In this final installment, I thought I would just offer up a some further reading on the issue for those who might be interested in doing further research on the topic. Although it is certainly not an exhaustive list of all the relevant books and law review articles out there, below you find a bibliography of some of the very best material on the issue of the Pacifica case, the “pervasiveness doctrine,” and modern First Amendment jurisprudence. I’ve also embedded a Scribd version of a law review article I penned on these issues last year that ties together all my thinking on this front. It is called, “Why Regulate Broadcasting: Toward a Consistent First Amendment Standard for the Information Age.”
The most popular group on my.barackobama.com, the social networking service that lies at the heart of Barack Obama’s wildly successful online strategy, is now the one titled “Senator Obama – Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity – Get FISA Right.” Created just over a week ago, it now has 16883 members, up from about 7000 members 48 hours ago. That compares to “Action Wire” with 13488 members and “Students for Barack Obama” with just 8704 members.
Social media are a two-edged sword. On the one hand, if harnessed effectively it can be a devastatingly effective way to mobilize large numbers of people toward a common goal. But the flip side is that the people have to want to be harnessed in the direction you want to go. If you start to betray the principles that attracted all those thousands of enthusiastic volunteers in the first place, they’re able to use the same potent organizational tools to express their dissatisfaction.
Democrats have been running left for the primaries and right for the general election for decades. (And Republicans, of course have done the reverse) Until recently, there simply wasn’t much party activists could do about it. The only organization with the scale and resources to mobilize a candidates supporters was the candidate’s campaign itself, and the campaign obviously isn’t a vehicle for criticizing the candidate. So once a candidate had the nomination in hand, he could safely ignore his “base” and focus on courting centrist voters. Continue reading →
Sen. Obama and I faced off in the Kansas City Star last week over the FISA bill. Well, sort of. Here are Obama’s comments in defense of the legislation. And here is my response, lifted from this blog post. So we’ve got Sen. Obama defending the White House position on illegal surveillance, while I got tapped to defend civil liberties. Something to keep in mind next time someone accuses the Cato Institute of being a right-wing think tank.
Did you know that one of last year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in economics was a software patent critic? I didn’t. Looks like a good paper. I wish I’d noticed it back when Maskin’s Nobel prize was announced.
On Julian‘s recommendation, I’m reading Peter Swire’s The System of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Law, a good treatise on the basics of surveillance law. One of the things I didn’t realize is how rare non-FISA wiretapping actually is:
Comments I have heard in public from knowledgeable persons suggest that there has been ongoing expansion of who is considered an “agent of a foreign power.” Consider an individual who works in the United States for the Cali drug cartel. Is that person an “agent of a foreign power?” The Cali cartel is a highly organized group that physically controls a substantial amount of territory in Colombia. Given these facts, one might well argue that the Cali cartel is more of a “foreign power” than the amorphous Al Qaeda network. If one accepts the Cali cartel as a “foreign power,” and a major smuggler as an “agent of a foreign power,” would a street-level cocaine dealer also qualify as its agent? There is no clear line in the statute stating that the dealer would not be so considered. To take another example, what about the activities of the so-called “Russian mafia?” Many organized crime groups have links to overseas operations. How small can the links back home be to still qualify that group’s actions as on behalf of a foreign power?
These examples, it turns out, go to the heart of whether Title III will continue to be a significant part of the overall American system of electronic surveillance. The threat of organized crime was a principal justification in 1968 for the extraordinary intrusion of performing wiretaps under Title III. Over time, narcotics and organized crime cases have constituted the vast bulk of federal Title III wiretaps. In 2002, for instance, narcotics cases numbered 406 (81%) and racketeering cases fifty-nine (12%) of the 497 total federal wiretaps. Yet an expansion of the definition of “agent of a foreign power” could render Title III wiretaps almost obsolete. Many heroin, cocaine, and other drug cases are linked to imported narcotics. Many organized crime cases in this era of globalization have significant links to overseas activities. FISA orders already outnumbered Title III orders in 2003.302 If most drug cases and organized crime cases shift to the secret world of FISA, then the constitutional teachings of Katz and Berger may have little effect.
WASHINGTON, July 2 – Broadband growth in the United States has effectively stalled over the past five months, a possible victim of the economic slowdown, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Some 55 percent of all adult Americans now have a high-speed internet connection, or a broadband connection, in their home, according to the report, “Home Broadband Adoption 2008.”
That number compares with 47 percent of adult Americans with broadband in early 2007, and 54 percent in December 2007. Hence broadband growth over the previous 12 or 13 months has dramatically tapered off.
The growth rate in broadband adoption from 2007 to 2008 was 17 percent. That compares favorably to the 12 percent growth recorded in the 2006 to 2007 timeframe, according to Pew’s annual studies in 2007 and 2008. Continue reading →
[Note: This is the fifth in a series of essays about the legacy of the Supreme Court’s FCC v. Pacifica Foundation decision, which turns 30 this week. Here are parts 1, 2, 3, and 4. This installment is a joint editorial I released today with my friend John Morris, general counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology].
_______________
I don’t know how I missed it, but Reason‘s Ron Bailey had a great interview with libertarian entrepreneur Peter Thiel back in May. There’s a lot of discussion of the singularity, a concept I’m finding less coherent the more I think of it. The basic concept is that at some point computers will get powerful enough that we’ll be able to build machines that are smarter than the smartest human, and at that point history becomes unpredictable because the smarter-than-human robots will start doing things that we can’t understand with our puny human brains.
It seems to me that this story has three really serious problems. Continue reading →
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.