Daniel C. Sneider: Since the Democratic Party of Japan won in the country's August national election, Japan watchers have worried that the new government might try to upset the status quo and ease away from the United States. The DPJ is implementing a new paradigm -- but not the one people think.

In a new policy paper from the Brookings Institution's Center on the United States and Europe, Steven Pifer outlines Ukraine's competing geopolitical options as Russia and the West compete for influence with the incoming administration, and assesses foreign policy options for the United States should the next Ukranian president decide to pursue stronger ties with Russia.

Steven Pifer is former ambassador to Ukraine.  Steven Pifer’s career as a Foreign Service officer centered on Europe, the former Soviet Union and arms control. In addition to Kyiv, he had postings in London, Moscow, Geneva and Warsaw as well as on the National Security Council.  He is currently at Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution, focusing on Ukraine and Russia issues.  He is a frequent invited expert speaker at the Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe is to be nominated U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council, the White House announced Nov. 9

Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe, an affiliated scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), is expected to be nominated as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council, the White House reported Nov. 9.

Donahoe must appear in a hearing before a Senate subcommittee before the Senate votes on the nomination, a process that could take several weeks. If confirmed, Donahoe would be responsible for advancing U.S. policies on the council to ensure protection of universally agreed human rights standards.

"I'm really pleased that President Obama has chosen Eileen Donahoe to be the ambassador to the Human Rights Council in Geneva," CISAC Co-Director Scott Sagan said. "Her scholarly research and work has focused on the ethical and legal dilemmas involving the political uses of military force in human intervention. I can't think of anyone more qualified to help reinvigorate the Human Rights Council to meet the challenges it must face today."

Donahoe, 50, was a CISAC visiting scholar in 2006-07 after earning a doctorate in ethics from the University of California's Graduate Theological Union. Her dissertation, "Humanitarian Military Intervention: The Moral Imperative Versus the Rule of Law," addressed the sometimes conflicting ethical and legal justifications for humanitarian military intervention, as well as the basis for authorization of the use of force by the UN Security Council. Her research has also focused on U.N. reform and the international rule of law.

Donahoe has worked with various human rights organizations, including The Lawyer's Committee for Human Rights, where she did research on the connection between U.S. foreign policy and human rights, and Amnesty International's Ginetta Sagan Fund, where she did strategy work related to human rights concerns of women and children.

Donahoe, a resident of Portola Valley, chaired the National Women for Obama Finance Committee during Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

Previously, Donahoe was a litigation associate at Fenwick & West in Palo Alto, where she served technology clients in intellectual property and commercial disputes. Prior to that, she was a teaching fellow at Stanford Law School and a law clerk to the Hon. William H. Orrick in San Francisco.

In addition to her doctorate, Donahoe earned a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College, a master's in theology from Harvard, and both a law degree and master's in East Asian Studies from Stanford University.

Jonathan Zittrain is a Visiting Professor at the Stanford School of Law. In his presentation he raised a number of concerns about current trends in online behavior. He suggested that these developments may undermine the practice of ‘civic technologies’, where unconnected individuals voluntarily come together to achieve something they could not do individually. 

The web is now full of opportunities to engage in tasks that somehow benefit a company or organization. At the most skilled end of the spectrum, there are sites such as Innocentive, a market place that organizations use to post specific problems they need solved; anyone can respond with their solution to win a cash prize. Then there are companies like LiveOps which draw their entire workforce from internet users who engage in call-centre tasks from home. There are also unskilled tasks available in exchange for extremely small amounts of pay; for example, Mechanical Turk gets workers to complete Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) such as labeling photos. ESP Game offers no pay at all but gets users to participate in its goal to label web images by turning this into a competitive game. Then there are activities we might not even realize could be beneficial to someone else – for example, creating hyperlinks in material you put online helps search engines to rank pages effectively.

Jonathan posited two kinds of concerns about these activities. Relating to participants themselves he is concerned about:

• Alienation: participants do not get to see the outcome of their work, but view a tiny part of the whole
• Moral valence: participants often have no idea who is hiring them and for what purpose
• Misappropriation: participants have no say in how their work is used
• Lack of rights: there is no protection for online workers – an individual can get laid off from LiveOps at any time, regardless of their time investment

He also set out some systemic concerns:

• Given the conditions of moral valence and misappropriation, the door is open for online users to be complicit in totalitarian government efforts to use the net to monitor and suppress (imagine Mechanical Turk being used to match protestor photos with citizen databases)
• There is likely to be a ‘race to the bottom’ – companies wanting to get tasks done in this way will operate wherever regulation protecting ‘workers’ is most lax
• Monetization of online tasks could mean the crowding out of voluntary contributions to the internet. Would so many people have freely devoted time to Wikipedia had there been a rival site offering pay for each entry?

Jonathan acknowledged that these are tough issues to address, but suggested a number of responses including: finding ways to apply labor standards so that those who invest a lot of time working on something like LiveOps have some protection; allowing workers to take their experience with them, so that it counts elsewhere if they get laid off; forcing companies to disclose the intended outcome of the overall task to enable users to make more informed decisions about how they use their time.