I’m hoping to get some input from readers as I look to finish up an amicus brief for the forthcoming Schwarzenegger v. EMA video game case. (Respondent briefs are due in mid-Sept and the State of California just filed its brief with the Court today). You will recall that the Supreme Court accepted the case for review in April, meaning it will be the first major case regarding video game speech rights heard by our nation’s highest court. It raises questions about the First Amendment status of games and what rights minors have to buy or play “violent” video games. One section I hope to include in the brief I’m working on deals with how other forms of media content are increasingly intertwined with video game content. In it, I explain how video games are less of a discreet category of visual entertainment than they once were. I’d welcome ideas for other examples to use relative to the ones you see below.
I begin by discussing games that were inspired by major motion pictures, such as both the recent Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movie trilogies, for example. I also note that many games were inspired by notable books, such as the LotR games being inspired by Tolkien, and The Godfather video games that were inspired by Mario Puzo’s novel of the same name. I also make mention of The Terminator movies starring California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, which inspired a wide variety of video games, many of which featured his likeness.
More importantly, I highlight how many video games are now inspiring movies, music, books, and comics, including: Prince of Persia, Max Payne, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, Doom, Final Fantasy, Halo, and Gears of War. The characters and storylines in the books, comics, and movies based on these games often closely track the video games that inspired them. Increasingly, therefore, games are developed along parallel tracks with these other forms of content. Thus, to regulate games under the standard California proposes in this case raises the question of whether those other types of media should be regulated in a similar fashion. Should every iteration of the original game title be regulated under the standard California has suggested if those books, comics, or movies contain violent themes?
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. . . when you realize how much data it can give up to law enforcement and phone thieves. Or maybe one of you smarties will write an app that wipes your iPhone clean, restoring your control over personal and private communications information.
Today, China renewed Google’s license to do business in the country, reports The Washington Post. The announcement means that Google will maintain its presence in the country for the foreseeable future. Google will likely meet criticism, but this is good news nonetheless for Chinese Internet users.
The rapidly unfolding Google-China saga has made headline after headline since January, when Google announced that it had suffered an intrusion originating in China. In March, after months of internal debate and heavy public criticism, Google shut down its China-based search engine Google.cn, redirecting all queries to its Hong Kong-based Google.com.hk site. Late last month, Google reactivated some of its China-based services and has continued to operate in China, albeit on a limited basis.
Operating in China has long been a headache for Google, due to the Chinese government’s notorious disregard for Internet freedom, embodied by its infamous “Great Firewall of China.” China surveils all Internet traffic that traverses its borders and attempts to block its citizens from accessing information sources which the government considers unfavorable. China also gleans data from its network to identify and retaliate against political dissidents.
Human rights advocates have long derided Google and other U.S. tech companies, such as Microsoft and Yahoo, for doing business in China. China requires all search engines operating in the country to censor a broad range of information, like photos of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Critics contend that complying with the Chinese government’s oppressive demands is unethical and that facilitating censorship and suppression is morally unacceptable on its face.
Such criticisms, however principled, miss the forest for the trees. If Google were to cease its Chinese operations entirely, the result would be one less U.S. Internet firm accessible to Chinese citizens. While Google is the worldwide search leader, in the Chinese search market Google lags behind Baidu, a search company based in China. Baidu’s market share increased after Google shut down its China-based search site. If Google were to pull out of China entirely, chances are Baidu would pick up many more users.
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I haven’t said a lot about Google picking up wifi signals as it gathered imagery for its helpful Street View service, but the group “Consumer Watchdog” is doing cartwheels and handstands to try and generate interest in it. In my opinion, they’ve gone a little too far, and now—as have so many before—they will learn to fear my blog post.
This release from CW’s “corporateering” section is misleading in several ways. Take this, for example:
Google now admits that its Street View cars snooped on private WiFi networks as they prowled streets in thirty countries photographing people’s homes over the last three years. The company acknowledges it recorded communications it picked up from unencrypted WiFi networks.
