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

On this day, June 5th, 2008, the news brings to our attention the offering of a manifesto to political guerrilla warriors, the triumph of activism over sexism in Sen. Obama’s win, a look at this year’s National Conference for Media reform, the syndication of computer hackers, Twitter tools, and more.

• Bibi van der Zee explains how to campaign effectively.
• A look at the fourth annual National Conference for Media Reform.
• Computer Hackers syndicate!
• Egyptian jail Twitter guy tries to Tweet his translator to freedom.
• A transcript of a talk with David Sirota on The Uprising, his book on eActivism.
• Open Left: Activism, not sexism elevated Sen. Obama.
• Gerry Nicholls offers a manifesto on how to wage political guerrilla warfare.
• Apparently green advocates are more likely to be tech savvy.
• Micah L. Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, discusses the upcoming conference.
• Having trouble putting Twitter to work for you (when it’s actually up and running)?
• Post-quake, China re-tightens media limits.
• Lincoln, Obama, and Rove: Organization matters
• And finally, LA Times readers respond to the Guerrilla Gardener.

-Filed in News

On this day, May 21th, 2008, the news brings to our attention a generation raised online, Hillary’s direct appeal to bloggers, The Onion’s Twitter question, Zimbabwean protest singers, the slowing of Chinese Internet censors, and more.

• What to do with all these terrorist videos on Google? Sen. Joe knows!
• Frontline featured “Growing Up Online” last night.
• Are you on “the list”?
• Hillary appeals directly to blogs.
• Estonia Cyber War (awesome comic/movie name?): One Year Later
• The Onion asks – What are we Twittering?
• Zimbabwean singer uses Internet radio to evade censorship.
• Earthquake slows censors, allows Chinese bloggers (temporary) free reign.
• And finally, rest assured — The Internet will fix pretty much everything.

-Filed in Uncategorized

I have received approximately one hundred and fifty thousand notes (in their various electronic forms) from friends and family members about the young blogger that could [get his ass out of jail using Twitter]. Everyone from my net-addicted peers to the 80-something grandparents of net-addicted peers have sent emails, tagged me in Facebook notes, and (not ironically) sent tweet after tweet about this incident, which is such a potent reminder of how everything is changing thanks to how we communicate online — even the process and potential of being arrested in a different, and somewhat terrifying, country.

-Filed in Uncategorized

Eric Gundersen, co-founder of and strategist for Development Seed, recently spoke with us about the work that the company is doing to create better Internet-based information aggregation tools. He also shed some insight on some of the processes of thought that a person or organization should consider before moving forward with a campaign or movement. The company, which refers to themselves as “communications plumbers,” specialize in unclogging communication channels. According to their website, Their team is “banded together around our common mission to build creative communications solutions for organizations doing world-changing work.”

Or, they clean up messy information and figure out how to best put it to use.

I had the pleasure of meeting Gundersen a few years ago through his parents. They told me that their son was really smart and working in Washington, DC on various forms of Internet development. Weeks after hearing about him, I told them about a campaign I had seen and gotten excited about a year or so before where some SUV company had allowed consumers to make their own commercials for the product via the website and the concept obviously unraveled into something of a disaster. They lit up and found video of Gundersen being interviewed on a news magazine show about his involvement and analysis of happening. We’ve met a handful of times since and it is always a pleasure to talk with him.

At present, Development Seed is working on Managing News, a tool used for news tracking. An aggregator, it is built to suck all of the chatter and news from all over the Internet and it will will also geotag it in order to help better visualize trends. According to Gundersen:

“The short is you get a snapshot view of what’s happening online and make it easy for us to manage up the news so you can take action on it. This has really exciting promise for organizations because once you know who is talking about you and what they are saying you can get out to these other sites and influence the conversation.”

Further, Gundersen says that Managing News will track and analyze in real time, allowing for up to date information without creating a sense of information overload.

Clearly, he holds chatter tracking to an extremely high regard. As the base of people contributing to Twitter–a site he has long been a user of–has grown, the ability to track has increased. He sees these methods as very powerful listening devices by way of being a different, decentralized and inevitably more manageable way to express ourselves. “When there was a new allowance for the mobile hookup with respect to blogging,” he said, “this was really influential with different organizations and corporations. For example, American Airlines didn’t do so hot with Twitter chatter during the backups of flights. Jet Blue, on the other hand, follows the traffic and listens to what is being said. That makes a lot of sense.”

“It also makes a lot of sense for political campaigns to do it too,” he added. And Managing News will be initially really focused on supporting political campaigns for the first couple months of the launch.

Of advice for those who are using the web to create and perpetuate campaigns, Gundersen shared the procedure Development Seed talks through while assessing potential projects. From an organizational perspective, they look at concept and design. “Concept kicks off with a meeting where we ask five questions: What do you do? What will it do in two years? How does the communication system function? How would we do it without a website? What is a successful outcome of this project?” If they are able to answer these questions, he explains, they are able to move forward:

“People need to be focused on the end communication goals and they need to put a value on that end communication goal and they really have to look at the web stuff as a tool box. What tools make most sense on the problem, who they are, how they are figured, and take that into consideration for overall achievement. It is critical for success points and for business.”

From a personal standpoint, he says that his communication goals involve making DC look cooler. “We’re based here and we’re having a hard time hiring folks because we’re competing against firms in Vancouver, New York and San Francisco and they have a little more sex appeal than DC. I am strategically blogging, taking pictures, linking my iPhone to my email, sending it to Flicker which is hooked to my Twitter account. I am twittering some stuff in DC.”

Finally, Gundersen celebrates aggregation and its roll in getting people to more effectively use the Internet productively. “Aggregation plays nicely into considering how to get people using all elements of the Internet succeffully for what they are doing.” It’s not just blogging anymore, but figuring out how to synthesize information, and how to get your message read. Whether geomapping news and blog chatter, developing ideas for a better aggregation system, or giving DC a sexier reputation than it presently holds, Gundersen surely enjoys making online interaction a generally more user-friendly and manageable experience.

-Filed in Uncategorized