Rich Gordon emailed to point out this multimedia report about government surveillance. Of particular interest is this interactive feature on the government’s many existing surveillance programs. There are dozens and dozens of them, touching virtually every aspect of our lives.
Most of them seem pretty innocuous individually. For example, government surveillance of large currency transactions probably strikes most people as harmless. But as you go down the list, it becomes obvious that the whole has the potential to be a lot more than the sum of its parts. If the government tracks you every time you visit your bank, every time you get on an airline, every time you apply for financial aid, every time you apply for a driver’s license, every time you apply for a credit card, and on and on, pretty soon the government has a bit of data about almost every facet of your life.
Moreover, those are just the programs the government admits to. The press has uncovered two secret programs that engage in surveillance via the telephone network. And there are doubtless others that have not yet been uncovered.
The sheer complexity of these widely varied programs makes it especially difficult for grassroots action to deal with. If there were a single Big Brother program, the ACLU or EFF might be able to organize a grassroots backlash against it. But developing backlashes against Big Uncle, Big Cousin, Big Sister, and dozens of other piecemeal intrusions on our privacy is much more difficult. You kill one head of the hydra, and three more sprout up in its place.
By sheer coincidence, I’m currently (re-)reading Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, which I recommended to Luis in a recent post. I thought this passage was interesting:
The importance of our being free to do a particular thing has nothing to do with the question of whether we or the majority are ever likely to make use of that particular possibility. To grant no more freedom than all can exercise would be to misconceive its function completely. The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use.
It might even be said that the less likely the opportunity to make use of freedom to do a particular thing, the more precious it will be for society as a whole. The less likely the opportunity, the more serious will it be to miss it when it arises, for the experience that it offers will be nearly unique. It is also probably true that the majority are not directly interested in most of the important things that any one person should de free to do. It is because we do not know how individuals will use their freedom that it is so important. If it were otherwise, the results of of freedom could also be achieved by the majority’s deciding what should be done by the individuals. But the majority action is, of necessity, confined to the already tried and ascertained, to issues on which agreement has already been reached in that process of discussion that must be preceded by different experiences and actions on the part of different individuals.
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Via Mike Linksvayer, I see that Nick Gillespie has a new interview with Chris Anderson. Anderson “laments that national politics has yet to become part of the Long Tail,” to which Mike responds:
The real long tail of politics isn’t about elections at all. Even if I can vote for my ideal candidate, or vote directly on every issue, at the end of the day I will still get policies approximating those of George W. Bush and John Kerry. That’s like being able to order any of millions of books at Amazon but always getting the current #1 best seller delivered regardless of your order.
The real long tail of politics is decentralization and arbitrage. Lots of people say “Bush isn’t my president.” Why can’t that be true? Declare yourself Venezuelan, Hugo Chavez is your president. It should be (almost) that easy. If that seems extreme and disruptive, at least executive power should be curtailed, for surely it is the antithesis of long tail politics. And being able to live and work in any jurisdiction should be a given.
Now, I don’t think this would work exactly as he describes it. If Mike declares himself Venezuelan and steals my hubcaps, I still want the American police to arrest him, rather than waiting for Venezuelan police to fly up and deal with it. But this is an interesting way to think about federalism. One of the great virtues of the American political system is that left-wingers can move to San Francisco or Boston and get policies they generally like, while right-wingers move to Salt Lake City or Birmingham to get the kind of government they want. To some extent, federalism allows us to have the same kind of diversity in government that we’re used to getting from the market. We don’t all listen to the same music or eat the same food. Why shouldn’t we have the same kind of choice in politics?
Of course, no matter where we Americans live, we all have to put up with the decisions of the bozo in the White House. Which is why I think it’s so important to move as much power as possible away from Washington, DC. That way, I might not be able to get the entire country to adopt my preferred political views, but I at least have the option of moving to a state or city where the majority shares my values.
In any event, Anderson’s interview is definitely worth reading.
Luis Villa has an interesting post about the evolving understanding of open source software:
I’ve long thought that in open source software we are seeing a trend away from trust in an institution (think: Microsoft) and towards trust in ‘good luck’- i.e., in the statistical likelihood that if you fall, someone will catch you. In open source, this is most manifest in support- instead of calling a 1-800 # (where someone is guaranteed to help you, as long as you’re willing to be on hold for ages and pay sometimes very high charges), one emails a list, where no one is responsible for you, but yet a great percentage of the time, someone will answer anyway. There is no guarantee, but community practices evolve to make it statistically likely that help (or bug fixing, or whatever) will occur. The internet makes this possible- whereas in the past if you wanted free advice, you had to have a close friend with the right skills free time, you can now draw from a much broader pool of people. If that pool is large enough (and in software, it appears to be) then it is a statistical matter that one of them is likely to have both the right skills and the right amount of free time.
