Larry Lessig is so respectful to his ideological opponents:
The press conference brought together some unlikely allies. “This is the first time in our history that we have tried to build fundamental infrastructure on the basis of a Neanderthal philosophy,” announced Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, “which is that we don’t need government to do it.” Seated next to Lessig was David All, founder of the Republican fundraising site Slatecard—and normally a proponent of that “Neanderthal” philosophy. All later argued for wider broadband access as a means of fostering the next generation of tech entrepreneurs.
Tell us what you really think, Prof. Lessig.
Ars reports on an important case down in Florida:
The defense against the obscenity charges will focus, in part, on the suggestion that interest in group sex fails the community standards test. Google search trends will be used to demonstrate that, except for brief periods near Thanksgiving, searches for “orgy” consistently outrank attempts to find information about “apple pie” in Florida . The rest of the year, orgy searches are closer in frequency to what might be expected to be a common activity in Florida, “surfing.” An astute reader at Slashdot also recognized that, among Floridian Internet users, “boobs” has built and then expanded a lead over surfing during the past three years.
Personally, I find the legal concept of “obscenity,” and the notion that obscenity rules could pass First Amendment muster, to be baffling. I can’t imagine what “compelling state interest” could trump the plain language of the First Amendment to allow the censorship of sexually explicit content consumed by adults in the privacy of the home.
The Wikipedia entry on the 1992 Copyright Renewal Act is pathetic, and needs to be improved. I don’t know enough about it to add very much content, but I bet there are a few copyright nerds reading TLF who could help out!
Ars has an interesting interview with the head of Sandvine, the company at the heart of the Comcast Kerfuffle:
What Caputo seems to think he’s doing with Sandvine is enabling “all-you-can-eat” models at reasonable prices. People who argue for network neutrality are “painting the service providers into a corner,” he says in the interview. “If all packets are created equal then it’s equal utility and we should be charging on a per-packet basis, and I don’t think anybody wants to go there.”
Without traffic management, especially of P2P, the idea is that prices would either go up or congestion might reach truly terrible new heights, and Caputo believes that most users would rather just throttle P2P; let it work, but slowly and in the background, so that ISPs don’t need to make expensive infrastructure improvements and everyone can continue eating at the buffet for $30 or $40 a month. We might also see tiers emerge that allow P2P users free rein for, say $70 a month, while non-P2P users could keep paying lower prices. Caputo insists, “it’s going to be laughable in the next two or three years that people used to say all packets should be treated equally.”
This strikes me as seriously misguided. The obvious problem is the issue of evasion. For example, I’ve written before about BitTorrent header encryption, a technique that helps BitTorrent users evade deep packet inspection. No doubt Sandvine is working on finding new ways to detect encrypted BitTorrent packets. And if they do, the BitTorrent hordes will start looking for better evasion strategies. An arms race, and one that Sandvine is unlikely to win.
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Larry Lessig is a great writer and a brilliant legal scholar, but my goodness does he have bad political instincts:
I can’t begin to understand why in a war where soldiers go to jail for breaking the law, the US Congress is so keen to make sure telecom companies don’t have to fight a law suit about violating civil rights. Obama doesn’t support that immunity. He promises to get it removed. But he has signaled agreement with the compromise, which I assume means he will not filibuster immunity as he had indicated before he would. I wish he had decided differently.
But the key thing we need to keep in focus is what the objective here is. This is a hugely complex chess game. (Or I’m assuming it’s complex, since how else can you explain losing twice (ok once) to this President.) The objective of this chess game is to keep focus on the issues that show America why your candidate should win. Keeping focus (in this media environment, at least) is an insanely difficult task. But one tool in that game is picking the fights that resonate in ways that keep focus on the issues that show America why your candidate should win.
That doesn’t mean you (as a candidate) should change what you would do as President. Or change what you would fight for. But it does me that we (as strong supporters of a candidate) need to chill out a bit for about five months.
We (and I think that means all of us) can’t afford to lose this election. When we win, we will have elected a President who will deliver policy initiatives I remain certain will make us proud. If he doesn’t, then loud and clear opposition is our duty.
If “our” goal is to elect a Democrat president, then Lessig’s advice is spot on. If, on the other hand, “our” goal is to use politics as a way to improve public policy, Lessig’s advice couldn’t be worse. Continue reading →
Barack Obama is supporting the FISA bill. That pretty much seals it: Russ Feingold and Chris Dodd may filibuster, but we already know that there are enough Democrats willing to break ranks to reach cloture, and with the party’s figurehead on board, none of them are likely to switch sides. Obama says he’s going to try to strip out the immunity provision, but this is obviously so much political theater. If he were serious about doing that he’d be saying he planned to oppose the “compromise” until the immunity provision got stripped out. The fact that he’s committing himself to support the overall bill whether or not it comes with immunity is proof that he doesn’t really care about getting rid of immunity. And why would he? A few angry liberals may decide not to give to his campaign, but he’s already got a lopsided fundraising advantage over John McCain, and in the long run he probably wants to stay on the good side of a powerful lobby that could prove useful to him once he’s in the Oval Office. Same goes for Steny Hoyer: Obama will need his support when it comes time to nationalize the health care system, so why risk alienating Hoyer just to make Glenn Greenwald happy?
