Last week, Joe Klein penned a column purporting to show that the Democrats still didn’t “get” national security issues. It included this charming paragraph:
There is broad, bipartisan agreement on how to legalize the surveillance of phone calls and emails of foreign intelligence targets. The basic principle is this: if a suspicious pattern of calls from a terrorist suspect to a U.S. citizen is found, a FISA court warrant is necessary to monitor those communications. But to safeguard against civil-liberty abuses, all records of clearly nontargeted Americans who receive emails or phone calls from foreign suspects would be, in effect, erased. Unfortunately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi quashed the House Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan effort and supported a Democratic bill that — Limbaugh is salivating — would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only. In the lethal shorthand of political advertising, it would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans. That is well beyond stupid.
Now, as Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Singel ably explain, virtually every word of this is false. In fact, it’s so confused that it’s hard to figure out what he’s even talking about. I have no idea what the “House Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan effort” is supposed to refer to (Greenwald and Singel are equally confused), but it certainly doesn’t require warrants for overseas surveillance, which has always been outside the purview of domestic laws. And the RESTORE Act specifically exempts domestic wiretapping of foreign-to-foreign calls from the reach of the FISA courts.
New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera penned a lengthy column on the potential dangers of a la carte regulation over the weekend. He summarized why–as we have pointed outhere before–despite the best of intentions, a la carte regulation is certain to backfire:
À la carte. It sounds so appealing, doesn’t it? Instead of having to accept — and pay for — all the channels bundled by your cable company, you could pick from a menu and pay for only the ones you watch. … Yet as appealing as the idea might seem at first glance, there is a reason that Congress has not taken the bait and passed an à la carte law. À la carte would be a consumer disaster. For those of you who yearn for it, this is a classic case of “be careful what you wish for.”
Nocera goes on to show that, contrary to what a la carte regulatory advocates believe, prices for most customers would rise in the long-run:
This Arsticle goes through the details. Which I don’t understand. And that makes me all the more certain that Al Qaeda will get their hands on dark-energy observation tools and use them to establish a Muslim caliphate!
The term of copyright has steadily expanded under U.S. law. The first federal copyright legislation, the 1790 Copyright Act, set the maximum term at fourteen years plus a renewal term (subject to certain conditions) of fourteen years. The 1831 Copyright Act doubled the initial term and retained the conditional renewal term, allowing a total of up to forty-two years of protection. Lawmakers doubled the renewal term in 1909, letting copyrights run for up to fifty-six years. The 1976 Copyright Act changed the measure of the default copyright term to life of the author plus fifty years. Recent amendments to the Copyright Act expanded the term yet again, letting it run for the life of the author plus seventy years.
The table above illustrates the growth of the general U.S. copyright term over time, including the retroactive effects of various statutory extensions. Note the overhanging ledges. The 1962-74 Acts, the 1976 Act, and the Sonny Bono Act reached backwards in time, extending the copyright term even for works that had already been created. The Supreme Court has held that legislative trick constitutional, notwithstanding copyright policy’s implied aim of stimulating new authorship—not simply rewarding extant authors.
[NB: The above text comes from part of my draft book, Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good. Specifically, it comes from Part I, Chapter 3.A.1: Copyright Imbalance: Duration of Copyright. You can find a complete draft of the full chapter, together with footnotes, here [PDF]. I welcome your comments.]
Hmmm. What to do. I’ve already got a law. Harper’s law states: “The security and privacy risks increase proportionally to the square of the number of users of the data.”
So maybe I also have to have a theorem. Harper’s Theorem states: “People call privacy a ‘right’ just before they drop it in the blender.”
So my blender detector went on high alert today when I saw Hugo Teufel characterize privacy as a “fundamental right” twice in a recent post on the Department of Homeland Security’s Leadership Journal blog. He’s Chief Privacy Officer at DHS.
Isn’t it incredible that “a junior official” could simply “download” detailed personal and financial information on 25 million people? Why would a system be designed this way?
To me this is the equivalent of assembling a vast pile of dynamite in the middle of a city on the assumption that excellent procedures would therefore be put in place, so no one would ever set it off.
