Cameras and Trust

Here's a side-thought arising from something I said in my previous post on the Purpose of Anonymity.

"Obviously this ban [on camera phones in election booths] doesn't actually prevent voters from selling their votes - votes were being bought and sold long before cameras were invented - but the lack of photographic evidence reduces the economic efficiency of the transaction."

In some societies, nearly everybody has a mobile phone, and nearly every phone can take crude photographs. And while people often leave proper cameras at home, except on special occasions, most people carry a mobile at all time. This has led to a heightened expectation of photographic evidence - including evidence of wrong-doing. For example, gang members recording antisocial behaviour (such as "happy-slapping" - a physically violent form of bullying framed as slapstick) to boost their social standing within the gang.

The same technology can of course be used for more praiseworthy purposes: for example, to record interviews and video diaries from areas where traditional journalism is constrained and independent journalists are banned. The smuggled pictures and video perform the function of samizdat.

As it happens, both happy-slapping and samizdat are subversive, although in very different ways. But the justice system also relies on photographic evidence: older readers may remember the "twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one" taken by Officer Obie in evidence against one Arlo Guthrie for littering on Thanksgiving [source: Alice's Restaurant (lyrics) (track)]. And then of course there are surveillance cameras ...

But this widespread expectation of photographic evidence devalues oral testimony. We don't trust words as much these days: if there aren't any pictures, it probably isn't true. In the past, even bribery and corruption relied on trust, because there wasn't any alternative; the camera (or rather the way society increasingly uses cameras) undermines trust.

Purpose of Anonymity

This post is an edited and extended version of my comments to Robin Wilton's post The Department of Perverse Consequences.

Campaigners are eloquent on the dangers that threaten anonymity and privacy: administrative inquisitiveness, gratuitous leaks, fraud. But what exactly is the purpose of anonymity and privacy? What are the benefits to the individual and to society? Indeed, does society benefit in any way from anonymity and privacy, or does this debate expose a fundamental conflict of interest between society (so-called "public interest") and the individual?

Here's the example from Robin's blog: anonymity of voting in elections. Robin mentions the fact that camera phones were banned from the polling booths in the recent Italian elections. Obviously this ban doesn't actually prevent voters from selling their votes - votes were being bought and sold long before cameras were invented - but the lack of photographic evidence reduces the economic efficiency of the transaction.

In this example, anonymity has a specific social purpose - to protect voters from improper influence, and to protect the democratic system from being bought by the highest bidder. In other words, it is a security mechanism, whose purpose is to counter certain specific forms of vulnerability and abuse.

If anonymity is merely a security mechanism, it is a means-to-an-end rather than an end-in-itself. Any claim of the form "security mechanism X protects against vulnerability Y" raises a number of questions of effects and effectiveness.

• How effective is X at protecting against Y?
• What alternative mechanisms could be devised to protect against Y?
• What other effects does X have?
• In particular, how does X-preventing-Y affect the wider sociotechnical system?
• Overall, does the prevention of Y provide sufficient justification for X?

And it is not obvious that anonymity is the only or best way of protecting individual voters and the electoral system from bribery and corruption. After all, we often protect systems against bribery and corruption by a security mechanism that appears to be based on exactly the opposite principle: transparency and openness. There is also an apparent conflict between the principle of anonymity and the principle of non-repudiation - the "stand-up-and-be-counted" principle. So why is anonymity appropriate for some situations, and transparency and non-repudiation for others?

We can try to answer this question by looking at the other effects of anonymity. One likely possibility is that anonymity makes it easier to change your mind, because you don't have to explain or justify your change of mind to other people, whereas delegates who are publically committed to a political position need to construct an elaborate rationalization before they can change position or party. Anonymous elections can therefore respond more quickly to the tide of public opinion, and elected politicians get a more rapid judgement from the electorate. It is of course debatable whether this is a Good Thing or not.

On this argument, anonymity is not just a security mechanism, but a system feature that affects the dynamic behaviour of the electoral system in an interesting way.

