[NNagain] Introduction: Dr. David Bray

Thu Oct 5 17:21:05 EDT 2023

Indeed Jack - a few things to balance - the Administrative Procedure Act of
1946 (on which the idea of rulemaking is based) us about raising legal
concerns that must be answered by the agency at the time the rulemaking is
done. It's not a vote nor is it the case that if the agency gets tons of
comments in one direction that they have to go in that direction. Instead
it's only about making sure legal concerns are considered and responded to
before the agency before the agency acts. (Which is partly why sending "I'm
for XYZ" or "I'm against ABC" really doesn't mean anything to an agency -
not only is that not a legal argument or concern, it's also not something
where they're obligated to follow these comments - it's not a vote or
poll).

That said, political folks have spun things to the public as if it is a
poll/vote/chance to act. The raise a valid legal concern part of the APA of
1946 is omitted. Moreover the fact that third party law firms and others
like to submit comments on behalf of clients - there will always be a third
party submitting multiple comments for their clients (or "clients") because
that's their business.

In the lead up to 2017, the Consumer and Government Affairs Bureau of the
FCC got an inquiry from a firm asking how they could submit 1 million
comments a day on an "upcoming privacy proceeding" (their words, astute
observers will note there was no privacy proceeding before the FCC in
2017). When the Bureau asked me, I told them either mail us a CD to upload
it or submit one comment with 1 million signatures. To attempt to flood us
with 1 million comments a day (aside from the fact who can "predict" having
that many daily) would deny resources to others. In the mess that followed,
what was released to the public was so redacted you couldn't see the
legitimate concerns and better paths that were offered to this entity.

And the FCC isn't alone. EPA, FTC, and other regulatory agencies have had
these hijinks for years - and before the Internet it was faxes, mass
mimeographs (remember blue ink?), and postcards.The Administrative
Conference of the United States (ACUS) - is the body that is supposed to
provide consistent guidance for things like this across the U.S.
government. I've briefed them and tried to raise awareness of these issues
- as I think fundamentally this is a **process** question that once
answered, tech can support. However they're not technologies and updating
the interpretation of the process isn't something lawyers are apt to do
until the evidence that things are in trouble is overwhelming.

52 folks wrote a letter to them - and to GSA - back in 2020. GSA had a
rulemaking of its own on how to improve things, yet oddly never published
any of the comments it received (including ours) and closed the rulemaking
quietly. Here's the letter: https://tinyurl.com/letter-signed-52-people

And here's an article published in OODAloop about this - and why Generative
AI is probably going to make things even more challenging:
https://www.oodaloop.com/archive/2023/04/18/why-a-pause-on-ai-development-is-not-the-answer-an-insiders-perspective/

[snippet of the article] *Now in 2023 and Beyond: Proactive Approaches to
AI and Society*

Looking to the future, to effectively address the challenges arising from
AI, we must foster a proactive, results-oriented, and cooperative approach
with the public
<https://davidbray.medium.com/challenges-and-needed-new-solutions-for-open-societies-to-maintain-civil-discourse-part-1-b5ea95f8c679>.
Think tanks and universities can engage the public in conversations about
how to work, live, govern, and co-exist with modern technologies that
impact society. By involving diverse voices in the decision-making process,
we can better address and resolve the complex challenges AI presents on
local and national levels.

In addition, we must encourage industry and political leaders to
participate in finding non-partisan, multi-sector solutions if civil
societies are to remain stable. By working together, we can bridge the gap
between technological advancements and their societal implications.

Finally, launching AI pilots across various sectors, such as work,
education, health, law, and civil society, is essential. We must learn by
doing on how we can create responsible civil environments where AIs can be
developed and deployed responsibly. These initiatives can help us better
understand and integrate AI into our lives, ensuring its potential is
harnessed for the greater good while mitigating risks.

