[NNagain] Introduction: Dr. David Bray

Mon Oct 9 19:46:26 EDT 2023

David, this is a good list.
FACA has rules for public participation, for example.

I think it should be taken into account for any public commenting process
that online (and offline such as USPS or fax and phone calls) that spam and
artificial inflation of comments are possible. Is there any specific
standard for US agency public comment handling? If now, what committees of
the US Congress might have jurisdiction?

v

On Tue, Oct 10, 2023 at 8:22 AM David Bray, PhD via Nnagain <
nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> I'm all for doing new things to make things better.
>
> At the same time, I used to do bioterrorism preparedness and response from
> 2000-2005 (and aside from asking myself what kind of crazy world needed
> counter-bioterrorism efforts... I also realized you don't want to interject
> something completely new in the middle of an unfolding crisis event). If
> something were to be injected now, it would have to have consensus from
> both sides, otherwise at least one side (potentially detractors from both)
> will claim that whatever form the new approaches take are somehow
> advantaging "the other side" and disadvantaging them.
>
> Probably would take a ruling by the Administrative Conference of the
> United States, at a minimum to answer these five questions - and even then,
> introducing something completely different in the midst of a political
> melee might just invite mudslinging unless moderate voices on both sides
> can reach some consensus.
>
> *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?*
>
>
> On Sat, Oct 7, 2023 at 4:10 PM Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi again David et al,
>>
>> Interesting frenzy...lots of questions that need answers and associated
>> policies.   I served 6 years as an elected official (in a small special
>> district in California), so I have some small understanding of the
>> government side of things and the constraints involved.   Being in charge
>> doesn't mean you can do what you want.
>>
>> I'm thinking here more near-term and incremental steps.  You said "These
>> same questions need pragmatic pilots that involve the public ..."
>>
>> So, how about using the current NN situation for a pilot?  Keep all the
>> current ways and emerging AI techniques to continue to flood the system
>> with comments.   But also offer an *optional* way for humans to "register"
>> as a commenter and then submit their (latest only) comment into the melee.
>> Will people use it?  Will "consumers" (the lawyers, commissioners, etc.)
>> find it useful?
>>
>> I've found it curious, for decades now, that there are (too many)
>> mechanisms for "secure email", that may help with the flood of
>> disinformation from anonymous senders, but very very few people use them.
>> Maybe they don't know how; maybe the available schemes are too flawed;
>> maybe ...?
>>
>> About 30 years ago, I was a speaker in a public meeting orchestrated by
>> USPS, and recommended that they take a lead role, e.g., by acting as a
>> national CA - certificate authority.  Never happened though.   FCC issues
>> lots of licenses...perhaps they could issue online credentials too?
>>
>> Perhaps a "pilot" where you will also accept comments by email, some
>> possibly sent by "verified" humans if they understand how to do so, would
>> be worth trying?   Perhaps comments on "technical aspects" coming from
>> people who demonstrably know how to use technology would be valuable to the
>> policy makers?
>>
>> The Internet, and technology such as TCP, began as an experimental pilot
>> about 50 years ago.  Sometimes pilots become infrastructures.
>>
>> FYI, I'm signing this message.  Using OpenPGP.  I could encrypt it also,
>> but my email program can't find your public key.
>>
>> Jack Haverty
>>
>>
>> On 10/5/23 14:21, David Bray, PhD wrote:
>>
>> 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
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Nnagain mailing list
>>>> Nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net
>>>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>>>>
>>>
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