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.


Privacy Debacle Top Ten

by on August 23, 2006 · 2 comments

Wired News reporter Annalee Newitz has compiled a “top ten” list of privacy debacles.

It’s easy to quibble with the results, but I was delighted to see “The Creation of the Social Security Number” at #1. Our national identifier has used its government backing to push aside all others and enable government and corporate surveillance on a scale that never would have occured under natural conditions.

In Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood, I discuss how the uniform identification system we’ve built around the Social Security Number is insecure for individuals, making information about them too readily available to governments, corporations, and crooks.

The fix is nothing so ham-handed as banning uses of Social Security Numbers. Rather, it will be necessary to remake our identification systems so that they are diverse, competitive, and thus solicitous of individuals’ interests.

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Watching the “Lack of Competition” Meme

by on August 22, 2006 · 36 comments

Ars Technica – a wonderful publication with brief, informative, and interesting pieces – is showing a little sloppliness in covering the broadband competition issue. The question of broadband competition underlies the drive for net neutrality law, or public utility regulation of broadband.

Discussing FTC Chair Deborah Majoras’ speech at the PFF Aspen Summit, an Ars reporter casually observes, “[M]arket forces really do not exist when it comes to broadband.” That’s at least overstatement. A little more caution would be good given the centrality of the issue.

To show the existence of a duopoly (which is not inherently a competition-free situation), the report links to an earlier Ars piece interpreting a study as showing “not much” competition. But that conclusion goes only to price competition. And it’s a little overstated, too.

The actual study from Kagan research seems to show that DSL is the low-cost option (and getting lower), while cable is the high-bandwidth option (getting higher in bandwidth while dropping in cost more slowly). That diminishes head-to-head price(-only) competition because each is focused on a different niche. But they’re still in competition.

The Kagan Research analyst concludes “Eventually, cable will probably have make [sic] some reductions to cater to the lower end of the consumer market simply to get more customers.” So the study author believes more direct price competition is coming.

That’s some distance from “market forces really do not exist when it comes to broadband.” There is some price and quality competition among the major broadband platforms. Substitutes (such as getting broadband at work and getting information and entertainment offline) play a role in the competition question. And several competitors wait in the wings, to become viable through improvements in technology, new investment, or bad behavior by the current platforms.

I hasten to add that I am not satisfied with the current level of competition. I would like it to be more intense along all fronts and in all regions.

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Wireless Progress – and the Challenge Not Yet Met

by on August 18, 2006 · 2 comments

Lots is happening in the world of wireless telecommunications these days.  And lots is not.  First, let’s look at a couple things that are happening.

WiMax is poised to move forward as a significant new platform for broadband.  As TLFers know, “WiMax” is the popular name for the 802.16 wireless metropolitan-area network standard.  It’s like WiFi but can travel a lot farther.  It easily traverses the “last mile,” the complicated and expensive rights-of-way that create a high barrier to entry for competitors to DSL and cable.

Recently, Intel announced that a line of its chips will support WiMax.  It also invested $600 million in leading WiMax provider Clearwire.  Clearwire recently pulled back from an IPO, though, fueling speculation that Clearwire and WiMax are not all they’re cracked up to be.  Since then, Sprint Nextel has announced that it would spend up to $3 billion to build a WiMax network.  Nothing is certain, but WiMax looks pretty good right now for bringing more competition to broadband.

Here’s another thing happening: The Federal Communications Commission is amidst an auction of wireless spectrum.  In 1993, Congress gave the FCC the authority to use competitive bidding for allocating rights to use radio spectrum.  This beats comparative hearings and lotteries by a mile because companies that have paid good money for spectrum tend to be well focused on making good use of it.  This redounds to the benefit of consumers and the public through new, competitive wireless services.

But much more can be done to improve how this natural resource is deployed.  It is widely recognized that creating property-like rights in spectrum will foster secondary markets and help move spectrum to its highest and best use.  That work seems not to be happening very quickly, however.

And a report Cato released yesterday shows that much difficult work remains to be done if we are to have a property regime for spectrum, with all the benefits it entails.  In “Toward Property Rights in Spectrum: The Difficult Policy Choices Ahead,” University of Colorado professors Dale Hatfield and Philip Weiser, show why creating a property-oriented system for electromagnetic spectrum rights will not be easy.

“Even though the merits of the case for property-like rights in spectrum is beyond dispute, the details about how such a regime would work must still be defined,” Hatfield and Weiser point out.  Variation in the way radio waves behave means that simple geographic borders cannot define how rights to use spectrum are divided. Regulation of transmitter technology and power can not be replaced wholesale with enforcement of radio “trespass.”  Rather, ownership of rights to use spectrum must be defined and enforced with a model suited to the particular characteristics of radio propagation.

