Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
It may be a strange combination, but Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA), Rob Atkinson of the centrist Internet and Technology and Innovation Foundation and myself teamed up today on a piece in The Hill to denounce taxation of the Internet. Our conclusion: Congress should make the ban permanent. You can read the full text here.
The House, by the way, has already ignored our advice, and voted instead yesterday for a four-year extension. The action now moves to the Senate.
Stay tuned, of course.
Some recent reporting by the Washington Post reveals some of the hardball tactics that the federal government may have used in support of mass surveillance programs, even preceding the attacks of September 11, 2001. In an article published last Saturday, Ellen Nakashima and Dan Eggen report that Qwest’s Joe Nacchio sought to have the cancellation of government contracts introduced in his trial on insider trading charges. He alleges that he fully expected the contracts to make up for losses the company would otherwise suffer, which would contradict the allegation that he sold his shares knowing of an imminent drop in price. The contracts were canceled in retribution for Qwest refusing to go along with the government’s surveillance demands, he says.
Because so much is cloaked in secrecy, one must speculate about where those machinations are today, but a Statement of Administration Policy (veto threat) issued yesterday laid down a notable marker: Congress must retroactively immunize telecom firms for past law violations in any FISA amendment or the President will veto it.
The common rap on this is that the Bush Administration wants to help out its buddies in the telecom industry. But Joe Nacchio was a buddy – he was chairman of the president’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee – and the administration threw him right under the bus. There is probably more than the standard corruptions of government involved.
My guess is that the telecoms have the Bush administration by the short hairs because they have information about yet more egregious surveillance activities. They’ve probably signaled that if they don’t get immunity in a FISA amendment, they’ll spill the beans and really bring it down on the administration.
This, again, is speculation, but it best explains the administration’s excessive commitment to immunizing the telecom firms that violated the law.
Its been clear for some time that unbundling regulation discourages investment by potential competitors in their own facilities. Now comes a new study providing some hard numbers on just how much is discouraged. The study, released last month by London’s LECG consulting group, and commissioned by European telcos, looks at the connection between “access regulation” and investment in competing broadband platforms. Based on data from 12 European countries, the authors conclude that a 10 percent reduction in the prices for mandated access causes an 18 percent fall in market share for alternative platforms. For Europe as a whole, this could mean E10 billion in lost long-term investment, and E30 billion in GDP loss.
Worthwhile reading for policymakers here in America, as well as their European counterparts.
A reader points me to another example of the administration’s bogus talking points on FISA. The usual contention is that these wiretapping powers are needed in the heightened post-9/11 security environment. I didn’t exactly buy that rationale in the first place, but now a Qwest executive is claiming that he was approached way back in February 2001 with a request to participate in a legally dubious wiretapping scheme. Evidently, the NSA’s cavalier attitude toward judicial oversight predates the September 11 attack.
Also, the Qwest exec in question claims that the government dangled government contracts in front of telecom companies to entice them to cooperate. I think this is one of the most crucial reasons not to give telecom companies blanket immunity for their actions. Qwest did the right thing and took a financial hit as a result. It would be extremely unfair to allow AT&T and Verizon walk away unscathed, with extra money from those government contracts in its pockets. Even if you don’t think telecom companies should be punished for breaking the law, they certainly shouldn’t be financially rewarded.
Ryan Singel at the always-excellent Threat Level blog debunks the latest lies about wiretapping laws getting Americans killed in Iraq. The story claims that it took soldiers in Iraq 10 hours to get the necessary legal permission to wiretap the cell phones of terrorists who had kidnapped American soldiers.
As Singel points out, there are a bunch of problems with this story. In the first place, the military doesn’t need any court approval to do wiretaps physically outside of the United States, so if they had taps on cell phone towers in Iraq (and as Singel points out, if we don’t have wiretaps on the Iraqi cell phone network, “we all deserve tax refunds”), no approval would have been necessary. Secondly, the issue never reached the FISA court, as the executive branch determined it had the authority to conduct the search without a new court order. Third, most of the delay came not from the NSA’s doing paperwork required to determine if they needed a warrant, but from delays at the DOJ, which sat on the NSA’s request for seven hours. A timeline from Rep. Reyes tells the story:
At 10:00 a.m., key U.S. agencies met to discuss and develop various options for collecting additional intelligence relating to the kidnapping by accessing certain communications
At 10:52 a.m., the NSA notified the Department of Justice (DOJ) of its desire to collect some communications that require a FISA order. It was determined that some FISA coverage already existed.
At 12:53 p.m., the NSA General Counsel agreed that all of the requirements for an emergency FISA authorization had been met for the remaining collection of the communications inside the U.S.
Collection could have started immediately – the requirements of the statute were satisfied. As James Baker, head of the FISA office has testified to Congress, emergency authorization can take place in minutes and can be granted orally.
However, the NSA played it safe and waited for the Justice Department to give the go ahead. How long could that take?
Andrew Keen is the web’s favorite whipping boy these days, and in some ways he has it coming. His latest book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, is an anti-all-things-Web 2.0 screed. Keen lambastes “Internet democracy” (specifically the Wiki model of collaborative creation) and decries the rising tide of user-generated everything. When you get right down to it, Keen’s view of the world is unapologetically techno-conservative and culturally elitist. He’s angry that there are fewer intermediaries minding the culture. As a result, he argues, “professional” media (by which he means to say “better” media) is giving way to “amateur” media (which he regards as synonymous with, well… crap).
