Dan Gillmor

I have a piece in today’s Boston Globe called “Net gains” — some suggestions on how to improve politics in the digital age, specifically political debates. Here’s what the Globe ran. In another posting I’ll amplify, as promised, one one part of the piece.

On Thursday night, most of the Democratic presidential candidates will travel to Las Vegas for the latest in this election cycle’s “debates.” The quotes around that word are deliberate, because political debates are stuck in a world of television sound bites, after-the-fact spin, and almost blatant contempt for voters.

Mass media, the communications technology that became supreme in the 20th century, has ruined debates. The Lincoln-Douglas confrontations in 1858 and other verbal contests were once among the deepest and most revelatory of conversations. They revealed intellect and passion, and illuminated the issues of their day. Today’s mass media, reflecting a cultural short attention span, elevates shallowness.

This year’s endless series of events, with so many candidates aiming for the nominations, have been especially puerile, little more than mini-press conferences and spin sessions. Even when the questions are serious, the time limitations on answers puts a premium on regurgitating canned, semi-clever lines that entertain instead of illuminate. These things are to real debating what motel room art is to Picasso.

But technology can also help restore the debate. The Internet and digital tools – search, blogging, online video, wikis, interactive games, and virtual worlds – are made to order for serious conversations. The collision of technology with media offers an unparalleled chance to hold debates that would illuminate our problems and opportunities and give us true insight into the people who want us to elect them.

The role of technology in politics has always been prominent, notably in communications. The pamphleteers of America’s Revolutionary era, and newspaper people later on, knew how powerful the printing press could be. The telegraph sped the news. Telephones, a one-to-one device, transformed personal communications. Radio and then, even more, television became the ultimate tools: one-to-many megaphones of unparalleled power.

The Internet subsumes all that came before, and adds a many-to-many capability. The democratization of media means that anyone can publish; that what we publish is available to a potentially global community; and that creation naturally leads to conversation and collaboration.

The Net has, of course, already made itself felt on the campaign trail. Howard Dean’s 2004 team innovated with blogging and online fund-raising ideas. Former senator George Allen lost his 2006 reelection race in part because of an unflattering video posted on YouTube. In this cycle, the presidential candidates are all over the Internet map, and so are their supporters – witness the now-famous “I’ve got a crush on Obama” video and Mitt Romney’s invitation to his supporters to create advertisements, among countless other efforts.

We’ve seen some modest attempts to make the Internet part of the debate process. The CNN-YouTube Democratic event during the summer (a Republican version is scheduled for Nov. 28), demonstrated at least one thing of value: Regular folks can ask questions that are at least as penetrating, or vapid, as the ones posed by journalists in more typical settings. But post-event chatter focused, to a major extent, on what questioners looked like – and whether CNN and YouTube should have let the audience, not just the journalists, select the questions posed to candidates (the answer is obviously yes). Still, this was a sideshow. We learned almost nothing useful about the candidates or their views.

Meanwhile, Slate and Yahoo joined forces a few weeks ago to offer a slightly more innovative, roll-your-own version. Voters could select specific questions and issues, and get a brief video lineup of candidates’ views. Yahoo says visitors to the site stuck around for an average of seven minutes, a long time on the Web but a pathetic span for serious voters. Perhaps they’d have delved more deeply had the site included more truly interactive features.

Better still is 10Questions.com, created by the TechPresident site working with The New York Times and MSNBC, a site that lets regular folks ask video questions and vote on the ones that get posed to candidates. Then the candidates answer, and the regular folks vote on whether the candidates actually answered.

But we can do even better, using a variety of media and techniques. Consider two approaches, different in character but both aimed at greater understanding.

First, the candidates should agree to hold lengthy, one-on-one debates and then put the results online for the public to slice and dice. Rather than having journalists and/or YouTubers ask the questions, we should leave the questioning to the candidates themselves. Give the candidates time to provide substantial responses, and give them full freedom to follow up on their opponents’ remarks. Moderators could help keep the debate on track and civil.

The videos should be posted online and made freely available. Media organizations, party organizations, interest groups, and private citizens could use increasingly inexpensive digital editing tools to help us sort through the mass of video; for example, someone who cares about healthcare could create a comparison of what each candidate said about the topic.

Then let voters decide what they want to watch. A few will watch everything. Many more will watch several debates, or parts of many.

Certainly this system would ask a great deal of the candidates, including perhaps more of their time than they might wish to spend. It would also demonstrate the utter shallowness of the so-called debates that broadcasters and interest groups sponsor today.

A second approach would be even more ambitious: A debate that would unfold online over the course of days, or even weeks and months. Imagine that one candidate takes a position and poses a question. The opponent would answer with a written response of some predetermined length, but with the help of staff, experts, and the general public. Then the first candidate, again with the help of anyone who wants to join the process, would dissect the response and reply with (we’d hope) a truly nuanced update. Continue this process at length – and repeat it with many other topics.

What would the site look like? What technologies would we use? I have my own ideas, and have posted them on my blog (citmedia.org/blog), but I’m just one person; we need a collective effort to figure this out, using much the same iterative process. The specific tools are less important than the willingness to deploy them.

