Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Today we’re launching both TechFreedom, a new digital policy think tank, and its first publication, The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet—after the conclusion of the State of the Net conference. Watch the livestream below—12:45-5:30 pm Eastern / 9:45 am – 2:30 Pacific:
Please join the conversation about the book by tweeting about the event using the #NDD hashtag. And follow us at @Tech_Freedom & @Digital_Decade! Check out the agenda below. Continue reading →
On the podcast this week, Don Norman, a former Apple vice-president, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, and one of the world’s most influential designers, discusses his new book, Living With Complexity. Norman talks about differences between complexity, something being complicated, and simplicity, and suggests that people who bemoan “technology” don’t actually seek simplicity. He also discusses differences between designing a product and designing a system, using examples of iPods and iTunes, the Amazon Kindle, and BMW’s Mini Cooper — products whose success depended upon the success of larger systems. Norman also notes the difference between a forcing function and a nudge, explains how complicated rules can weaken security, and comments on sociable design in realspace and on the internet.
To keep the conversation around this episode in one place, we’d like to ask you to comment at the web page for this episode on Surprisingly Free. Also, why not subscribe to the podcast on iTunes?
If you’re in for the State of the Net conference this week (or happen to live here), join us for a happy hour among tech policy peeps Tuesday afternoon at 6pm at Johnny’s Half Shell (400 N Capitol St).
We’ll also toast the launch of TechFreedom, the new digital policy think tank we’re launching Wednesday with a half-day symposium for TechFreedom’s first publication: The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet.
RSVP on Facebook here! (We need an accurate headcount.)
The smartphone is arguably one of the most empowering and revolutionary technologies of the modern era. By putting the processing power of a personal computer and the speed of a broadband connection into a device that fits in a pocket, smartphones have revolutionized how we communicate, travel, learn, game, shop, and more.
Yet smartphones have an oft-overlooked downside: when they end up in the wrong hands, they offer overreaching agents of the state, thieves, hackers, and other wrongdoers an unparalleled avenue for uncovering and abusing the volumes of sensitive personal information we increasingly store on our mobile phones.
Over on Ars Technica, I have a long feature story that examines the constitutional and technical issues surrounding police searches of mobile phones:
Last week, California’s Supreme Court reached a controversial 5-2 decision in People v. Diaz (PDF), holding that police officers may lawfully search mobile phones found on arrested individuals’ persons without first obtaining a search warrant. The court reasoned that mobile phones, like cigarette packs and wallets, fall under the search incident to arrest exception to the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
California’s opinion in Diaz is the latest of several recent court rulings upholding warrantless searches of mobile phones incident to arrest. While this precedent is troubling for civil liberties, it’s not a death knell for mobile phone privacy. If you follow a few basic guidelines, you can protect your mobile device from unreasonable search and seizure, even in the event of arrest. In this article, we will discuss the rationale for allowing police to conduct warrantless searches of arrestees, your right to remain silent during police interrogation, and the state of mobile phone security.
FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell will be interviewed by veteran tech reporter Declan McCullagh of CNET in a “fireside chat” on tech policy at TechFreedom‘s half-day symposium to introduce its first publication: The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet.
TechFreedom is a new non-profit, non-partisan think tank. Our mission is to promote the progress of technology that improves the human condition and expands individual capacity to choose. We advance the freedoms that make experimentation, entrepreneurship and investment possible, and thus unleash the ultimate resource: human ingenuity. On a wide variety of issues, TechFreedom will outline a path forward for policymakers towards a bright future where technology enhances freedom, and freedom enhances technology.
The Next Digital Decade brings together 26 thought leaders on Internet law, philosophy, policy and economics to consider the future of the Internet, from a wide variety of perspectives. This book is essential reading for anyone gazing toward the digital future. The symposium features authors from a selection of the ten organizing questions asked in the book. You can read, download or buy the book here.
Today the Mercatus Center has released a short new paper I have authored on “Unappreciated Benefits of Advertising and Commercial Speech.” I begin the piece by noting that:
Federal policy makers, state legislators, and state attorneys general have recently shown interest in regulating commercial advertising and marketing. Several new regulatory initiatives are being proposed, or are already underway, that could severely curtail or restrict advertising or marketing on a variety of platforms. The consequences of these stepped-up regulatory efforts will be profound and will hurt consumer welfare both directly and indirectly.
