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.
I wrote here a couple of months ago about the shady practice among a few Internet retailers of handing off customers who accept a “special offer” to a company that charges people a monthly fee for some kind of credit monitoring service. And I argued hopefully that maybe technologists and the Internet community could generate a response to this problem:
Being a smart, informed, and aggressive consumer is each person’s responsibility if a free market is to operate well. The alternative is a negative feedback loop in which government authorities protect us, we rely on that protection and stop policing retailers. Thereby we abandon the field of consumer protection to government authorities, who—try as they might—can never do as good a job for us as we can for ourselves.
The Senate Commerce Committee is having a hearing today on “Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and Their Impact on American Consumers.”
Adam has done yeoman’s work for years pointing out, and arguing against, the phenomenon of techno-panic as it relates to children. That’s not the only area in which techno-panic can tighten its grip on the neck of common sense and the constitution, of course.
But here’s a delight I ran across this morning: the Los Angeles Times arguing against techno-panic despite the use of Web sites to research and case potential burglary victims (by the “bling ring,” soon to be the subject of a major motion picture).
[T]hieves [did not] have to wait for the invention of Google maps to reconnoiter neighborhoods in search of easily accessible homes. That’s worth remembering if, as we fear, some legislator decides that a law should be passed to prevent Internet surfers from looking at houses they easily could scope out from the sidewalk. . . . . A law against photographing a home or what occurs outside it in plain sight — or disseminating the images to others — would be overreaching, not to mention unconstitutional.
What a delight—a major newspaper arguing to keep a hot issue in perspective and citing the constitution as a limit on government power! Thank you, L.A. Times.
I have ranted once or twice before about the regulatory requirement that Google—a search engine—post a link to a privacy notice on its home page.
Not all computers all places may see it, but Google appears to be experimenting with a bit of javascript that leaves the page blank but for the Google image and the search field until you roll your cursor over it. But they’re leaving the privacy notice (and a copyright notice) there, probably for fear that privacy advocates will yelp about a modern-day paperwork violation.
This provides an opportunity to see the difference between a world with privacy notice regulation and one without. One is cluttered and overlawyered. The other is pure and clean and fresh.
Take a look for yourself. Which do you prefer?
This?
Or this?
I think the answer is obvious. The only difference, mind you, is aesthetic. If Google were permitted to have a truly good looking Web site, users’ privacy would be no worse off for it because they don’t read privacy notices.
I have always regarded standard-setting organizations as serious players who take care to keep slightly boring the work of establishing uniformity in products and protocols. But a press release from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) may cause me to reassess.
[T]he Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA) and the REAL ID Act of 2005 require verification of identity prior to the issuance of birth certificates and driver’s licenses / ID cards, respectively. However, the IRTPA regulations have not yet been released even in draft form and the REAL ID regulations do not provide practical guidance on how to corroborate a claim of identity under different circumstances.
Folks, REAL ID repealed the identity security provisions in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. (It’s a good bet that regulations for a repealed law aren’t going to move out of draft form for a very long time, eh?) And REAL ID does not require verification of identity prior to issuance of birth certificates. What could that even mean?! “Hey you—little baby—let me see some ID before I issue you your birth certificate.”
The release repeats the tired mantra that 9/11 terrorists got U.S. identity documents—“some by fraud.” The 9/11 Commission dedicated three-quarters of a page to its identity recommendations—out of 400 substantive pages—and neither the commission nor anyone since has shown how denying people U.S. identity documents would prevent terrorism.
Are there needs for identity standards? Of course. And there are a lot of projects in a lot of places working on that. If an organization doesn’t know the law, and doesn’t know how the subject matter it’s dealing with functions in society, I don’t know how it could possibly be relied on to set appropriate standards.
ANSI should take a look at this subgroup and see if its work is actually competent. Judging by this press release, it’s not.
It’s a quiet, rainy evening at home for me tonight, and I chanced to watch a segment from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart dealing with ‘net neutrality regulation.
