Here’s an interesting glimpse into the attitudes of career law enforcement bureaucrats towards civil liberties:
Since the Patriot Act, the FBI has dispersed the authority to sign national security letters to more than five dozen supervisors — the special agents in charge of field offices, the deputies in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, and a few senior headquarters officials. FBI rules established after the Patriot Act allow the letters to be issued long before a case is judged substantial enough for a “full field investigation.” Agents commonly use the letters now in “preliminary investigations” and in the “threat assessments” that precede a decision whether to launch an investigation.
“Congress has given us this tool to obtain basic telephone data, basic banking data, basic credit reports,” said Caproni, who is among the officials with signature authority. “The fact that a national security letter is a routine tool used, that doesn’t bother me.”
If agents had to wait for grounds to suspect a person of ill intent, said Joseph Billy Jr., the FBI’s deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, they would already know what they want to find out with a national security letter. “It’s all chicken and egg,” he said. “We’re trying to determine if someone warrants scrutiny or doesn’t.”
I have no doubt he’s right that being able to demand peoples’ personal information virtually on a whim makes investigations go a lot more easily. But as the saying goes, only in a police state is a policeman’s work easy.
Matt does a sensible post on the merit of more liberal immigration policies for high-skilled workers, and receives a barrage of criticism from his readers. Some of them are just economic illiterates who believe that importing too many brown people will destroy America’s middle class. But the really galling comments are those from self-serving engineers like “Dave” who can’t stomach the thought of having to compete on a level playing field with people swarthier than themselves:
Because if you can’t trust business to only use H-1B visas only when there are no other qualified workers and not as a weapon to drive down salaries who can you trust.
As an engineer, I can tell you that when many more visas started to be issued in the late 90’s, engineering salaries stagnated. Even as were told that there was a labor shortage for skilled workers, I knew many engineers who were laid off and could not find jobs. At the same time, the company I worked for more or less stopped hiring American engineers in favor of H-1B applicants.
I’m really tired of someone who has zero chance of losing his job in favor of a cheaper labor lecturing those who are on what a wonderful world it would then be.
Poor baby.
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There was a blogosphere dust-up last week when the Washington Post reported on a law student who had been savaged in Internet chat rooms and subsequently not been hired by any of the many law firms she interviewed with. It’s a perfect story for the Post because Washington has so many lawyers and because the culture here lags in tech-savvy.
Reliable TechDirt debunked the story somewhat by pointing out that employers would be foolish to rely on such things in their hiring decisions.
Now, Volokh conspirator Ilya Somin points out that, given her credentials, the law student was probably left without major-law-firm work on the merits.
Like this person, when I interviewed for law firm summer associate jobs as a second year student at Yale, I had “graduated Phi Beta Kappa [from my undergrad institution], ha[d] published in top legal journals and completed internships at leading institutions in [my] field.” And, very similar to her, after interviewing at a dozen big DC firms, I ended up with two call backs and zero offers. Why did this happen? Frantic later investigation showed that the main culprits were precisely some of the credentials listed above. Because of them (particularly the publications), firms feared that I would go into academia and either never take a permanent job with the firm, or leave after just a year or two. A highly paid associate who quickly jumps ship for academia is far less profitable for a firm than one that stays for several years and can eventually bill hours as a senior associate.
Once again, “blame the Internet” fails to hold up. Law firms and other employers are unlikely in general to use salacious information that is anonymously posted, or long outdated, in their hiring decisions. Correlation is not causation.
TLF readers, I need your help. As most of you know, many federal and state lawmakers are suggesting that “social networking websites” need to be regulated in the name of keeping minors safe online. So far, regulatory proposals have come in two varieties: (1) an outright ban on such sites in publicly funded schools and libraries, or (2) mandatory age verification of users before they are allowed on the sites.
Setting aside the many potential pitfalls associated with either form of regulation, proponents of these mandates seem to be ignoring a very challenging threshold question: What exactly constitutes a “social networking website”? In my past and upcoming papers on this issue, I argue that lawmakers are opening up a huge Pandora’s Box of problems here in terms of unintended regulatory consequences. That’s because “social networking” defies easy definition since, in many ways, the Internet and most of the websites that make up the World Wide Web have been fundamentally tied up with the notion of social networking from their inception.
So, here’s how I need your help. Below the fold you will find the amorphous legislative definitions of “social networking websites” that lawmakers have proposed so far. Using those definitions as a guide, I am hoping that you can list for me a couple of your favorite websites that might be subject to federal or state regulation should lawmakers pass bans on social networking sites or demand age verification of them. This will help me construct a diverse list of websites that will be negatively impacted by regulation which we can then present to policy makers and the press in coming months as these debates unfold.