To say “Google now admits” suggests that Google covered it up. Wrong. Google came forward with the information as soon as it discovered its mistake.
Is it “private WiFi networks” from which Google picked up data? The concepts and terminology are unclear to many, but the “private” characterization is misleading.
Many of these networks were privately owned, no doubt, but the question is whether they were configured to conceal the data being transmitted on them. They were not. Information was sent out in the clear (i.e. unencrypted) on these networks. And it was sent out by radio.
We should go into that: Continue reading →
If you are an avid reader of everything Clay Skirky pens — and I’m going to assume most readers of this blog are — then the chapters you’ll find in his new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, will seem quite familiar. In fact, as I was working my way through the book, I was reminded of a piece of advice my old boss David Boaz gave me once (but that I foolishly ignored several times over): Sometimes there’s no need to write a book when a good article with suffice.
We’ve seen or heard most of the material in Cognitive Surplus many times before and I think we got the point: The Internet and digital technology has freed up an enormous amount of time for more productive / worthwhile endeavors that was previously squandered — most by too much coach potato television consumption. He spells out his thesis a bit more eloquently on pg. 63:
The harnessing of our cognitive surplus allows people to behave in increasingly generous, public, and social ways, relative to their old status as consumers and couch potatoes. The raw material of this change is the free time available to us, time we can commit to projects that range from the amusing to the culturally transformative. […] Flexible, cheap, and inclusive media now offers us opportunities to do all sorts of things we once didn’t do. In the world of “the media,” we were like children, sitting quietly at the edge of a circle and consuming whatever the grown-ups in the center of the circle produced. That has given way to a world in which most forms of communication, public and private, are available to everyone in some form. (p. 63)
Shirky spends 200+ pages here trying to bolster that claim in various ways. But, again, I’m not sure he needed to. I think he had most of us at “hello.” The notion that the Net has made us and our culture better off seems fairly uncontroversial to most of us. Of course, one could argue, as Jonah Lehrer or Wired Magazine has, that “the consumption of culture is not always worthless,” and that just because the Internet and digital technologies have empowered the audience to talk back doesn’t mean they’ll have anything all that much more interesting to say. Lehrer’s critique of Shirky continues: Continue reading →
Congressmen working on national intelligence and homeland security either don’t know how to secure their own home Wi-Fi networks (it’s easy!) or don’t understand why they should bother. If you live outside the Beltway, you might think the response to this problem would be to redouble efforts to educate everyone about the importance of personal responsibility for data security, starting with Congressmen and their staffs. But of course those who live inside the Beltway know that the solution isn’t education or self-help but… you guessed it… to excoriate Google for spying on members of Congress (and bigger government, of course)!
Consumer Watchdog (which doesn’t actually claim any consumers as members) held a press conference this morning about their latest anti-Google stunt, announced last night on their “Inside Google” blog: CWD drove by five Congressmen’s houses in the DC area last week looking for unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. At Jane Harman’s (D-CA) home, they found two unencrypted networks named “Harmanmbr” and “harmantheater” that suggest the networks are Harman’s. So they sent Harman a letter demanding that she hold hearings on Google’s collection of Wi-Fi data, charging Google with “WiSpying.” This is a classic technopanic and the most craven, cynical kind of tech politics—dressed in the “consumer” mantle.
The Wi-Fi/Street View Controversy
Rewind to mid-May, when Google voluntarily disclosed that the cars it used to build a photographic library of what’s visible from public streets for Google Maps Street View had been unintentionally collecting small amounts of information from unencrypted Wi-Fi hotspots like Harman’s. These hotspots can be accessed by anyone who might drive or walk by with a Wi-Fi device—thus potentially exposing data sent over those networks between, say, a laptop in the kitchen, and the wireless router plugged into the cable modem.
Google’s Street View allows you to virtually walk down any public street and check out the neighborhood Continue reading →
Reliable national security reporter Siobhan Gorman at the Wall Street Journal has broken a story about an Internet surveillance program called “Perfect Citizen” to be managed by the National Security Agency.
