Articles by Jim Harper

Jim HarperJim 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.


Sunlight Before Signing Disappointment

by 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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How to Make a $200 Million Movie

by on August 6, 2010 · 0 comments

Economize!

Uncle Jack from Futuristic Films on Vimeo.

HT: Bob

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Digital, Electronic, and Online—Each is Different

by on July 23, 2010 · 3 comments

The Economist has gotten on the wrong side of a favorite pet-peeve of
mine: confusing “digital” with “electronic.” Fear the blog post, Economist.

When I read in the story “Digitisation and Its Discontents” that the works of the Beatles are “scarcely available digitally,” I was struck. How does that square with the Beatles CD I have in my CD collection? All the others for sale on Amazon? Is this some mass bootleg operation?

No, what’s going on is that the Economist is confusing the words “digital” with “electronic” or “online.”

What digital means, in the context of modern technology and communications, is “converted to digital form,” as in a series of 1s and 0s that contain the meaning of the original analog version. The random online dictionary I just selected has “representing data as numbers” and “representing sound/light waves as numbers” as its top two definitions. It does allow “of e-commerce” as a third definition, but—ugh—I think we’d be smart to distinguish carefully between digital, electronic, and online, each of which mean different things.

Lots of Beatles works are available digitally—on CDs. Just now, I was waiting in line at the pharmacy staring intently at the prescription I was trying to fill—not because I’m near-sighted, but because it has a digital watermark in it, thousands of dots arranged in patterns. These dots are undoubtedly arranged to contain signals that will frustrate forgery of the prescription pads. This was information in digital form, but not electronic and not online.

Electronic means “using valves, transistors, or silicon chips” or, secondarily, “by computer.” If electricity is used in a communications process, it’s probably electronic, but that says nothing about whether it was digital or not. A bullhorn is electronic, but not digital, and it’s not online.

Online, of course, is “operating under the direct control of, or connected to, a main computer” or “connected by computer to one or more other computers or networks, as through a commercial electronic information service or the Internet.” Most online stuff is going to be digital and electronic, but lots of things that are digital and lots of other things that are electronic are not online. The Beatles works are available digitally, as are several of the other works discussed in the story. They’re just not available online yet.

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Coupla Cybersecurity Notes

by on July 19, 2010 · 7 comments

Check out national security reporter Shaun Waterman’s report on lapses in security using techniques that only recently became known as “social engineering.”

Ms. Sage’s connections invited her to speak at a private-sector security conference in Miami, and to review an important technical paper by a NASA researcher. Several invited her to dinner. And there were many invitations to apply for jobs.

“If I can ever be of assistance with job opportunities here at Lockheed Martin, don’t hesitate to contact me, as I’m at your service,” one executive at the company told her.

Then there’s former DHS policy official Stewart Baker’s unusually harsh attack on the “privacy lobby” and Wired reporter Ryan Singel at Volokh.com. The comments are good-quality and interesting.

Knowing how canny Baker is, I would guess that his unusually shrill tone is a ploy to start a fight that helps him sells more copies of his book. But maybe he’s just losing his cool.

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Google’s Lobby Shop Creates Need for Itself

by on July 14, 2010 · 1 comment

“Live by the sword, die by the sword.”

“Play with fire and you might get burned.”

Those are lines that sprung to my mind as I read this FT article noting how Google’s support for ‘net neutrality regulation has transmogrified into a push for “search neutrality.” Such regulation would be aimed directly at Google’s heart throat nuts business model.

(I was the first to discuss “search neutrality” here on TLF. Ignore Adam’s comment.)

But sloganeering is cheap. Let’s take a minute to try and understand why things like this happen to companies like Google.

First, I think, most executives—certainly executives in tech companies—don’t understand Washington at all. They have a gauzy impression that good people work for the betterment of public policy here.

Actually, that’s true. Just about everyone is good. And everyone is working for the betterment of public policy as they see it. The thing is, everybody sees the betterment of public policy as turning it to their own interests. Washington, D.C. is a war of all against all—each trying to grab the most stuff—using politics instead of clubs, knives, and guns.

Next, I think it’s important to recognize the incentives of the people who advise tech executives. They are people with families and mortgages. They want to have and keep a job. So what do they do? They encourage involvement in public policy. The public policy advisor who says “steer clear of Washington” may be giving better advice, but his consulting contract is small and its term is short.

The government relations/lobbying shop in a company like Google is part of a larger business, yes, but it is a small bureaucracy within the business. It doesn’t produce anything subject to competitive pricing, so (accounting practices notwithstanding) there is little way to measure its value. The fallback measure is activity—the more things happening, the more ‘valuable’ the lobbying shop. (Surprise me, Google, so famous for measurement, testing, and rigor in product development. Have you got a way to measure the true value produced by your lobbying shop, law department, accounting group, etc.?)

You see how the dynamics quickly get perverse. A public policy advisor or lobbyist makes him- or herself ‘valuable’ by getting the client into trouble.

Google is not in trouble. The FT story is premature, and it’s overstatement to say that Google has been “hoisted by its own petard.”

But imagine a controlled experiment in which another Google in a parallel universe didn’t draw attention to itself in Washington, D.C., didn’t push for conditions in the 700 MHz spectrum auction, didn’t advocate for ‘net neutrality regulation, and so on. That Google might not have created—or might have delayed—the need for a permanent lobbying/government relations cost center.

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You Might Quit Bragging About Your iPhone

by on July 12, 2010 · 2 comments

. . . 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.

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Consumer Watchdog Gets Creepy With Congress Trying to Make its “WiSpying” Case

by on July 9, 2010 · 6 comments

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 →

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“Perfect Citizen”: Congress’ Perfect Failure

by on July 8, 2010 · 3 comments

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.

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Watch it, Study it, Think About it, Watch it Again, Pass it Along

by on July 7, 2010 · 0 comments

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Obama Admin Implementing Sunlight Before Signing

by on July 2, 2010 · 2 comments

The phrase, “well, 26 times, but who‘s counting?” has 26 letters and numbers in it. Each one in this Cato@Liberty blog post about the Obama administration’s moves toward implementing Sunlight Before Signing is a link to another post about Sunlight Before Signing. I do like to entertain me.

Recall that President Obama promised on the campaign trail that he would post bills Congress sends him online for five days before he signs them. His early performance was not good, but he’s improving and Whitehouse.gov took major steps in the last few weeks to advance the ball.

There are now RSS feeds on Whitehouse.gov’s new “pending legislation” page—the stuff getting that sunlight—as well as on the “signed legislation” and “vetoed legislation” pages. Readers of this blog certainly know how feeds can propagate information.

As I said in my C@L post, “A habit of civic awareness can take root thanks to these RSS feeds . . . . We’ll have a more engaged, self-governing citizenry as a result.”

Won’t you help with that process by using these feeds yourself, and by promoting them to others by writing about the feeds, forwarding this post, reTweeting and so on?

Thanks!

Sincerely,
Democracy

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