In 2019 and 2020, a group of fifty-two people asked the Administrative
Conference of the United States
<https://tinyurl.com/letter-signed-52-people>(which helps guide rulemaking
procedures for federal agencies), General Accounting Office, and the
General Services Administration to call attention to the need to address
the challenges of chatbots flooding public commenting procedures and
potentially crowding out or denying services to actual humans wanting to
leave a comment. We asked
<https://davidbray.medium.com/challenges-and-needed-new-solutions-for-open-societies-to-maintain-civil-discourse-part-1-b5ea95f8c679>
:

*1. Does identity matter regarding who files a comment or not — and must
one be a U.S. person in order to file?*

*2. Should agencies publish real-time counts of the number of comments
received — or is it better to wait until the end of a commenting round to
make all comments available, including counts?*

*3. Should third-party groups be able to file on behalf of someone else or
not — and do agencies have the right to remove spam-like comments?*

*4. Should the public commenting process permit multiple comments per
individual for a proceeding — and if so, how many comments from a single
individual are too many? 100? 1000? More?*

*5. Finally, should the U.S. government itself consider, given public
perceptions about potential conflicts of interest for any agency performing
a public commenting process, whether it would be better to have third-party
groups take responsibility for assembling comments and then filing those
comments via a validated process with the government?*

These same questions need pragmatic pilots that involve the public to
co-explore
and co-develop how we operate effectively amid these technological shifts
<https://davidbray.medium.com/challenges-and-needed-new-solutions-for-open-societies-to-maintain-civil-discourse-part-2-2f637c472112>.
As the capabilities of LLMs continue to grow, we need positive change
agents willing to tackle the messy issues at the intersection of technology
and society. The challenges are immense, but so too are the opportunities
for positive change. Let’s seize this moment to create a better tomorrow
for all. Working together, we can co-create a future that embraces AI’s
potential while mitigating its risks
<https://medium.com/peoplecentered/the-need-for-people-centered-sources-of-hope-for-our-digital-future-ahead-ef491dd2703d>,
informed by the hard lessons we have already learned.

Full article:
https://www.oodaloop.com/archive/2023/04/18/why-a-pause-on-ai-development-is-not-the-answer-an-insiders-perspective/

Hope this helps.