The study is a nice tour through radio for the technically uninitiated – you can find out why radio arguably has seven dimensions.  And it challenges readers (and hopefully the FCC) to think about the set of rules that will best divide and organize spectrum licenses so that Ronald Coase’s vision can be realized in the area where he did his early work.

[Cross-posted, with edits, from Cato@Liberty]

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An Embarrassing Public Pants-Wetting

by on August 14, 2006 · 6 comments

Scotland Yard should be ashamed of Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson.

Last week, discussing the foiled attack on passenger air transportation, Stephenson stood before cameras, flash-bulbs popping, and read the following from a prepared statement:

We cannot stress too highly the severity that this plot represented. Put simply, this was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale.

In fact, Stephenson quite badly over-stressed the severity of the plot. It is easy to comprehend in terms of both execution and anticipated result. The planned attack would have killed many people in a very dramatic way – everyone should be glad that it was defeated – but it wasn’t anything near “unimaginable.”

Is this a quibble about semantics? No. Stephenson’s hysterical statement is a form of incompetence.

As I wrote [at Cato@Liberty] last week (citing national security expert John Mueller), it is the reaction to terrorist attacks that inflict the most damage. Controlling the reaction through even-handed public communications is the best thing officialdom can do when an attack has succeeded – to say nothing of the opportunity for confidence-building when an attack has been thwarted.

The fact that this embarrassing public pants-wetting was part of a statement written in advance is reason for Scotland Yard to fully review its communications strategy. Stephenson’s verbal vomitus splashed across America’s television screens numerous times over the weekend.

But the public doesn’t appear to be falling for it. A poll appearing in this morning’s Washington Post Express found that 72% of people feel safe flying. USA Today reports that air travelers are adapting quickly to measures that foreclose the threat of a liquid bomb attack. Let’s hope that the measures are quickly minimized to reach what attacks are actually possible, rather than those that are only speculative.

My [Cato] colleague Gene Healy’s post here last week (preceding news of the foiled terror plot) and his citation to James Fallows’ article “Declaring Victory” are even more solid and relevant now than they were before. We do not face an existential threat from terrorism. The “War on Terror” is effectively won. All that’s left is for someone to declare it so.

(Cross-posted from Cato@Liberty, where it was edited so as not to offend government-types. The result is kind of amusing. Or sad.)

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TechCrunch Gets It

by on August 7, 2006

We refer to TechDirt a lot here on TLF because of the good information and analysis there, and the engagement of its writers on policy issues. I want to throw props to another Tech[Something] blog, though – TechCrunch.

I’ve been reading it for a while now. TechCrunch is very forward-looking in terms of Web apps and information business. I ain’t gonna lie to ya’ – I don’t understand everything I see there. But I don’t understand everything I see on the bus either – and that’s still interesting and entertaining.

I’m particularly pleased with TechCrunch because of the acknowledgement it gave yesterday to WashingtonWatch.com.

I like WashingtonWatch because it translates Bills into understandable costs and allows direct and collaborative feedback before the Bill is voted on. These are new web ideas put to work in a tangible and useful form. I hope our elected representatives are among the readers.

The other day, I blogged about how technology-aided transparency may defeat the twin scourges of rational ignorance and rational inaction in the area of politics and public policy. TechCrunch sees the vision.

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Technology Beats Law, Part Deux

by on August 3, 2006

A few weeks ago, I blogged on Cato@Liberty about how technology beats law for curtailing video voyeurism. (You may have come across it here in my recent cavalcade of cross-posting.)

Now a TechDirt post shows how technology can beat law for promoting net neutrality. Broadband Reports cites technology to test how neutral a network is, putting users in a position to gauge what they’re getting from their ISP. A watchdog press (inculding folks like TechDirt) stands ready to amplify consumer concerns, adding seasoning to the stew that is a competitive marketplace.

This doesn’t solve the whole problem, but it solves an important part of the problem. As Tim points out, the alternative – public utility regulation of broadband – may address problems in the near-term while tying knots that take decades to unravel.

Alas, Dan Kaminsky, who’s debuting this tool at BlackHat this week, sees it as an adjunct for regulation. But it is just as powerful as a tool for consumers. Take some advice from the people who’ve seen Washington (not) work, people! Stay as far away as you can!

Speaking of which, I have nothing but sympathy for observers like TechDirt Mike, who rarely fails to note the dishonesty, truth-bending, disingenuousness, and astro-turfing that goes on in the net neutrality debate. My first job in politics/policy was advocating against single-payer health care (read socialized medicine) in California. Advocates on each side came to directly opposite conclusions about what the proposed law would do. Each side honestly believed that the other was composed of complete liars.

Repeat: Run as fast as you can from coercive society! (politics) Run toward cooperation. (markets)

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ID-Based Security is Broken – and Can’t be Fixed

by on August 2, 2006

The Government Accountability Office testified to the Senate Finance Committee today that investigators were easily able to pass through borders using fake documents. Indeed, sometimes documents were not checked at all.