In this post, I have talked purely about the possible social benefits of anonymity. Obviously there may also be arguments for anonymity in terms of individualism, but for the time being I'll leave those arguments for Robin and others to articulate ...

Political Party Donors

Donations to the UK Labour Party are in the news again [Party funding row 'a sorry tale' - BBC News, December 4th 2007]. There are two related questions here, which Stafford Beer's POSIWID principle may help us answer.

1. Why does anyone give money to a political party?
2. Why does anyone care about the manner of the donation?

Doubtless some political donations are made in the hope of getting something in return. The UK still has a so-called honours system, where selected people can be given various awards, including peerages and knighthoods. People may also hope to be appointed to various statutory bodies and quangos, where they can exercise some influence and status. Sometimes the motive is more straightforward - perhaps a business wishes to lobby for a favourable decision. (Lots of political donations come from property developers, for some reason.) 

From a moral point of view, all of these practices would count as corrupt. Some people find it hard to believe that anyone gives large sums of money to a political campaign without having some agenda of this kind. And public servants (including politicians, judges and policemen) are vulnerable to accusations of corruption if they accept these donations - and get found out. 

As a (political) response to earlier incidents of sleaze in the UK, we now have laws that govern donations to political parties. It seems that some recent donations to the Labour party have broken these laws, while other donations have evaded these restrictions by being framed as "loans" rather than "gifts". 

There is now an extraordinary public dispute going on between Labour Party officials and someone called David Abrahams, who donated large amounts of money anonymously (and therefore illegally) to the Labour Party. Like most people perhaps, I had never heard of Mr Abrahams until his attempts to maintain his anonymity back-fired. And like many other people, I started to wonder what his real motives were. 

In the past, giving anonymously was an accepted way of ensuring that the recipient was not put under obligation. But under the new regulations, anonymity is now always suspect and often illegal. So things change. 

By donating a few hundred thousand pounds to the Labour Party in a dodgy manner, Mr Abrahams may have delivered a greater benefit to the Conservative Party. Indeed, some Labour Party officials may be treating Mr Abrahams as if they believed this was the effect he intended all along. Abrahams himself has written an aggrieved article in the Independent on Sunday ("I accuse", Sunday December 2nd, 2007), putting the blame for this embarrassment on Labour Party fund-raisers. 

Fund-raising is not an easy job, and it is perhaps understandable that some people with this responsibility steer close to the limits of what is ethical or legal, and are willing to be flexible in order to accommodate the whims of donors. After all, you probably wouldn't be doing the job if you didn't believe in the goals of the party, and the party obviously needs money to achieve these goals. And if you believe absolutely in the moral integrity of the Party Leaders, then surely there is no harm in allowing donors to pay large amounts of money for the privilege of meeting them, since the Party Leaders will never allow their principles to be compromised by vulgar financial influence. So it is easy to see how party functionaries might persuade themselves that the end justifies the means, and that there is no moral risk in bending the rules or exploiting any loopholes. 

The rules may be supposed to protect the nation from corruption, but it's not easy to see whether they actually work. As a citizen with limited access to information, I don't really benefit much from knowing the donors' names or nationalities - what I really want to know is whether there is any link between party donation and, say, planning approval. Advocates of the current arrangements speak of the benefits of "transparency" - but transparency isn't worth much unless you can see the whole end-to-end system, from donation to influence. And links can't be proved from single cases, but require detailed data and statistical analysis. 

Transparency alone (at least in its current form) cannot control corruption. Is it relevant here that the current arrangements were designed by politicians who had a strong stake in the continued possibility of political donation? 

Because they have little power, at least in the mundane world, churches and charities have always been free to accept donations from the most vile people, and devote these donations to worthy causes. (Yet even this freedom is nowadays put under question, and charities are sometimes put under pressure to return donations from highly unpopular sources, lest they are themselves tainted by the same unpopularity.) But political parties can never be given this freedom. 