Reading about it is frustrating, and for me blame quickly settles on Congress. Our legislature is utterly supine before the national security bureaucracy, which exaggerates cybersecurity threats and consistently uses the secrecy trump card to defy oversight.
If there is to be a federal government role in securing the Internet from cyberattacks, there is no good reason why its main components should not be publicly known and openly debated. Small parts, like threat signatures and such—the unique characteristics of new attacks—might be appropriately kept secret, but no favor is done to any potential attackers by revealing that there is a system for detecting their activities.
A cybersecurity effort that is not tested by public oversight will be weaker than ones that are scrutinzed by private-sector experts, academics, security vendors, and watchdog groups.
Benign intentions do not control future results, and governmental surveillance of the Internet for “cybersecurity” purposes may warp over time to surveillance for ideological and political purposes.
These abstract criticisms of “Project Citizen” are all that publicly available information allows. Far better would come from me and others more qualified if Congress were to do its job.
Congress owes it to us, the United States’ true citizens, to have public hearings on “Perfect Citizen.” Congress should reject broad assertions of secrecy so that the whole body politic can participate in securing our country from all threats.
Congressional and public oversight—searching oversight that tests assumptions and asks hard questions—would strenghten any government cybersecurity effort we find warranted. It would also ameliorate the threat of such programs to our civil liberties, democratic processes, and privacy.
Join The Progress & Freedom Foundation and the law firm of Hogan Lovells LLP for a luncheon discussion (12-2 pm) on trans-national regulation and litigation of defamation, hate speech, indecency and political dissent on the Internet. Our own Adam Thierer will moderate a panel of cyberlawyers including:
Hope to see you at Hogan Lovells (555 13th Street NW Washington, D.C.) at noon on Wednesday, July 14. Space is limited, so please register here.
The Federal Communications Commission has an open proceeding in which it seeks advice on how to repurpose universal service subsidies for phone service in high cost areas to subsidize broadband instead. The FCC apparently wants to subsidize broadband with a minimum download speed of 4 megabytes per second (mbps) and upload speed of 1 mbps. These are the goals proposed in the commission’s National Broadband Plan.
I’m no lawyer, but I wonder if the FCC can do this legally. Section 254 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 lays out criteria the FCC is supposed to consider when it decides whether to provide universal service subsidies for new services in addition to phone service. One of the criteria is that the new service must be subscribed to by a “substantial majority” of residential consumers.
Sixty-five percent of Americans have broadband at home. (National Broadband Plan, p. 167) But a minority of residential customers subscribe to broadband that meets the FCC’s 4 mbps/1 mbps definition. According to the FCC’s Omnibus Broadband Initiative technical report on the “Availability Gap” (p. 43), 48 million subscribers have download speeds of 4 mbps or higher. More subscribers – 53 million – have broadband download speeds of 3 mbps or lower. And 35 percent of Americans have no broadband at all. These figures imply that a “substantial majority” of Americans have not subscribed to broadband that meets the National Broadband Plan’s proposed definition.
Based on figures in the technical report, I calculated that approximately 59 percent of Americans subscribe to broadband with a download speed of 768 kbps or higher. Perhaps this figure qualifies as a “substantial majority,” but surely the 4 mbps/1 mbps definition does not.
A reasonable person might also question whether even 59 percent counts as a “substantial majority” for the purpose of declaring broadband a service eligible for subsidy. Surely Section 254 requires a “substantial majority” in part to ensure that consumers who have chosen not to subscribe to a service do not bear the injustice of having to subsidize the provision of that service to others. It is clear from the FCC’s figures that most of the 35 percent of American households without broadband have it available but choose not to subscribe. Therefore, subsidizing even 768 kbps broadband would force many consumers to pay universal service assessments to provide others with a subsidized service that they themselves have decided is not worth the cost.
Wait and see how the FCC addresses this issue once it starts creating a universal service program for broadband.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.