The Genius of Pictures
Yesterday's COPA decision represents a milestone in the era of data visualization: citation to histograms created by a politically diverse group looking together at a screen. And those histograms turn out to have been critically important to the majority opinion in the case.
David Johnson, who wrote the program that encouraged the group to come up with those histograms, should be feeling very proud today. (He's now an esteemed professor of law at New York Law School.)
Here's the story: One part of COPA that wasn't declared unconstitutional created an (unfunded) Congressional commission to study technologies and methods designed to reduce access by minors to “harmful to minors” material on the internet. The Commission's report is here.
Congress directed the Commission to evaluate the accessibility, cost, and effectiveness of protective technologies and methods, as well as their possible effects on privacy, First Amendment values and law enforcement.
The COPA Commission worked hard. It met in person several times (all without funding). It held regional meetings. It examined a wide range of child-protective technologies and methods, including filtering and blocking services; labeling and rating systems; age verification efforts; the possibility of a new top-level domain for harmful to minors material; “greenspaces” containing only child-appropriate materials; internet monitoring and time-limiting technologies; acceptable use policies and family contracts; online resources providing access to protective technologies and methods; and options for increased prosecution against illegal online material.
It was hard work even coming up with this list of technologies and methods to examine. And then an even tougher task was confronted by the Commission: how to “evaluate” all these disparate things along the axes suggested by Congress. David Johnson and I were staff to the chair of the Commission, Don Telage, for this effort, and I'd like to thank our former law firm, Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now WCP Hale Dorr) for supporting our work on this task.
David came up with the idea, and coded the program, that allowed the Commission to complete its work.
What David did was to build a software program that displayed a separate screen for each technology and method that was the subject of the group’s study. On that screen, he put a histogram consisting of bars that could be higher or lower based on a set of scores for effectiveness, cost, accessibility, privacy-compatibility, and impact on First Amendment rights. The screen also contained a numeric rating given to the technology by every member of the Commission. The overall state of any given bar in the histogram, on any given screen, reflected the average views of the group.
We passed out scoring sheets to the members of the group (which included people with a wide spectrum of different views – everything from prosecutors and anti-porn crusaders to civil libertarians). We had them tell us their ratings individually, without compromise or log-rolling or speeches.
At the next physical meeting, we showed the Commission the resulting pictures. Each member of the Commission saw how his/her ratings compared to those of his colleagues. This allowed us to focus on scores that were quite different from the others, and gave those scorers a chance to persuade the rest of this group that he/she was right. Sometimes this led to changes by scorers. Sometimes, the group agreed to disagree. But the most remarkable effect of this shared screen was that the group worked well together. No one talked about irrelevant subjects or tried to derail the discussion. The question was the picture on the screen.
The Court cited the results of this histogram work, saying what the ratings of the Commission were for use of filtering technologies, and citing with approval the overall work of the Commission. The answer that was reached by the group: filtering technologies are more effective, with less adverse impacts, than any of the other technologies and methods considered. And that's what the Court found.
The COPA Commission, chaired by Don Telage, was made up of the following people:
Stephen Balkam, Internet Content Rating Association
John Bastian, Security Software Systems
Jerry Berman, Center for Democracy & Technology
Arthur H. DeRosier, Jr., Rocky Mountain College
J. Robert Flores, National Law Center for Children and Families
Albert F. Ganier III, Education Networks of America
Michael E. Horowitz, Department of Justice
Donna Rice Hughes, Author, Kids Online/Founder, Protectkids.com
William M. Parker, Crosswalk.com
C. Lee Peeler, Federal Trade Commission
Gregory L. Rohde, Department of Commerce/NTIA
C. James Schmidt, San Jose State University
William L. Schrader, PSINet Inc.
Larry Shapiro, Walt Disney Internet Group
Srinija Srinivasan, Yahoo! Inc.
Karen Talbert, Nortel Networks
George Vradenburg III, America Online, Inc.