There is no need to store all of society’s dynamite in one place, and no need to run the risk of the collosal explosion that an error in procedure might produce.
Similarly, the information that is the subject of HMRC’s identity catastrophe should have been partitioned – broken up both in terms of the number of records and the information components.
Were our REAL ID Act implemented, we would have similar piles of identity dynamite placed around the country waiting to explode. The proposed regulations implementing REAL ID punted on the security and privacy issues, perhaps “on the assumption that excellent procedures would therefore be put in place” by states.
Final REAL ID regulations are expected Real Soon Now.
TheFunded.com is an interesting site where people who have pitched VCs get to report on their experience. There was a big story on it in Wired this month.
Interested as I am in the entrepreneurship that iswas is the Internet, I’ve been looking over the posts and came across an interesting one, about Accel Partners:
We pitched Kevin Efrusy on taking a round and he provided excellent advice …
He liked what we were doing but suggested to NOT take funding since we were profitable.
He was concerned that our exit wouldn’t be high enough to justify their investment but thinks that we’d probably get acquired in the next year.
Being a serial entrepreneur I’ll certainly pitch Accel again and recommend them to others.
Spot the albatross? I’ll point it out after the break.
I’ve testified and written several times about how such things as REAL ID and “electronic employment eligibility verification” are threats to our identity system. Collecting identity information in one place is the creation of new security risks. Now the UK has proven it – so we don’t have to!
The sensitive personal details of 25 million Britons could have fallen into the hands of identity fraudsters after a government agency lost the entire child benefit database in the post.
A major police investigation is being conducted after Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, admitted yesterday that names, addresses, birth dates, national insurance numbers and bank account details of every child benefit claimant in the country had gone missing.
Most likely, this data is just lost, but in the wrong hands it would provide criminals all they need to impersonate any of these 25 million people.
The persons responsible have been sacked. Specifically, Paul Gray, chairman of HM Revenue & Customs office.
Patient Privacy Rights is campaigning to restrict the use of prescription information. I was impressed by their video.
The thing I like about the campaign is that it’s mostly directed at pharmacy chains. I’d like pharmacies’ practices with prescription information to be one of the dimensions on which they compete. We need more information and we should use it when we decide which pharmacy to go to.
A wee quibble: The video talks about what the law should be, and the campaign cc:s members of Congress. I’m not impressed with legislative attempts to protect privacy. The legislative process is a playground dominated by organized interests – governments, corporations, and their lobbyists – not by consumers. In fact, the PPR site links to a Hastings Center report that documents nicely how the HIPPA “privacy rule” is not a privacy protection at all. My own effort on that score, from a few years back, is here.
That gloss aside, though, restriction of prescription information is the right outcome, and addressing the issue to pharmacy chains in the right way to pursue it.
The casual observer can be excused for being a bit confused by the on-going cable imbroglio at the FCC. Throw away your old-fashioned ideological assumptions about who should line up where — the players on this one have been as jumbled as a flight schedule on a holiday weekend. A Republican chairman of the FCC, with support from leftish activist groups and AT&T, is pushing for massive regulation. He is being challenged by fellow Republicans on the commission, as well as Republicans in Congress. Now comes one more voice against new cable regulation: Jesse Jackson’s.
That’s right. Jesse Jackson, the founder of the Rainbow Coalition, thinks FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is going too far:
“There is virtually no political support from either progressives or conservatives for such pet policies as a la carte pricing, which would raise prices for consumers and hurt most programmers, or for the various ‘leased-access’ programs that will squeeze out channel space for minority-owned programmers,” Jackson said in comments earlier this week.
“Rather than work through the democratic process in Congress, a bureaucratic agency should not be using a 20-year-old-legal clause to implement wholesale policy changes that hurt consumers and hurt minority television programmers.”
And he’s right. Despite the rhetoric, regulation isn’t the friend of diversity — it more often suppresses it than fosters it.
Welcome to the deregulatory coalition, Rev. Jackson. You can sit over there, where Mr. Martin used to sit.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.