Clay Shirky today makes an argument that this isn’t just something that is occurring in open source, but is hitting other fields of expertise as well: “My belief is that Wikipedia’s success dramatizes instead a change in the nature of authority, moving from trust inhering in guarantees offered by institutions to probabilities created by processes.” Instead of referring to a known expert to get at knowledge, you can ask Wikipedia- which is the output of a dialectic process which may fail in specific instances but which Clay seems to suggest can be trusted more than any one institution’s processes in the long run.
This is an excellent point, but it’s actually not a new one. Two examples that immediately spring to mind are Darwin’s
Origin of the Species and Friederich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (and, more specifically, his subsequent essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” ). Darwin and Hayek each described decentralized processes in which the correctness of the result is produced by statistical processes, rather than by the good judgment of a trusted authority.
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It’s interesting how people on the technology side of the media business tend to badmouth digital rights management technology even as they acquiesce to the content industry’s demands for it. We’ve seen how Steve Jobs bluntly admitted that DRM is not an effective piracy deterrent, just months before rolling out what became one of the world’s most widely deployed DRM schemes. And we’ve seen how Yahoo has pointed out to the labels that DRM does little more than inconvenience paying customers. Now Ashwin Navin, co-founder of the BitTorrent service, is badmouthing the concept even as his company implements it at the behest of Hollywood:
The reason it’s bad for content providers is because typically a DRM ties a user to one hardware platform, so if I buy my all my music on iTunes, I can’t take that content to another hardware environment or another operating platform. There are a certain number of consumers who will be turned off by that, especially people who fear that they may invest in a lot of purchases on one platform today and be frustrated later when they try to switch to another platform, and be turned off with the whole experience. Or some users might not invest in any new content today because they’re not sure if they want to have an iPod for the rest of their life.
Quite So. The people who pay for your content are not the enemy, and it’s counterproductive to create headaches for them.
Hat tip: Ars Technica
Techdirt highlights an incredibly wrongheaded decision that was handed down this week by the Belgian courts:
In the ongoing case where a bunch of newspaper publishers are trying to force Google to pay them to index them and send them traffic (a move that has search engine optimizers worldwide wondering what they could possibly be thinking), Google appealed both parts of the ruling. The bigger issue (the indexing and showing links to Belgian certain news sources) will be heard on appeal in November. However, on the issue of forcing Google to place the entire text of the legal order on the front of both google.be and news.google.be, the Belgian courts have turned down Google’s appeal, and said they will start fining the company if it does not place the entire text (with no commentary, either) on both websites. This seems drastic and entirely unnecessary for a variety of reasons. All it really seems to do is broadcast the backwardness with which Belgian news publishers view the internet. It makes you wonder… do Belgian publishers require libraries to pay them extra money to list their books in a card catalog? What this really highlights, however, is that there are still plenty of industries out there that don’t necessarily understand how the internet works–and that can cause all sorts of problems for internet companies who assume most people understand when things are being done for their benefit.
The legal issues here are pretty well settled on this side of the Atlantic. Deep linking has been repeatedly upheld by American courts, and site administrators have several ways to remove their site from Google’s index and cache on request. The issue here is really about what the default should be: does Google have to get sites to opt-in to search engines, or do the sites have to opt out. If the courts were to uphold the former position, it would have a devastating impact on the search engine industry, because the logistics of getting opt-in permission from millions of individual site owners would likely be beyond the resources of all but the largest companies. If you want a stagnant search engine industry dominated by Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo, just set up copyright hurdles that will make it virtually impossible for new firms to enter the market.
Update: It’s been pointed out to me that I should make clear the distinction between law and policy here. I have no idea if the case was correctly decided as a matter of Belgian law, about which I know nothing. It’s quite possible that the Belgian courts decided this case correctly based on the laws on the books in Belgium. My point was simply that this decision is likely to have bad policy outcomes. I should have that more clear.
Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. Before I get to this week’s patent, I wanted to note that the Public Patent Foundation has launched Software Patent Watch, a new blog that tracks the software patent problem. On Tuesday they announced that the patent office has broken the all-time record for software patents in a single year, and is on track to issue 40,000 patents by year’s end. That’s more than 100 software patents per day.
