When I talk about information, I sometimes describe it as being volatile, like gasoline or acetone. It has similar properties to these substances, which evaporate and dissipate rapidly. They are very difficult to contain once exposed to the air.
Jeff Jonas has a post ruminating on how personal information multiplies in enterprises. It’s a good illustration of how “volatile” it is. It helps to illustrate how difficult a task it would be to ask organizations to provide access to customers’ personal information, for example. It helps show that the best protection for privacy is keeping information bottled up. Once you open the gas can, don’t expect to be able to collect the atoms of gasoline you’ve released.
The prescription? If you want to keep all your gasoline, put it in a sealed container. Likewise, if you want to keep your privacy, don’t tell people stuff.
Sorry if these observations require too much personal responsibility, effort, and discretion, but I think that’s the way it is with things that have these properties.
Stanley Fish (I won’t bother with the link to the Times, y’all can find it) has recently raised the issue of whether a commitment to tolerance of religion “really” means is that one must be prepared to tolerate even a religious regime doctrinally committed to killing off nonbelievers.
From a classical liberal (morphed into modern libertarian) standpoint, this seems pretty silly. The concept of religious toleration got inspired by people getting tired of killing one another off in the name of religion. Whatever it is in theory, it has this practical goal of preserving civil society as a “reality check.” It *doesn’t* mean that one must tolerate a religious regime doctrinally committed to killing off nonbelievers.
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Do land line telephones have a future? Yes. . .but not a long one. Cell phones, VOIP, and Device Based Telephony are quickly making copper phone lines an anachronism. Eli Lehrer, a colleague of mine at CEI, discusses how deregulation may help to keep copper online a little longer and urges government to get out of the way of emerging telephony technologies in a new paper entitled “Keeping the Voices Alive.”
I don’t think the government should act in anyway to prop-up the endangered and soon-to-be extinct copper cable phone system, but there is no reason for government to act to hasten its death and squander resources in the process–the exact point Eli makes. Eli also points out the ill effects of E-911 and universal service participation on new voice technologies.
It’s a quick read that makes a very salient point about the transition from copper to fiber and how the static regulatory system has a chance to reform and improve in the face of the dynamic telecommunications market.
I suppose it should warm my heart when interest groups deploy libertarian rhetoric. At the very least it’s a sign that libertarian themes resonate with policymakers, which is a hopeful sign. But despite their best efforts to sell the issue in libertarian terms, I didn’t find this very persuasive:
Recent initiatives have been floated that would expropriate from nonprofit and commercial journals results of their work in conducting peer review of authors submissions — if the authors’ research was funded by the government. The government would then post these articles for free use on the Internet and in direct competition with the journals from which the articles are taken. The expropriation of the journals’ contribution is being proposed in spite of the fact it is the publisher and not the government who conducts the peer review.
This issue seems very simple to me: if I’m going to be forced as a taxpayer to fund a given scientist’s research, I shouldn’t have to pay a second time to see the results of that research. The effect of such a policy on the publishing industry is really beside the point. Nobody is forcing scientific journals to accept papers based on government-funded research. If they accept only privately-funded research, then they can set any policies they like regarding public access. But if a journal is going to publish research funded with my tax dollars, I shouldn’t have to pay a second time to read the results.
Things get even more specious here (PDF), where John Conyers charges that mandating public disclosure of research results “would send a mixed message to our trading partners about the importance of intellectual property rights.” The “intellectual property rights” in question belong to the researchers, at least until they sign contracts assigning rights to the publishers. Researchers are entitled to assign or not assign those “intellectual property rights” to whomever they want, and it strikes me as perfectly reasonable and appropriate for the government to make it a condition of receiving federal funding that the researchers not sign any contracts giving exclusive rights to another private party.
I’m a little behind the curve, but Chris Anderson has an interesting post in which he expresses ambivalence about a 17-year-old Iranian who’s seeking help with building a small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle—one of Anderson’s favorite hobbies.
Part of me says “Bravo Amir! Excellent work on the airframe, and thanks for posting.” And part of me says “Yikes. We’re helping Iranians make UAVs draped in nationalistic colors. This isn’t going to help us in our efforts to destigmitize drones.”
Obviously Iranian != terrorist/bad guy/anti-Israeli zealot. And needless to say, most of the terrorist/bad guy/anti-Israeli zealots out there who are building UAVs aren’t posting on RC Groups. But what should I do if Amir or someone like him from a country associated with Bad Stuff posts on our own forums looking for technical advice? My instinct is to treat everyone alike and help anybody who asks, regardless of where they’re from (odds are Amir is just a geek like the rest of us, no matter where he lives). But how does this look to someone in Washington? We’re just a pen stroke away from being regulated out of existence, and in this climate it’s politically unwise to discount the Homeland Security card (my own feelings about that notwithstanding).
I think this is pretty much spot on. One thing that’s worth emphasizing is how perverse it is to treat the kid’s use of the Iranian flag as evidence that he’s associated with “Bad Stuff.” A quick comparison with the American flag should make it clear how silly this is. American flags are flown by Americans of all political stripes. Flying an American flag is not a symbol that you support the Bush administration, the Republican Party, or the war in Iraq. It simply means “I’m proud to be an American.”
The same is doubtless true of the Iranian flag. This kid is doubtless not trying to say “I support the Iranian nuclear program” or “I support Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs.” Rather, it simply means “I’m proud to be an Iranian.”
Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, that’s not the gut reaction most people have. Our flag is an innocuous symbol of unity and patriotism. But when you’re talking about an Islamic country with an unsavory government (but no history of terrorism against the US; there has never been an Al Qaeda terrorist from Iran) the other guy’s flag takes on a sinister tinge.
I’ve not seen much mention of the fact that libertarian journalist extraordinaire Declan McCullough has joined the blogosphere. His most interesting post to date was this one, in which he revealed that the White House has been using its robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing or archiving potentially embarrassing information:
Whitehouse.gov was programmed to block search engines from indexing a photo gallery of President Bush in a flight suit standing in front of that famous Iraq “Mission Accomplished” banner in May 2003.
What’s odd is that the gallery, which has since been moved, was the only one on the entire Whitehouse.gov site listed as off-limits. To be fair, though, the current location is not off-limits.
By way of background, there was a flap in late 2003 about the White House using robots.txt to tell search engine bots to stay away from “/iraq” pages because the same file was posted in the main section and duplicated in the “/iraq” section. It’s the same logic as blocking text-only pages; here’s an example of the same text appearing in three different templates: normal, text-only, and printer-friendly. The White House seems to have subsequently discontinued the Iraq template.
That explains the “/nsc/iraq” directory being marked as off-limits to search engines. But out of 767 mentions of “/iraq” in the robots.txt file from 2003, the sole Iraq press release or gallery listed as blocked this week (a) represents a uniquely embarrassing moment for the Bush administration and (b) has been the subject of revisionism.
Don’t believe me? Bush’s carrier speech originally was titled, according to the Internet Archive, “President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended” and featured photographs of smiling Iraqi children. At some point the children vanished and the speech was quietly renamed: “President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended.” Another USS Abraham Lincoln-related switch: before and after.
It looks like it’ll be a great blog!
I can’t say I’m too disappointed that a House vote on the Holt bill has been pushed back once again. Apparently the proximate cause was two Democrats on the rules committee—which normally votes along party lines—bucking the leadership and threatening to vote against bringing the legislation to the floor unless further changes were made. It’s becoming increasingly clear that new rules won’t be ready in time for 2008, which means our focus should be on getting the rules right in 2010 and 2012. And although the Holt bill is a step in the right direction, it certainly leaves substantial room for improvement. Hence, I found the comments of the dissident committee members reassuring:
Slaughter quickly indicated she didn’t like the bill, and raised questions about the quality of the new paper ballot machines.
“I am very much concerned that we are passing this law that you have to have it by a certain date,” Slaughter said during the hearing, “when experts tell us there is not a machine that will do this right.”
In an interview, Slaughter said New York election authorities would have trouble getting equipment to replace their lever-pull machines in time for the deadline mandated in the bill.
She wasn’t the only one to express concerns. Rep. Alcee Hastings, a Democrat from Florida, said the bill didn’t go far enough.
“I need to be persuaded. Otherwise I would do something that I have not done since I have been here, and that is vote against a proposed rule,” Hastings said, according to a transcript. “If we ain’t gonna fix it all, then we oughtn’t fix something that ain’t a fix and is not an assurance that we have done the best we can. This isn’t good enough for me.”
These are precisely the questions House members ought to be asking: are these deadlines feasible, and will this legislation fix the problem or will it require the next Congress to come back and deal with the problem yet again? The obvious compromise is to completely drop the new requirements for 2008 in exchange for more robust requirements (e.g. source code disclosure and no thermal printers) in 2010 and beyond. I don’t know if that’s where Slaughter and Hastings are headed, but at least they’re asking some good questions.
I’m excited to report that Techdirt has asked me to be an occasional contributor to their blog as part of the Techdirt Insight Community. In my first contribution, I express skepticism about Japan’s plan to create a Google-killer using government subsidies. I assume that most TLF readers are already reading Techdirt, but in case you’re not, now’s the time to add it to your feed reader!
Do Google execs get special treatment on YouTube? Maybe. Last month, Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, spoke at the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s annual conference in Aspen. Among the topics covered were the value of an open Internet and the need for net neutrality rules. Soon thereafter, the Google public policy team posted their bosses’ speech on the (Google-owned) YouTube site. No problem with that, except that the clip runs some 55 minutes. Since early 2006, YouTube – to the consternation of many users — has limited videos to 10 minutes.
It’s not clear how the clip – one among several over-limit pieces by Schmidt on YouTube -made it past YouTube’s time limit cops. The policy itself seems clear. A notice on the YouTube “Help Center” site states clearly:
“You can no longer upload videos longer than ten minutes regardless of what type of account you have. Users who had previously been allowed to upload longer content still retain this ability, so you may occasionally see videos that are longer than ten minutes.”
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There was an interesting hearing on “Warrantless Surveillance and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: The Role of Checks and Balances in Protecting Americans’ Privacy Rights” in the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. Former Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA) claimed that,
Essentially, thanks to this law, the government has potentially carved out from Fourth-Amendment protection an entire class of communication – electronic communications going to a person outside the United States, or coming to a person inside the United States. There is — and here again contrary to the public missives by the Administration and its supporters — no requirement whatsoever, implied or express, that even one of the parties to such category of communications subject to warrantless surveillance would first have to have any known or even suspect connection with any terrorist or other targeted group or activity.
Barr also repeated the warning of Judge Royce Lamberth, that “you can fight the war [on terrorism] and lose everything if you have no civil liberties left when you get through fighting the war…”
But no one — George Bush included — is advocating that …
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