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Here’s another installment in my series of blog posts analyzing the European Commission’s free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) report. In prior posts, I’ve discussed how the report is a call to action for Europe’s policymakers, that FLOSS’s popularity is growing, and that many FLOSS developers live in the EU. In short, the report contains ambitious policy proposals to transform Europe’s ICT sector through industrial policies — I’ve called it the new Airbus project for the European economy. As I get further into the report, however, I’m becoming more skeptical of the report’s overall claim that open source software can rescue Europe’s software industry.
Here’s why – the authors go to the extreme to show FLOSS in a good light, without giving much emphasis to how FLOSS has so far achieved its growing and respected status. Why do I care? Well, I haven’t read much critique on the report, and it’s often fun to be the dissenting voice. And I’m sick of hearing that open source software will rescue the planet from the evils of commercial software and the capitalist system that spawned it. I know that TLF readers are savvy enough to stay away from such absolute statements, but many others in the blogosphere aren’t.
Moreover, at the public policy level, there’s a lot of confusion I’m anxious to clear up between open source the license and the community development model that will often characterize open source software. Finally, I’m becoming more interested in free and open source software on a personal level, which can be technically challenging and at times overwhelming.
So…here I’ll analyze the report’s claim in Section 7 that “FLOSSers Work Faster”.
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Yesterday, the Idaho Senate passed Joint Memorial 3, earlier approved unanimously by the House, to refuse implementation of the REAL ID Act. More info here.
I testified on the bill in the Idaho House’s Transportation and Defense Committee, and participated in a panel discussion at the Idaho statehouse, where some common sense was heard.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been slowly whittling down the tall stack of books I’ve been meaning to read. A lot of them are ponderous tech policy tomes that have been a chore to get through (I still haven’t finished this one), so I was happy to get to Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters. It was given to me for Christmas over a year ago, and I’ve been looking forward to reading it ever since, but it just now bubbled up to the top of the list.
I devoured it in two sittings over the course of about 3 days, and I’m not a particularly fast reader, so that’s saying something. It’s a delightful mix of philosophy, sociology, and hard core geekery. He explains why junior high sucks, why Lisp is the world’s best programming language, why web-based software is going to take over the software world, why geeks tend to be libertarians, how Bayesian spam filters work, why heresies are essential to a free society, and how to make great things.
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A judge has dismissed a lawsuit involving a bogus software patent I wrote up last year:
Judge Douglas Woodlock of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in Boston denied a complaint by Skyline Software Systems that the Google Earth mapping software of Google’s Keyhole infringed Skyline patents.
The judge also denied motions from both parties on whether the patents in question were valid, but left the possibility for either party to reassert these issues if they do so before April 20. He canceled a planned trial date set for June.
In his ruling, Woodlock held that Google’s system does not attempt to render views of Earth’s terrain, a key claim of the patent held by Skyline, which is based in Chantilly, Va., and offers its own “fly through” three-dimensional software.
Hat tip: Google Copyright Blog, which doesn’t appear to be officially affiliated with Google, but has some good commentary.
Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel, 2007: “Protection for software patents and other intellectual property is essential to maintaining the incentives that encourage and underwrite technological breakthroughs. In every industry, patents provide the legal foundation for innovation. The ensuing legal disputes may be messy, but protection is no less necessary, even so.”
Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO, 1991: “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today…A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose.”
It sure would be unfortunate if the giants were able to use software patents to squelch start-ups.
The recent TLF podcast touched on the way that states and state AGs are actively trying to regulate social networking and e-commerce sites. My colleague Steve DelBianco recently testified on this issue before the New Jersey General Assembly, and his testimony is a good read. He writes about three rules for state legislators to keep in mind when attempting to regulate e-commerce:
As a firm believer in the benefits of the Internet, I often feel like that little boy who was asked why he was digging through a huge pile of horse manure and responded with a smile, “Well there must be a pony in here somewhere.”
Lawmakers need to understand that e-commerce, instant communication, and global information sharing are worth digging for. To help them do that I offer a simple three-part formula: consumer education, industry responsibility, and law enforcement.
Rule number one – regulate behavior, not technology.
Rule number two – don’t smother the Internet under a patchwork quilt of conflicting state laws.
Rule number three — watch out for special interest legislation.
Read more here.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.