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.
Soon, perhaps, the American Psychological Association can certify that anti-spam activism is an obsessive-compulsive disorder. At the risk of wasting a lot of time myself, I’ll let you read for yourself about the guy who (literally) thinks getting an e-mail is a federal case. Alas, it is. But it really isn’t.
The delete key, Bob! And then go on with your life!
I’ve ranted here before about the bad things that are in the intelligence reform legislation pending on Capitol Hill. As election day draws nearer without a final vote, it looks less likely that intelligence reform will pass during the pre-election posturing season.
One hopes that the lame-duck Congress will be hungry for turkey and return ever-so-briefly after the election to simply pass a resolution continuing appropriations until 2005. Kicking intelligence reform into the new Congress would be a boon.
On the national ID question, I spoke the other day at a Cato Institute event. The synopsis of what I said is: IDs provide accountability (e.g., the driver’s license) or they are issued based on risk assessment (e.g., the credit card). 1) Terrorists are willing to die so they are not accountable to worldly justice and 2) there is not a plausible risk assessment tool that can predict one-time acts of terrorism.
National IDs won’t work, but they will make Americans substantially less free, subject to far greater surveillance. (If the synopsis has failed you, watch the video.)
It is becoming increasingly clear that the Markle Foundation, a New York based non-profit, is evil. It assembled a group of people to think very carefully about anti-terrorism. The work of this group has quickly metastisized into federal Big Brother legislation.
Exhibit A: A National Surveillance Network
The Markle Foundation’s Report entitled “Building a Trusted Network for Homeland Security” advocates a program that could be called “Total Information Awareness Lite”. It got into the Senate bill to reform the intelligence system (section 207 of the Public Print). I have commented on it in an Op-Ed, and debated it vigorously in posts to Declan McCullagh’s Politech list. Here are postings number one and number two. Number three is not yet archived on the site, so it is reprinted in the extended entry below.
Exhibit Two: A National ID Card
The same intelligence reform legislation has proposals to create a national ID card system by standardizing state IDs. The source of this idea is the 9/11 Commission report (page 390), but the 9/11 Commission cites – you guessed it – the Markle Surveillance Project. In particular, it cites an Appendix written by a rump group (and I use the word advisedly).
The chief author was Amitai Etzioni, Director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University. He organized a panel discussion on national IDs that I appeared on back in April. After the actual panelists spoke, he invited from the audience a representative of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators to give an infomercial for national IDs. (It was broadcast on C-SPAN.)
It was all quite bizarre, but revealing: AAMVA, Markle, and many others working behind the scenes are part of the surveillance-industrial complex, working to grow the state and erode our liberties.
Here’s a news story about parents discovering pornographic links on the ‘blog of their girls’ volleyball coach.
But this cub reporter’s investigation reveals that the links are all just ‘blog spam. That is, postings to the comments section that are done by a script. Typical material for these postings includes Viagra, online casinos, and good ol’ porn.
Don’t know how long this link will last, but check it out for yourself.
The fact that the coach has quit creates the impression of some guilt. And someone using the coach’s name has said at least one potentially naughty thing about Jennifer Aniston. So maybe there’s more here, but it isn’t apparent yet.
It’s hard to hold a blogger blameworthy for automated comments that exploit the openness and uniformity of ‘comment’ features in ‘blog software.
The lesson?: Never ever coach girls volleyball.
Here is a speech I gave on RFID the other day. I followed Katherine Albrecht of spychips.org, who is probably the world’s leading critic of RFID.
She’s very well-spoken and her presentation is thorough, but she makes a singular error: She takes at face value all the fantastic (at times, farcical) claims of people who are trying to build RFID systems and applications.
If I believed all the sales pitches that are out there, I’d be freaked out too. But I don’t, so I’m not. Please join me, dear readers.
The Progressive Policy Institute is very active on technology issues, providing a thoughtful point of view from what I guess would be ‘center-left.’ They take a bit of a “get over it” point of view on privacy, which is worrisome at times, but entirely welcome in the RFID debate. Here is PPI’s new piece on RFID, aiming to calm the hypesteria about RFID and privacy.
