Chris Soghoian has an interesting post at his Surveill@nce St@te blog on C|Net decrying the “evisceration” of a data-breach bill in the Indiana legislature. He’s a big advocate of the bill and evidently spent a lot of time working for its passage.
“In a committee meeting Tuesday morning,” he reports, “Republican committee members successfully eviscerated the bill, reducing it to a mere 17 lines of text from the original 72. The Web site report provision and the requirement that companies notify the state attorney general whenever a data breach is discovered were stripped.” Etc.
I’m somewhat bemused to sense the excitement a young person has getting his first experience with the legislative process, then being disappointed with the results. I’m less amused – annoyed, frankly – that someone would use the length of a bill as a proxy for its quality. By that measure, the Consolidated Appropriations Act must be a real gem.
But it’s downright troubling to see a smart young man so thoroughly fallen victim to the fatal conceit. Top-down planning is no better in data security than it is in distributing bananas, but Soghoian is pretty sure he’s figured out how data security should be done across the economy (at least the economy of Indiana). I’m not sympathetic when his plans to have the legislature in his state carry out his will are quashed by others similarly situated.
Better than the regulatory contraption Soghoian desires is the use of simple common law rules, letting liability bring distributed knowledge about data breaches and data security together to construct the practices that best serve the public. There’s more to law than legislation, and people need to learn that.
Hmmm.. This sounds like trouble waiting to happen for kids in the UK. According to News.com:
British students aged 14 to 19 will have their school records permanently placed on an electronic database accessible to prospective employers. The project, called Managing Information Across Partners (MIAP), will launch in September. The record will include personal details and exam results and will remain with the pupil for life.
[…]
The system will be based on a Unique Learner Number. “The Unique Learner Number, necessary to acquire a learner record for the diploma is a unique identifier that can be used by a learner for life,” MIAP said on its Web site. “It is a national number that is validated and is therefore deemed to be unique.” The aim is to expand the system to include other information and to allow details already available but scattered across many databases to be brought together, it said.” The pupil would have control over the record and would be able to restrict the information shared.
Maybe. Or maybe not. As the story goes on to point out:
My Progress & Freedom Foundation colleagues Ken Ferree, president of PFF, and Bret Swanson, a senior fellow with PFF, have filed comments today at the FCC in the heated proceeding about broadband network management policies. [Note: For more background, listen to our recent TLF podcast on the issue.] In their filing, Ken and Bret argue that:
Traffic shaping or channeling by broadband Internet access providers should be no more controversial than the examples provided above. Broadband access is not an unlimited resource. To the contrary, video and other rich media applications are profoundly changing the nature and volume of Internet traffic, straining network capacity. Video applications require between 100 and 1,000 times more bandwidth than static applications involving text, voice, or simple graphics. As video and graphics move to high-definition, many observers believe that web content and applications will grow in data-density by yet an additional factor of 10. Internet and IP traffic in the U.S. could grow more than 50-fold by 2015. The challenge facing providers of broadband access is how to maintain high-speed service for the vast majority of consumers while demands on the network mount.
[…]
Far from some nefarious plot to undermine the communications of their own subscribers, broadband access providers using traffic management tools to maintain the highest level of service for the greatest number of users simply are mirroring the commercially reasonable conduct of service providers everywhere, in nearly every field.
They go on to detail the technical reasons why various types of network management activities are necessary and beneficial:
The headline on the Web site has now been changed, but here’s how the email alert and Web headline first appeared.
These are perfectly ambiguous as to who killed whom, and I took them to mean that Hezbollah had killed a target of theirs, someone representing the United States.
Cable and telecom operators have long fought like cats and dogs in the political marketplace. And now that they are competing more intensely for customers in the real marketplace, we can expect relations between the two camps to grow even more acrimonious inside the Beltway.
Case in point: Yesterday, cable operators Bright House, Comcast, and Time Warner filed a complaint at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) alleging that telecom giant Verizon has been offering “unlawful inducements to customers” in an effort to retain those customers looking to switch over to cable-based voice offerings. The cable companies want to FCC to force Verizon to halt those “winback” tactics which take place before a customer switches over. And the cable operators also want the FCC to award damages based on past harm supposedly done to them.
