I think we can all agree that Don Imus is an ass and that his comments about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team were offensive and racist. He has rightly been universally condemned for his actions, and his employers — CBS Radio and MSNBC — have terminated his morning talk show program as a result.
But does his behavior justify something more in the form of a regulatory response? Some people think so, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D-Mich.), the head of the Congressional Black Caucus. As this L.A. Times article notes, Rev. Sharpton and Rep. Kilpatrick argue that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should sanction the CBS Radio stations that aired the Imus remarks. Rep. Kilpatrick has also suggested that the FCC should mandate diversity training for CBS Radio and MSNBC employees who allowed the show to be broadcast.
It goes without saying that any effort by the FCC to regulate hate speech is going to raise a number of sticky constitutional issues. As former FCC Chairman Richard E. Wiley tells the L.A. Times: “Lets say there was a discussion of some minority issue, and somebody said something that somebody took offense to. You can see how very quickly it could get very complex constitutionally.” And as Tom Taylor, editor of Inside Radio, told the Times: “You’d have to build another building just for all the complaints” the FCC would receive, he said.
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I’ve spent the last 7 years closely monitoring the ongoing debate over media ownership in this country and what I find most intriguing about it is the inherent schizophrenia of the media criticism emanating from the political Left. That is, although we find ourselves in the midst of unprecedented explosion of media options and diversity, critics on the Left are still spinning gloom-and-doom stories about our modern media environment and the state of deliberative democracy. But they are doing so from two radically different perspectives.
This is the subject of a new article of mine that appears in the latest issue of the City Journal entitled “The Media Cornucopia.” In the essay I note that:
This media cornucopia is a wonderful development for a free society–or so you’d think. But today’s media universe has fierce detractors, and nowhere more vehemently than on the left. Their criticisms seem contradictory. Some, such as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, contend that real media choices, information sources included, remain scarce, hindering citizens from fully participating in a deliberative democracy. Others argue that we have too many media choices, making it hard to share common thoughts or feelings; democracy, community itself, again loses out. Both liberal views get the story disastrously wrong. If either prevails, what’s shaping up to be America’s Golden Age of media could be over soon.
I go on to describe these two competing schools of Leftist media criticism, which I label the “scarcity-obsessed” critics versus the “information-overload” critics. I discuss the views of the various theorists who occupy each camp of thinking and explain how they have quite successfully used these competing theories of media criticism to spin reality out of the political dialogue about these issues. In the end, I conclude that: “What unifies the two schools of leftist media criticism, beneath their apparent opposition, is pure elitism. … Both liberal groups would love to put their thumbs on the scale and tilt the media in their preferred direction.”
Anyway, if you are interested in reading the entire essay, the folks at the City Journal have posted it on their site here.
Former IRS Commissioners Doris Meissner and James Zigler editorialize in today’s New York Times about their support for “secure, biometric Social Security cards” as an essential part of immigration law reform.
The give-away line?: “To insist on secure documents with biometric identifiers is not a call for a national ID.” They provide no logical support for this naked assertion. Because it’s false.
Strengthened “internal enforcement” of immigration law means federal surveillance and tracking of all workers. All of them. Including you.
Last week, Mark Blafkin said:
There is a loophole (that Stallman hasn’t found a way to close yet) in the GPL that allows distributors to ship proprietary binaries on the same CD as free software, but they can’t be part of the same program/system. The GPL is designed to make it as difficult possible (and GPLv3 more so) to run both proprietary and free software at the same time.
Now, Merriam-Webster defines a “loophole” as “an ambiguity or omission in the text through which the intent of a statute, contract, or obligation may be evaded.” With that in mind, here is the relevant provision of GPL v2:
Mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.
Now, as it states above, the term “loophole” describes an interpretation of a contract that is contrary to the intention of its drafters. If the ability to distribute free and proprietary software side-by-side on a CD is a “loophole,” it’s mighty hard to explain why they would have added a provision that explicitly permits such distribution.
But whether that was a loophole or not, at least Stallman is working hard to close it, right? Well, here’s the latest version of the GPL 3 draft:
A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation’s users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.
This is a bit wordier, but it seems to me that the intent is no less clear: the GPL specifically and deliberately permits distributors to “ship proprietary binaries on the same CD as free software.” Blafkin either doesn’t know what a loophole is, or didn’t bother to read and understand the GPL before criticizing it.
The IRS likes to talk about how it’s primarily concerned with improving taxpayer services, particularly this time of year. But don’t be fooled. Earlier this year, the Bush Administration proposed to require “brokers” to report online sales of tangible personal property to the IRS.
This is really another giant surveillance program, like the trial balloon the administration has previously floated to require internet service providers to retain customer data to combat crimes committed against children (as I’ve discussed here and here). In both cases, the government is trying to harness the unique capacity of the Internet to identify and document conduct in ways that were never feasible nor possible before — in this case ordinary commercial transactions that just happen to be conducted online. According to press coverage, the proposal is specifically aimed at online auctions (see this and this).
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Ed Felten describes the latest phase of the cat-and-mouse game between the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray cartel and hackers trying to crack their AACS encryption scheme:
To reduce the harm to law-abiding customers, the authority apparently required the affected programs to issue free online updates, where the updates contain new software along with new decryptions keys. This way, customers who download the update will be able to keep playing discs, even though the the software’s old keys won’t work any more.
The attackers’ response is obvious: they’ll try to analyze the new software and extract the new keys. If the software updates changed only the decryption keys, the attackers could just repeat their previous analysis exactly, to get the new keys. To prevent this, the updates will have to restructure the software significantly, in the hope that the attackers will have to start their analysis from scratch.
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I’ll be speaking tomorrow at the Security and Liberty Forum hosted by the Privacy and Technology Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina and the Department of Computer Science, UNC-Chapel Hill.
That’s Saturday, April 14, 2007 from 1-5 p.m., Chapman Hall on the UNC Campus.
Rep. Barney Frank is continuing his effort to repeal the U.S. ban on online gambling, which he calls “one of the stupidest things I ever saw.” The law, the “Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act,” was passed during the last session of Congress. Now that he’s the chair of the House Financial Services Committee he certainly has a better chance taking this silly law off the books, but he still faces an uphill battle.
Back in October 2003, when I was still with the Cato Institute, my colleague Wayne Crews and I brought Rep. Frank to Cato to deliver some keynote remarks on this issue during an event we hosted. He was amazing and his speech that day remains to the most principled (and highly entertaining) thing I’ve ever heard anyone say on the issue to date. And, luckily, the video is still on the Cato website here. Make sure to check it out and listen to the excellent Q&A session in particular. Great stuff.
Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Jerry Brito, James Gattuso, Tim Lee, Adam Thierer, and Ryan Paul of Ars Technica. Topics include,
- More states governments defy congress and reject REAL ID
- Won’t someone please think of the children?!
- the FTC’s new report on marketing violence to children
- the Child Online Protection Act
- and the .xxx domain is rejected
- How the net neutrality debate is bleeding into spectrum auctions and other quick bits
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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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.