Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certaincompanies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.
Republicans scored a victory yesterday—with the help of many Democrats and independent Joe Lieberman—with the Senate’s spy bill. The legislation would give retroactive immunity to telecom companies who have shared customer data with the government in violation of the law, and it would expand the government’s ability to spy on Americans’ international phone calls without court oversight. Conservatives were ecstatic. “Immunity is very, very important, obviously, to get the full capability and cooperation we need,” Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas, said yesterday. And yet this enthusiasm for telecom immunity is a betrayal of a principle Republicans love to invoke in other contexts. “America is based on the rule of law, and that law must be enforced,” Sen. Hutchison thundered during last year’s immigration debate. The conservative arguments against forgiving illegal immigrants apply with equal force to the telecom industry, even if no one made them yesterday.
The Senate legislation must now be reconciled with the House version, which does not include retroactive immunity. Given that the Democrats control both houses of Congress, you’d expect they’d come up with something closer to the House version, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
This ad from the Republican National Committee has been making the rounds inside the beltway over the last week:
The ad is chock-full of misleading, scare-mongering claims, most of which I’ve alreadyaddressed. But of course, the point of this ad isn’t education, but intimidation. The message is that Democrats who don’t fall in line behind the president’s warrantless surveillance agenda will face similar attack ads in the fall elections.
But as the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, this tactic has already been tried, and it failed miserably. In the 2006 elections, incumbent Nancy Johnson used an ad with a virtually identical message to ward off challenger Chris Murphy. The ad backfired, sparking newspapers to editorialize that it was “desperate” and a “fraud.” Murphy returned fire with an ad quoting these editorials and arguing that Johnson would say anything to stay in power.
The rule of law and judicial oversight of domestic spying are bedrock principles of our system of government. There is no reason Democrats (or Republicans, for that matter) should be afraid to run on those principles in November. Capitulating to the president’s demands on this issue would not only undermine our civil liberties, but it would also miss a key opportunity to draw a clear contrast with an unpopular president.
Democrats are constantly complaining about the fact that they’re seen by voters as weak on national security issues. Perhaps their constant capitulation to the president’s demands is part of the problem. Democrats are never going to win elections by presenting themselves as being just as willing to shred the constitution. In the first place, no one will believe them, and in the second place, why would you vote for the imitation when you can vote for the original? Democrats are only going to win on national security when they’re willing to say something different from the Republicans. This, it seems to me, is a golden opportunity. It allows them to stake out a clear position: “yes to eavesdropping on terrorists, no to eavesdropping on innocent Americans, and no to allowing big telecom companies to break the law.”
Threats can work wonders. A few months ago I tried to bargain Charter into giving me a better deal on my cable service. They jerked me around and successfully made the process unpleasant enough that I decided it wasn’t worth the bother. Recently, I got an offer from AT&T for $15/month Internet access. I don’t really want their slow, “Your World Delivered to the NSA” Internet access, but it gave me a good excuse to call Charter and tell them I wanted to cancel my service. Boy did that work wonders. No longer did I have to go through some ridiculous Internet sign-up process to get a cheaper deal. They knocked $20 off of my bill right on the phone.
So if you’re not getting a “special” price from your cable provider, call and tell them you want to cancel; tell them your phone company is offering you a lower price. Most likely they’ll offer you a discount to keep you as a customer. And if they don’t, you can always call back the next day and tell them you changed your mind.
In response to the contention that incandescent light bulbs aren’t inefficient in the winter, when you’re heating your house anyway, commenter David over at Yglesias’s blog asks:
Have you done the cost benefit analysis on that? My hunch is that your heater is far more efficient at heating your place and that the ratio of electricity to heat that your bulb is producing is highly inefficient. Do you have studies that say differently?
It’s been a while since I took physics, but I’m pretty sure that the conservation of energy suggests this is a non-sensical question. If all the energy is being converted into either heat or light, and both heat and light are desired, then it’s incoherent to talk about the heat-producing efficiency of the bulb, since there’s nowhere else for the energy to go.
On the broader point, Matt gets it exactly right: it’s absurd for Congress to decide no one has a legitimate reason to use a less efficient light bulb. There are 300 million people in the country, surely at least a few of us have legitimate uses for incandescents. The right way to deal with the problem is to ensure that the electricity is being priced appropriately (perhaps increasing taxes on generators if there’s evidence that they’re imposing uncompensated environmental harms) and then let consumers decide for themselves how much energy they want to “waste.” Surely in a country where people are allowed to set their thermostats to 80 in the winter and 60 in the summer, they should have the option to spend their hard-earned money on slightly more-expensive but aesthetically more pleasing light if they want to.
