There’s an interesting contrast between Bamford’s book about the NSA and Theoharis’s tome on the FBI. Theoharis documents an agency that was, at least under J. Edgar Hoover, basically criminal. Between World War II and Watergate, it put legitimate criminal investigation on the back burner while it focused on Hoover’s personal priorities of blackmail, voyeurism, and political manipulation. In contrast, Bamford, writing in 2001, portrays the NSA as a basically law-abiding agency that has yet to seriously abuse its massive powers. In some cases, such as Project SHAMROCK, the NSA did things that were technically illegal, but as Bamford tells it they were nonetheless scrupulous about obeying the spirit of the law, suppressing information about US persons if they were not directly related to legitimate intelligence-gathering or law-enforcement activities.
As we see on pp. 450-1, Bamford in 2001 saw the threats from the NSA as largely theoretical:
NSA’s major push into law enforcement came with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism. “Because the Soviet Union was no longer a threat,” said Baker, “some of the resources devoted to extracting its secrets could be turned to other tasks, to other foreign targets. But some of those foreign targets had a domestic tinge. As topics like international narcotics trafficking, terrorism, alien smuggling, and Russian organized crime rose in priority for the intelligence community, it became harder to distinguish betweeen targets of law enforcement and those of national security.”
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Declan has got it exactly right here in commenting about the antitrust circus taking place between Google and Microsoft right now as the rhetorical war between them heats up and the feds—both in Congress and at the DOJ—get more and more involved in monitoring this market:
The underlying problem is that antitrust law is so malleable that it can be bent into virtually any shape that its practitioners desire. Given nearly any set of hard-nose business practices, some economist can be hired to claim that “predatory” prices are illegally low (hurting competitors) or illegally high (hurting consumers). No wonder Lester Thurow, the former dean of MIT’s business school, concluded that “the time has come to recognize that the antitrust approach has been a failure. The costs it imposes far exceed any benefits it brings.” And no wonder that some state attorneys general are now sniffing around to see if there’s a way for them to join the antitrust hunt.
And things are only going to get worse–far, far worse–in coming months.
Via Ellen Miller, I came to a post on techPresident lamenting corporations’ use of their customer databases to lobby Congress. Zephyr Teachout received an email from United Airlines asking her to go to a petition site which asked her to contact her member of Congress about oil speculation.
This is clearly just the beginning, and its a crude one–a few years from now you’ll see more organizing, including international organizing, to leverage corporate databases to influence policies that help corporate wealth. At least as of 2004, the airlines were among the biggest email/database owners in the country (along with casinos). As someone concerned about concentrated power in any form, this is not a great development.
I don’t think this is the unfortunate story Teachout believes it to be. More important than the fact that a corporation is using information at its disposal to advance its public policy agenda is the fact that the corporation feels obligated to communicate with Congress through the intermediary of its customers (and presumably shareholders). That’s a move in the direction of openness and democracy.
Consider the alternative: corporate officials going to Congress for meetings in smoke-filled rooms – or just showing up with bags of cash. No, there’s a dimension of modern politics that requires them to produce actual voters to support the policies they like. That’s good.
Most large corporations are publicly held so the term “corporate wealth” (assumed bad) refers to the wealth of investors and workers (in retirement funds), which is actually good.
Corporations come in every size and shape, so the formula corporate=bad fails to describe the world well. Corporations sometimes lobby for bad policies just like individuals and government agencies do. I have called out corporations with substantive policy agendas that are bad, and there are plenty. But just because an agenda is “corporate,” it isn’t necessarily bad.
Corporations lobby for freedom of speech (booksellers and publishers); they lobby for policies that keep down the cost of food (importers; agribusiness; grocers); they lobby for wind energy; etc. etc. There’s just no shorthand which holds that corporate interests are bad.
BTW, it sounds like the policies United was pitching Teachout are pretty dumb. Oil “speculation” is a hobgoblin that masks real issues of supply and demand. I hope they fail to win the day – not because they’re corporate; because they’re wrong.
I hate to burst a theory, but Adam is wrong to say that PC gaming is on the decline. But I understand how appearances can be deceiving. Walk into your average GameStop or Best Buy and you’ll see row after row of console games placed front and center. You’ll usually find the PC games stuck in a corner with routers and external hard discs.