I’ve talked plenty about why this deal was bad policy on this blog, and you can get more from Julian if you’re interested, but at this point I’m more interested in the politics of the deal, since it turns out that’s all that mattered. It’s important to remember that when you’re in the majority, you control the calendar and so hardly anything goes to the House floor unless you want it to. Nancy Pelosi could have continued to keep the FISA issue bottled up in committee for the remainder of this Congress. Hell, Harry Reid could still refuse to take up the House legislation, although he has made it clear that he won’t. So despite Reid’s protestations to the contrary, he supports this deal.
Why? Not only have Hoyer, Reid, and company sold out our civil liberties, but they’ve angered their core supporters as well. Glen Greenwald has a gem of a poll showing that while Congress is wildly unpopular with everyone, the nominally Democratic Congress is currently polling substantially worse among Democrats than among Republicans. And that was before this FISA “compromise” was announced. This kind of spinelessness is likely to depress donor and volunteer enthusiasm come the fall.
But I think the even worse problem, from Obama, Reid, and Pelosi’s perspective, is that this means the return of the narrative of Democratic weakness on national security issues. As I wrote back in March, the Democratic Congress got some of its best press this Spring in the wake of its successful showdown with the White House:
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A friend points out this MP3 featuring a Andrew Rasiej of the Personal Democracy Forum and Allison Fine of Demos appearing on WNYC radio. They’re the authors of this book about the future of democracy.
Rasiej and Fine mention Internet voting as the wave of the future. They then took three or four calls, all of which consisted of cogent arguments for why Internet-based or electronic voting is a disaster in the making. One pointed out that it will be too complicated to make sure your vote is complicated. Another contended out that Internet-based voting disenfranchises poor people. When Fine responded that poor people could vote with their cell phones, a third caller pointed out that this would undermine the secret ballot.
Fine and Rasiej, obviously exasperated, conceded that, yes, current voting technologies had some kinks. But they insisted that once those kinks get worked out, we’ll all be able to choose our next president on our cell phones.
Fine and Rasiej struck me as irritatingly airheaded. If current e-voting technologies are deeply flawed (which they are) it’s irresponsible to be writing book chapters and giving radio interviews disparaging paper ballots as outdated. And it’s especially irritating that their support for e-voting seems to be entirely based on a gee-whiz sense that paper is old-fashioned and boring while touch-screen machines are new and exciting. This is not a serious argument, and if that’s all you have to say on the subject, you should leave scarce radio time to people who know what they’re talking about.
Incidentally, the book in question is an edited collection featuring a bunch of really great writers, including Clay Shirky, Yochai Benkler, and Brad Templeton. So I’m sure there’s some great stuff in there, even if the chapter on e-voting isn’t so good.
I’ve previously praised Rush Holt before for his thoughtful and energetic leadership on behalf of civil liberties issues. Over at TPM Cafe, he’s got a post explaining why he will not be supporting the FISA “compromise” tomorrow:
In reviewing the FISA legislation now under consideration, it is clear to me that it does not meet the criteria or the principles I shared with you earlier.
The bill lacks the very specific “reverse targeting” protections I secured in the two previous House FISA bills we’ve passed. This goes to the issue of not being precise in who we are targeting. It appears to me that innocent Americans who are not “targeted” still may have their communications intercepted with ultimately damaging results.
Also, the telecom immunity provisions are tilted in favor of the government and telecommunication firms, not the citizens. If enacted, this bill will ensure the plaintiffs never get their day in court. This bill contains an “exigent circumstances” provision–something so broad and undefined that virtually anything could be considered an “exigent circumstance.” That is not the way to conduct targeted intelligence collection designed to provide us with reliable, actionable intelligence on verified bad actors.
This bill also has a four year sunset provision, which is entirely too long and which would have the effect of tying the hands of the next Congress and the next President in terms of making changes to the law.
I agree with others who have commented that we have time to get this right. We do. The existing FISA statute has served us well and will continue to do so until we pass a more balanced FISA reform bill. This is not that bill.
Quite so. It’s too bad the majority of Holt’s colleagues don’t seem inclined to listen.
AP sends nastigrams to blogs for citing as few as 39 words from its stories.
Mike Arrington blogs about it at TechCrunch.
The AP quotes 22 words from Arrington’s post.
Arrington responds:
Now the A.P. has gone too far. They’ve quoted twenty-two words from one of our posts, in clear violation of their warped interpretation of copyright law. The offending quote, from this post, is here (I’m suspending my A.P. ban to report on this important story).
Am I being ridiculous? Absolutely. But the point is to illustrate that the A.P. is taking an absurd and indefensible position, too. So I’ve called my lawyers (really) and have asked them to deliver a DMCA takedown demand to the A.P. And I will also be sending them a bill for $12.50 with that letter, which is exactly what the A.P. would have charged me if I published a 22 word quote from one of their articles.
Brilliant.
The ACLU has joined forces with Ron Paul supporters in a “strange bedfellows” coalition to raise money that will be used in primary challenges against Democrats who vote in favor of the FISA capitulation. Personally, I don’t see anything strange about libertarians and liberals joining forces on civil liberties issues, but if the label helps them get more media coverage, more power to them. Another example of those “damned, so-called libertarians” getting involved in the FISA fight.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.