Topic “asymmetry”
Organizing the Masses
March 1, 2008 | Posted by Kip - 9:09am | 6 Comments
Organizing a protest or boycott has always been a difficult affair. After all, the individual logic simply doesn't add up. For example, "why should I boycott a product that I like when it causes me harm but is unlikely to cause harm to a company or change practices that I don't like? "
(see, for instance, Dogbert's great quip to Dilbert about buying a fuel efficient car)
A new application for Facebook may provide a model by which to change the rules of the game and, when employed as part of a coordinated campaign, change the underlying personal logic of mass protest.
The application, called "Ultimatums," allows users to establish a threshold of people boycotting or protesting that the group believes will be sufficient to change the behavior of their target. Users then pledge to act, but only when the threshold has been crossed.
For instance, a local store places an anti-immigrant sign on their door. Local high school students then develop a protest based on boycotting the store. They use the Ultimatum App and post their ultimatum on Facebook. "Take down the sign, or your store will be boycotted." They can then set a threshold of 2,000, feeling that the small store would balk or fold at this level of protest in the community. The store could follow along to see if its stance is actually bad for business.
Of course, there are problems in the model. No one has proven that a commitment made by all the beautiful, intelligent, and extroverted personalities of social networking sites translates into action by living counterparts in the real world. Also, in the case of the small store owner, he may not care if 2,000 people sign up for the protest if 95% of them are empathetic high school students from a different zip code who have never shopped at the store.
On mass issues, however, such as Walmart and healthcare or the presidential elections, it may offer the ability to mobilize masses of people--and may be able to stimulate change by the threat of mobilization. Beyond that, it offers counterinsurgents fighting in less wired lands (and, of course, their enemies) an insight into how to mobilize people. The logic for an individual family to resist the insurgents does not work. However, if we can gain commitments to participate in self-policing at a certain threshold and demonstrate our ability to meet that threshold, then perhaps we can change the individual logic of fear.
(see, for instance, Dogbert's great quip to Dilbert about buying a fuel efficient car)
A new application for Facebook may provide a model by which to change the rules of the game and, when employed as part of a coordinated campaign, change the underlying personal logic of mass protest.
The application, called "Ultimatums," allows users to establish a threshold of people boycotting or protesting that the group believes will be sufficient to change the behavior of their target. Users then pledge to act, but only when the threshold has been crossed.
For instance, a local store places an anti-immigrant sign on their door. Local high school students then develop a protest based on boycotting the store. They use the Ultimatum App and post their ultimatum on Facebook. "Take down the sign, or your store will be boycotted." They can then set a threshold of 2,000, feeling that the small store would balk or fold at this level of protest in the community. The store could follow along to see if its stance is actually bad for business.
Of course, there are problems in the model. No one has proven that a commitment made by all the beautiful, intelligent, and extroverted personalities of social networking sites translates into action by living counterparts in the real world. Also, in the case of the small store owner, he may not care if 2,000 people sign up for the protest if 95% of them are empathetic high school students from a different zip code who have never shopped at the store.
On mass issues, however, such as Walmart and healthcare or the presidential elections, it may offer the ability to mobilize masses of people--and may be able to stimulate change by the threat of mobilization. Beyond that, it offers counterinsurgents fighting in less wired lands (and, of course, their enemies) an insight into how to mobilize people. The logic for an individual family to resist the insurgents does not work. However, if we can gain commitments to participate in self-policing at a certain threshold and demonstrate our ability to meet that threshold, then perhaps we can change the individual logic of fear.
Seymour Butts
February 29, 2008 | Posted by Kip - 8:50pm | 1 Comment
An excellent article by Kevin Poulsen in Wired Magazine explains a pernicious form of prank calling known as “swatting.”
At 4 in the morning of May 1, 2005, deputies from the El Paso County Sheriff's Office converged on the suburban Colorado Springs home of Richard Gasper, a TSA screener at the local Colorado Springs Municipal Airport. They were expecting to find a desperate, suicidal gunman holding Gasper and his daughter hostage.