Retail numbers also support the theory that PC games are on the decline. NPD Group says that while North Americans spent $18.8 billion on game software in retail stores last year, just $910 million went to PC games, down from $970 million the year before. So, PC games are roughly 5% of retail sales. It sounds a lot like a death nil.
But retails isn’t the only place games are sold these days. Just like iTunes and its online component—the cleverly named iTunes Store—have revolutionized the way music is sold, so too have PC game makers revolutionized software sales in recent years.
My most recent gaming experience has been barreling through Half-Life 2 and Portal as I make my way through the Orange Box. When I installed the Orange Box, a package of 5 games by Valve Software, I wasn’t just installing games, but also a game-buying service. I’m now a proud registered user of Steam, one of the largest online game buying services. The Boston Globe recently published a story covering the rise of Steam:
Today Steam sells more than 250 games by Valve and other PC game publishers. The service has 15 million registered users, and posted 2007 sales growth of 158 percent. Valve cofounder Gabe Newell recently said he expects Steam sales will soon surpass Valve’s retail store revenues.
Even with services like Steam around, aren’t the consoles swimming in dough after the release of mega-hits like Grand Theft Auto IV? Not when you factor in the subscription fees being forked over on a monthly basis by those who have given over countless hours of their lives to massive multi-player online games (MMOs).
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Sean Sands makes the argument that it is in a very powerfully worded editorial today over at The Escapist entitled “Sink the Pirates“:
PC developers are being forced to make more dramatic decisions in the face of overwhelming piracy, an issue that Cevat Yerli, CEO of Crysis developer Crytek, recently enumerated at one legitimate copy to every twenty pirated. […] Yes, I think Cevat is inflating his 20 to 1 statistic, but he’s probably not nearly as far off as you or I might think. Looking at arguably one of the largest P2P torrent sharing sites on the web (no, I’m not going to link to it), and the number of Games torrents currently available, the evidence is absolutely damning. Despite PCs’ relative weakness in the marketplace, clearly in the backseat by orders of magnitude in relation to the next gen and handheld systems, it represents 50% of all torrents. Let me stress that – the number of illegal PC downloads are, at any given moment, equal to or greater than the illegal downloads for every other system combined. […] Here’s the bottom line: Yes, piracy is destroying PC gaming. That is an immutable truth, evidenced by the exodus of PC developers defecting en masse to make games for consoles. End of story.
I’m not prepared to offer an opinion one way or the other, but I have noticed the slowdown in the PC gaming market recently and wondered about why many developers were moving over the more secure gaming consoles. That doesn’t necessarily prove that piracy was the primary factor, but it certainly could be part of the explanation.
What do you think?
If you ask my colleague Jim Harper about his past, he’ll tell you a suspiciously plausible story about going to law school, working on the Hill, and so forth. This of course, is complete nonsense, as I’m learning from James Bamford’s Body of Secrets. It turns out that Jim has been intimately involved in espionage activities since the 1960s. From pp. 244-5:
A man with darting eyes was walking quickly up the sidewalk on Sixteenth Street in northwest Washington. A dozen blocks behind him stood the North Portico of the White House. Just before reaching the University Club, he made a quick turn through a black wrought-iron fence that protected a gray turn-of-the-century gothic stone mansion. On the side of the door was a gold plaque bearing the letters “CCCP”—the Russian abbreviation of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
A few minutes later, Yakof Lukashevich, a slender Soviet embassy security officer with stiff, unruly hair, greeted the man. “I want to sell you top secrets,” the man impatiently told the Russian. “Valuable military information. I’ve brought along a sample.” With that, he reached into the front pocket of his jacket and handed Lukashevich a top secret NSA keylist for the U.S. military’s worldwide KL-47 cipher machine. With it, and the right equipment, the Russians would be able o break one of America’s most secret cipher systems. “My name is James,” the man said. “James Harper.” It was the beginning of a long and profitable relationship. Within weeks Harper would be selling the Soviets keylists for the KW-7, a cipher system more modern and secret than the KL-47. Over the KW-7 passed some of the nation’s most valuable information.
So when Jim writes about effective and ineffective ways to conduct surveillance, we should pay attention, because he writes from first-hand experience.
TLF readers may have heard that Google was craftily censoring my free-market colleagues at the Progress & Freedom Foundation. Our good friend and invaluable TLF commenter Richard Bennett blogged over the weekend about how Google seemed to block access to our site when he tried to search for “net neutrality.”
