On the podcast this week, Daniel Solove, professor at the George Washington University Law School, discusses his new book Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security. He suggests that developments in technology do not create a mutually exclusive relationship between privacy and national security. Solove acknowledges the interest government has in maintaining security within our technological world; however, Solove also emphasizes the value of personal privacy rights and suggests that certain procedures, such as judicial oversight on governmental actions, can be implemented to preserve privacy. This oversight may make national security enforcement slightly less effective, but according to Solove, this is a worthwhile tradeoff to ensure privacy protections.
Related Links
Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security
I‘ve Got Nothing to Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy, by Solove
“No rights left to lose: Destroying privacy in name of security in the age of terror”, The Daily
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Today is the 33rd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark First Amendment decision, FCC v. Pacifica Foundation. By a narrow 5-4 vote in this 1978 decision, the Court held that the FCC could impose fines on radio and TV broadcasters who aired indecent content during daytime and early evening hours. The Court used some rather tortured reasoning to defend the proposition that broadcast platforms deserved lesser First Amendment treatment than all other media platforms. The lynchpin of the decision was the so-called “pervasiveness theory,” which held that broadcast speech was “uniquely pervasive” and an “intruder” in the home, and therefore demanded special, artificial content restrictions.
Back in 2008, when Pacifica turned 30, I penned a 6-part series critiquing the decision and discussing its impact on First Amendment jurisprudence:
In addition to those essays, I brought all my thinking together on this issue in a 2007 law review article, “Why Regulate Broadcasting: Toward a Consistent First Amendment Standard for the Information Age.” Importantly, this could be the last year we “celebrate” a Pacifica anniversary. Earlier this week, on the same day it handed down a historical video game free speech win, the Supreme Court announced that next term it will examine the constitutionality of FCC efforts to regulate “indecent” speech on broadcast TV and radio. Here’s hoping the Supreme Court takes the sensible step of undoing the unjust regulatory mess they created with Pacifica 33 years ago. Speech is speech is speech. Lawmakers should not be regulating it differently just because it’s on TV or radio instead of cable TV, satellite radio or TV, physical media, or the Internet. Continue reading →
It remains unclear how interested the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is in bringing a formal antitrust action against Google, but we at least know that inquiries have been made. I suspect these inquires are far more serious than whatever the agency is fishing for with its new Twitter inquires. After all, as I note in my latest Forbes column, “Google isn’t even a teenager yet (having only been founded in September 1998), but the firm’s rise has been meteoric and it has made a long list of enemies in the process. Practically every major player in the Digital Economy… is gunning for Google these days, both in the commercial and political marketplace.” In this sense, it’s not surprising the FTC might take a keen interest in the company with so many competitors complaining.
Still, I just can’t find much merit in an antitrust case against Google since, as I noted in my column, “The firm’s success seems tied to high quality products that users prefer over rival services. Importantly, barriers to entry are low: there’s nothing stopping new entrants from innovating and offering competing online services to match Google.”
Regardless, instead of arguing about the merits of an antitrust action against Google, let’s consider the more interesting, and I think intractable, question of remedies. Here’s what I had to say about that in my Forbes essay: Continue reading →
As we’ve noted here before, state and local politicians just love wireless taxes. They are going up, up, up. Dan Rothschild outlined this disturbing trend in his recent Mercatus Center paper making “The Case Against Taxing Cell Phone Subscribers,” and I discussed it in my recent Forbes essay lambasting the “Talking Tax.” Another new study by Glenn Woroch of the Georgetown University School of Business notes how “The ‘Wireless Tax Premium’ Harms American Consumers and Squanders the Potential of the Mobile Economy.” Woroch estimates that “the American consumer forgoes over $15 billion in surplus annually compared to when cell phones receive the
same tax treatment as other goods and service.” Read the entire study but I want to draw everyone’s attention to this chart that appears on page 7 of the report comparing state and local wireless taxes burdens to beer taxes. It really makes you realize just how drunk on wireless taxes are local lawmakers have become! [Click to enlarge. Red bar = wireless taxes.]
According to a report today from SAI Business Insider, “The Federal Trade Commission is actively investigating Twitter and the way it deals with the companies building applications and services for its platform.” Apparently the agency has reached out to some competing application / platform providers to ask questions about Twitter’s recent efforts to exert more control over the uses of its API by third parties. [The Wall Street Journal confirms the FTC’s interest in Twitter.]
It remains to be seen whether this leads to any serious regulatory action against Twitter by the FTC, but such a move wouldn’t necessarily be surprising considering the more activist tilt of the agency recently. It’s even less surprising considering that Columbia University law professor and prolific cyberlaw scholar Tim Wu was appointed as a senior advisor to the FTC earlier this year. When the announcement of Wu’s appointment was made, the Wall Street Journal kicked off an article with the warning, “Silicon Valley has a new fear factor.” It seems the Journal may have been on to something!
It’s impossible to know how much of an influence Tim Wu is having on the agency, but as I have noted here before, Prof. Wu is man with a healthy appetite for regulatory activism. [See all my essays about Wu’s work here.] Moreover, he’s a man who has already determined that Twitter is a “monopolist” in his November 13, 2010 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “In the Grip of the New Monopolists.”
That essay prompted a fiery response from me [“Tim Wu Redefines Monopoly“] as well as a far more reasoned essay by antitrust gurus Geoff Manne and Josh Wright [“What’s An Internet Monopolist? A Reply to Professor Wu.”] Prof. Wu was kind enough to swing by the TLF and respond to my criticisms in an essay “On the Definition of Monopoly,” which he said served as a “corrective” to my earlier essay [even though I continue to believe that what I said fairly reflected the last four decades of economic wisdom on competition policy and that it is Wu who is well off the reservation with his expansionist views of antitrust enforcement].
Regardless of what one thinks about that exchange, if the FTC is moving forward with a case against Twitter, three practical questions need to be considered: (1) What’s the relevant market? (2) Where’s the harm? and (3) What’s the remedy?
I’ll briefly discuss each question below but should also mention that I already explored many of these issues in my essay, “A Vision of (Regulatory) Things to Come for Twitter,” so I apologize in advance for the repetition. I will then discuss all this in the context of Tim Wu’s latest law review article on “Agency Threats” and what he approvingly refers to as regulatory “threat regimes.” 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.