Unsurprisingly, the blogosphere has fought back with a vengeance and called Keen every nasty name in the book. But the best and most level-headed critique of Keen’s work is still this old essay by the ever-insightful Clay Shirky. Clay’s response rightly concedes that Keen in correct in pointing out that some important things have been lost with the rise of the Internet. There certainly are fewer intermediaries filtering our culture for us, and that will sound like a great thing to many of us. But it’s important to realize that some of those mediating forces serve a valuable role. Editors, for example, play an important, but often overlooked, role in terms of improving the quality of great deal of media content of all varieties (journalism, books, movies, music, etc). The blogosphere is becoming an editor-free zone, and at times it really shows. There are times when some particularly insulting things are said or silly mistakes are made that probably would have been corrected had a good editor been responsible for overseeing the final product.
On the other hand, the unfiltered Web 2.0 experience is wonderfully refreshing. Sometimes it’s nice to see what the uninhibited exchange of ideas results in. Regardless, the bottom line is that the editing profession (broadly defined) is changing because of the Internet. That is undeniable. And other mediating forces or institutions are seeing their power or relative importance in the cultural creation process diminished as the Internet-spawned disintermediation continues unabated.
Will that create short term problems? Undeniably. But Keen thinks these developments are contributing to a sort of cultural catastrophe and that we are collectively much worse off because of this disintermediation and empowerment of the “amateur.” This goes much too far in my opinion.
It’s long been conventional wisdom that a Hillary Clinton presidential administration would quickly move to adopt net neutrality regulation. Now that conventional wisdom has been cast into doubt. Although Sen. Clinton has supported net neutrality legislation in Congress, the idea was noticeably absent from the “innovation agenda” she announced in late August. The absence has caused some — perhaps belated — consternation on the net neutrality Left — with a post last week by Matt Stoller on Open Left asking “Where’s Your Net Neutrality Proposal Senator Clinton?” Stoller warns: “If anyone has illusions about how horrific Clinton will be as a President, disabuse yourself now.”
Strong words. Maybe its just election-season hyperbole. And maybe a Clinton neutrality proposal is still in the cards (Clinton did after all label the innovation agenda “version 1.0”.)
Still, one can’t help but sense a bit of panic on the left as the neutrality army continues to fray.
One more thing to which you should stay tuned.
(Thanks to Scott Cleland for the heads up.)
I was very interested to read Solveig’s recent discussion of copyright issues and the justice of file sharing. It seems to me that her line of arguments runs contrary to a core insight of libertarian theory, best articulated by Robert Nozick, that a just outcome is one that emerges from a series of just transactions. Nozick endorsed what he called historical theories of justice, contrasting them with patterned theories such Rawls’s Difference Principle. Libertarians have always been wary of starting with a desired social result (i.e. “everyone should have affordable health care”) and then reasoning backwards to derive a set of legal rules we think will achieve that outcome (i.e. Every employer shall provide health insurance to his employees,” “no hospital shall turn away an emergency room patient due to inability to pay”). That’s partly because we have an instinctive aversion to telling other people how they should live their lives, but just as importantly it’s because we we’re aware that these sorts of cause-and-effect predictions are extraordinarily difficult to make. Libertarians are constantly explaining the various clever and non-coercive mechanisms people develop to solve collective action problems that economic theory says can only be solved by government action.
For example, in the Abigail Alliance case, libertarians’ sympathies were with the plaintiffs, who assert that terminally ill patients have an inalienable right to experiment with unapproved but potentially life-saving drugs. FDA bureaucrats countered that, in essence, they needed the power to condemn certain people to death to ensure the integrity of their clinical testing program. Now, despite the prejudicial way I just described it, the FDA’s argument isn’t completely crazy. It really is easier to design statistically rigorous clinical trials if they can be assured that anyone they reject will not be able to get access to experimental drugs through other channels. And it’s at least possible that in the long run, ensuring the integrity of the current system of clinical trials will save lives on net.
Needing a critter fix, I hauled The Grub, now three, off to the National Wildlife Visitor’s Center this weekend for their festival. Actual wildlife was promised, and they had splendid owls and turtles, looking rather sleepy. On the whole, though, I find that the direction that such organizations has taken in their public presentations to be both uninteresting and depressing. I learned little about the behavior, habits, and lives of the critters being studied, and a great deal about their habitats and the destruction thereof.
There are good reasons for the focus on systems. Although the naturalists would not put it this way: The environment is a commons of sorts; as such, it is likely to be degraded, with no one properly internalizing the costs–it needs a fix at the systemic level. But I already knew this; I wanted to learn more about the critters. I like critters. Too much. I am an old school amateur naturalist of the sort that made such a disaster of federal forest management–putting out forest fires when they ought to be allowed to burn off the brush and bugs, because I am not willing to see a racoon’s toes be singed. But the result of decades of such a policy is a sick forest that ultimately burns so fiercely it cannot be controlled at all.
Copyright debates strike me as suffering from the opposite defect. We hear a great
Chris Castle and others square off to discuss what’s wrong with the music industry at the Commonwealth Club in San Fransisco.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