Indeed, we’d start with an inventory of what people are already doing. Nonpolitical online conversations are already achieving remarkable depth and breadth using a variety of methods.

But before we finish yet another campaign cycle in the traditional way, let’s resolve to bring debating into the new century. We have the ability to turn top-down, sell-the-candidate methods of electioneering into edge-in conversations among candidates and the electorate. I’ll happen eventually. Why not this time?

SF Chronicle: Feinstein backs legal immunity for telecom firms in wiretap cases. Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Thursday that she favors legal immunity for telecommunications companies that allegedly shared millions of customers’ telephone and e-mail messages and records with the government, a position that could lead to the dismissal of numerous lawsuits pending in San Francisco.

So what if these companies flagrantly committed felonies, says our feckless senator.

Again, she’s delivered a slap in the face to her constituents. Unsurprising, sadly, given her record.

She’s nearly completed her morphing into a right-wing Republican — that is, someone who thinks civil liberties are outmoded. (No doubt the Chronicle editorial page will find some excuse to explain this decision, too, as they’ve done so many times with Feinstein.)

Once, she was someone who believed in the rule of law, or at least pretended to. Now she’s become one of the people who makes clear, through actions that are unmistakable, that she has no time for it.

If liberty dies in this nation, it will not be just the fault of people like Bush and Cheney. It will be the equal responsibility of their enablers.

Dianne Feinstein, United States Senator, will vote to confirm Mukasey, a man who shares Bush’s hostility to civil liberties. Utterly contemptible, but in keeping with her previous positions.

She’s a disgrace to California.

As Glenn Greenwald observes in his Salon colum, the pending immunity for telecommunications companies that committed felonies by acceding to the Bush administration’s wiretap lawbreaking is beyond disgraceful:

By definition, our Beltway establishment does not believe in the rule of law — at least not for them. They are creating a completely segregated, two-track system where high Beltway officials and their corporate enablers arrogate unto themselves the power to decide when they can break the law. They are thus literally exempt from our laws, even our criminal laws, while increasingly harsh, merciless, and inflexible punishments are doled out for the poorest and least connected criminals — who receive no consideration of any kind, let alone presidential commutations or special laws written for them by Congress retroactively rendering legal their patently criminal behavior.

The Republicans have made it entirely clear that they hold the Constitution increasingly in contempt. But to see the Democrats remain such pathetic wimps on fundamental liberty, and the rule of law itself, is deeply depressing.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein will certainly vote for this travesty. I hope Barbara Boxer upholds her oath of office, but in these days — when the rule of law is an discardable inconvenience to the people who write the laws — it’s hard to be optimistic.

From Bloomberg news:

As many as half of the 450,000 subprime borrowers whose mortgage payments increase in the next three months may lose their homes because they can’t sell, refinance or qualify for help from the U.S. government.

No one can take joy at the family turmoil that is about to become real after these years of marketplace fantasy. But it’s a huge stretch to make a case that most of these borrowers — many of whom put no money down, or signed up for loans on which they paid only the interest for several years, or used what equity they did have as a piggy bank to spend on other things — own the property at all. Legally, yes. In reality? No.

Calling it home ownership when someone has zero equity (or less) is absurd. Some of these people are not victims in the slightest, except of their own greed or foolishness, or both.

Which isn’t to deny that there’s been some major-league sleaze going on in executive suites. I’m all for going after the sleazeballs who engaged in things like forging documents, etc., or who lied outright to borrowers. There are undoubtedly many of them.

And we should come down hard on the mortgage industry, top to bottom, which helped engineered this bubble in ways guaranteed to cause such woe. But the fact that the game came to an end does not — in the slightest — make me want to let people off the hook for some incredibly bad decisions.

(Of course, the Fed’s latest rate cut is going to bail out the people at the top of the housing food chain, and leave the ones at the bottom just as screwed as they were. That’s scandalous, too, rewarding the financial engineers for their recklessness.)

But I’m not feeling much sorrow for the people who signed for loans that they had to at least suspect were going to be risky at best — loans that would make sense only if property prices continued to rise indefinitely and consistently. Maybe, shedding all common sense, they bought a line of bull from the media (and probably their neighbors and definitely the mortgage industry) that prices would never stop rising. But they were willing participants in making this mess, not passive bystanders or victims in any standard sense.

The bailout proposals in Congress are crazy. We should give people taxpayer subsidies to pay down loans they never should have qualified for in the first place? Insanity.

A lot of these folks are victims of their own greed and/or willingness to believe the impossible. They have my sympathy if they’re forced to leave the houses they never really owned, because that’s a disruptive situation for anyone. But they don’t qualify as victims in my book.

Meanwhile, the media will continue get this story wrong. Nobody cares, apparently, that you can’t logically own something when you have a negative equity and no plausible way of paying down the principal. But never mind. The meme is being well-established — victimhood for a new class of people who, by any rational standard, don’t deserve it.

