Open Access Archivangelism

Despite its protests that "more than 20 hours of video [are] uploaded every minute worldwide," google and youtube are definitely guilty already of gross neglect and irresponsibility. Instead of sloughing off responsibility by offloading it onto "community vigilance," google should use its enormous multilingual mechanical and computational resources to flag automatically all posted youtube content that contains a growing list of code words (known names and terms, in all languages) and immediately divert all suspect postings to a human inspection buffer before allowing them to be publicly viewable.

Everyone is making monumental worldwide efforts in screening at airports, and now in cargo transport, with real human time and energy and money involved, yet one enormous company, with the means to do automated computational screening of unprecedented power and pinpoint specificity -- look how much ingenuity is put into screening shoppers' predilections -- is not exercising its latent capacity on content with equally unprecedented damage potential vastly exceeding any airport's. Instead, google/youtube is waiting passively for the damage that it hosts and amplifies to be dutifully detected by the worldwide user community (good supplement to -- but no substitute for -- automatic screening).

As newspapers have lately reported, a simple search on a prominent terrorist's name retrieves over 5000 videos. The postings from accredited news organizations could be hand-cleared easily. But there are plenty up there from the sage himself, advocating jihads and fatwas and god (sic) knows what else, with thousands of user views and no user alert flags (or none that have been acted upon).

Text can of course be almost as menacing as videos, but the penetration and band-width of videos in today's media-shaped brain-space is much greater, so computational pre-emption there should have an even higher priority.

And before the reflexive, unreflective laissez-faire fatalists begin to whine about censorship and freedom of expression, recall that this is not about the right to speak or publish but about the privilege of using one private company's global megaphone.

Entrust porno-flagging to the global usership, but not terror-flagging. Otherwise we are playing global gaussian roulette.