I go on to note that “advertising can be an easy target for politicians or regulatory activist groups who make a variety of (typically unsubstantiated) claims about its negative impact on society,” but then continue on to explain how “the role of commercial speech in a free-market economy is often misunderstood or taken for granted.” I outline how, despite regulators’ concerns, consumers actually derive three important types of benefits from advertising and marketing: (1) Informational / Educational Benefits; (2) Market Choice / Pro-Competitive Benefits; and (3) Media Promotion / Cross-Subsidization. After discussing each benefit, I conclude that:
For these reasons, a stepped-up regulatory crusade against advertising and marketing will hurt consumer welfare since it will raise prices, restrict choice, and diminish marketplace competition and innovation—both in ad-supported content and service markets, and throughout the economy at large. Simply stated, there is no free lunch.
Read the entire 1,800-word essay here. I have also embedded the document down below in a Scribd reader.
Via @csoghoian (who can be wrathful if you don’t attribute), Adobe buries the lede in its blog post about privacy improvements to the Flash player. They’re working with the most popular browser vendors on integrating control of “local shared objects”—more commonly known as “Flash cookies”—into the interface. Users control of Flash cookies will soon be similar to control of ordinary cookies.
It doesn’t end there:
Still, we know the Flash Player Settings Manager could be easier to use, and we’re working on a redesign coming in a future release of Flash Player, which will bring together feedback from our users and external privacy advocates. Focused on usability, this redesign will make it simpler for users to understand and manage their Flash Player settings and privacy preferences. In addition, we’ll enable you to access the Flash Player Settings Manager directly from your computer’s Control Panels or System Preferences on Windows, Mac and Linux, so that they’re even easier to locate and use. We expect users will see these enhancements in the first half of the year and we look forward to getting feedback as we continue to improve the Flash Player Settings Manager.
Mysterious, sinister “Flash cookies” were Exhibit A in the argument for a Do Not Track regulation. There is no way that people can cope with the endless array of tracking technologies advertisers are willing to deploy, the argument went, so the government must step in, define what it means to be “tracked,” and require it to stop—without kneecapping the free Internet. (Good luck with that!)
But Flash cookies are now quickly taking their place as a feature that users can control from the browser (or OS), customizing their experience of the Web to meet their individual privacy preferences. This is not a panacea, of course: People must still be made aware of the importance of controlling Flash cookies, as well as regular cookies. New tracking technologies will emerge, and consumer-friendly information controls meeting those challenges will be required in response.
But if this is what the drawn-out “war” against tracking technologies looks like, color me pro-war!
In a few short months, Adobe has begun work on the controls needed to put Flash cookies under peoples’ control. The Federal Trade Commission—prospective imposer of peace through complex, top-down regulation—took more than a year to produce a report querying whether a Do Not Track regulation might be a good idea. This problem will essentially be solved (and we’ll be on to the next one) before the FTC would have gotten saddled up.
Yes, Adobe may have acted because of the threat of damaging government regulation. That seems always to be what gets these companies moving. Of course it does, when the primary modus operandi of privacy advocacy is to push for government regulation. Were the privacy community to work as assiduously on boycotts as acting through intermediary government regulators, change might come even faster.
We could do without the standing army of regulators. Having a government sector powerful enough to cow the business sector is costly, both in terms of freedom and tax dollars.
With the failure of Do Not Track, the vision of a free and open Internet—populated by aware, empowered individuals—lives on.
Over at the Brain Pickings blog, Maria Popova has posted an amazing 1972 documentary based on Alvin Toffler’s famous 1970 book, Future Shock. The documentary, like the book, focuses on many of the themes we hear Internet optimists and pessimists debating all the time today: “information overload,” excessive consumerism, artificial intelligence and robotics, biotechnology, cryonics, the nature of humanity and how technology impacts it, etc, etc. Again, all the same stuff people are still fighting about today.
