As the Associated Press put it recently, “Talk of a New York tax increase just got a little, er, hotter.” But seriously, at a time when the nation is about to spend $787 billion on a so-called “stimulus,” new taxes on top of what we will already be paying is scandalous. New York is going to go through very hard times, and new taxes on digital downloads will only make things worse. In a recent story by NPR, the hosts noted that to avoid the tax, porn makers could just leave the state. Such a move might make local conservatives happy (although they are unhappy with the tax because they see it as legitimizing porn), but it would indeed push more businesses out of the state (as was the case with overstock.com) and ironically harm tax revenues in the long run.
The much anticipated site Recovery.gov has just been launched. It has been advertised by the administration as the place where stimulus spending will be completely disclosed to the public. As President Obama says in an introductory video on the home page, “once the money starts to go out to build new roads, modernize schools, and create new jobs, you’ll be able to see how, when and where it is spent” on the web site.
Reading the transparency and accountability portion of the stimulus bill today, however, I’m left with a few questions:
The House bill called for the creation of a site to be called Recovery.gov, but that was stripped out from the final legislation. Instead, the Act calls for the independent Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to create a website to house stimulus-related disclosures. Is the newly launched Recovery.gov that website? If so, is it indeed under the control of the independent Board? Right now the site’s content is certainly not independent of the president. If Recovery.gov is not the same thing as the legislatively created Board website, then won’t the launch of Recovery.gov serve to confuse citizens?
I don’t see any mandate in the legislation for deep reporting of how stimulus funding is spent. The Act requires fund recipients to report on a quarterly basis to the agencies from which they received funds (HUD, DoT, DoE, etc.) how they have spent the funds. Thirty days after receiving these reports, the Act requires agencies to publish not necessarily the recipient reports themselves, but “the information submitted in reports” publicly available on “a website.” That is, not necessarily on Recovery.gov or the board website (if they are separate sites).
Can we be assured that the full text of all recipient reports will be published? And can we be assured that they won’t be scattered across dozens of sites, but placed in a central and easy to access place?
Finally, how deep will the data go? The Board website mandated in the Act only requires the publication of “detailed information on Federal Government contracts and grants that expend covered funds” in the same fashion that USASpending.gov now employs. (Emphasis added.) The problem is that a federal grant could be $10 million to Miami from DoT for roads, and that’s it. There is no requirement that the city then publish its contractors and subcontractors on the Board site. This is a big gap; if the only that must be disclosed on the Board site is the contract or grant award, then the trail will run cold very quickly.
That said, there is a requirement for contractor and subcontractor reporting, but it comes in the recipient report mandate I explained in question 2, and like I said, there is no guarantee that we will get the full report data, nor that it will be centrally housed. Can we get that assurance?
As Recovery.gov and any other official stimulus accountability sites come on line, StimulusWatch.org and other will be looking to make the data useful to citizens. We can only do this, however, if the administration keeps its pledge to be transparent. Mr. President, just give us the data.
David Margolick has penned a lengthy piece for Portfolio.com about the AutoAdmit case, which has important ramifications for the future of Section 230 and online speech in general. Very brief background: AutoAdmit is a discussion board for students looking to enter, or just discuss, law schools. Some threads on the site have included ugly — insanely ugly — insults about some women. A couple of those women sued to reveal the identities of their attackers and hold them liable for supposedly wronging them. The case has been slowly moving through the courts ever since. Again, read Margolick’s article for all the details. The important point here is that the women could not sue AutoAdmit directly for defamation or harassment because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 immunizes websites from liability for the actions of their users. Consequently, those looking to sue must go after the actual individuals behind the comments which (supposedly) caused the harm in question.
I am big defender of Section 230 and have argued that it has been the cornerstone of Internet freedom. Keeping online intermediaries free from burdensome policing requirements and liability threats has created the vibrant marketplace of expression and commerce that we enjoy today. If not for Sec. 230, we would likely live in a very different world today.
Sec. 230 has come under attack, however, from those who believe online intermediaries should “do more” to address various concerns, including cyber-bullying, defamation, or other problems. For those of us who believe passionately in the importance of Sec. 230, the better approach is to preserve immunity for intermediaries and instead encourage more voluntary policing and self-regulation by intermediaries, increased public pressure on those sites that turn a blind eye to such behavior to encourage them to change their ways, more efforts to establish “community policing” by users such that they can report or counter abusive language, and so on.