"I will shoot," the gravely voice had warned, in a phone call to police minutes earlier. "I'm not afraid. I will shoot, and then I will kill myself, because I don't care."
But instead of a gunman, it was Gasper himself who stepped into the glare of police floodlights. Deputies ordered Gasper's hands up and held him for 90 minutes while searching the house. They found no armed intruder, no hostages bound in duct tape. Just Gasper's 18-year-old daughter and his baffled parents.
A federal Joint Terrorism Task Force would later conclude that Gasper had been the victim of a new type of nasty hoax, called "swatting," that was spreading across the United States. Pranksters were phoning police with fake murders and hostage crises, spoofing their caller IDs so the calls appear to be coming from inside the target's home. The result: police SWAT teams rolling to the scene, sometimes bursting into homes, guns drawn.
It turns out that a brilliant and socially awkward teenager was responsible for the phone call, which appeared to come from Gasper’s home.
The teenager, and others like him, used in-depth knowledge of the technical aspects of the phone system along with social engineering in order to make prank calls, turn off and reroute phone lines, obtain free services from the phone companies, and perform various acts which run from the mundane and annoying to the potentially dangerous and deadly.
In a super-connected world, the actions of hyper-empowered individuals such as this boy demonstrate the vast potential not just for mischief but also for great damage that can be done by intelligent people with a good understanding of social responses and excellent technical knowledge. If the wrong types were to develop this further, one could see potential for distant and dangerous attacks of other sorts. Mind you, the boy in question did not use a computer to perform his mischief. He simply developed sophisticated understanding through exacting open source research, networks of other like-minded individuals, and exploitation of human intelligence.
Other applications that would allow, for instance, insurgents in Iraq to mask the source of anonymous tip or provide false information to Iraqi Security Forces also present themselves.
It is a brave new world...
At 4 in the morning of May 1, 2005, deputies from the El Paso County Sheriff's Office converged on the suburban Colorado Springs home of Richard Gasper, a TSA screener at the local Colorado Springs Municipal Airport. They were expecting to find a desperate, suicidal gunman holding Gasper and his daughter hostage.
"I will shoot," the gravely voice had warned, in a phone call to police minutes earlier. "I'm not afraid. I will shoot, and then I will kill myself, because I don't care."
But instead of a gunman, it was Gasper himself who stepped into the glare of police floodlights. Deputies ordered Gasper's hands up and held him for 90 minutes while searching the house. They found no armed intruder, no hostages bound in duct tape. Just Gasper's 18-year-old daughter and his baffled parents.
A federal Joint Terrorism Task Force would later conclude that Gasper had been the victim of a new type of nasty hoax, called "swatting," that was spreading across the United States. Pranksters were phoning police with fake murders and hostage crises, spoofing their caller IDs so the calls appear to be coming from inside the target's home. The result: police SWAT teams rolling to the scene, sometimes bursting into homes, guns drawn.
It turns out that a brilliant and socially awkward teenager was responsible for the phone call, which appeared to come from Gasper’s home.
The teenager, and others like him, used in-depth knowledge of the technical aspects of the phone system along with social engineering in order to make prank calls, turn off and reroute phone lines, obtain free services from the phone companies, and perform various acts which run from the mundane and annoying to the potentially dangerous and deadly.
In a super-connected world, the actions of hyper-empowered individuals such as this boy demonstrate the vast potential not just for mischief but also for great damage that can be done by intelligent people with a good understanding of social responses and excellent technical knowledge. If the wrong types were to develop this further, one could see potential for distant and dangerous attacks of other sorts. Mind you, the boy in question did not use a computer to perform his mischief. He simply developed sophisticated understanding through exacting open source research, networks of other like-minded individuals, and exploitation of human intelligence.
Other applications that would allow, for instance, insurgents in Iraq to mask the source of anonymous tip or provide false information to Iraqi Security Forces also present themselves.
It is a brave new world...
