2010 — Page 23

Birgitta Jónsdóttir on the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative

by Jerry Brito on August 10, 2010 · 0 comments

This week on the podcast, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Member of the Icelandic Parliament for the Movement party, and one of the chief sponsors of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, discusses the initiative. She explains how it was crafted, who it would protect and how, and Wikileaks’ influence on it. Jónsdóttir specifically discusses the proposal’s impact on journalists, sources, whistleblowers, libel tourism, superinjunctions, freedom of information, prior restraint, and government transparency. She also talks about the inspiration behind the initiative, which stems partly from her background as a writer and activist, and her path to the Icelandic Parliament.

Related Readings

Icelandic Modern Media Initiative
“Iceland aims to become a legal safe haven for journalists”, guardian.co.uk
“What will Iceland’s new media laws mean for journalists?”, Nieman Journalism Lab
“No Secrets: Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency”, The New Yorker
Birgitta Jónsdóttir official blogspot

Do check out the interview, and consider subscribing to the show on iTunes. Past guests have included Clay Shirky on cognitive surplus, Nick Carr on what the internet is doing to our brains, Gina Trapani and Anil Dash on crowdsourcing, James Grimmelman on online harassment and the Google Books case, Michael Geist on ACTA, Tom Hazlett on spectrum reform, and Tyler Cowen on just about everything.

So what are you waiting for? Subscribe!

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Software Patents in Business History

by Jim Harper on August 10, 2010 · 1 comment

Reading the 2002 edited volume, From 0 to 1: An Authoritative History of Modern Computing, I came across an interesting history of the first software patent—a business history, as opposed to a legal history. I hadn’t seen this anywhere before, so I’ll recount it here.

Luanne Johnson, president (now co-chair) of the Software History Center, tells the story of Martin A. Goetz at Applied Data Research (ADR), a Princeton, New Jersey company founded in 1959 to sell computer programming services.

In 1964, computer manufacturer RCA approached ADR about writing a flowcharting program that RCA would provide to users of its RCA 501 computer at no cost. ADR designed and wrote the program, AUTOFLOW, and offered it to RCA for $25,000. But RCA didn’t want it at that price. Marty Goetz then went to work on a different approach to recouping the $10,000 his company had laid out to write AUTOFLOW.

There were only hundreds of companies using the RCA 501, to whom he might have sold directly. So, seeing a larger market among users of the IBM 1401, Goetz and his colleagues re-wrote AUTOFLOW for that computer. They ultimately produced superior flowcharting software to what IBM offered its customers. AUTOFLOW was capable of flowcharting the logical sequence of existing software, easing the design of software to compliment what was already in use on IBM machines. Writes Johnson: Continue reading →

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NYT “Room for Debate” on Verizon-Google

by Jim Harper on August 9, 2010 · 3 comments

The nice folks at the New York Times “Room for Debate” feature asked me and a group of bright lights to discuss the Verizon-Google agreement on network neutrality regulation, as it stood at various points in the day.

Read the comments of Tim Wu, Lawrence Lessig, David Gelernter, Ed Felten, Jonathan Zittrain, and myself. Much of my comment owes credit to Tim Lee’s excellent paper “The Durable Internet.”

We’re all over the place, folks . . .

Update: Late addition: Gigi Sohn.

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What Do Prince and H.R. 1586 Have in Common?

by Jim Harper on August 9, 2010 · 3 comments

Give up?

Both have adopted highly unconventional names in their lifetimes. In Prince’s case, it was the adoption of a symbol to protest Warner Brothers’ artistic and financial control of his output.

Following suit, H.R. 1586 has adopted the name, the “______Act of____,” apparently because of the haste with which the Senate wanted to pass the bill last week.

The Senate’s substitute amendment on this $26 billion spending bill had a placeholder bill name, and it could not take time to replace the placeholder. The House is expected to return this week and pass the Senate amendment, sending it to the president.

