. I have a couple of lawyers who are really good and doing what lawyers do. We’ll have to wait and see.

MSH: What fascinates you now about the way that people are presently using the web to organize?

Hirsch: The central tension now, it seems, results from the fact that all of the web 2.0 tools out there are so easily accessible. If you think about texting, there are now a number of organizations using Twitter as their tool of choice. There is good reason to do that, as it is cheap and it is a big, robust tool. It raises some questions, though. The user is putting sensitive data into the hands of people and forces they may not know. Some people are working on coming up with alternatives, such as taking TXTmob and redeveloping it as a Drupal module, which is one alternative. Because of the way that messaging works, there is a limit on what you can really do with the model. One should ask, though, what is really at stake when we give over all of our communication infrastructure to a small number of companies?

(Photo Credit: Duncan Davidson)

-Filed in People