April 2008

Over at Ars, I have an in-depth look at the White House’s email troubles. The administration is either spectacularly incompetent or going out of its way to avoid complying with the law:

When the Bush administration took office, it decided to replace the Lotus Notes-based e-mail system used under the Clinton Administration with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. The transition broke compatibility with the old archiving system, and the White House IT shop did not immediately have a new one to put in its place.

Instead, the White House has instituted a comically primitive system called “journaling,” in which (to quote from a recent Congressional report) “a White House staffer or contractor would collect from a ‘journal’ e-mail folder in the Microsoft Exchange system copies of e-mails sent and received by White House employees.” These would be manually named and saved as “.pst” files on White House servers…

These deficiencies were repeatedly brought to the attention of White House systems administrators. In 2002 and 2003, they attempted to retrofit the old, Lotus Notes—based archiving system to work with the new Exchange-based email system. When this effort failed, they awarded a contract to Booz Allen Hamilton to design a new system, and to Unisys to implement it. According to McDevitt, the new system was set up and configured during 2005 and was “ready to go live” in August 2006. But the White House CIO, Theresa Payton, reportedly aborted the project in late 2006, citing perceived inadequacies with the system’s performance and its ability segregate official presidential correspondence from political or personal materials. McDervitt resigned in protest soon afterwards.

Payton claims that the White House is working on yet another archiving system. But until it’s completed—and it’s now looking increasingly unlikely that it will be operational before the end of the administration—the White House will lack an automated system for complying with the requirements of federal law.

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Julian didn’t like Tom Sydnor’s paper on Lessig either. In particular, he went back and looked up the sections in Code in which Lessig ostensibly expressed sympathy for Communism. Here’s the rest of the story:

We learn that Lessig wrote, in the first edition of his book Code, of his “impulse to sympathize” with those on the left who are “radically skeptical” about using property rights in personal information to protect privacy. We do not learn that the long quotation that follows is Lessig’s summary of an anti-market view of which he declares himself “not convinced.” (Lessig originally endorsed a property right in personal data; he has since altered his view, and now supports treating Web sites’ privacy policies as binding contracts.)

Sydnor similarly presents selective quotations from a passage in Code where Lessig describes his impression of life in communist Vietnam as surprisingly free and unregulated in certain respects. Lessig’s point is that despite a formal ideology of state omnipotence, the lack of an effective architecture of control leaves many ordinary Vietnamese relatively unfettered in their day-to-day interactions; institutional structure often determines reality more powerfully than official philosophy. Possibly Lessig is mistaken about modern Vietnamese life, but Sydnor, in what seems like a willful misreading, deploys the anecdote to depict Lessig as a disciple of Ho Chi Minh.

And of course yesterday Mike pointed out that Lessig’s point about property rights and DDT wasn’t as outrageous as Tom seemed to think. These examples strikes me as a serious problem. One of the basic obligations of any scholar is to present one’s opponents’ quotes fairly and in context. If a scholar writes “I’m sympathetic to view X, but ultimately I find the arguments for it unconvincing,” it’s extremely misleading for someone to quote the first half of the sentence without mentioning the second half.

Likewise, Julian suggests that Tom’s summary of Fisher’s proposal leaves something to be desired:
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Our friends at the Progress and Freedom Foundation have released a paper by PFF’s new copyright guru about Larry Lessig, Free Culture, and whether libertarians should take them seriously. Since the paper is framed as a response to my recent post on Lessig’s work, I suppose I should offer some thoughts on the subject.

I have to say that I found the paper disappointing. I’ve frequently said I wished more libertarians took Lessig’s ideas about copyright seriously, and so I’m generally happy to see libertarian organizations writing about Lessig’s work, even if they do so critically. But it seems to me that a basic principle of good scholarship is that you start with a good-faith interpretation of your opponent’s position and then proceed to explain the flaws in fair-minded way. The goal isn’t to give your readers the worst possible impression of your opponent, but to help your readers to better understand the opponent’s arguments even as you refute them. That doesn’t appear to be what Tom did. Rather, he appears to have read through Lessig’s rather substantial body of work (3 books and numerous papers) and cherry-picked the words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that, when taken in isolation, give the impression that Lessig is (as Tom puts it) a “name-calling demogogue.”

This makes it awfully hard to know where to begin in analyzing Tom’s arguments, such as they are. For example, consider the first paragraph after the introduction:

Disputes about whether Lessig “demonizes” property owners are easily resolved. He does so incessantly. Scholars are supposed to be disinterested, balanced and thoughtful. Lessig is an name-calling demagogue: In just one law-review article, he calls those who fail to agree with him sheep, cows, unimaginative, extreme, stupid, simplistic, blind, uncomprehending, oblivious, pathetic, resigned, unnoticing, unresisting, unquestioning, and confused—”most don’t really get it.”

Now, he does indeed use all of those words in “The Architecture of Innovation.” In some cases, they’re even applied to people he disagrees with. But they’re sprinkled through a 15-page paper, and to judge how demagogic they are, you really have to see the full context to see who, exactly, he’s referring to with each of these words. To take just the first example—sheep—what Lessig actually says is that he frequently encounters a sheep-like stare from his audience when he asks the questions “what would a free resource give us that controlled resources don’t? What is the value of avoiding systems of control?” He’s clearly not calling everyone who disagrees with him sheep, he’s making a point—valid or not—about peoples’ failure to understand a set of questions that he thinks are important.
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