“This vulnerability potentially allows terrorists or others involved in criminal activity to pass freely into the United States from Canada or Mexico with little or no chance of being detected.”

That’s true, but shoring up that vulnerability would add little security while devastating trade and commerce at the border.

Identity-based security works by comparing the identity of someone to their background and determining how to treat them based on that. To start, you need accurate identity information. That’s not easy to come by from people who are trying to defeat your identity system.

Here’s a schematic of how identification cards work from my book Identity Crisis.

Continue reading →

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Getting to Government Transparency

by on August 1, 2006

There’s technology policy, and there’s how technology affects policy.

That’s why I found my Cato Institute colleague Chris Edwards’ recent Tax & Budget Bulletin so interesting.  He discusses a number of federal databases that bring some transparency to federal spending, including the Federal Assistance Award Data System and the Federal Audit Clearinghouse.  Between them, they reveal quite a bit of information about federal spending and the staggering number and amount of subsidies and grants handed out by the federal government each year.

Edwards also hails a proposal by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) to create a comprehensive Internet database of federal contracts, grants, and other payments.  It would be a great leap forward in terms of transparency about spending, like the Thomas system was for the legislative process.

Advocates from across the political spectrum want a government that “works.” Most believe that their perspective would “win” if the politics and government worked.  Whatever the case, transparency is widely agreed to be good–the more the better.

Thomas was an improvement.  Yet it hasn’t transformed the legislative process the way some might have hoped.  Lawmaking remains murky and confusing to the vast majority of the public.  Even if it was done well, a federal spending database probably wouldn’t transform the politics of government spending either.

Information technology will surely help, but transparency isn’t enough.  The twin problems that must be overcome are rational ignorance and rational inaction.  It’s hard to learn about government, and hard to affect it, so people make better uses of their time.  Operating a lemonade stand would be far more lucrative and enjoyable for most people than campaigning for a tax reduction.  (The piece linked here is a good discussion of rational ignorance.)

There are some efforts to defeat the twin plagues of ignorance and inaction.  GovTrack.us, for example, attacks ignorance with more information presented more accessibly than Thomas.  Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales recently took after inaction with a wiki devoted to campaigns. 

My favorite–because I run it–is WashingtonWatch.com.  It displays pending legislation with its price-tag per person, per family, etc. and it gives visitors a chance to air their views.  A little run at ignorance, a little run at inaction.  Given time, it could blossom into transformed government.  In the meantime, the more transparency the better.

(Cross posted from Cato@Liberty)

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A Cavalcade of Cross-Posting

by on August 1, 2006

For those of you who don’t read the variety of interesting posts over at Cato@Liberty – you really should broaden your horizons – I thought I’d briefly review some of the tech-relevant posts I’ve had over there recently. Most of them relate to the REAL ID Act:

But others deal with more general topics:

Thanks for tolerating this cavalcade of cross-posting.

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Broadband Bad News is Good News . . . but it’s Bad News

by on July 16, 2006

Headlines are meant to draw readers in, and this one did me: Broadband’s Double-Digit Growth Coming to an End.

Something’s gone wrong with broadband! Quick! To the BroadbandMobile!

In the next instant, I realized that something had actually gone right. You see, double-digit change in percentage-based figures can’t keep going forever. In fact, it can’t last more than about ten time-periods. (Because then you’d have 110% of something, which only makes sense in rock ‘n’ roll, where the loudest speakers go to 11.)

Adoption of broadband is slowing as people who want it have already got it and people who don’t want it persist in not having it. (Bizarrely to people who live every minute of every day online, some people live no minute of every day online – ever. That is perfectly acceptable.)

There is undoubtedly a tiny margin of poor people who can’t afford broadband. But “can’t afford” is subjective. Many prioritize things other than broadband to buy with their limited resources (which is fine – remember, sans broadband is an acceptable way to live).

But the news report says this is all bad news:

One of the goals of US public policy when it comes to broadband is to ensure all US residents have access to broadband. President Bush said in 2004 that he wanted universal access to broadband in 2007, an achievement that appears unlikely at this point.

But, but . . . if people who want it are getting it, and people who don’t are not, isn’t that universal access to broadband? Apparently not. Affordability has been added to the metric, moving the goal posts so that federal subsidies for telecommunications seem important once again. Our news report continues:

The Democrats think it’s a great idea too–one plank in their platform for the 2006 mid-term elections is universal access. The telecom law rewrite which may or may not emerge from Congress this year intends to further that goal by funding broadband in areas currently unserved via the Universal Service Fund.

That’s the Universal Service Fund about which Daniel Berninger asks: What have we gotten for our $50 billion dollars?

In the end, this report amounts to an argument that satiation is a basis for subsidy. Huh.

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