Of course, those efforts will never be fool proof and a handful of bad apples will still be able to cause a lot of grief for some users on certain discussion boards, blogs, and so on. In those extreme cases where legal action is necessary, it would be optimal if every effort was exhausted to go after the actual end-user who is causing the problem before tossing Sec. 230 and current online immunity norms to the wind in an effort to force the intermediaries to police speech. After all, how do the intermediaries know what is defamatory? Why should they be forced to sit in judgment of such things? If, under threat of lawsuit, they are petitioned by countless users to remove content or comments that those individuals find objectionable, the result will be a massive chilling effect on online free speech since those intermediaries would likely play is safe most of the time and just take everything down. Continue reading →
Savvy TLF Readers probably realize that the TLF was preceded by the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front. I suspect neither group has much of a sense of humor (although I’m glad to see from their Wikipedia pages that neither organization appears to have actually killed anyone, despite their use of terrorist tactics).
A TLF reader just called my attention to another group that most definitely does have a sense of humor: the Beard Liberation Front. I also discovered the The Hamster Liberation Front through Google. Then there’s the classic People’s Liberation Front of Judea (or is it the Judean People’s Liberation Front?) from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian:
It’s my pleasure to welcome Wayne Crews to the TLF as a regular contributor. Wayne is the vice president for policy and director of technology studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. For about four years, Wayne and I worked together at the Cato Institute, where we spent most of our time debating the greatness of various guitarists in southern rock bands, the best Harley Davidson motorcycle designs of all time, and our favorite types of BBQ sauce. Oh, and we co-authored three books, dozens of papers, and countless op-eds together on various aspects of tech policy. But we didn’t let that distract us from those other, more important activities.
Wayne’s full bio can be found here. We very happy to have him join our merry band of cyber-libertarian rebels here on the Tech Liberation Front. Welcome Wayne!
I often ponder what the TLF is all about. Of course, our official mission is “keeping politicians’ hands off the ‘net and everything else related to technology.” You can read more on our “About Us” page. But this quote from Robert Heinlein‘s 1973 classic Time Enough for Love (among my top five favorite novels) really hits the nail on the head for me:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.”
“Man is the measure of all things,” said Protagoras of Abdera (c. 480-410 B.C.). So it is for me: technology is ultimately a means—indeed, the means—by which the condition of humanity is improved. By “liberating technology”—i.e., defending the freedom to innovate and to profit from bringing innovation to the marketplace—we’re all doing our small part to prevent “right-thinking people” from squelching the creative minority whose toils will sometday take the species to the stars.
I can’t wait to see what the coming decades will bring. In the words of the immortal 1970s rock band, Bachman-Turner Overdrive: You ain’t seen nothing yet!
(The full version of the video—not the embedded player—includes an ad to buy the song, a new YouTube feature. Heinlein would be proud.)
During my summer internship at CEI, a couple of us interns discussed the book Cato’s Robert Levy published last May, The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom. We looked at Levy’s list of the worst decisions and sent each other lists of our own. Now that I’m taking ConLaw, I feel as though the time has come to post my lists of the twelve worst and the twelve best Supreme Court decisions of all time. It is by no means an exhaustive list. My inclusion of different cases than Levy does not indicate that I disagree with his assessment that those decisions are terrible – just maybe not as bad as the ones I select.
Katzenbach v. McClung (1964). It was tough to decide which of the variouscases reading the Commerce Clause expansively enough to permit Congress to pass any law it desires, thus destroying the basis of the federal government as one of defined and limited powers to include. But McClung seems to be the most expansive in both its result and its holding.
What would it take to create a more secure Internet? That’s what John Markoff explores in his latest New York Times article, “Do We Need a New Internet?” Echoing some of the same fears Jonathan Zittrain articulates in his new book The Future of the Internet, Markoff wonders if online viruses and other forms of malware have gotten so out-of-control that extreme measures may be necessary to save the Net. Compared to when cyber-security attacks first started growing over 20 years ago, Markoff argues that:
[T]hings have gotten much, much worse. Bad enough that there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.
