Greetings & Good Hello! Let’s talk about solutions – let’s talk about the CCA – the Consensual Communications Act. For the longest time I have been caught up in the technology side of communications and now I have just spent one year in complete forced isolation from all electronic communications. I was literally scooped out of my world as if I had died and immediately cut off my e-life. In a lot of ways the disconnect has been tremendously refreshing. It makes the little bits of information that trickle in all the more poignant. I tried to get my hands on the EU’s AI act, but the sender sent me a 4 page super high-level introduction, with a link to the act instead. Regardless, it got me thinking.
The age of personal AIs is here. It is not coming – we are late to the party. We are waiting in the living room only to find out that the party started in the front yard. When it comes to legislation, it is true that we will need some form of legislation for AI in general, but, more importantly, we will need our legislation in other domains to be agile and responsive to the changes and challenges AI brings. This is where we failed with communications and if we keep repeating the same patterns we will certainly fail again with AI. Given how much damage pre-AI social media and current communications have done to our democracy, and the general impotence of our congress, I think we very much have reason to be concerned whether business as usual is the right approach or not. I believe the CCA is a solid middle of the road between business as usual and the sort of total revolution I truly desire. Moreover, the CCA gives us a handle that can accommodate AI-driven communications. Here is how, and here is why we want CCA at our AI communications core.
The CCA is fundamentally about establishing, maintaining, and possibly revoking the consent to communicate between two parties. This means that you need to have a pretty clear idea who is doing the communicating – you have to have some sort of trusted knowledge about who is on the other end of the proverbial phone. We have come to de-facto agreement on what that looks like in terms of financial transactions, election transactions, legal transactions, and so forth. This is not perfect, but the point is, we do have a general social solution and it is evolving and improving every year if not faster. And while our lived experience of this technology varies dramatically, from biometrics on phones to special key fobs to magic passwords in the cloud, it all rests on the same mathematical core of cryptography.
It is important here to comment that we are not talking about encrypted data. I do not mean encrypted information which can be hacked, rather I am talking about the entire suite of mathematics that make up the field and all of the toolkits. As such it is not a thing that can be hacked – certain algorithms can be hacked, but then new algorithms can be added. Houses can be burglarized, but housing as a concept should not be abandoned because some houses get burgled. So what does this have to do with CCA?
Consent architectures, as we currently understand them, can be written as contracts anchored in this language of cryptographic identity. This is what we currently have and do, and it operates at a very, very general level – roughly X allow Y for purpose Z until T. Alice allows Bob to send birthday cards until Alice is 85.
What the CCA then says is that, if Alice tells this to Bob and Alice is 86, then Bob should not send Alice a birthday card. This seems simple, but current law does not support this. This seems simple, so simple that our AIs could interact with it so that Alice can protect herself from malicious AI-Bob-bots. The current legislation is so complicated that it is not possible even for a team of lawyers to determine, ahead of time, if any given act of communication is legal. This means that law enforcement is powerless and it means that enforcement of the law is a joke. Of the millions in fines levied by the FTC for communications violations of SPAM and do-not-call violations, almost none of it has been collected. I would look it up, but I am in jail for trying to get off the Trump campaign lists [maybe I tried too aggressively, but with the CCA it would not have been an issue].
Something else we can do with the CCA is re-write the old do-not-call lists in terms of the CCA – and we can close some of the loopholes cleanly. Take, for example, the issue of political campaigns. In this discussion I will stay away from the silliness of modern political speech and pretend we live in a Trump-free world filled with intelligent orators and stateswomen. In such a world the argument against a “do-not-contact” list is that it blocks the dissemination of ideas. This is flawed in at least two counts. First is that the perspective arose in a time prior to media overload and second, in this age of media overload the CCA applies only to push on penetrative messaging. The CCA applies to messages which insert themselves into the media environment of the individual by depositing post penetration memetic seed. It is not at all unreasonable to require that our intelligent orators and stateswomen, our intellectual partners, collaborate with us in an agreement to use memetic protection – such as exposing their ideas through moderated channels or by personal consent. The only channel blocked is unsolicited insertion and deposition of an idea within a private message space – that is all. You would feel violated if a politician hid under your bed at night waiting to jump out and deliver a message. In many ways penetrative memetic deposits are no different – unless you are of a certain age and have fond memories of getting all the news from the Sunday paper in your mailbox. Problematically, these people are both making the laws and also least familiar with AI.
The trick with legislating AI-based communication, and indeed with fixing the hodgepodge of communication laws, is to make legislation that is automation-friendly. This means it has to have a certain merciless clarity and ruthless simplicity – it cannot have long lists of complex exemptions and confused edge cases. It has to be simple enough that a person can understand it, for if we can not understand our own law, how on earth can we govern the AIs?
The core of the CCA then must be very simple – X (dis)allows Y for purpose Z until T. As long as that rule exists, somewhere, like a contract, it is valid. A do not call list is pretty much X disallows Y for purpose Z until T for a bunch of people. The federal do not call list itself is a long list of X – all the phone #s, one Y – any call, the Z is “any reason except z1, z2, z3, …, zn” until T, where T is “X is removed from list” and the exceptions are things like “it is a survey call” or “it is a political call” and so on. But the core of CCA is still that one very, very simple “contract”.
The hallmark of a truly useful core idea is how many new tools you can build with it. From the CCA you can get to the do-not-call registry pretty quickly. A personal form of it is useful in another deeply meaningful way, and that is securing personal communications. You have all heard about end-to-end encryption. This works exactly by maintaining a “whitelist” of Y’s at your port of use, your X. That is, your WhatsApp(X) allows Bob’s WhatsApp (Y) for purpose Messaging(Z) until You-Block-Bob(T). In this case, you are managing Y using your “contact list” on your device. What the CCA does is give that relationship a solid legal foundation that exists outside of corporate control. The corporations all must support a socially common basis for secure communication.
Did you catch that? The right to secure communication and the right to be left alone are two sides of the same coin. People like Tom Tillis are fighting for the right of government intervention and oversight of messaging – that is what this fight is about. The right to privacy means the right to secure communication, but also the right not to communicate. By demanding the right to communicate at people against their will and wishes, the Republican Party is clearly positioning itself as the party of maximum government intrusion in communications.
Help us clean up the communications legislation nightmare. Make consent the backbone of future communications. Tell Trump to get his junk out of your box! Tell Biden to get his junk out of your box! Support Consensual Communications!
Eric Charles Welton
Prisoner #94911
Columbus County Detention Center
March 30, 2024