In episode #44 of “Tech Policy Weekly,” Berin Szoka and Adam Thierer engage in a debate with Internet security expert Chris Soghoian, who is a student fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He is also a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University’s School of Informatics.

Chris is an up-and-coming star in the field of cyberlaw and technology policy as he has quickly made a name for himself in debates over privacy policy, data security, and government surveillance.  He straddles the line between academic and activist, and the role he often plays in many tech policy debates is somewhat akin to what Ralph Nader has done in many other fields through the years. Except, in this case, instead of “Unsafe at Any Speed” it’s more like “Unsafe at Any Setting,” since Chris is often raising a stink about what he regards as unjust or unreasonable privacy or security settings that various online websites or service providers use.

On the show, Chris talks about two of his recent crusades to get certain online providers to change their default settings to improve user security or privacy: (1) His effort this week to get major email providers—and Google in particular—to change their default security settings on their email offerings; and (2) his earlier crusade to create permanent opt-out cookies to stop behavioral advertising by advertising networks.

There are several ways to listen to today’s TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. (And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!)

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Finally, here’s some relevant links that were mentioned during today’s show:

• Chris Soghoian’s webpage + his Harvard Berkman Center page
• Chris’s blog (“Slight Paranoia”)
• Chris’s “TACO” (Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out) plug-in for Firefox (and description of it on his home page)
• Chris’s “Caught in the Cloud” paper (+ a video of him presenting it at Harvard)
• The letter from 38 cybersecurity researchers that Chris sent to Google
• Berin Szoka’s response to Chris’s “Caught in the Cloud” paper
• Berin’s discussion of the issue of preserving user choice through permanent opt-out cookies

Conversations about how the Internet can be used to increase the openness and accountability of government usually focuses on the Executive and Legislative branches of the Federal government.  But on this week’s episode of Technology Policy Weekly, I hosted a discussion of the equally vital issue of public access to court records, joined by:

• The TLF’s own Tim Lee,  who’s written about the problems with PACER , the arcane and expensive system by which court documents are currently made publicly available—with a separate system for each of the 100+ Federal courts!
• James Grimmelmann of New York Law School, who wrote Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer.
• Steve Schultze, of Harvard’s Berkman Center, who’s  been writing about these issues on his own blog, especially about Sen. Lieberman’s recent laudable efforts.  Also check out a talk he gave recently on “Selling the Law: The Business of Public Access to Court Records.”

We discussed a wide range of issues, including:

• Why lay people should care—this is ultimately about reducing the legal profession’s monopoly over access to the courts!
• The philosophical reasons why better access to court records is important – little things like democracy, fairness, consistency, equality, the rule of law, etc.
• The copyrightability of legal records
• The history of the problem & what can be done about it

There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!

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I’ve been catching up on Radio Berkman, the podcast produced by our friends at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and a great companion to the TLF’s own Tech Policy Weekly Podcast.  There’s been a lot of talk about government transparency on the TLF lately, including TPW 40: Obama, e-Government & Transparency.  But that conversation has been mainly focused on how to make “public” records accessible.

The most recent Radio Berkman episode, “Can you Keep a Secret?” explores the thorny questions about what should be deemed public in the first place, and what should be classified:

The government keeps secrets. We take that for granted. But should we? Some speculate that intelligence agencies and elected officials are a little bit trigger happy with the “Top Secret” stamp, and that society would benefit from greater openness. With the government classifying millions of pages of documents per year – in a recent year the U.S. classified about five times the number of pages added to the Library of Congress – a great deal of useful human knowledge gets put under lock and key. But some argue that secrecy is still crucial to our national security. Radio Berkman pokes its head into a recent talkback with the directors of the film  Secrecy, Harvard University professors Peter Galison and Robb Moss. They are joined by Harvard Law School professors Jonathan Zittrain, Martha Minow, and Jack Goldsmith.

I look forward to seeing the film (when it comes out on Netflix).  

What I found most interesting was the discussion of the essential trade-off in the relationship between the media and the state has always been between the media’s “independence” and its “responsibility” (~33:30 in).  Even the staunchest critics of the national security state would probably accept that there are some stories in the media shouldn’t publish because they’d jeopardize the safety of Americans.  But we all want the media to blow the whistle on the bad stuff that goes on behind a veil of secrecy.  Drawing that line is a terribly difficult task.  But it becomes even more complicated with the decline of traditional professional investigative journalism and the rise of blog/amateur journalism.  

I’m generally not very sympathetic to the chicken-littleism of those who bemoan the fact that journalism is being forced to evolve and innovate by technological change, but on this point, it does indeed seem more likely that the increasingly diffuse media will act less “responsibly” by running stories that really shouldn’t be run.  As one of the panelists points out, the problem is not so much that journalists (of whatever kind) don’t want to be responsible; it’s that they can’t possibly know enough about the context of their story to appreciate why publishing the story might be damaging in surprising ways (such as exposing the capability of U.S. spy satellites by publishing a photo of a Soviet tank).  In the “good” old days of media scarcity, the small number journalists whose beat touched on national security had the luxury of being able to think through their stories and having personal relationships with someone inside the government who could be relied on to tell them whether the story really shouldn’t be run or, even more importantly, which particular aspect of a story truly deserved secrecy.  

The panelists also touched on a separate danger:  the “independence” of media will suffer from economic dependence on the government.  Would a newspaper sucking at the teet of government bail-outs really have run photos of American soldiers torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, for example?  Herein lies a secondary danger of the rise of Internet journalism—that traditional media will become less effective watchdogs as their bottom line suffers and government starts to supplement income once provided by advertising revenue.  Were classified ads the very thing that kept newspapers independent?  What will happen if newspapers cannot shed their physical distribution costs, or find new sources of revenue in the form of smarter advertising, subscriptions, micro-payments or donations?  Adam Thierer has discussed these tough questions and others.

Other interesting points:

• Protective orders no longer offer an effective safety valve by which certain parties can gain access to classified materials because the ease of Internet publishing means that such orders too often lead to disclosure.
• 80% of leaks of classified documents are made by persons inside the Executive branch for political purposes (usually in order to advance a pet policy).  If that’s true, then maybe the “problem” (to the extent that leaks really are a problem, as some leaks certainly are) is more on the “supply” side (at the leaks’ source) and less on the “demand” side (investigative journalism).  If so, perhaps the ethics of journalistic responsibility matter less than we might think. 

On this episode “Tech Policy Weekly,” Technology Liberation Front contributors Ryan Radia and Berin Szoka join me for a discussion of the flare-up over Facebook’s recent changes to the data retention provisions of its Terms of Use agreement and whether there are any serious privacy issues in play here—or if this is all much ado about nothing. [Ryan blogged about it here, and I did here.]

Earlier this month, Facebook announced changes to the way it handled or retained user data on its site after a user quits Facebook, raising questions about who actually owns that data and whether any privacy issues were raised by the company’s new policy. Following some intense scrutiny in the blogosphere, Facebook decided this week to revert to their old terms of service until they figured out a new approach to data management and ownership.

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