So went the headline on Drudge. The article itself says:
Officials initially expressed concern after discovering that Besai’s house is located along a flight path for Newark Liberty International Airport. They later learned that used, inoperable AT-4 tubes are sold to the public through military surplus Web sites and other outlets.
It might as well have been used army boots – but the media had you thinking terrorism and downed planes, didn’t they! Gotcha!
Reporting like this is part of the reason why mass surveillance and national ID cards have currency in today’s political debate.
I’ll wait to see the final proposal, but my initial reaction is that this is not a compromise worth having:
House Democratic officials say they are now working on compromise legislation that could allow hundreds of counties in 20 states to simply add tiny, cash-register-style printers to their touch-screen machines for the 2008 and 2010 elections, while waiting for manufacturers to develop better technology by 2012.
House officials said the compromise would ensure that all voting machines nationwide would have some kind of paper trail in 2008 through which voters could verify that their ballots were properly recorded and that could be used in recounts. Under the plan, New York, which has delayed replacing its old lever machines, would be the only state that would have to change its entire voting system by November 2008.
Adding cheap, easily-jammed printers to voting machines and then making fragile cash-register-style rolls of paper the official voting record is a just a horrible idea. Printers will jam. Those giant paper rolls will be a pain to deal with. Frustrated poll workers will have no choice but to continue the election on machines with broken printers. With a significant number of votes either never printed or stored on damaged paper tape rolls, it will be impossible to conduct a meaningful recount. Which, if the election is close, will mean endless litigation as the courts try to reconcile a legal mandate that the paper record be the official record with the bare fact that many of the votes were never recorded on paper. And then, of course, the failure of those crappy printers will be used as an argument against paper trails altogether.
Also, if the paper tapes aren’t expected to be a permanent solution, how much sense to does it make to force states to purchase them for one election? They might be cheap, but they’re not free. And it’ll be a non-trivial amount of work to install them and train poll workers to use them properly.
My sense is that states can still have a high-quality paper-based voting systems in place by 2008. If nothing else, Congress can allow states that really can’t meet the deadline to petition for a federal waiver. But if it’s really true that we can’t get high-quality, paper-based systems in place by November 2008, I would much rather have Congress leave the rules for 2008 unchanged and put good rules in place for the 2010 election than force states to install some kind of horrible frankenstein voting system for one or two elections.
Tom Lee says I’m missing the point about the iPhone:
But the point Ars is making is that the iPhone actually isn’t being subsidized by the contract fees. Consumers are buying the hardware at full retail price and being locked into a contract. This puts the lie to the carriers’ argument that early termination fees are in place to avoid losses over hardware subsidies — they charge the fees whether there’s a subsidy or not (and only one carrier will prorate this fee).
To paraphrase Yglesias, terms like “full retail price” and “subsidized” are a kind of accounting fiction. What matters is how many dollars come out of your pocket and how many end up in the pockets of AT&T and Apple. The label on the credit card bill, and exactly when the charge is made, just isn’t that important. Consider the following four scenarios:
Scenario 1:
- Apple charges $500 for an iPhone
- AT&T service costs $60/month
- Apple gets $5/month from AT&T for every iPhone customer.
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Yesterday, AT&T backed away from its strong opposition to any sort of open access regulations in the 700 MHz spectrum auction, backing a proposal by FCC chairman Kevin Martin to apply open access rules to one block of spectrum while leaving the other blocks unregulated.
In this week’s podcast, Hance, James, Adam, Jerry, and I discuss the politics and economics of the 700 MHz auction. We discuss what the rules will look like, whether there’s enough competition in the wireless market, whether Google will bid for the spectrum, and how recent developments affect Frontline’s proposal.
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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With the National Governors Association meeting in Traverse City, Michigan, this weekend, the Detroit Free Press has seen fit to lay out some sensible thinking on the REAL ID Act:
[The governors] ought to do themselves and their states a service by serving a definitive notice on Washington that the Real ID Act is not just unworkable but unacceptable and ought to be repealed before it takes effect next year. . . .
Several states already have flatly said no to implementing Real ID. The NGA should, too.
Good stuff. The FreeP gets it.
Comm. Daily had a good article on July 16, “Republican Fairness Doctrine Measure Sidetracked,” concerning a measure that would have blocked the FCC from reinstating the Fairness Doctrine:
Durbin rejected an amendment to the defense authorization bill (HR-1585), offered by Republican Sen. Norm Coleman of Minn., that would block the FCC from reinstating the doctrine that was banned in 1987. Durbin favors reinstatement, which has provoked an uproar among Republicans fearful the doctrine would be used to shut down conservative talk radio, Coleman said. The fairness doctrine required broadcasters to present balanced viewpoints on controversial issues (CD July 2 p1).
Conservative talk radio has flourished because the market “says ‘I want to listen,'” Coleman said, and consumers have a choice — they can turn off the dial. But government should not be regulating content, he argued: Bringing back the Fairness Doctrine would be a “very, very bad idea.” Durbin said Americans should hear both sides of a story since the airwaves are public property: “What if the marketplace does not provide opportunities to hear both points of view?” Durbin mused whether a government role would then be appropriate.
