Stanford Center for Internet and Society

The Economist this week runs a title story called 'Soft Paternalism'
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=6772346

In m book on e-government published in 2003 I coined the term 'repressive de-parternalisation' for this exact phenomen.

Deeply intertwinded to E-Government programs which all over Europe claim to empower citizens

this is not orwell, not top down visibilty. ths is a post-orwellian configuration, bottom-up visibilty where it's rational for indiivduals to be seen. think of prevention, where it is beneficial to reveal life habits.

Since last summer the assistance of companies like Yahoo and Google in Chinese censorship practices is a much debated issue. Last week Yahoo again has been accused of having played a role in jailing a chinese journalist. Although considerable pressure has been generated neither Yahoo nor Google did change their policies concerning China. I interpret this behavior as strategic, sending a signal to Chinese as well as other authorities worldwide, that these companies can 'play by the rules'.
When looking at the world map one will find that democracies are rather an exeption than the norm. Moreover one will find that authoritarian capitalisms like China currently enjoy unparalleled economic growth. Just take a look at Russia, some African countries and especially the Middle East! And even worse: China's flavor of authoritarian capitalism might be viewed as a model by a number of other countries in the second and third world.

Bruce Sterlings rant at SXSW is highly enjoyable and contains tons of observations worth a second thought! Get it here.

Austria has finished to issue its citizens the 'ecard' and now is the first country worldwide where the whole population is equipped with a government approved smart-card.

All 8 million people have the 'e-card' in their pockets, basically is the user-side element of an government approved public key infrastructure.

The backbone consists of two redundant IBM servers with 96 processors each and 10 TB of HD that are currently processing up to 450.000 transactions per second. At this stage the system is solely used for e-health purposes. The servers store encrypted electronic health-records of the citizens. With the ecard the patient can decrypt the data and grant doctors access to it, prescriptions are also handeld through the system.Austria plans to extend the ecard system into a full blown 'citizen-card' that serves as an authentication media for eGovernment and eBusiness processes. As the next step the introduction of a electronic qualification record is under discussion and it is to be expected that ultimately all public data about an individual will be stored in the system.

Today North Carolinas State Board of Elections has included Diebold to the list of recommended manufactures of voting maschines. This ruling comes despite the fact that Diebold denies public access to the source code of the maschines and is also unwilling to name the programmers that contributet to the codebase. Both is required by the new laws for electronic voting maschines in North Carolina. The ruling is astonishing and needs to be reversed.

Voting maschines are a prime example where code becomes law. Similar to law the code included in this maschines should serve the public interest and implement precautions that prohibit behavior against it.Without public access to the source codes of voting maschines it cannot be guaranted that the maschine is free from bugs, partisan- or third party interests that effect the votecount. Effectively this means that closed source voting maschines are not viable in a democratic society since their legitimacy cannot be proven.

Robert Harrison, Chair of the Department of French and Italian at Stanford, hosts a weekly radio show on KSZU.

'Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)' is a podcasts for intellectuals. One hour of pure talk with a studio guest about a philosophical problem or a work of literature. This is for you hardcore listeners who read Hegel before breakfast - and I like to assert that beyond their educational value the shows are even entertaining.

Yesterday the CIS and the Berkman Center collaboratively hosted a workshop on ID-Management centered around Microsofts proposal for an ID-Metasystem. Except a couple of academics most attendees were from the tech community that currently is pushing ID-Management to become the next big thing - and it certainly will be!Microsofts ID-Metasystem is actually embracing ideal heralded by the Open Source scene, a development that didn't really surprise me (see here why), but I was very impressed by the massive and very determined bottom up effort to build a infrastructure for identity management. It became more than once palpable that some in the tech community whish to do without the state and even still have the fantasy that they could build solutions that render the state unnecessary. Besides the fact that state and commodity exchange share a reciprocal relationship, since no private actor can legitimately enforce property rights, this is a very different development from the developments in several European countries.

The Dutch goverment plans to consolidate all information about its citizens in a centralized database. Introduced as a tool to help to identify troubled children, the database is scheduled to start collecting information of all newborn children in the Netherlands from January 1. 2007 on. Each file is to contain data about health, family background, education and also police records. The children will be assigned a 'Citizens Service Number' which basically is a unique identifier that allows to link all government data on one person together.

We are pushing very long days at the oii Summer Doctoral School. Sessions start at 9.15 am and go until 5 pm and on most days we had a sightseening programm going well into the evening afterwards.

A wiki is up where our procedings can be accessed. Also a first set of photos has made it onto flickr, search for the tag 'sdp2005'. More pictures will be added soon.

Time went by quickly in Beijing. I have been here almost a week, and although not seeing much of this amazing city due to being heavily jetlagged, recovering from my ac-induced cold and having to prepare the oii-summer school, I still managed to collect some vivid impressions. I took an evening stroll with a couple oii sdp fellows on a small street of Wangfujing Daije where all kind of strange foods are on display for curios tourists like us. I had a bit of a roasted scorpion-stick, which although looking spectacular tasted less so. I skipped the roasted maggots, but already had jellyfish and sea-cucumber, both which taste like salt-sea-flavored jello.