National Journal’s Drew Clark is looking at the recent spate of Google issues through a different lens. Many folks have suggested that Google is being inconsistent by defending liberty in the U.S. (resisting the Justice Department’s subpoena) while caving to China (installing filters as required by the government there). That’s an oversimplification in many respects and the case that Google is being inconsistent is harder to make than that.
If you want consistency, Clark’s piece shows where it is: The governments of both China and the United States are seeking to censor.
Clark goes into the fundamental problem that makes the subpoena of Google by the Justice Department so concerning: Supreme Court case law holds that people don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy (for Fourth Amendment purposes) in information about them held by third parties. This notion is flat-out wrong. It is falling further and further out of step with reality with the advance of online life.
Law enforcement has put a lot of investment into this backward state of affairs, though. A constitutional sea-change will have to take place before people can be confident of going online without exposing themselves to the government’s prying eyes.
My ex-roomie Julian offers another example of how digital rights management technology is needlessly inconveniencing paying customers:
A politics professor at a small liberal arts college is bringing a class to D.C. in March and has asked me to talk to his students, who have been doing a seminar on protest music in American politics, about some of the ideas in this column. Naturally, I’d like to be able to illustrate what I’m talking about with some examples, short clips from songs by Metric, Rilo Kiley, Green Day, Radiohead, Mike Doughty, The Decemberists, and others. I own all the songs in question–bought them on iTunes rather than just downloading them from Limewire or Kazaa. But Apple’s DRM doesn’t want to let me extract these short clips–indubitably a fair use, and something I could obviously do legally just by cueing up the songs manually at the appropriate timecode.
I’d be curious to know what DMCA supporters think he should do in this kind of case. Should he write a letter to each of the labels that publish these songs and ask for permission to use the exceprts? Should iTunes have a feature where you’re allowed to purchase small song clips for a nickel a piece? Or is it just possible that the most sensible way to deal with this sort of thing is to legalize DRM circumvention in circumstances where the use would otherwise be legal.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a class action lawsuit against AT&T for allowing the NSA to violate its customers’ privacy. I’m not sure what the chances of the lawsuit succeeding are, but Ars has a good explanation for why such data mining schemes are a poor way to battle terrorism. Matthew Yglesias has another.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.