The segment’s title, typical of the show’s tenor these days, was, Duh, It’s So Obvious That the Administration is Right Again. Anyone Who Doesn’t Think So Is Just So Dumb. I Can’t Even Believe It.
Watching it, I noticed that a clip they used to show “krazy konservative TV people being obviously stupid” was the beginning of a segment I appeared in on Fox! See it, the first of the two clips, here. (“Well, Senator John McCain wants the government to keep its hands off the Innnterrnet.”)
But did they find some blundering overreach in my commentary? Somewhere in which I went a step too far, opening a flank to comedic ruin? No. The Daily Show people, having reviewed my segment, turned to mocking Phil Kerpen from Americans for Prosperity instead.
The obvious conclusion? What I said was too sensible to be lampooned—a tacit admission by Daily Show producers that I was right. Net neutrality regulation really is a transfer of power from consumers to Washington bureaucrats. Jon Stewart practically says so. Watch me again, getting it right, as confirmed by Jon Stewart.
Some people have labored under the impression that “net neutrality” regulation was about the government stepping in to ensure that large corporations would not control the Internet. Now that the issue is truly joined, it is clear (as exhibited in this Wall Street Journal story) that the debate is about one set of corporate interests battling another set of corporate interests about the Internet, each seeking to protect or strengthen its business model. The FCC is surfing the debate pursuing a greater role for itself, meaning more budget and power.
Tim Lee’s paper, The Durable Internet, dispells the idea that owners of Internet infrastructure can actually control the Internet. The better approach to “net neutrality” is to let Internet users decide what they want from their ISPs and to let ISPs and content companies do unmediated battle with one another to create and capture the greatest value from the Internet ecosystem. If the FCC were to reduce its power by freeing up more wireless spectrum—either selling it as property or dedicating it to commons treatment—competition to provide Internet service would strengthen consumers’ hands.
These are notions I have tried to get across in some recent television interviews, which you’ll find after the jump. Continue reading →
There was somebuzz earlier this year when the White House used the free, open-source Drupal content management platform for Recovery.gov. Now the administration’s marquee Web site Whitehouse.gov will be using it.
The AP story linked just above does a good job of recounting the benefits of open source in this application: chiefly, low cost and high security.
Arnold Kling wrote recently on the Library of Economics and Liberty blog relating the work Elinor Ostrom did to win the nobel prize in economics to how the Internet enables private provision of public goods—no regulation, little to no centralized authority at all.
Open source is nothing if not an example of that, and it’s good to see this use of open source joining many others across the big, beautiful Internet.
A large group of privacy advocacy groups and individuals sent a letter to the leadership of the House Homeland Security Committee today, suggesting that the role of Chief Privacy Officer at the Department of Homeland Security should be scrapped.
The DHS CPO has shown an extraordinary disregard for the statutory obligations of her office and the privacy interests of Americans. Outreach is certainly important, but the job of Chief Privacy Officer is not to provide public relations for the Department of Homeland Security. The job as defined in the statute is to protect the privacy of American citizens, through investigation and oversight. If an internal office cannot achieve this, then the situation calls for an independent office that can truly evaluate these programs and make recommendations in the best interests of the American public.
The current CPO, Mary Ellen Callahan, has not been on the job long enough to lay all these concerns at her feet, but the substance of the complaint is valid. Does the Privacy Office actually help protect privacy, or has it, over years, favored the paperwork function over privacy protection, falling into the role of apologist for DHS programs?
I serve on the DHS Privacy Committee, which advises the CPO. The views stated here, of course, are my own.
I wrote on Privacilla in 2001: “As a management matter, government privacy officers may become antagonistic to the agencies with whom they deal, and lose effectiveness, or they may be captured by agencies and become professional apologists for government erosion of privacy.”
And when I joined the committee four years later, I expressed my concern with the potential for co-option, saying in a Privacilla press release: “I have asked friends and family members to beat me up if I change or mute my advocacy for privacy, civil liberties, and freedom.”
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.