Articles by Jim Harper 
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.
The Google Public Policy blog likes S. 2321, a bill to amend the E-Government Act of 2002.
According to the Googlers, “it directs the Office of Management and Budget to create guidance and best practices for federal agencies to make their websites more accessible to search engine crawlers, and thus to citizens who rely on search engines to access information provided by their government.”
Who says everything Google says and does is interesting?
But seriously, more government transparency is better. And my effort at government transparency and public involvement shows opinion on S. 2321 running at . . . well, take a look for yourself!
Get out the vote, Google!
Update: Jerry and I seem to have written about this at about the same time. Look to him for more substance. Me, I’m just links, quotes, snark, and widgets.
Here’s an email I got today on behalf of Steve Kelley, a former Minnesota state senator who is now Director of the Center for Science, Technology & Public Policy at the University of Minnesota.
A Message From Steve Kelley
Dear Friends,
I have appreciated your becoming part of my Internet community by signing up to get emails during the 2006 campaigns . . .
Needless to say, I never signed up to any Steve Kelley email list.
As a legislator, Kelley was active in a variety of efforts to regulate the Internet and e-commerce, and he passed legislation regulating ISPs’ information practices and attempting to prevent spam by outlawing deceptive subject lines.
Do ya’ think Minnesota is anything close to a spam-free state? Kelley’s work is little more than surplusage in the Minnesota code.
But given Kelley’s expertise, perhaps the Center for Science, Technology & Public Policy should start a project to outlaw political and academic spamming.
Google has announced the Google Policy Fellowship – “to support students and organizations working on policy issues fundamental to the future of the Internet and its users.”
Fellows will have the opportunity to work at public interest organizations at the forefront of debates on broadband and access policy, content regulation, copyright and trademark reform, consumer privacy, open government, and more. Participating organizations are based in either Washington, DC or San Francisco, CA, and include: American Library Association, Cato Institute, Center for Democracy and Technology, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Internet Education Foundation, Media Access Project, New America Foundation, and Public Knowledge.
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An Arsticle by Ken Fisher reviews a recent talk given by Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of National Intelligence, who is second in command to Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell.
In a recent speech, Kerr fumbled around with privacy and related concepts, concluding in Ken’s (and an AP reporter’s) opinion that he’s trying to redefine privacy in somewhat Orwellian ways.
Here’s the meat of what Kerr said:
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And it works well!
Amazon.com sent me an email yesterday morning recommending that I buy my own book.
Kudos, Amazon!
AFP is reporting that more than a hundred people with false identification documents were given employee security passes to Chicago’s O’Hare airport.
This is a good opportunity to compare conventional wisdom to actual security wisdom.
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The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, ordinarily the source of quality thinking, has produced an embarrassingly bad paper called Don’t Shoot the Messenger: Telecommunications Carriers Deserve Immunity for facilitating illegal wiretapping and surveillance.
Here’s a sampling of the kind of reasoning that pegged my b.s. detector:
[I]n its legislation to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), Congress is poised to condone lawsuits against telecommunications carriers for complying with what they thought was a legal information-sharing program that was approved by the highest levels of government.
The author has inverted the debate – “if Congress does nothing it condones lawsuits.” No, in fact, if Congress does nothing, it does nothing. What it is considering doing is condoning illegal wiretapping and surveillance.
The question whether any program was approved by the highest levels of government is perfectly irrelevant unless that approval came from the judicial branch, which it did not. The inference is that someone in the executive branch can approve programs regardless of what the law is. This is flatly wrong.
On the question of whether the telecommunications companies thought this was a legal program, the presumed facts are not in evidence. That is one of the issues in the lawsuits. It will help set the damages if the participating telecom firms did think they were legally in the right and turned out to be wrong.
So bad is the legal reasoning in this paper that I think the author should lose her law license. Turns out, she doesn’t have one. It shows. ITIF brings discredit on itself publishing this dreck.
The D.C. Examiner reported yesterday that the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles plans to embed drivers’ licenses with SmarTrip chips, the RFID chips increasingly used to access the Metro system.
This is another step taken to make Metro access more convenient – oh, and more subject to surveillance.
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A few days ago, Lauren Weinstein announced the formation of an organization called “Network Neutrality Squad,” an “open-membership, open-source effort, enlisting the Internet’s users to help keep the Internet’s operations fair and unhindered from unreasonable restrictions.”
This, I assume, is a part of his proposal to create an infrastructure for collecting and processing metrics associated with network neutrality, which I find to be a generally good idea. ISPs should be held to their Terms of Service and their Terms of Service should conform to customer expectations, including expectations with regard to neutrality (or non-neutrality), along with all the other dimensions of Internet access service that matter.
Needless to say, the founders of this group (at least the ones I know and what I know of them) probably favor government regulation of broadband service in the name of ‘net neutrality. An early correspondent reveals what I view to be an upside down view of the world, writing:
[B]ecause ISPs are not currently subject to common carriage rules they can pretty much do anything they want as long as they conform to their published terms of service which are usually written to allow just about anything the ISP cares to do.
The solution to the problem is matching Terms of Service to consumer expectations. That’s what Terms of Service are for; they’re a contract reflecting the agreement between the company and the consumer. Common carriage regulation would be a mistake.
Consumers can and do push back against ToS they don’t like. This was done again recently when one dimension of AT&T’s ToS was found to be ridiculous. The Internet is a communications medium, and the community of users is well-equipped to name, shame, and punish violators of consumer interests and demands.
Whatever the ideology of the project, I suspect that any legitimate deviation from consumer expectations it turns up will be corrected by market processes long before regulation ever could. If the project unwittingly helps market processes conform Internet service provision to consumer demands, all the better.
An ACLU release issued yesterday reports that the Department of Homeland Security is telling state leaders that it will not enforce the REAL ID law.
“In discussions I participated in with the Department of Homeland Security, they were asked point blank, ‘What will happen to states that don’t participate?’” said Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, who was on the phone call with [DHS Assistant Secretary Richard] Barth. “The response was, ‘Nothing will happen. There will be no penalty. You can still get on a plane.’”
It’s hard to make out why the DHS is saying this and what it means. Most likely, Barth and the DHS are trying to shrink REAL ID down so far that they can convince a substantial number of states to announce compliance so they can claim a “successful program.” Later regulations could then grow it into the national ID it’s meant to be.
The fact that the REAL ID Act has no teeth, of course, means that states can refuse to comply entirely. There’s not even the (long known to be impotent) threat that their residents wouldn’t be able to get on planes.
Whatever the case, the program is in shambles. It would be cool if Congress were to go ahead and admit it, but nothing needs to happen for the last nail to go into REAL ID’s coffin.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.