There are several nested layers of analysis here, which Stafford Beer's POSIWID principle can help us with.

• What is the purpose/effect of a single donation, and the manner in which it was given?

• What is the (collective) purpose /effect of the totality of donations, and the manner in which they were given?

• What is the purpose of the regulations governing political donation, and what are the (presumably unintended) side-effects of these regulations?

• How do the systems of political donation and funding fit into the larger political system?

In general, there are major problems with looking for engineering solutions to social and political problems. Stafford Beer ran into some of these problems himself, in Chile and elsewhere. But regulation is itself a form of engineering; thus once we are on a regulatory path it makes sense to turn to the systems engineering tradition to discover why a particular regulation doesn't produce the required outcome, and how to design better regulations. 

Hence POSIWID.

Anonymity

In a comment to my earlier post on Root Cause, Robin Wilton suggested a link between anonymity and bad behaviour.

"If all potential criminals were identifiable all the time, they would be inhibited from committing crimes ... [and therefore] if no-one has any anonymity, everyone will be law-abiding."

This proposition appears to justify a high level of surveillance, as a crime-prevention measure. It also appears to justify various forms of "naming-and-shaming". Unfortunately, the proposition is not universally true. There are apparently some people who are not inhibited - and may even be encouraged - by the possibility of being identified.

For example, "a head teacher has spoken of his shock at seeing a video clip posted on a public website of a laughing pupil hurling a rock at a classroom window". [BBC News Jan 3rd 2007 via Into the Machine] And see also "Is there shaming in naming?" [BBC News Magazine via Tomorrow's Fish and Chip Paper, with a comment from me.]

So we have two kinds of identity in competition here. There is an old-fashioned notion of identity-as-respectability, and a Big-Brother notion of identity-as-notoriety. And so if social control mechanisms are designed by and for people with a given mindset, how are they supposed to work on people with an entirely different mindset? On people who find the proposition "Big Brother is Watching You" thrilling rather than chilling?

According to Donella Meadows' 12-point framework for system intervention, changes in mindset or paradigm are among the most powerful modes of system change (leverage point 2). Old fashioned social control (including the measures enthusiastically embraced by the current Government) doesn't seem to have the requisite variety to respond appropriately to these changes.

I am not saying that people are changing their notion of identity solely in order to evade social control - paradigm shifts aren't generally amenable to such rational calculation. But it is interesting that certain changes in the prevailing notion of identity seem to have the effect of weakening or negating certain social control mechanisms. And it is conceivable that these social control mechanisms have the effect of reinforcing certain social trends, including a paradigm-shift in notions of identity.

See my earlier post on Big Brother. And see Scribe's post on The Polarizing Effect of Surveillance.

Bullying 2

In a comment to my previous post on Root Cause, Robin Wilton makes a useful point about anonymity. Thanks Robin.

One of the interesting things about this particular proposal is that it is not the anonymity of the bully that is at issue but that of the victim. Honest schoolchildren (!?) are supposedly protected against bullying (!?) by giving them a card that cannot be stolen (!?) because it contains a photograph and other identity information (!?).

As readers of Robin's blog will know, "identity" happens to be his specialist subject, and I expect he can see even more flaws in this "solution" than I can. He has discussed many other proposals like this in his blog.

Update: Robin has just posted another similar example, in which honest citizens are urged to engrave their postcodes on their car windscreens, apparently as a deterrent against theft.

But I don't think it is enough for us to shake our heads in despair at the folly of politicians and others. The important analytical work is to expose and challenge the world-view in which this kind of proposal appears to make sense. And this analysis needs to be communicated to a broad intelligent audience beyond the blogosphere.

The mission of the POSIWID blog is stated in the margin, but you may not have looked at it recently, so I'll repeat it here.

When we understand the complex loops that maintain the status quo, we are better equipped to make positive changes in organizations and society.

With your help, dear readers, I hope we can make POSIWID more effective in 2007.

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