As reported on the WashingtonWatch.com blog and cnet news, this highly unconventional name may be what goes into law. With the Senate out of town until September, there is no chance to pass a correcting amendment in both houses. The constitution requires both to pass identical bills, so the House must take up the “______Act of____” and pass it as such.

If it does, the “law with no name” will stand as a lasting tribute to the inattention Congress gives its work. Spending billions of taxpayer dollars is a hurried and casual affair for our lawmakers.

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Net Neutrality & the First Amendment

by Adam Thierer on August 8, 2010 · 6 comments

There are few things I find more annoying in the Net neutrality wars than the silly assertion by groups like Free Press and other regulatory radicals that “Net neutrality is the Internet’s First Amendment.” It’s utter rubbish as I have documented here many times before. But now Sen. Al Franken is running around sputtering such nonsense, as he did in this recent CNN.com editorial, claiming that “Net neutrality is foremost free speech issue of our time.” The folks at CNN invited me to response and below you will find the piece PFF press director Mike Wendy and I submitted.

____________

“Big Government the Real Threat to Internet”

by Adam Thierer & Mike Wendy

In his recent CNN.com opinion piece, “Net neutrality is foremost free speech issue of our time,” Sen. Al Franken claims that “our free speech rights are under assault — not from the government but from corporations seeking to control the flow of information in America.”

He alludes to potential corporate blocking of online products and speech and says, “If that scares you as much as it scares me, then you need to care about net neutrality.”

Chicken Little, call your office!

Such sky-is-falling scare tactics are all too common in the heated debate over net neutrality regulation, but actual evidence of such nefarious corporate scheming is nowhere to be found. Perhaps that’s why Franken resorts to such tall tales.

Moreover, his reading of the First Amendment is at odds with the one most of us learned about in civics class (“Congress shall make no law…”). His would empower regulators by converting the First Amendment from a shield against government action into a sword that bureaucrats could wield against private industry. Continue reading →

6 comments

The Great Privacy Debate on WSJ

by Jim Harper on August 7, 2010 · 16 comments

I have a piece on Internet privacy in the Wall Street Journal today. It’s one side of a “debate” on Internet privacy and tracking. I say be careful what you give up if you thwart online tracking—personalization, free content, and other goodies may go by the wayside.

My “opponent” is Nicholas Carr, whose identity and arguments I didn’t know as I wrote, nor likely did he mine. His is a good piece that lays out the many legitimate concerns with online tracking. Must be nice to be the maximal-privacy “good guy”!

For the sake of making it interesting I’ll pick out one important point that highlights the nub of the issue.

Privacy tradeoffs have always been a part of life, Carr says, “But now, thanks to the Net, we’re losing our ability to understand and control those tradeoffs—to choose, consciously and with awareness of the consequences, what information about ourselves we disclose and what we don’t.”

This sentence brought back to me a memorable moment from law school. In a seminar course, the professor called upon a fellow student who rather dopily apologized, “Sorry, I didn’t have time to do the reading.”

“In fact you did have time to do the reading,” replied the teacher, “but you just didn’t take it. Isn’t that correct?”

It was funny, if embarrassing for my colleague, and a great illustration of precision with language.

Holding to that standard of precision, I’ll disagree with Carr’s statement: The Net is not affecting our ability to understand and control privacy tradeoffs. Its development has outstripped that capacity. Developing consumers’ understanding of information flows, information uses, and consequences will position them to restore privacy.

I don’t think Carr would disagree with that sentiment in the main. Later he says, agreeably to me, “We need to take personal responsibility for the information we share whenever we log on.”

And I do think that’s the heart of the problem: “Education is the hard way, and it is the only way, to get consumers’ privacy interests balanced with their other interests.”

16 comments

book review: Cyber War by Clarke & Knake

by Adam Thierer on August 6, 2010 · 4 comments

While on vacation last week, I finished up a few new cyber-policy books and one of them was Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake. The two men certainly possess the right qualifications for a review of the subject. Clarke was National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism during the Clinton years and also served in the Reagan and two Bush administrations. Knake is an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations where he specializes in cybersecurity.