Like many others, Markoff fingers anonymity as one potential culprit:
The Internet’s current design virtually guarantees anonymity to its users. (As a New Yorker cartoon noted some years ago, “On the Internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog.”) But that anonymity is now the most vexing challenge for law enforcement. An Internet attacker can route a connection through many countries to hide his location, which may be from an account in an Internet cafe purchased with a stolen credit card. “As soon as you start dealing with the public Internet, the whole notion of trust becomes a quagmire,” said Stefan Savage, an expert on computer security at the University of California, San Diego.
Consequently, Markoff suggests that:
A more secure network is one that would almost certainly offer less anonymity and privacy. That is likely to be the great tradeoff for the designers of the next Internet. One idea, for example, would be to require the equivalent of drivers’ licenses to permit someone to connect to a public computer network. But that runs against the deeply held libertarian ethos of the Internet.
Indeed, not only does it run counter to the ethos of the Net, but as Markoff rightly notes, “Proving identity is likely to remain remarkably difficult in a world where it is trivial to take over someone’s computer from half a world away and operate it as your own. As long as that remains true, building a completely trustable system will remain virtually impossible.” I’ve spent a lot of timewriting about that fact here and won’t belabor the point other than to say that efforts to eliminate anonymity for the entire Internet would prove extraordinarily intrusive and destructive — of both the Internet’s current architecture and the rights of its users. There’s just something about a “show-us-you-papers,” national ID card-esque system of online identification that creeps most of us out. That’s why I spend so much time fighting age verification mandates for social networking sites and other websites; it’s the first step down a very dangerous road.
But what if we could apply such solutions in a narrower sense? That is, could we create more secure communities within the overarching Internet superstructure that might provide greater security? Markoff starts thinking along those lines when he suggests… Continue reading →
Micropayments are an idea that simply won’t die. Every few years, there’s a resurgence of interest in the idea. Critics predict they won’t work. The critics are then proved right, as companies founded to promote micropayments inevitably go belly-up.
The latest iteration comes courtsey of Time magazine, which recently saw fit to run a cover story about how micropayments will save newspapers. And Shirky once again steps up to the plate to explain why micropayments won’t work any better in 2009 than they did in 1996, 2000, or 2003. (I wrote up Shirky’s arguments here and here) But for my money, the best response to the Isaccson piece is at the Abstract Factory blog:
Why did Time’s editors choose to run this article, rather than, for example, an article by Shirky or Odlyzko or any number of people who would write something more clueful? I hypothesize two reasons. First, Time’s editors themselves do not have a clue, and also do not have any problem publishing articles on a subject they have no clue about. Second, look at the author blurb at the bottom of the article (emphasis mine):
Isaacson, a former managing editor of TIME, is president and CEO of the Aspen Institute and author, most recently, of Einstein: His Life and Universe..
When you’re a member of the club, your buddies will publish any old crap you write; better you than some stupid professor nobody knows. We’ve seen this before.
I mentioned irony earlier. Isaacson has filigreed the irony with extraordinary precision. His article is inferior to material produced for free online by people who draw their paychecks from other sources (Shirky and Odlyzko are both professors who also work(ed) in the private technology sector). Furthermore, it is inferior as a direct consequence of structural weaknesses of traditional magazines. Despite its inferior quality, it presumes its own superior status by ignoring or dismissing contributions to the discussion which occurred outside of traditional “journalistic” media. Finally, taking that superiority as a given, it argues, poorly, that people ought to pay money for products like itself, because (quoting Bill Gates) nobody can “afford to do professional work for nothing.”
In short, Isaacson’s article not only fails to make its case, it actively undermines its own case while doing so.
Bureaucrash has just posted a new round of libertarian lolcats. Many involve tech policy. Check them out if you’re in the mood for some feline-and-political-commentary-based hilarity!
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 →
Savvy TLF Readers probably realize that the TLF was preceded by the 
It’s my pleasure to welcome Wayne Crews to the TLF as a regular contributor. Wayne is the vice president for policy and director of technology studies at 
I often ponder what the TLF is all about. Of course, our official mission is “keeping politicians’ hands off the ‘net and everything else related to technology.” You can read more on our “
During my summer internship at 
The Worst:
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.