Look. The system is absolutely rigged against the people in lower incomes, particularly the working poor. No question. Let’s change the tax system. Let’s make opportunities more level. But let’s not encourage speculation from top to bottom. It’s bad for everyone.

UPDATED

UC-Irvine has rescinded the hiring (LA Times) of a new law school dean who holds well-known views on key legal issues, because, the chancellor claims, “he felt the law professor’s commentaries were ‘polarizing’ and would not serve the interests of California’s first new public law school in 40 years.”

UPDATE: He’s now been rehired — but the school officials still won’t explain why they rescinded the hiring in the first place.

This doesn’t pass the smell test. Erwin Chemerinsky, the not-dean who has been teaching at Duke University, says the real reason was conservative pressure. Chancellor Michael Drake’s reasoning is, if you read it carefully, a non-denial denial.

As another law school dean noted, the Erwin Chemerinsky, the not-dean who has been teaching at Duke University, is well known for liberal views: “That’s been true for as long as I’ve known him. It’s rather like discovering that Wilt Chamberlain was tall.”

Chemerinsky’s positions aren’t the relevant issue. This would be just as outrageous if UC Berkeley (where I have a part-time gig) fired a conservative scholar for nothing more than holding views deemed polarizing. What does matter is the university’s cowardly decision. It’s shameful.

Glenn Greenwald: Think about how amazing this is. McConnell clearly described that in 1978, we enacted a law prohibiting warrantless eavesdropping; the Bush administration broke that law repeatedly; and the telecommunications companies actively participated in that lawbreaking. And now — as a matter of national security — the Bush administration is demanding that Congress pass a new law declaring that telecom companies are immune from any and all consequences — both civil and criminal — in the event they are found to have violated the law. It is hard to imagine open contempt for the rule of law being expressed more explicitly than this.

NY Times: U.S. Allocates $354 Million to Reduce New York Traffic. The United States Department of Transportation announced today that it has allocated $354 million to help Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg finance his plan to reduce traffic in Manhattan by charging tolls to drivers entering the busiest parts of the borough.

The Times has missed the other obvious federal agenda: more surveillance capabilities. No government in our history has been more ardent to spy on citizens’ activities, and this grant — which will vastly increase surveillance in Manhattan — is surely aimed, at least in part, at precisely that objective no matter what officials are saying.

For the Times to ignore this obvious angle is surprising. Or negligent. Or both.

(Note: I’m a NY Times Co. shareholder.)

Senator Dianne Feinstein’s vote in favor of the new surveillance law is a disgrace.

She has always been somewhat chilly toward civil liberties, but I’ve understood her positions from the frame of reference of her background in law enforcement. I also understood politicians’ fear of being labeled soft of terrorism in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 attacks. The latter was a contemptible abandonment of principle when it came to supporting drastic new police powers, but it’s sadly foolish to expect politicians to defend liberty in difficult times.

This vote, however, compounds the damage.

Rather than claiming they’ve preserved checks and balances, Sen. Feinstein and the other Democrats who supported this breathtaking expansion of government surveillance should at least acknowledge what they have done. They have given the most untrustworthy government in recent memory an essentially untrammeled ability to spy on Americans.

The law’s vague language that gives the administration — which has demonstrated again and again that doesn’t care much about law in the first place — ample room to widen its surveillance nets to capture anyone’s communications for any reason and with little or no oversight. The 6-month re-examination is meaningless given Congress’ quisling history in such matters, and so are the alleged watchdog measures.

In important ways, we will be less secure as a result of this law. The inevitable abuses, when we eventually learn about them, will lead Americans to have even less trust in our government. Moreover, a surveillance state creates a self-censoring, somewhat paranoid sense of being watched that inevitably inhibits the kind of robust free expression and creativity that a self-governing people needs. If China’s attempt to combine a repressive political system with quasi-free enterprise is Sen. Feinstein’s model for a future America, she is voting appropriately.

Yes, there are potential security risks in not being able to spy on everyone and anyone without serious oversight. But America’s meaning is that we take some risks in order to be more free, because liberty’s benefits outweigh the costs. When we trust in liberty, we end up stronger, not weaker.

I love my country, and I love our Constitution. No one, least of all me, doubts that Sen. Feinstein also loves her country. But she has apparently forgotten her oath of office, in which she swore to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

I don’t know whether her vote is the act of a political coward or a politician’s conclusion that Bill of Rights is an outmoded ideal. I suspect it’s a combination.

But I do know this: Sen. Feinstein earned my vote in the past with positions that were, while imperfect from my viewpoint, at least better than her opponents’. With this betrayal of liberty and the Constitution, she has lost more than my support as a voter. She has lost my respect.

Washington Post: Democrats Offer Up Chairmen For Donors. In the next 10 days alone, Democratic fundraisers will feature the chairmen of the House’s financial services panel and the House and Senate tax-writing committees. Senate Democrats also plan a fundraising reception during a major gathering of Native Americans in the capital Tuesday evening, an event hosted by lobbyists and the political action committee for tribal casinos, including those Jack Abramoff was paid to represent.

You expected something else?