Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Jim is the Director of Information Policy Studies at The Cato Institute, the Editor of Web-based privacy think-tank Privacilla.org, and the Webmaster of WashingtonWatch.com. Prior to becoming a policy analyst, Jim served as counsel to committees in both the House and Senate.
Don’t miss Radley Balko’s run-down on recording law enforcement at work.
The challenge is out there for rights groups and coders: fine-tune camera technology and remote storage so that evidence of police and government-agent behavior remains under the control of citizens and available to the public and courts.
If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll see in among the last several weeks’ dreck some Tweets skeptical of various themes about the Tea Party movement—chiefly that they’re significantly racist/xenophobic, or that they’re handmaidens of figures like Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin.
I may have been bending over backwards to resist attempts to define the Tea Party movement. In secret, I’ve thought about parallels to punk rock, which seemed at times to have as many strains as people. Part of being punk was not fitting into anyone else’s categories, and the Tea Party seems to have this quality—rejecting Washington, D.C.’s party labels and ideological affiliations.
Well, I’ve finally come across a careful assessment of the Tea Party movement. National Journal‘s Jonathan Rauch spent a good deal of time studying the Tea Party movement and came up with the article (and video), “How Tea Party Organizes Without Leaders.”
The winner paragraph for me:
“Essentially what we’re doing is crowd-sourcing,” says Meckler, whose vocabulary betrays his background as a lawyer specializing in Internet law. “I use the term open-source politics. This is an open-source movement.” Every day, anyone and everyone is modifying the code. “The movement as a whole is smart.”
I do believe there is something special about the Tea Party movement. Somewhat like the Internet regards censorship as damage and routes around it, the Tea Party routes around centralizers’ attempts to capture its mojo.
There are plenty working to capture its mojo: Right-wing and Republican leaders are using it to aggrandize themselves, marching in front of the Tea Party for TV cameras and newspapers. Left-wing groups and progressives are searching for—and finding—the racism and xenophobia that unfortunately does exist in any large collection of average Americans. The decentralized character of the Tea Party movement makes it easy for charlatans to claim its mantle and fund-raise deceptively on the “Tea Party” brand.
There are some bad people in the Tea Party movement, just like there are some bad users of the Internet. But overall a self-organizing political/cultural network will produce better things—and faster—than a hierarchical organization.
I’d love to have the Tea Party movement push for exquisitely libertarian outcomes, and I regret hearing Tea Party participants veer into anything resembling racism, fear of Islam, or anti-immigration rhetoric, but I don’t get to own the Tea Party either.
If there is a theme that doesn’t unfairly push the Tea Party movement into a box, I think it’s “self-government.” It seems like Tea Partiers are tired of being told how to do their politics, tired of being told how their government is going to run them. On the whole, I’ll stand up for a network of people who think like that—but don’t try to push me into a box either.
Update: David Boaz has written an excellent post at Cato@Liberty about the Tea Party movement’s relationships to libertarianism and social conservatism.
I’m in front of a non-TiVo-enabled television this evening, which has permitted me to see ads for a search site called YP.com. It’s a rebranded YellowPages.com, affiliated with AT&T, and it’s organized to be a search engine for the things in your life—dining, travel nightlife—distinguished from Google’s utilitarian-tech web search. Meanwhile Microsoft’s Bing has overtaken Yahoo! as the number two search engine. I was surprised to learn that “undisputed search king” Google has only 65 percent of the search market. Google is doing well, of course, but it can’t be comfortable with all these well-funded rivals circling it.
This is good news for consumers. These competitors are driving Google to improve, and they can pull consumers away from Google by serving search niches such as lifestyle search (as YP does), more privacy protective search, and so on. Competitors will threaten and cut into Google’s advertising profits, too.
Television ads also remind us that HughesNet is offering broadband Internet via satellite. It’s mostly aimed at moving rural Internet users off of dial-up, but it’s an outlet for consumers anywhere who are unsatisfied with cable or DSL service. Critics will point out that it’s not very fast, kind of expensive, and includes daily usage caps. But this doesn’t deny HughesNet’s role as competition for cable and DSL.
Internet service provided badly enough by the major ISPs would make satellite broadband a viable competitor. If HughesNet’s investors were confident that they could sign up enough customers, they would make the investments that bring satellite broadband to the economy of scale it needs to be price-, speed-, and usage-competitive.
The spur of competition does not have to pierce the horse’s belly to have its effect.
