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.
. . . in the communications world.
This recent TechKnowledge by James Plummer makes the case for more freedom in the use of the radio spectrum. This will bring more voices to the media marketplace, fostering competition and diversity in ideas and culture.
“Low-Power FM: Freedom is Diversity” concludes: “The FCC and Congress are both poised to further open up the FM spectrum. Both should ignore the pleadings of special interests on all sides as they do so. “
No.
Google stands accused of violating California law by failing to link to its privacy policy prominently enough. Linking to privacy policies on home pages was an experiment that failed long ago. People don’t read them. People who are interested in reading them can find them so long as they’re placed sensibly on the Web site.
What a strange kabuki dance, to fret about whether Google links to its privacy policy on its home page. Google does better than most – which is, in truth, only kinda good – at informing the public about its privacy practices and the privacy consequences of its products.
Move along. Nothing to see here.
Update: I’ve written a little bit more on this at Cato@Liberty.
Melissa Ngo has hung out her shingle as a privacy and information policy consultant, and she’ll be blogging about various privacy and civil liberties issues at PrivacyLives.com.
In her prior role as senior counsel and director of the Identification and Surveillance Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Melissa was a real credit to that organization. I especially appreciated her work on identification policy, national ID issues, and the REAL ID Act. She is as fluent in this field as anyone. (Now, we don’t agree on everything, of course, but wouldn’t that be boring?)
I’m glad she chose “Privacy Lives” for the name of her site, where she intends to “chronicle and analyze . . . attacks [on privacy] and various defenses against them to show that privacy lives on.” That’s an upbeat outlook, and it’s one I share. (Endlessly lamenting the privacy apocalypse must be so enervating! . . .)
Again, check out PrivacyLives.com. Good luck, Melissa!
Orin Kerr is a law professor at George Washington University and a blogger on the popular Volokh Conspiracy. He is a thoughtful, open-minded legal scholar, but I don’t think it’s unfair to say that he reliably sides with law enforcement on Fourth Amendment issues.
He recently posted a draft article defending the third-party doctrine, which is an interpretation of the Fourth Amendment holding that a person sharing information with a third party cannot make a Fourth Amendment claim to protection of that information. Use an ISP to transmit your email? No Fourth Amendment protection for its contents. Have a bank account? No Fourth Amendment protection for your banking records. Etc.
He treats as similar two issues that I see as separate: revelations gleaned from informants/agents and from business records. I have always thought of the third-party doctrine as being about business records. My remarks here apply to that area only.
I think the third-party doctrine was never right, and that it grows more wrong with each step forward in modern, connected living. Incredibly deep reservoirs of information are constantly collected by third-party service providers today. Cellular telephone networks pinpoint customers’ locations throughout the day through the movement of their phones. Internet service providers maintain copies of huge swaths of the information that crosses their networks, tied to customer identifiers. Search engines maintain logs of searches that can be correlated to specific computers and usually the individuals that use them. Payment systems record each instance of commerce, and the time and place it occurred. The third-party doctrine exempts law enforcement from the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness and warrant requirements when it looks at these records.
It’s wonderfully contrarian to run against the grain and defend the third-party doctrine, which has plenty of detractors, but sometimes contrarians can be wrong. I think Professor Kerr is, and here I’ll briefly lay out a few of the fundamental differences I have with his paper—all toward the end of perfecting it before it’s published in the Michigan Law Review next year, of course!
The basic gist of the article is that the third-party doctrine is better than most people think, for two reasons. First, it’s technologically neutral. It prevents criminals from making opportunistic use of technology to circumvent the basic balance between security and privacy struck by the Fourth Amendment. Second, it’s easier to administer than alternatives. The arguments against the third-party doctrine are weaker than most people believe, Kerr says.
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I was hoping to comment on a UK Libertarian Party blog post called “Car Crash Cato,” but the blogger.com comment function has never worked for me: The CAPTCHA doesn’t display and/or I’m supposed to sign up for and log in to something. Thanks – I’ve got enough logins.
The next first solution is to send a note to the author, but Patrick Vessey at the UK Libertarian party doesn’t seem to have made any contact information available.
SO, here’s my response to a UK Libertarian Party blog post criticizing the Cato Institute for giving the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty to Yon Goicoechea and for my recent Cato@Liberty blog post “L-1 and China – Oh, Nevermind – Naomi Klein.” (You’ll want to read the post first . . . .)
Thank you, Andrew [another commenter], for handling the Venezuela issue very nicely.
As for my posting on the Cato@Liberty blog – it’s my post, reflecting my thinking, not any Cato Institute policy – let me urge you to read the piece I wrote about L-1, which I linked to in that post. Concluding there, I wrote, “A corporate lobbying operation can do as much harm to liberty as any government agency or official.”
This is not a story about which “Cato obviously does not want to hear” – I’ve been writing about it at Cato. I was disappointed when Klein took an issue that I feel passionate about – and muddied it with her confused and divisive ideological dreck.