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This has to be one of the sillier critiques of the wireless industry I’ve seen:
Murray suggests that termination fees make competition between wireless carriers virtually nonexistent, as people are often unwilling to switch from one carrier to another until their contracts are fully expired. Worse still, the long lock-ins don’t always provide any proper consideration for consumers entering those contracts.
“We want lower consumer prices,” Murray said when referring to the $600 price of the iPhone. “Consumers don’t get a single dime of subsidy on the new iPhone, but it’ll still get them locked into a two-year deal or penalty to leave the carrier.”
It’s nonsensical to say there’s no competition because consumers only choose a wireless carrier once a year (or even once every two years). Most people don’t buy computers, cars, or major appliances more often than that, yet no one claims that makes those industries uncompetitive. If consumers get crappy service during their contracts, they remember this fact and switch to a different carrier at the end of the contract period. And consumers comparison shop before they sign a contract, so phone companies have as much incentive to keep their prices low in a contract-based system as they would in a system without contracts.
Moreover, the major carriers all give consumers the option to take a risk-free 14-day trial period on their phone. So I don’t see how you can possibly say consumers don’t know what they’re getting into. If they want to, consumers can get cell phones from all four national carriers, play with all of them for a week, and return the three they like least. Consumers aren’t being railroaded into anything.
The iPhone point also strikes me as especially silly. The iPhone is expensive because it’s a cutting-edge gadget that’s been on the market less than a month. The fact that some of the cost comes in the form of a 2-year contract, as opposed to an up-front sticker price, is beside the point. If you think the iPhone, 2-year contract and all, is too expensive, buy a different phone. There are plenty to choose from.
The state-federal showdown on the REAL ID Act is going through its long slow build. REAL ID would have states issue nationally standard IDs (read “national IDs”) by May 2008. Numerous states have passed bills and resolutions rejecting REAL ID, what with its $17 billion (net present value) costs, administrative hassles, and privacy/security threats for state residents.
The hook the federal law uses is that drivers’ licenses and IDs from non-compliant states won’t be accepted for federal purposes after the May 2008 deadline. From a ComputerWorld story:
“I think residents of states that choose not to comply are going to be displeased with their leadership’s decision when we get closer to full implementation,” a DHS spokesman said. “They’ll no longer be able do certain things that carriers of state-issued drivers licenses take for granted today.”
But the main thing the federal government uses state-issued IDs for is airport checkpoints (even though they’re not technically required). When the REAL-ID day of reckoning comes, federal officials will be standing in the way of American travelers. Accordingly, federal officials will take the heat. Accordingly, the federal government will back down.
In fact, the feds will back down before it even comes to that. The outcome in this game of chicken is easy to predict.
The imagery that you see here on the TechLiberationFront site is a clever little rhetorical flourish, I think. We’re mostly free-market types, but our Maoist-Soviet-Che Guevara-ish imagery skewers the idea that the political left has a lock on revolutionary ideas, dissent, civil liberties, and – oh, I don’t know – gusto.
So I’m delighted to find a Web site in a similar vein from none other than the National Republican Senatorial Committee. They have a site up called StopLiberalCensorship.com, which carries a revolutionary (if partisan) message:
Free speech is under attack.
As Democrats in Congress eagerly line up to legislate what you hear on the radio it begs the question: what’s next? Newspapers? There’s no end in sight to their power grab.
It’s about the Fairness Doctrine, the idea of requiring media to apportion their messages and content based on political judgments and direction. James Gattuso and other TLFers have rightly criticized it in spades. Adam specifically called out Democrats’ abandonment of free speech here.
The site seeks people to sign a petition saying that “Republicans should do everything in their power to defeat the Democrats’ attempts to trample our First Amendment rights.”
It’s a welcome turn of the tables to see Republicans on the barricades – in berets, perhaps? – defending freedom. Viva la revolucion!
S. 1748, the Broadcaster Freedom Act of 2007 is the Senate bill to abolish the Fairness Doctrine.
Update: Here’s the vote on an amendment to prevent the Federal Communications Commission from repromulgating the fairness doctrine. Forty-seven Democrats (and the independent who caucuses with the Democrats) voted against it.
The MPAA comments in the FCC’s Net Neutrality proceeding cautions against taking steps that would interfere with the deployment of watermarking, filtering, deep packet inspection, and so on. What’s the connection exactly? Part of it is unknown–since the technologies are new, and are just being deployed. Part of it is known… much of the dispute about technologies being deployed to protect content (not just in the sense of protecting copyrighted content, but in the sense of security generally) is about who will pay for it. The content creator? The network infrastructure engineers? The developers of software used in distribution? The retailer? The CPE manufacturer? Insofar as net neutrality principles end up constraining who may charge whom for what, they may preclude otherwise desirable arrangements of who bears the costs. And insofar as net neutrality constrains one player on the net from blocking or interfering with another, it may hamper efforts to control piracy like spam, by impeding traffic carried by or through disreputable ports of call.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.