The more I think about it, the less sense Wikipedia’s notability rule makes. That’s the rule that says that the subject of an article must “worthy of notice” to merit the creation of an article about them. For example, today I was goofing off on Wikipedia and looking at Wikipedia’s encyclopedic coverage of the Taft family. I was curious about Pres. Taft’s living relatives, so I drilled down to William Howard Taft IV, and I noticed that he has a son, William Howard Taft V, who appeared not to have a Wikipedia entry.
So I googled WHT V and quickly came to this 2005 wedding announcement in the New York Times. I thought I’d do my good deed for the day and create a new Wikipedia article based in the information in the Times story.
One of my favorite things about TLF is our ability to have vigorous but respectful disagreements. I appreciated Hance’s post making the case for telecom immunity, but I have to say I didn’t find it very persuasive.
I don’t understand the argument that telecom providers were facing “extraordinary circumstances” that led them to break the law. I might have some sympathy for that argument if we were talking about a program that occurred on 9/11 or in the chaotic days that followed. If the telecom providers has simply made rash decisions in their haste to prevent another attack and inadvertently broke the law, I might be sympathetic. There might be a plausible argument for providing immunity for information shared between, say, September 11 an December 31, 2001. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. If the Klein declaration is accurate—and AT&T hasn’t disputed it—the program at issue in that lawsuit started in 2003, and as far as we know it continues to this day. The Bush administration could have gone to Congress any time in 2002 and requested changes to the relevant statutes. And AT&T and Verizon could have—and indeed under the law were obligated to—do what Qwest did and tell the administration to come back when they had a warrant. They didn’t do that, and in my view they ought to be held responsible for breaking the law.
I don’t find the Posner and Kristol/Schmidtt hypotheticals very persuasive, but even if you do, they’re really beside the point. If current standards for obtaining warrants in terrorism cases are too stringent, the Bush administration should have gotten Congress to change the rules. We could have had this debate six years ago, Congress could have made a decision, and then AT&T and Verizon could have participated in whichever activities Congress approved with a clean conscience. Instead, the telcos helped the Bush administration ignore Congress, evade court scrutiny, and violate the clear requirements of the law.
So even if prospective rule changes are necessary, that doesn’t in any way justify retrospective white-washing of past lawbreaking. Granting telecom immunity will set the precedent that companies can break the law on the say-so of the executive branch, without needing to worry about what Congress or the courts might have to say about it. Which would mean the end of meaningful Congressional or judicial oversight over surveillance activities. Because telecom companies will know perfectly well that if they break the law at the request of the executive branch, the executive branch will go to the mat to make sure the law isn’t actually enforced and companies aren’t actually found liable. Once that precedent is set, it won’t matter what other rules Congress might enact, because telecom companies will have absolutely no incentive to follow them, and plenty of incentive (read: government contracts) to do the president’s bidding.
One final point: we don’t have to speculate what the world would look like if the executive branch had the power to eavesdrop on whomever it liked without meaningful judicial oversight. Martin Luther King was the most famous of the dozens of anti-war activists, civil rights leaders, journalists, and other undesirables whose communications were bugged by the Johnson and Nixon administration. There’s no evidence that the Bush administration has done anything like that. But if we eliminate meaningful judicial oversight of the executive branch’s surveillance activities, there’s every reason to think that a future administration will.
One of the frustrating things about working in tech policy is that our issues get precious little airtime in political campaigns. Politicians rarely get asked tough questions about the issues that matter most to the technology industry. So I was excited to come across this video of Ron Paul discussing his views on Internet and video game censorship, Internet taxation, and network neutrality regulation:
Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I found it jarring when they guy kept referring to Rep. Paul as “Ron.” If he had the president on would he have called him “George?”
Is the FCC moving too fast on media ownership? Senators Byron Dorgan and Trent Lott think so, announcing new legislation this week to slow things down a bit. His bill, S. 2332, would require the FCC to wait 90 days before promulgating any changes to current ownership rules, and to conduct a separate proceeding on localism. The bill is spurred by reports that Chairman Kevin Martin is pushing for a final vote on changes to the FCC’s ban on cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast outlets by the end of the year.
House Commerce Committee chair John Dingell has echoed the senators’ call, warning the FCC “against a rush to judgment in its media ownership proceeding,” as has activist groups such as Free Press – the energizer bunny of government regulation – which is warning that:
“Kevin Martin, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has been keeping a secret from the American people. He wants to push through plans to remove decades-old media ownership protections. And he’s trying to do it without public scrutiny”.
Now, I’m the first to recognize that the FCC has a lot of faults, but moving to fast is a new one to me. The Commission deliberations have long been known for their Bleak House qualities, extending – like the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce – seemingly for generations. Decisionmaking at the agency is – as long-time FCC policy chief Robert Pepper put it – “infinitely elastic.”
But it this case different? Is the FCC – like a runaway glacier – suddenly moving dangerously fast on media ownership? Hardly.
With all due respect for the views of my colleagues (here and here) and commenters, former Sen. Bob Kerrey had this, and other, mature insights in an op-ed which appeared yesterday in The Hill regarding whether to include immunity for telecom carriers in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) reauthorization:
Consider the atmosphere: the president had gone before Congress and said “one vial, one canister, one crate, slipped into this country, could bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.” So if these companies refused to cooperate, by implication, that dark day could be on their conscience. And now they cannot even defend themselves in court, because the details of the investigations remain classified.
Opposition to immunity isn’t aimed so much at punishing the telecom providers, but at obtaining information about what really happened and about reaffirming the significant legal duties that telecom providers have for safeguarding the privacy of their law-abiding customers.
Here’s a sampling of the kind of reasoning that pegged my b.s. detector:
[I]n its legislation to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), Congress is poised to condone lawsuits against telecommunications carriers for complying with what they thought was a legal information-sharing program that was approved by the highest levels of government.
The author has inverted the debate – “if Congress does nothing it condones lawsuits.” No, in fact, if Congress does nothing, it does nothing. What it is considering doing is condoning illegal wiretapping and surveillance.
The question whether any program was approved by the highest levels of government is perfectly irrelevant unless that approval came from the judicial branch, which it did not. The inference is that someone in the executive branch can approve programs regardless of what the law is. This is flatly wrong.
On the question of whether the telecommunications companies thought this was a legal program, the presumed facts are not in evidence. That is one of the issues in the lawsuits. It will help set the damages if the participating telecom firms did think they were legally in the right and turned out to be wrong.
So bad is the legal reasoning in this paper that I think the author should lose her law license. Turns out, she doesn’t have one. It shows. ITIF brings discredit on itself publishing this dreck.
[A] powerful group of ideological nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs . . . abhor profit in medicine and are pushing the World Health Organization toward a global treaty that would completely change the way drugs are researched and developed…
This Medical Research and Development Treaty, proposed by Brazil and Kenya, would have a central U.N. bureaucracy deciding what diseases to research while allocating funds, contracts and prizes accordingly. Its expert scientists would ensure that all diseases are given appropriate resources, including the handful of “unprofitable” tropical diseases in poor counties…
For those you who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) listen to our recent podcast on the Comcast kerfuffle, the Heritage Foundation has now released an edited transcript of the discussion. You can find it here.
With the shrill factor getting louder each day in this controversy, Richard Bennett and Ed Felton — as well as our TLF regulars — provide what I think is a good, fairly nuanced, discussion of the controversy.
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Kudos, Amazon!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.