It’s SO odd when ‘consumer groups’ rail against technologies that will lower prices and improve the quality of goods for consumers. Thank you PPI for tamping down on that nonsense.
Just in case you missed it, here’s my piece on the social influences that will steer RFID to the benefit of consumers and a long, deeply engaging letter to the editor I sent to Information Week.
The Federal Communications Commission has a pretty cool system for electronic filing of documents: comments in proceedings, disclosures, and such. It’s called the Electronic Comment Filing System.
The Washington Post is reporting that someone uploaded a lobbying strategy document through ECFS, rendering it quite widely available.
What’s most interesting is the ritualistic resignation of the guy who wrote the document and the collective twittering among the lobbyists. Johnny showed his underwear! Hee hee!
Lesson 1: Electronic communications are dangerous and powerful. Watch your step.
Lesson 2: The lather about the existence of lobbying, even among lobbyists themselves, shows the wide gap between public expectations that ours is a thoughtful, deliberative government and the reality that it’s pretty much a slot machine.
Here is my latest addition to the corpus of commentary on spyware. This week, your U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to consider legislation to ban it. The legislation is junk.
Why? Well, for one thing: it wouldn’t actually stop actual spyware. Considering how Congress did with suppressing spam through the CAN-SPAM Act, you kind of wonder how many times Congress is willing to lie to the American people. (Don’t start counting because, if you do, a few weeks from now you’ll still be counting and you’ll get an aneurysm and you’ll have to stop.)
Mine follows on fellow TLFer James Gattuso’s very good spyware piece and it marginally improves on a quick and dirty spyware rant I laid on y’all earlier. James and I agree: Carefully applying existing law to the online world is going to be superior to fresh statutes passed in haste each time a new Internet pathology emerges.
If you found this entry thanks to a Web search, you’re probably a perv. Go away!
For the rest of you, yesterday the House passed a bill to ban video voyeurism. Because it has already passed the Senate, it is likely to become law.
‘Upskirting’ with little cameras is ugly behavior, and juvenile. So do we all support a law against it? Good question.
Laws are supposed to protect people from bad things. So the most important question about anti-video voyeurism law is: Who is hurt?
Now, I’m a Web user who occassionally, purely by accident, runs across sites with vulgar content. And I’m here to tell you that ‘upskirt’ photos almost never identify whose skirt is being looked up.
In cases where a person’s identity could be determined because a face appears or a caption says “This is . . . ‘s backside,” the behavior is a clear violation of common law privacy rights. A cause of action already exists in nearly every state.
But to protect the decency and morals of the nation, should there be criminal penalties? Well, that justification has no stopping point, so I won’t abide it. On balance, the bill takes for the government a role that civil society should play: shaming and ostracizing perverts (like I did with you at the beginning of this post – why are you still reading?)
What makes this bill only minimally bad is that it applies in “the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States”. My understanding is that this means on federal property and within federal jurisdiction. It doesn’t establish law most places in most states. The states get to decide for themselves what’s legal and what’s not.
And the states should leave shame in place as the primary means of getting at camera-toting pervs who don’t expose identified individuals.
‘Anti-spyware’ legislation is being marked up in the Senate Commerce Committee this week. Here are the Top 10 reasons why it’s a dumb idea:
10. The lives of real consumers won’t be any better after it passes.
9. It doesn’t add any protections to existing law.
8. Preempting states prevents state legislators from learning how much harm they’re doing to their constituents with their own dumb anti-spyware laws.
7. In the future, so-called “consumer” groups and Luddite activists will use it as a sword against yet-unknown innovations.
6. Nascent software entrepreneurs, faced with yet more legal/compliance costs, will throw in the towel rather than delivering the next cool thing.
5. Requires lobbyists to pour more money into the Washington maw to protect against errant FTC interpretations and enforcements.
4. Legal ‘protections’ confuse consumers and steer them away from burgeoning market for anti-spyware tools (which actually work!).
3. Spyware writers, like spammers, don’t obey laws.
2. A bill that’s better than the House version is still not a good bill.
1. Once federal anti-spyware legislation passes, the tech lobbyists with nothing else to do will just push for another worthless law!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