It’s an example of just how cut-throat the marketplace competition has become between the two sectors recently. As Cynthia Brumfield of IP Democracy points out, telecom operators have been hemorrhaging customers in recent years and cable operators have been the primary recipient of those telco-defectors. As Cynthia notes:
This ad from the Republican National Committee has been making the rounds inside the beltway over the last week:
The ad is chock-full of misleading, scare-mongering claims, most of which I’ve alreadyaddressed. But of course, the point of this ad isn’t education, but intimidation. The message is that Democrats who don’t fall in line behind the president’s warrantless surveillance agenda will face similar attack ads in the fall elections.
But as the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, this tactic has already been tried, and it failed miserably. In the 2006 elections, incumbent Nancy Johnson used an ad with a virtually identical message to ward off challenger Chris Murphy. The ad backfired, sparking newspapers to editorialize that it was “desperate” and a “fraud.” Murphy returned fire with an ad quoting these editorials and arguing that Johnson would say anything to stay in power.
The rule of law and judicial oversight of domestic spying are bedrock principles of our system of government. There is no reason Democrats (or Republicans, for that matter) should be afraid to run on those principles in November. Capitulating to the president’s demands on this issue would not only undermine our civil liberties, but it would also miss a key opportunity to draw a clear contrast with an unpopular president.
Democrats are constantly complaining about the fact that they’re seen by voters as weak on national security issues. Perhaps their constant capitulation to the president’s demands is part of the problem. Democrats are never going to win elections by presenting themselves as being just as willing to shred the constitution. In the first place, no one will believe them, and in the second place, why would you vote for the imitation when you can vote for the original? Democrats are only going to win on national security when they’re willing to say something different from the Republicans. This, it seems to me, is a golden opportunity. It allows them to stake out a clear position: “yes to eavesdropping on terrorists, no to eavesdropping on innocent Americans, and no to allowing big telecom companies to break the law.”
In an essay earlier today, I discussed why I believe that private censorship is superior to public censorship since it lets each family dictate for themselves what is in their own best interest. Public censorship, by contrast, expects regulators to dictate for all families what is best for them by imposing a single arbitrary standard on the entire nation. The ideal state of affairs, I argued, would be a nation of fully empowered parents who have the ability to perfectly tailor their family’s media consumption habits to their specific values and preferences. That would include the ability to not only block objectionable materials, but also to more easily find content they feel is appropriate for their families.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that this ideal state of affairs exists but that many parents continue to allow their children to experience some types of media content that others believe is harmful. What should be done about that?
I ask because I was just reading through this month’s Federal Communications Law Journal, which includes the transcript of a Federalist Society symposium on the “Expansion of Indecency Regulation.” The discussion included remarks from FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and Robert W. Peters, the President of Morality in Media among others. During the discussion, both Chairman Martin and Mr. Peters suggested that it if we really wanted to get serious about protecting children from media content somehow deemed “harmful to minors,” then we might need to consider criminal sanctions for parents who voluntarily bring such fare into their homes.
Today, the BroadbandCensus.com has added a collection of the 1,527 carriers that the Federal Communications Commission says are providing broadband in the United States. If you don’t see your carrier when you Take the Broadband Census, please use the e-mail link to tell us who is missing!
I’ve been really heartened by the incredible response from so many people to this still-new Web site. We realize that our database is limited by broadband carriers’ reluctance, thus far, to provide the BroadbandCensus.com with information about where they offer services. With your help, the Broadband Census can go around them and get individual users, and others, to provide the information necessary to understand the true state of broadband availability, competition, speeds and prices.
So someone finally made the mistake of allowing me to be on television. If you’re interested in the marriage that might have been and could still be between Microsoft and Yahoo, check out my appearance on C-SPAN’s weekly show The Communicators, which is unfortunately only available in our favorite format, Real Media.
Though Mr. Ballmer’s proposal was rejected the first time, he’s not one to give up easily and he’ll likely barrow even more than the few billion he thought he’d need to increase the size of the dowry. Though he may want to pause, at least for a moment, as the Wall Street Journal reports that tech stocks are up after this weekend’s rejection of the deal by Yahoo!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.