I agree that the corporate form of organization is a subsidy – a government-imposed transfer of risk from owners to the general public – but that does not give L-1 any coercive power that’s relevant here. Only L-1’s combination with government power – in the U.S., China, or anyplace else – gives it access to legal coercion. The necessary condition for what Klein, you, and I find objectionable is the exercise of government power.
In fact, I’ve yet to understand what “corporate power” is, because once you de-link a corporation from access to government power, the corporation is just a legal construct, an entity that anyone (who’s not lazy) can walk away from and suffer no repercussion (risk-transfer aside).
I don’t know anything about the UK Libertarian Party, but I do find it strange that a person associated with it would be unclear enough on the nature of power to side with Hugo Chavez and Naomi Klein over the Cato Institute and me.
With Microsoft-Yahoo! going by the wayside, replaced by rumor and talk of a major transaction between Google and Yahoo!, it’s a good time to review some of the best industry analysis I’ve ever come across.
Twice in two days now, I’ve come across news articles using the term “Big Brother” to refer to private sector information practices that affect privacy. Big Brother is not an appropriate shorthand here. In his book 1984, George Orwell gave the name “Big Brother” to the oppressive government that observed and controlled the lives of the book’s protagonists. The unique oppressive powers of this governmental entity were a central motif of the book.
Yesterday’s Washington Post had an article headlined “FTC Wants to Know What Big Brother Knows About You.” Is the Federal Trade Commision examining warrantless wiretapping, one hopes? Alas, no – they’re looking at “behavioral targeting” on the Web. This is when advertisers collect information about Web surfers with cookies, using it to direct more relevant ads their way.
Consumers who care to can “opt out” of nearly all “behavioral targeting” by setting their browsers not to receive third-party cookies. In both Internet Explorer and Firefox, the “Tools” pull down has a selection called “Options.” Clicking the “Privacy” tab allows users to set blanket bans on cookies or site-specific preferences.
Behavioral targeting is in no way an exercise of the legal monopoly on coercion, much less an oppressive exercise of that power.
Ars Technica, an otherwise excellent tech publication, mangled the same literary reference in this headline: “Big Brother is Watching: Companies Snoop E-mail to Combat Leaks.” Employers monitoring communications on their systems are neither exercising government power nor oppressing their employees.
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Bruce Schneier is a smart and interesting guy. His sound thinking on computer security has influenced me a great deal, and it extrapolates well into related fields like national security. So I’m always interested to find writings of his with which I disagree. A recent essay in Wired, entitled “Our Data, Ourselves” is one. It calls for “a comprehensive data privacy law.”
This law should protect all information about us, and not be limited merely to financial or health information. It should limit others’ ability to buy and sell our information without our knowledge and consent. It should allow us to see information about us held by others, and correct any inaccuracies we find. It should prevent the government from going after our information without judicial oversight. It should enforce data deletion, and limit data collection, where necessary. And we need more than token penalties for deliberate violations.
If he really believes that these rules should govern the collection and use of data – “all information about us”! – what an administrative nightmare that would be to implement. The benefits of doing so would be quite small in comparison.
Some of these things are agreeable, such as judicial oversight of government data collection (the Fourth Amendment is that law) but even a solid libertarian like myself wouldn’t endorse judicial oversight of government officials looking up information about me on public Web sites, for example.
And should I have a right to review any email in which people discuss this blog post and its author? Incredible.
The flaw in this article (beyond its carelessness) is Bruce’s treatment of these information practices as all-new, and needing an all-new regulatory regime, just because decision-making is now undertaken using “data.”
“Whoever controls our data can decide whether we can get a bank loan, on an airplane or into a country. Or what sort of discount we get from a merchant, or even how we’re treated by customer support.”
But it’s always been true that decisions like these are made using “data” – perhaps not in digital form, but data/information all the same. When has a decision ever been made not using “data”? We don’t need to throw out old rules about privacy, fairness, and so on just because information is digitized.
Many of Schneier’s premises are correct. The change from analog to digital data systems does cause a lot more tracks to form behind people as they traverse the economy and society. This creates lots of efficiency, convenience, wealth, and problems – threats to privacy, fair treatment, personal security, seclusion, and liberty. Let’s deal with them – each one – on their merits rather than trying to write a single law to overhaul the use of information in society.
Reversing the course of a river would be a tiny problem compared to what Schneier proposes.
Here’s a video highlighting the Peer-to-Patent project originated by Beth Noveck and New York Law School’s “Do Tank.”
Whether because of inappropriately low standards for granting patents or recent decades’ outburst of inventiveness in technological fields, the Patent and Trademark Office is swamped. Patent examiners lack the breadth of knowledge in relevant fields to do the job they should be doing on each patent application. Drawing on the knowledge of interested and knowledgeable people can only improve the process, and this project aims to do just that.
I’ve written favorably about Peer-to-Patent a couple of times, but here’s a cautionary note: A successful Peer-to-Patent would result in a dispersion of power from patent examiners and the USPTO to the participants in the project. Surface support from the USPTO notwithstanding, the application of public choice theory to bureaucracies tells us that the agency won’t give up this power without a fight.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
