Invited TESTIMONY of Sonia Arrison
Director of Technology Studies
Pacific Research Institute

Before the Bipartisan Commission on Internet Political Practices Technology Subcommittee

Online technologies in the political process: considerations for California

Thank you for the opportunity to participate today. My name is Sonia Arrison, and I am director of Technology Studies at the Pacific Research Institute.

Today we are here to discuss the impact of online technologies in the political process. Answering this question requires a bit of conjecture, but there are three main ideas I’d like to discuss.

I. The most obvious impact of new online technologies is that they increase the ability to communicate and make it easier to access facts. Instead of going to a candidate’s office to hear about her views, for example, I can simply log on to her web site to find out what her views are. Similarly, if I want to volunteer or attend political rallies, I can sign up for an electronic mailing list which will inform me of times, dates, and places in a quick and efficient manner. Going even further, if I am really excited by politics, I can chat with various other people in a chatroom or by using an instant messaging client. These are the benefits of the online world: greater communication, convenience, and organizational power.

These benefits, however, come with some potential pitfalls. Many of the technologies described above are often not secure or anonymous methods of communicating, meaning that it may be possible to forge an email message from someone else, track if someone forwards an e-mail message they received, track which portions of a political web site people visit, intercept instant messages and even easily distribute annoying political messages (recall Bill Jones’s spamming mistake in his campaign for governor in March 2002).

As many of you know, some spammers attempt to harvest email addresses by implanting web bugs into an email which can tell them if the email has been opened (hence, the account is active) and if the message has been forwarded and then read by someone at another IP address. It would be easy for the owner of a political list to do the same. A web bug is a graphic on a web page or in an email message that is designed to collect information on web page and email reading habits. Among the information collected is the IP address of the computer that the web bug is sent to, the URL of the page the web bug comes from, and the time it was viewed. For more information on how web bugs work, I suggest the committee visit the Privacy Foundation’s web page at http://www.privacyfoundation.org/resources/webbug.asp#1.

While web bugs sound somewhat unsettling and bring up some privacy issues, they could also help campaign officials better tailor their message to their constituents if they can see which places on the web are most interesting to readers and which emails are forwarded around. In any case, there are technologies available to squash web bugs and alert the user if their email contains a web bug (For instance: http://www.popupstop.com/squashwebbugs.htm).

Another problem mentioned earlier is the possibility that political foes could start distributing forged emails, thereby spreading false or misleading information. This happened about a month ago in Houston, Texas where an anonymous email that stretched the truth about Mayoral candidate Michael Berry was distributed to a massive list of people and certainly stirred up a good deal of buzz.

This is a potentially serious problem whose threat won’t really go away until we have a good system of authenticating people on the Net. Such a system would utilize digital signatures, which are essentially an encrypted digital stamp that certifies that the sender is who he says he is. A certification authority then backs up the signatures.

While these potential downsides exist and they bring up worrisome privacy issues, they may not be quite as bad as they sound. As I mentioned, there are ways to prevent web bugs from being such a nuisance and I believe that as the Net and e-commerce develop we will come up with a workable authentication system.

II. The second way that online technologies could impact the political process is that they could aid users in voting decisions. Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA and a fellow at PRI, made this point in a new paper called “How Might Cyberspace Change American Politics?” (It can be found at: http://www1.law.ucla.edu/~volokh/cyberpol.htm).

The argument goes like this: most people don’t have the time to educate themselves about every issue and every political race, so they rely on things like party affiliation, endorsements, or prominent people siding for or against an issue. With the advent of the Internet, it is possible for interest groups to efficiently and cheaply collect and distribute information to individuals about who and what they should vote for. And, if we look farther into the future, to a day where we are voting from home, it could be possible for interest groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Association or the National Rifle Association, to simply let you download a small program that places their recommended votes into your electronic ballot form. Each group might not have recommendations on all the races, but maybe you could go to a central site, www.votesareus.com, fill in a form indicating which interest groups' views you respect, and with a few clicks have their recommendations.

The implications of this are fairly obvious. It could serve to increase the political power of trusted interest groups. If the groups can show not only that they are making recommendations, but also that a good number of people are choosing to follow them, then they will be more likely to hold more influence with politicians and donors. This is not necessarily a problem, but it is something to watch and something that may be opposed by some circles.

III. A third way in which online technologies could influence the political process is that they could increase people’s sense of connection to their geographical political community. This was also a point made in the paper I mentioned by PRI fellow and UCLA professor Eugene Volokh.

The idea is this: that since people move much more these days than they used to, often for economic reasons such as a job, they feel less attachment to their new community. Telecommuting, which the Internet enables, would allow more workers to stay in their chosen communities and thus be more attached to their local geographic space. This could increase political interest and participation at the local level as well as continue support for geographical representation systems.

Sonia Arrison is the Director of Technology Studies at the Pacific Research Institute, a California-based think tank. She can be reached via email at sarrison@pacificresearch.org.