Yesterday I attended the White House Hispanic Community Action Summit to discuss engagement and social media. Executive Director for the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence Jose Rico and Associate Director of the Office of Public Engagement Julie Rodriquez set the stage by outlining their goal of increasing the number of Latino students in schools by 4.5 million in the next 10 years. From there, others jumped in with ideas on civic engagement, methodologies for outreach, and new definitions of education.
The question which officials didn’t ask, but that I find fascinating is this — If you’re targeting Latinos for educational programs, how do you determine race and ethnicity online?
HOW DO YOU IDENTIFY RACIALIZED PEOPLE ONLINE?
Before I even start in on this, I recognize how controversial this can be and how the Fourth Amendment is meant to protect us from race-related profiling. But honestly, I’ve thought about this for myself for a while and wondered about a machine-readable way to identify my own Asian-ness. Self-identification (like I just did in the last sentence) is the obvious and most accurate method. 
But beyond that, other potential indicators lack validity including looking at organizational affiliations (today I’m Hispanic as per the first sentence of this post), foreign language tracking and then of course the seemingly telltale fact that I love to use the Shanghai font. None of these are accurate.That being said, even without self-identification from the user…the White House doesn’t have to start from scratch if they choose to target Latinos in education online.
According to Rico, the White House Initiative has already power mapped a list of 33 key communities for Latin Americans. I ironically just wrote a post about how you can disguise your IP address and location, but one controversial way I know that the Department of Education could tailor its services to Latinos is to target the IPs of the power mapped communities. By looking at these community IPs, the government could:
1. Find common referring organic search terms (and design content to those terms to increase relevance and usefulness);
2. Find common referring sites and social networks and do outreach through these external tools in order to increase distribution around grant program access etc.;
3. And finally, create culturally appropriate content and serve it.
The build for this would be simple, but the opt-in piece of it would not be. Although this search report would offer no more insight than a basic Google Analytics account (something all commercial content owners have for their incoming site users), even high level government tracking seems scary at a time when the Patriot Act’s surveillance procedures leave so much to interpretation.
Based on yesterday’s discussions, it’s clear that a diverse range of citizens have new implementations to the country’s solutions. The really difficult task is getting us to set aside our partisanship, dispelling anger against past and present injustices, and gaining widespread buy-in without getting caught in the weeds.
To offer up a better way to technically target Latinos for access to educational opportunities such as grants, subsidies and school programs you can comment below, sign up at La Plaza or use the #WHenCA hashtag on Twitter.
After highlighting what you can do to protect the momentum of a message against site bans and service outages, now I want to talk about how you can protect yourself online.
Just a year after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg insinuated that privacy was irrelevant, several Mexican bloggers posting anonymous tips on Narco drug activity were found decapitated after their identities were revealed. The dire truth is that when powerful messages and movement can’t be suppressed, organizers often are.
Common methods of tracking content owners include tracing credit cards, tracking browser activity, tracking IP addresses and subpoenaing web hosts for information. There are a number of identity and location cloaking measures you can use to protect yourself including:
- Writing under a pseudonym;
- Paying for a related site service with a pre-paid temporary credit card;
- Using an anonymous browser like Tor to avoid exposing identifying cookies and applications;
- Using an anonymous proxy service like Privoxy to disguise your IP address and thus your location; and finally,
- Choosing the right web host.
That final point is a particularly important one. Web hosts least their server space to you and depending on their policies, are logging your activity, identity and file uploads. If you don’t have the right host, you may find your files hacked or your identity willingly released in compliance with a Doe subpoena without even knowing it.
There are a couple precautions you can take with your web host in order to ensure your anonymity:
- Choose Hosts that Alert You To Subpoenas: In the US, ISP’s are not required to alert you to a request for your identifying information. That being said, the good ones will send you a note warning you about the request and you then have a minimum of 7 days to file an appeal. Really good ISPs actually report the frequency of requests. Google reports the number of personal data requests by country here. More on subpoenas is available on the CyberSlapp site.
- Choose Hosts that Support the Rewriting of the Electronic Privacy Communications Act: The Electronic Privacy Communications Act (ECPA) has come under a great deal of scrutiny due to the fact that it was written in 1986 with little insight into today’s tech reality. These companies support revisions while others may state support on their corporate websites.
- Host Offshore and Above the Law: Some ISPs like PRQ (created by the founders of Pirate Bay) refuse to adhere to Doe subpoenas simply because US laws hold no jurisdiction in Sweden. Labeling itself as “refugee hosting” the service promise reads, “Our boundless commitment to free speech has been tested and proven over and over again. If it is legal in Sweden, we will host it, and will keep it up regardless of any pressure to take it down.”
NOW I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING…Ninety percent of my free time on the computer is spent messaging friends, uploading food pics and viewing cat videos. I hardly think that’s grounds for a raid or retaliation. Still isn’t it your First Amendment right to have the option to speak out without retribution? As a cat watching, food photographing nerd, I can get behind that.
Whether you’re Left-Wing, Right-Wing, Religious, Atheist, Blue or Green — some of the best ways to maintain your online Freedom of Speech are to protect against Site Bans, Service Outages and Identity Tracking.
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED…
If the revolution is televised it’ll be 3 days behind Twitter and the blogs. Regardless of how the political pendulum swings, if you’re a part of the online debate, it’s best to protect yourself and your ideas.
In my last post I talked about how organizers often see their efforts countered by site bans. Now I want to discuss service outages.
During Egypt’s election and subsequent protests, the government banned access to Twitter, Facebook and few select blogs. Still, messages spread as platforms, sites and forums rose up to carry the load. The reason why was because the movement was branded across platforms.
HASHTAG: #EGYPT #JAN 25
When the Egyptian movement was first mentioned on Twitter, messages were tagged as “#egypt” or “#jan25” to mark the date of the first uprising. The story of the woman who started the Jan 25 hashtag is available here. Because the status updates were consistent in their use of the hashtag, even when all of Egypt’s internet service was cut, the tags were recognizable in signage, guerilla art and Western media coverage. According to Twitter’s corporate site, the Egyptian tags were among the top 10 most popular topics of the year. 
BRANDING A MOVEMENT
The point here is that if you want to organize a movement, you need to avoid being dependent on one distribution method and concentrate instead on spreading the symbol or idea across many platforms.
A year ago 99% meant very little to Americans but today it’s pregnant with meaning and that meaning reaches far beyond Twitter, Facebook, etc.
The bottom line is that if you’re going to enact change, the medium ISN’T always the message — the message is the message
Next Post: ANONYMITY & PERSONAL PRIVACY - PART 3/3
