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.
Ellen Miller got the scoop in an email:
A major research institution has recently announced the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science.
The new element has been named Governmentium. Governmentium (Gv) has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.
These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons . . . .
It continues from there.
“Instead, the country should have a national debate on security and identification that leads to a thoughtful plan that protects privacy . . . .”
Apropos of my post earlier today on Google’s good privacy citizenship, the Center for Democracy and Technology has a report out reviewing progress in the search privacy area.
“Despite the progress that has been made,” Ars reports, “the CDT still feels that there is a need for stronger privacy legislation. ‘No amount of self-regulation in the search privacy space can replace the need for a comprehensive federal privacy law to protect consumers from bad actors,’ the report says.”
The computers at CDT have a macro on them (Alt+CDT) that writes an argument for comprehensive privacy legislation into any document. I heard that one time an intern at CDT printed a Chinese food menu, and it came out of the printer with a special on Comprehensive Privacy Legislation Foo Yung.
Update: I like snark, obviously, but don’t want to put snark ahead of substance. This is a good report and reports like this are a good thing to do. Do ISPs next, CDT!
There are no two ways about it: Google is doing good things on privacy.
The video below provides ordinary people very important information that will empower them with the awareness they need to protect their privacy. To those of us who are technically aware, the information presented here is a little obvious, but the average Internet user doesn’t know it. They need to.
Over the long haul, this kind of education will be much more effective protection for consumers than privacy regulation – and it will have none of the costs of regulation: in wasted tax dollars, market-distorting rent-seeking and regulatory capture, etc.
The video raises some important new points and questions, of course:
A very good observation from Latanya Sweeney in an interview with Scientific American.
Think about it: we leave fingerprints all over the place, just like our SSNs are all over the place. As we use fingerprints to regulate access to more value, the value of collecting fingerprints and faking them will rise.
It won’t be tomorrow or next week, but watch for fingerprint-based identity fraud – if we rely on that biometric too much. DNA has the same quality. Other biometrics, like vein recognition, are neither easy to collect nor to reproduce (though, yes, both of these facts are technology-contingent).
In my book, Identity Crisis, I talked about the qualities of identifiers: fixity, permanence, and distinctiveness. Biometrics like fingerprints and DNA are high on the scale of fixity and permanence, but may drop in reliable distinctiveness with advanced forgery techniques.
The better designed systems will use biometric identifiers that are not only hard to forge, but that are somewhat hard to collect. Biometrics that can only be made available through some volition on the part of the individual will be the most secure.
The vote tallies on Public Law 110-55, subject of some consternation around here, are up on WashingtonWatch.com, in case you want to see how your representatives represent you.
Last week, Congress passed a bill spending $250 million on reconstruction of the I-35 bridge in Minnesota. Over at WashingtonWatch.com, we did some calculating and found that this quarter-billion in spending amounts to about $130,000 per foot.
It’s about a third of the height, but triple the cost-per-foot, of the infamous Bridge to Nowhere.
Harold Feld speculates on a Google/Sprint/Clearwire consortium. All well and good – and just as viable without a government subsidy, in an open, full-price auction.
e-gold has always been an interesting company – an alternative value-transfer system that’s not attached to government currency because it’s backed by gold. The payments business charges much more than my gut tells me the service should cost; any competitor in this market should be welcome. And I’m no expert in monetary policy, but I know that fiat money (“this has value because the government says it does”) is dangerous because it relies on the credibility of the government that issued it, and because governments regularly inflate their fiat currency by printing or minting more of it. This diminishes the value of the currency in our hands.
But money is a sensitive area – governments are pretty protective of their prerogatives – and e-gold hasn’t always done such a good job making the case for itself. Suspicions about the use of this service may have culminated recently in an indictment against e-gold officials alleging conspiracy to launder money and various regulatory infractions, which met with a strenuous response from them.
Now e-gold is going to tell it’s story, putting a human face on what they’re trying to do. No, it’s not this video. They’ve started a blog. It should be interesting and educational. I’m listening to an interview with e-gold’s Chairman, Douglas Jackson, right now.
The idea of an asset-backed, non-governmental value-transfer system is very attractive to me, and an indictment is not a conviction. I think it’ll be worthwhile to get e-gold’s side of the story, and they definitely need to tell it in Washington, D.C.
I first became aware of the massive statistical infrastructure of the U.S. government because much of its data collections have privacy consequences. The Census Bureau, for example, has turned a simple instruction to count people (“[An] Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.” ) into a large organization with lots and lots of different information products.
Recognize that the process of collecting, compiling, and disseminating information is an economic function. This Federal Register notice on federal statistical practices does so, with some interesting spin:
To operate efficiently and effectively, our democracy relies on the flow of objective, credible statistics to support the decisions of governments, businesses, households, and other organizations. Any loss of trust in the integrity of the Federal statistical system and its products could lessen respondent cooperation with Federal statistical surveys, decrease the quality of statistical system products, and foster uncertainty about the validity of measures our Nation uses to monitor and assess its performance and progress.
Without us, you’d be lost! And if federal statistical agencies just disappeared, that would be true. Statistics are an important tool of government and business.
But . . . is it government’s responsibility to develop and deliver statistics to business? Or is that another dimension of corporate welfare? Here in Washington, there are statistics “user” organizations whose mission is to preserve the flow of data from government to business – to collect another set of goodies free – or, most accurately, at the taxpayers’ expense.
In my former life as a lobbyist/consultant, I represented a very cool satellite remote sensing company called Digital Globe. You’ve probably seen their stuff on Google Maps, and TV networks often use their imagery to illustrate news stories. Given my libertarian predilections, I was painfully aware that this company was in competition with a rather substantial competitor, the U.S. government, and in this area, like so many, the competition was hydra-headed.
If the market for geospatial data weren’t already well occupied by government suppliers, Digital Globe and its many competitors would be producing better information products than are available in the government-dominated market, and the costs of doing so would fall where they should – directly on users.
I’m not asking you to be convinced yet, but just think about having the corporate sector pay its own way for the data and statistics it uses.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