J. C. R. Licklider (1915-1990) was early to expound on the potential of computing. His papers “Man-Computer Symbiosis” and “The Computer as a Communications Device” (both collected here) foresaw many of the uses we make of computers and the Internet today.
In Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet, Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon write about “Lick’s” vision for computing’s influence on society:
In a McLuhanesque view of the power of electronic media, Lick saw a future in which, thanks in large part to the reach of computers, most citizens would be “informed about, and interested in, and involved in, the process of government.” He imagined what he called a “home computer console” and television sets linked together in a massive network. “The political process,” he wrote, “would essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would be a months-long series of communications among candidates, propagandists, commentators, political action groups, and voters.”
My project WashingtonWatch.com is one of several efforts, however rudimentary, seeking to realize this vision. We’re working on it, Lick.
Washington Times reporter Shaun Waterman has a characteristically excellent article out today about U.S. cybersecurity authorities failing to secure their own systems.
According to a new report by government auditors, systems at the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), part of the Department of Homeland Security, were not maintained with updates and security patches in a timely fashion and as a result were riddled with vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit.
Time and again, people look to government intervention based on what they imagine government might do under ideal conditions. Real conditions produce far weaker results.
We’re better off distributing the problem of data, network, and computer security among all the self-interested actors in the country—fallible as they are. We should not abandon the problem to a central authority whose failure fails us all.
Individuals, shadowy criminal organizations, and nation states all now have the capacity to devastate modern societies through computer attacks.
It’s simply not true.
The author must not know the meaning of “devastate,” which is, according to the handiest Web dictionary, “to lay waste; render desolate.”
There is no such capacity—anywhere—to do such damage through computer attacks, and the capacity of some actors to produce some inconvenience, to cause some economic harm, and perhaps to cause physical damage or injury—none of that justifies such a stupidly phrased sentence.
It’s the first line of the abstract to “An e-SOS for Cyberspace” by Temple University law professor Duncan Hollis. Almost certainly, given the overblown premise, it calls for overblown reactions.
This concludes my review of the first sentence of another fear-mongering cybersecurity paper.
Don’t miss the current issue of Cato Unbound, which explores the ideas in author James C. Scott’s essential book, Seeing Like a State. Scott’s opening essay, “The Trouble With the View From Above,” captures many of the ideas from the book.
I stumbled across Scott when I was researching my book on identification policy, Identity Crisis. As Scott observes, naming systems for people have been altered over time from vernacular to formal, the latter serving the needs of governments and large institutions. The next step in the process is numbering (well underway, the Social Security number) and full-fledged national ID and possibly world ID systems. Such systems would be used to peg humans into their place in governmental, economic, and social machinery, obviously at a high cost to liberty and social mobility.
Twice in the paragraph above I used the passive voice to hide the actor. It was governments, of course, that pushed formal naming systems, but both governments and corporations will use our increasingly formalized and machine-processable naming systems to assign people their roles. Scott is far from a libertarian battler against government power, and he specifically disclaims having Hayekian aims in his book. This makes it all the more powerful and opens the door to interesting pathways of thought, parallels between corporate environmental destruction and government intervention in economic life, for example.
I’m keen to see the comments that follow Scott’s essay, from George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux; Brad Delong of UC Berkeley; and TLF alum Timothy B. Lee, a Cato adjuct and scholar at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Cato Unbound. Go.
Stung by criticism of its site as the “worst in government”—that mighta been Jerry Brito talking—the FCC has rolled out a new set of sites under a “Reboot” brand.
When I first saw the presentation on it at today’s Gov 2.0 Summit, I thought that the FCC has merely redone its web site, but it appears to be releasing data that can be re-purposed in any number of ways for true public oversight of the agency.
Developers, check out FCC.gov/developer and let us know what you think of it.
The Federal Trade Commission is looking for a computer scientist.
Have you always aspired to work at a “duty location”?
Do you think of yourself as a GS-1550-13/14 kinda guy or gal?
Then this is the gig for YOU!
I’ll be there, speaking on a privacy-focused panel entitled: “We Know What You Watch.”
Spooky!
There’s an interesting agenda and, as conferences go, this one seems to be pretty well organized. For example, they have a page of badges they encourage participants to use in promotions like this one. (What do you think of the one I selected?)
And they suggest the Twitter hashtags #openvideo and #ovc10.
Once again, New York TLFers, that’s the Open Video Conference, Oct. 1-2 at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