Luckily, none of those tens of thousands of patents produced any high-profile litigation this week, so I thought I’d cover one of the classics of recent software patent litigation, Microsoft’s (and now Apple’s) legal battle with Burst.com. Burst sued Microsoft back in 2002, claiming that Microsoft’s Windows Media software violates its patents. Microsoft settled the dispute last year, and Burst turned its legal guns on Apple in April, claiming that Apple stole the same “technology.”
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I think the hysterical tone of this article about the new restrictions in the latest version of the Windows Media Player DRM is unnecessary, but it makes some good points:
One of the problems with WiMP11 is licensing and backing it up. If you buy media with DRM infections, you can’t move the files from PC to PC, or at least you can’t and have them play on the new box. If you want the grand privilege of moving that content, you need to get the approval of the content mafia, sign your life away, and use the tools they give you. If you want to do it in other ways, you are either a lawbreaker or following the advice of J Allard. Wait, same thing.
So, in WiMP10, you just backed up your licenses, and stored them in a safe place. Buying DRM infections gets you a bunch of bits and a promise not to sue, but really nothing more. The content mafia will do anything in its power, from buying government to rootkitting you in order to protect those bits, and backing them up leaves a minor loophole while affording the user a whole lot of protection.
Guess which one wins, minor loophole or major consumer rights? Yes, WiMP11 will no longer allow you the privilege of backing up your licenses, they are tied to a single device, and if you lose it, you are really SOL.
We hear a lot about how DRM is a contract. But what kind of contract allows one party to unilaterally and retroactively change its terms?
Moreover, this is really a pretty severe restriction on the use of digital files. Backups are a fundamental part of good computer use. I back up my data at least once a month. I use my laptop pretty heavily, and a little bit abusively, and I rely on the fact that if my hard drive dies (or is lost or stolen) I’ll be able to get my data from backups.
In some cases, if you ask really nicely, the store that sold you the files will permit you to access the files again. But it’s clear that they do this out of the goodness of their hearts: “Some stores do not permit you to restore media usage rights at all.”
Is it any wonder that Windows Media-based music stores are going down in flames?
Techdirt is reporting that Maryland Governor Erlich has come out against the use of electronic voting machines in this year’s elections. I agree with Mike:
The rationale for keeping the machines also leaves us scratching our heads: “We paid millions. These are state-of-the-art machines.” Two responses: The evidence is pretty clear that these are not state of the art machines. They’re badly made, with ridiculously weak security, and a company behind them that bullies its critics, blatantly misleads in its responses to security problems and cracks jokes about their weak security when confronted. Therefore, it really doesn’t matter how many millions you spent on them, the machines are a problem. The Senate President also accused Ehrlich of simply using this issue as a political ploy to rally his supporters. By the way, for those of you who want to believe e-voting is simply a big Republican conspiracy (based on some offhand remarks by Diebold’s former chief), we should note that Ehrlich (who wants to scrap the machine) is a Republican, and the folks who want to keep the machines are Democrats. So, once again, we’ll note that this is not a partisan issue. It’s an issue about having secure, fair and accurate voting.
Quite so. Computers are very useful for a wide variety of tasks, but merely putting a computer in something does not make it “state of the art.” These are defective voting machines, they put the integrity of the election at risk, and so they shouldn’t be used no matter how many bells and whistles they might have. Hopefully Erlich’s announcement will be the start of a trend.
The Washington Post reports that the president’s “national security agenda”–that is, its campaign to undermine the Fourth Amendment (and the Geneva Convention)–is faltering:
Frist surprised senators yesterday on the warrantless wiretapping issue, sending surveillance legislation already approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee to the intelligence committee for further review. With one week left to consider the bill on the Senate floor, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), an intelligence committee member, said passage before the election would be “extremely ambitious.”
The intelligence committee is considered hostile to legislation worked out between Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and the White House. That bill would allow but not order the administration to submit its warrantless surveillance program to a secret national security court for constitutional review. The program involves monitoring overseas phone calls and e-mails of some Americans when one party is suspected of links to terrorism.
Three Republicans on the intelligence committee–Snowe, Sen. Mike DeWine (Ohio) and Sen. Chuck Hagel (Neb.)–have co-authored competing legislation that would give Congress considerably more oversight of the program.
It’s good to see Republicans standing up to the president in defense of civil liberties. I wish I could have said the same for a certain “moderate” senator from Pennsylvania.
Hat tip: EFF
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