Popova correctly notes that “The film, darkly dystopian and oozing techno-paranoia, is a valuable reminder that… societies have always feared new technology but ultimately adapted to it.” Indeed, at one point in the film we hear, “The future has burst upon us… [but] is technology always desirable?” And that’s just in reference to the (now-obsolete) supersonic jet transport, or Concorde! “Changes bombard our nervous systems, clamoring for decisions. New values, new technologies, flood into our lives… Escape from change in today’s society become more and more impossible. But change itself is out of control.” Geez.. how did we make it past 1972!
The documentary is narrated by Orson Welles, which makes it even more fun. Welles had a presence that just made everything seem larger than life, and his voice-of-God narration here really added a nice touch to this film.
It’s an absolutely great find. Here’s the first 10-minute segment from the documentary. Watch all five segments over at Brain Pickings.
My colleague Dr. Richard Williams, who serves as the Director of Policy Research at the Mercatus Center, has just released an excellent little primer on “The Impact of Regulation on Investment and the U.S. Economy.” Those who attempt to track and analyze regulation in the communications and high-tech arenas will find the piece of interest since it provides an framework for how to evaluate the sensibility of new rules.
Williams, who is an expert in benefit-cost analysis and risk analysis, opens the piece by noting that:
The total cost of regulation in the United States is difficult to calculate, but one estimate puts the cost at $1.75 trillion in 2008. Total expenditures by the U.S. government were about $2.9 trillion in 2008. Thus, out of a total of $4.6 trillion in resources allocated by the federal government, 38% of the total is for regulations.
If regulations always produced goods and services that were valued as highly as market-produced goods and services, then this would not be a cause for alarm. But that is precisely what is not known. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary for many regulations. Where regulations take resources out of the private sector for less valuable uses, overall consumer welfare is diminished. … Regulation also impacts the creation and sustainability of jobs… [which] can have very real consequences for the economy.
He also explains how regulation can affect international competitiveness, especially when burdensome rules limit the ability of companies to attract capital for new innovations and investment. Continue reading →
I’ve been bemused by a minor controversy about remarks Ryan Calo of Stanford University made to a New York Times reporter for this story on Internet privacy and government access.
“When your job is to protect us by fighting and prosecuting crime, you want every tool available,” said Ryan Calo, director of the consumer privacy project at the Center for Internet & Society at Stanford Law School. “No one thinks D.O.J. and other investigative agencies are sitting there twisting their mustache trying to violate civil liberties. They’re trying to do their job.”
That apparently didn’t sit well in some corners of the privacy community, and Calo felt obligated to explain the comment as though he had implied that DoJ efforts to undercut privacy should not be resisted. He hadn’t.
But evidently some people do think DoJ officials, or some relevant segment of them, are mustache-twisting privacy-haters. There are a few genuine oddballs committed to undercutting privacy, but it’s not worth casting aspersions on the entire security bureaucracy because of these few.
I believe the motivations of the vast majority of DoJ officials are good. They feel a real sense of honor from doing their self-chosen task of protecting the country from various threats. On average, they’ll likely weigh security and safety more heavily than the average privacy advocate or civil libertarian. Because they don’t think about privacy as much, they may not understand as well what privacy is and how to protect it consistent with pursuing justice. These are all good faith reasons why DoJ officials may undervalue and, in their work, undercut privacy. It is not necessary to believe that a dastardly enemy sits on Constitution Avenue mocking the document that street is named after.
The theory of the evil DoJ official says more about the theoretician than the DoJ. Experience in Washington has shown me that incompetence is almost always the better explanation than malice. (That’s not very nice, talking about “incompetence,” but there are some DoJ officials who lack competence in the privacy area.) Some people apparently need a dramatic story line to motivate themselves.
I’m sure it feels good to cast oneself as a white hat facing down a team of secretive, nefarious, government-sponsored black hats. But this mind-set gives away strategic leverage in the fight for privacy. The story is no longer how to protect privacy; it’s who is bad and who is good. Everyone (everyone thoughtful about messaging and persuasion, anyway) recognizes that Wikileaks veered off course by letting Wikileaks itself and Julian Assange become the story. We’re not having the discussion we should have about U.S. government behavior because of Assange’s self-regard.
I agree with my privacy brethren on the substance of the issues, but those who have similar self-regard, who insist on good-vs.-evil framing in order to cast themselves as heroic—they are closing the ears of DoJ officials they might reach and giving away opportunities to actually improve protections for privacy in the country.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