This is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. Google is blocking net neutrality documents from the PFF’s web site, but documents in the same format that deal with other subjects are not flagged “dangerous.”
This is really outrageous, and a clear example of the problem with a monopoly gatekeeper.
This story made the rounds this morning and much of the DC Internet policy community was atwitter with allegations of censorship by Google. But as I explain in the comment I tried (unsuccessfully) to post on Richard’s blog, this is all an innocent and unfortunate misunderstanding: Continue reading →
A few days ago, I posted an essay about the recent history of “moral panics,” or “technopanics,” as Alice Marwick refers to them in her brilliant new article about the recent panic over MySpace and social networking sites in general.
I got thinking about technopanics again today after reading the Washington Post’s front-page article, “When the Phone Goes With You, Everyone Else Can Tag Along.” In the piece, Post staff writer Ellen Nakashima discusses the rise of mobile geo-location technologies and services, which are becoming more prevalent as cell phones grow more sophisticated. These services are often referred to as “LBS,” which stands for “location-based services.”
Many of phones and service plans offered today include LBS technologies, which are very useful for parents like me who might want to monitor the movement of their children. Those same geo-location technologies can be used for other LBS purposes. Geo-location technologies are now being married to social networking utilities to create an entirely new service and industry: “social mapping.” Social mapping allows subscribers to find their friends on a digital map and then instantly network with them. Companies such as Loopt and Helio have already rolled out commercial social mapping services. Loopt has also partnered with major carriers to roll out its service nationwide, including the new iPhone 3G. It is likely that many other rivals will join these firms in coming months and years.
These new LBS services present exciting opportunities for users to network with friends and family, and it also open up a new world of commercial / advertising opportunities. Think of how stores could offer instantaneous coupons as you walk by their stores, for example. And very soon, you can imagine a world were many of our traditional social networking sites and services are linked into LBS tools in a seamless fashion. But as today’s Washington Post article notes, mobile geo-location and social mapping is also raising some privacy concerns:
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According to the Associated Press, FCC Chairman Kevin Matin will circulate an order recommending enforcement action against Comcast “for violating agency principles that guarantee customers open access to the Internet.” Reports the AP,
Mr. Martin’s order would require Comcast to stop its practice of blocking, provide details to the commission on the extent and manner in which the practice was used and give consumers detailed information on how it planned to manage its network in the future.
Plain and simply put, the FCC has no authority to enforce a non-binding policy statement. If you’d care for the details, I dissected the issue at length in this comment to the FCC in its still-unresolved net neutrality proceeding. The take-away is this: In order for a rule to have the force of law, it must have been enacted in accordance with the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires notice to the public and an opportunity for comment and publication of the rule in the Federal Register. The Commission’s August 5, 2005 Internet Policy Statement that Martin is now trying to enforce was neither the result of notice-and-comment rulemaking, nor was it published in the Federal Register.
It may or may not be wise to promulgate the contents of the Internet Policy Statement as a binding legislative rule, and we can debate that when it’s proposed. But there must be an opportunity for input and a binding vote needs to take place before anyone can be held accountable to a statement.
As the D.C. Circuit in Batterton v. Marshall put it, the purpose of requiring notice and comment is “to reintroduce public participation and fairness to affected parties after governmental authority has been delegated to unrepresentative agencies.” The court quoted the legislative history of the APA stating that because of the unrepresentative nature of a regulatory agency, “public participation . . . in the rulemaking process is essential in order to permit administrative agencies to inform themselves, and to afford safeguards to private interests.”
Jeff Eisenach, Chairman of Criterion Economics, and I have just released a new article about the perils of a la carte regulation in the Federalist Society’s journal Engage. In “A La Carte Regulation of Pay TV: Good Intentions vs. Good Economics,” we argue that: “From a policy perspective, a la carte regulation is worse than a solution in search of a problem; it is a problem waiting to happen.” We show that the pay TV marketplace is functioning quite efficiently and that consumers have more choices and content diversity at their disposal than ever. A la carte mandates, we argue, would destroy that diversity and likely put pressure on prices to go up, contrary to the goals of the backers of a la carte.
We also discuss how a la carte is being proposed a tool of social regulation / speech control, with backers labeling it a way of “cleaning up cable.” We explain why that is not going to work and why, even if it did, it would be a betrayal of the First Amendment.
This new article can be found online here.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.