On Thu, Oct 5, 2023 at 4:44 PM Jack Haverty via Nnagain <
nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> Thanks for all your efforts to keep the "feedback loop" to the rulemakers
> functioning!
>
> I'd like to offer a suggestion for a hopefully politically acceptable way
> to handle the deluge, derived from my own battles with "email" over the
> years (decades).
>
> Back in the 1970s, I implemented one of the first email systems on the
> Arpanet, under the mentorship of JCR Licklider, who had been pursuing his
> vision of a "Galactic Network" at ARPA and MIT.   One of the things we
> discovered was the significance of anonymity.   At the time, anonymity was
> forbidden on the Arpanet; you needed an account on some computer, protected
> by passwords, in order to legitimately use the network.   The mechanisms
> were crude and easily broken, but the principle applied.
>
> Over the years, that principle has been forgotten, and the right to be
> anonymous has become entrenched.   But many uses of the network, and needs
> of its users, demand accountability, so all sorts of mechanisms have been
> pasted on top of the network to provide ways to judge user identity.
> Banks, medical services, governments, and businesses all demand some way of
> proving your identity, with passwords, various schemes of 2FA, VPNs, or
> other such technology, with varying degrees of protection.   It is still
> possible to be anonymous on the net, but many things you do require you to
> prove, to some extent, who you are.
>
> So, my suggestion for handling the deluge of "comments" is:
>
> 1/ create some mechanism for "registering" your intent to submit a
> comment.   Make it hard for bots to register.  Perhaps you can leverage the
> work of various partners, e.g., ISPs, retailers, government agencies,
> financial institutions, of others who already have some way of identifying
> their users.
>
> 2/ Also make registration optional - anyone can still submit comments
> anonymously if they choose.
>
> 3/ for "registered commenters", provide a way to "edit" your previous
> comment - i.e., advise that your comment is always the last one you
> submitted.   I.E., whoever you are, you can only submit one comment, which
> will be the last one you submit.
>
> 4/ In the thousands of pages of comments, somehow flag the ones that are
> from registered commenters, visible to the people who read the comments.
> Even better, provide those "information consumers" with ways to sort,
> filter, and search through the body of comments.
>
> This may not reduce the deluge of comments, but I'd expect it to help the
> lawyers and politicians keep their heads above the water.
>
> Anonymity is an important issue for Net Neutrality too, but I'll opine
> about that separately.....
>
> Jack Haverty
>
>
> On 10/2/23 12:38, David Bray, PhD via Nnagain wrote:
>
> Greetings all and thank you Dave Taht for that very kind intro...
>
> First, I'll open with I'm a gosh-darn non-partisan, which means I swore an
> oath to uphold the Constitution first and serve the United States - not a
> specific party, tribe, or ideology. This often means, especially in today's
> era of 24/7 news and social media, non-partisans have to "top cover".
>
> Second, I'll share that in what happened in 2017 (which itself was 10x
> what we saw in 2014) my biggest concern was and remains that a few actors
> attempted to flood the system with less-than-authentic comments.
>
> In some respects this is not new. The whole "notice and comment" process
> is a legacy process that goes back decades. And the FCC (and others) have
> had postcard floods of comments, mimeographed letters of comments, faxed
> floods of comments, and now this - which, when combined with generative AI,
> will be yet another flood.
>
> Which gets me to my biggest concern as a non-partisan in 2023-2024, namely
> how LLMs might misuse and abuse the commenting process further.
>
> Both in 2014 and 2017, I asked FCC General Counsel if I could use CAPTChA
> to try to reduce the volume of web scrapers or bots both filing and pulling
> info from the Electronic Comment Filing System.
>
> Both times I was told *no* out of concerns that they might prevent someone
> from filing. I asked if I could block obvious spam, defined as someone
> filing a comment >100 times a minute, and was similarly told no because one
> of those possible comments might be genuine and/or it could be an ex party
> filing en masse for others.
>
> For 2017 we had to spin up 30x the number of AWS cloud instances to handle
> the load - and this was a flood of comments at 4am, 5am, and 6am ET at
> night which normally shouldn’t see such volumes. When I said there was a
> combination of actual humans wanting to leave comments and others who were
> effectively denying service to others (especially because if anyone wanted
> to do a batch upload of 100,000 comments or more they could submit a CSV
> file or a comment with 100,000 signatories) - both parties said no, that
> couldn’t be happening.
>
> Until 2021 when the NY Attorney General proved that was exactly what was
> happening with 18m of the 23m apparently from non-authentic origin with ~9m
> from one side of the political aisle (and six companies) and ~9m from the
> other side of the political aisle (and one or more teenagers).
>
> So with Net Neutrality back on the agenda - here’s a simple prediction,
> even if the volume of comments is somehow controlled, 10,000+ pages of
> comments produced by ChatGPT or a different LLM is both possible and
> probably will be done. The question is if someone includes a legitimate
> legal argument on page 6,517 - will FCC’s lawyers spot it and respond to it
> as part of the NPRM?
>
> Hope this helps and with highest regards,
>
> -d.
> --
>
> Principal, LeadDoAdapt Ventures, Inc. <https://www.leaddoadapt.com/> &
> Distinguished Fellow
>
> Henry S. Stimson Center <https://www.stimson.org/ppl/david-bray/>, Business
> Executives for National Security <https://bens.org/people/dr-david-bray/>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 2, 2023 at 2:15 PM Dave Taht via Nnagain <
> nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
>> All:
>>
>> I have spent the last several days reaching out to as many people I
>> know with a deep understanding of the policy and technical issues
>> surrounding the internet, to participate on this list. I encourage you
>> all to reach out on your own, especially to those that you can
>> constructively and civilly disagree with, and hopefully work with, to
>> establish technical steps forward. Quite a few have joined silently!
>> So far, 168 people have joined!
>>
>> Please welcome Dr David Bray[1], a self-described "human flack jacket"
>> who, in the last NN debate, stood up for the non -partisan FCC IT team
>> that successfully kept the system up 99.4% of the time despite the
>> comment floods and network abuses from all sides. He has shared with
>> me privately many sad (and some hilarious!) stories of that era, and I
>> do kind of hope now, that some of that history surfaces, and we can
>> learn from it.
>>
>> Thank you very much, David, for putting down your painful memories[2],
>> and agreeing to join here. There is a lot to tackle here, going
>> forward.
>>
>> [1] https://www.stimson.org/ppl/david-bray/
>> [2] "Pain shared is reduced. Joy shared, increased." - Spider Robinson
>>
>>
>> --
>> Oct 30:
>> https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
>> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
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>>
>
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