Clarke and Knake’s book is important if for no other reason than, as they note, “there are few books on cyber war.” (p. 261) Thus, their treatment of the issue will likely remain the most relevant text in the field for some time to come.

They define cyber war as “actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage or disruption” (p. 6) and they argue that such actions are on the rise. And they also claim that the U.S. has the most to lose if and when a major cyber war breaks out, since we are now so utterly dependent upon digital technologies and networks.

At their best, Clarke and Knake walk the reader through the mechanics of cyber war, who some of the key players and countries are who could engage in it, and identify what the costs of such of war would entail. Other times, however, the book suffers from a somewhat hysterical tone, as the authors are out here not just to describe cyber war, but to also issue a clarion call for regulatory action to combat it. Ryan Singel of Wired, for example, has taken issue with the book’s “doomsday scenario that stretches credulity” and claims that “Like most cyberwar pundits, Clarke puts a shine on his fear mongering by regurgitating long-ago debunked hacker horror stories.” Bruce Schneier and Jim Harper have raised similar concerns elsewhere.

Continue reading →

4 comments

Sunlight Before Signing Disappointment

by Jim Harper on August 6, 2010 · 0 comments

The Obama administration seems to be working to pull defeat from the jaws of victory on the president’s “Sunlight Before Signing” campaign promise. Whitehouse.gov sometimes posts bills as “pending” before they get out of Congress, when it’s premature to ask the public for a final review.

The problem is particularly acute today, as I note in a Cato@Liberty post:

H.R. 1586 is a “shell bill” that Congress has been batting back and forth, and it has covered various subject matters in its busy life. It indeed started out as a bill to tax the bonuses of executives in TARP-subsidized firms. When it passed the House, though, it had become the “Aviation Safety and Investment Act of 2010.” And this week it was amended in the Senate to contain a potpourri of spending and revenue programs. (WashingtonWatch.com cost estimate: $125 per U.S. family.)

Lets say a high schooler has been assigned by her teacher to monitor the bills President Obama receives from Congress. From the White House’s pending legislation page, she clicks on a link to find a bewildering hodgepodge of bill versions on the Thomas page for the bill. (Click on the image at right to see a screen capture.)

And none of the bill versions has passed Congress! Thomas, the Library of Congress’ legislative tracking service, tells visitors that the last bill listed is most recent. But the current version of the bill is item four of six, referrred to as the “XXXXXXAct ofXXXX.” Thanks to Whitehouse.gov, our high schooler is misled into believing that President Obama will soon sign a tax on bonsuses given to TARP-slurping executives when in fact a variety of other policies may soon pass.

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Join Us for pii2010 “Privacy Identity Innovation 2010” Conference in Seattle 8/17-19!

by Berin Szoka on August 6, 2010 · 1 comment

If you’re as fascinated as I am by the interplay of privacy, identity and innovation, I hope to see you at the pii2010 conference in Seattle, August 17-19! Organized by the folks who’ve put on the top-notch Tech Policy Summit since 2003, and co-sponsored by The Progress & Freedom Foundation (among others), this event offers a truly unique perspective on privacy—not just another policy food fight, but a true roll-up-our-sleeves, in-depth seminar on what to do about privacy, especially through technological innovation.

I’ll be on the “pii & Digital Advertising: Navigating the Regulatory Landscape” panel on the 18th at 10am, giving my usual talk about the need to be careful about the trade-offs inherent in privacy regulation. Check out the detailed agenda here.

TLFers Larry Downes and Carl Gipson will also be attending, so we’re planning a long-overdue “Alcohol Liberation Front” happy hour after the conference on August 18—details to be announced soon.

Check out the discussion around the #pii2010 hashtag on Twitter. And register today! Mid-August is supposed to be paradise in Seattle, and the week of the conference also happens to be Seattle GeekWeek, so there are a bunch of other events worth checking out in town before and after the pii2010 conference.