It’s the worst. Are you kidding me? Look at all the great evils. They’re all ideologically drive. You’ve got the crusades, the Holocaust, Communism, no third-party apps on the iPhone. Never, never surrender yourself to an idea, my friend, never.
The iPod is a marvelously well-designed product. But one of the things about it that really irritates me is the way it handles podcasts. If I’m halfway through listening to one, and I plug the iPod in to download new ones, it will remove the half-listened-to podcast from the iPod. This is so obviously the wrong behavior, and should be so easy to fix, that I find it amazing that no one at Apple has done so. It’s a shame that iTunes isn’t an open source project, because this seems like the sort of thing a competent hacker could find and fix in a weekend if she had access to the source code.
Relatedly, if iTunes finds and downloads a new podcast while an iPod is plugged in, why does it require me to manually push the “sync” button in order to get the podcast onto the iPod. It appears that I could leave the iPod plugged in for hours and it wouldn’t perform the appropriate sync until I either manually tell it to or unplug the iPod and plug it back in. This is another thing that really should be trivial to add.
As luck would have it, I’ve got two new pieces out today on two very different privacy debates. First, in the latest issue of TechKnowledge, which is based on my Computing in the Cloud talk, I argue that privacy policy should be focused on empowering consumers to make their own decisions about privacy tradeoffs, rather than having government bureaucrats decide which information companies should collect and how it can be used. I discuss three cases—cookies, GMail, and Facebook’s newsfeed—where initial privacy concerns turned out to be overblown, and one—Beacon—where they weren’t.
Second, in a new piece for Reason, I chide Democrats for capitulating on civil liberties. I point out that Congress wasn’t always so spineless:
Bush’s predecessor was also an ardent supporter of increased wiretapping authority. For example, on July 29, 1996, Bill Clinton unveiled a proposal to expand government surveillance by permitting the use of “roving wiretaps.” The nation was still reeling from terrorist attacks on the Atlanta Olympics and American barracks in Saudi Arabia, and many suspected that the explosion of TWA Flight 800 was also the work of terrorists. Clinton argued that these tragedies highlighted the need for legislative changes, and he pressed Congress to act before its August recess.
But Congress had a bipartisan tradition of its own to defend. As they had done since Watergate, Congressional leaders raised concerns about civil liberties. Then-Speaker Newt Gingrich said he was willing to consider changes to the law, but vowed to do so “in a methodical way that preserves our freedoms.” Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott vowed that Congress would not “rush to a final judgment” before going on vacation. In the end, the 104th Congress finished its term without giving President Clinton the wiretapping authority he sought.
It’s a little depressing that Harry Reid is less concerned with civil liberties than Trent Lott was a decade ago.
Really, most of my posts about fair use are excuses to post funny videos:
Is this fair use? My feeling is that a straight-forward reading of the four factors would probably suggest a “no” answer, but a sympathetic judge might find it to be sufficiently creative as to be transformative. Certainly, this clip doesn’t reduce demand for the work it’s based on.
Charles Francis Adams, Jr., then director, and soon to become president of the Union Pacific… revealed to Long on March 1 why railroads were soon [in 1884] to bring all their weight behind the commission form of regulation. Indeed, he suggested the whole course of subsequent big business attitudes toward federal regulation: “If you only get an efficient Board of Commissioners, they could work out of it whatever was necessary. No matter what sort of bill you have, everything depends upon the men who, so to speak, are inside of it, and who are to make it work. In the hands of the right men, any bill would produce the desired results.”
I’ll probably get mocked again, but here’s another thing I didn’t know about regulation in the good ‘ol days of the 1970s (from this paper):
With capacity and route expansion foreclosed as outlets for product differentiation, the trunk carriers devised new means of service competition. “Capacity wars” gave way to “lounge wars.” On wide-bodied aircraft, lounges were introduced in first class, then in coach. When American installed piano bars, TWA countered with electronic draw-poker machines. Live entertainment proliferated, with musicians, magicians, wine-tasters, and Playboy bunnies.
When’s the last time you saw live entertainment on a commercial flight?
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.