Articles by Tim Lee

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 certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.


Ron Paul on Tech Policy

by on November 10, 2007 · 0 comments

One of the frustrating things about working in tech policy is that our issues get precious little airtime in political campaigns. Politicians rarely get asked tough questions about the issues that matter most to the technology industry. So I was excited to come across this video of Ron Paul discussing his views on Internet and video game censorship, Internet taxation, and network neutrality regulation:

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I found it jarring when they guy kept referring to Rep. Paul as “Ron.” If he had the president on would he have called him “George?”

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Lessig and Causby

by on November 7, 2007 · 6 comments

Larry Lessig has a good talk about free culture. There’s nothing in there that won’t be familiar to people who’ve read Lessig’s book, but it does a good job of briefly and succinctly laying out his basic argument.

One thing that’s worth mentioning, though. Lessig’s telling of the Causby decision is a little misleading. Yes, Justice Douglas rejected Blackstone’s notion that, in general, property rights reach to the heavens. But the Causby’s still won. What Lessig doesn’t mention is that the airplanes in question weren’t just flying over the Causby’s land. Their land was adjacent to a military base and the airplanes were at extremely low altitude when they crossed the Causby’s land, creating deafening noise.

I don’t really understand why Lessig gives the misleading impression that the Causbys lost the case. Yes, it complicates the story a little bit, but I think it would be perfectly possible to tell the story accurately and still preserve his basic, entirely valid, and quite powerful point about the importance of common sense in the law.

I used Lessig’s story myself a couple of years ago. Unfortunately I didn’t do my due diligence of reading the original case and so I wound up giving the same misleading impression Lessig did. Were I writing that article today, I definitely would have framed it differently. The full story is plenty powerful; there’s no need to oversimplify it.

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A Note to Ron Paul Activists

by on November 6, 2007 · 0 comments

While I’m on the subject, I wish someone would explain to the rank-and-file online Ron Paul activists how badly their behavior reflects on the campaign, and on libertarianism more generally. Ars did a story on the spambots similar to Wired’s story, and the comment section was flooded with comments by people who had registered for accounts the day before. The comments ranged from boilerplate campaign talking points to comments that make them look completely insane. For example:

I find it far more likely that this botnet spam attack is not the design of the Paul campaign or any of its supporters. It is far more likely that this is the release of a first round of direct cyber attack against the Ron Paul campaign. I base this opinion on the fact that the attack is becoming clearly targeted at the youtube videos of Ron Paul. Youtube links to his videos are beginning to be inserted into the the body of these spam message and as a direct result the video’s are being pulled by youtube for violation of their terms of use policy.

This attack method can do far more harm than good for the Ron Paul campaign so I will make a guess that this is the work of those in the NSA using cyber war tactics out of loyalty or possibly under orders to use this stealth attack method to derail the Ron Paul campaign by using the campaign’s online strength against them.

Yup, that definitely sounds like the most plausible explanation. In fact, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself!

This army of over-enthusiastic online supporters puts the Paul campaign in a bit of a bind. It’s not like they can put out a press release saying “Dear supporters, please stop making fools of yourselves.” And because these campaigns are spontaneously organized, it’s not clear who the campaign would contact to privately ask them to tone it down. On the other hand, if my first exposure to Paul’s candidacy was a comment-spam flood in the comment section of my favorite blog, I’m pretty sure I’d be turned off.

Even worse, it’s likely that the most obnoxious comment spammers are also the least likely to realize that they’re among the obnoxious ones. So the Paul campaign might be able to tone down the volume of commenting, but at the cost of making the median comment even nuttier.

Since the Paul campaign probably can’t say it, I will. Maybe if I say it a few of the comment-spamming horde will find their way here. Ron Paul comment spammers, you’re making fools of yourselves and embarrassing the campaign you want so much to help. An occasional, respectful post supporting your candidate is great. A flood of angry, paranoid rants is just going to turn people off. If you want to see Ron Paul win the election, please knock it off.

Update: Sigh, you can click the comments for several examples of the point I’m making here. For Ron Paul supporters who are new to this blog: I’m a libertarian and I gave Paul $50 yesterday. So I’m not criticizing Paul or his views. Rather, my point is that you’re not going to win any converts through angry rants or indiscriminate comment spam. All you’re going to accomplish is to irritate people who might otherwise be sympathetic to your message.

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Ron Paul Good, Ron Paul Spam Bad

by on November 6, 2007 · 0 comments

I like Ron Paul and I’m happy he raised a boatload of money yesterday. I wish he didn’t attract so many crazy supporters, though. Confidential to Thomas DiLorenzo: Insinuating that Wired‘s coverage was driven by political bias only makes you look like a nutjob.

Incidentally, if the Paul campaign hasn’t specifically condemned the pro-Paul spam campaign, they should do so posthaste. I’m sure they’re telling the truth when they say they had nothing to do with it, but spamming is a sufficiently scummy activity that they should be explicitly repudiating it.

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Ashcroft on the Telcos’ Get-Out-Of-Jail Free Card

by on November 5, 2007 · 2 comments

In today’s New York TImes, John Ashcroft jumps on the bandwagon for giving telcos blanket immunity for their participation in illegal wiretapping programs:

At the outset, it is critical to understand what the immunity provisions the administration and Congress have negotiated actually do. This is not “blanket immunity,” as it is sometimes caricatured by its opponents. The Senate bill would confer immunity in only two limited circumstances: if the carrier did not do what the plaintiffs claim; or if the carrier did do what the plaintiffs claim but based on explicit assurances from the highest levels of the government that the activities in question were authorized by the president and determined to be lawful.

Longstanding principles of law hold that an American corporation is entitled to rely on assurances of legality from officials responsible for government activities. The public officials in question might be right or wrong about the advisability or legality of what they are doing, but it is their responsibility, not the company’s, to deal with the consequences if they are wrong.

To deny immunity under these circumstances would be extraordinarily unfair to any cooperating carriers. By what principle of justice should anyone face potentially ruinous liability for cooperating with intelligence activities that are authorized by the president and whose legality has been reviewed and approved by our most senior legal officials?

A couple of points immediately spring to mind here. In the first place, if “longstanding principles of law” tell us that the telcos are “entitled to rely on assurances of legality from officials responsible for government activities,” then why is new legislation necessary? Why can’t AT&T simply invoke those principles in court and get the lawsuits dismissed without Congress having to get involved?

Second, the claim that this is not “blanket immunity” is absurd. Obviously, AT&T and Verizon aren’t going to hand over customer data the executive branch hasn’t asked for. And the executive branch would never admit that its information requests were unlawful. So granting immunity for any requests the executive branch says are lawful means granting immunity for any conceivable information request. That’s blanket immunity; there’s nothing “limited” about it.

Third, the “principle of justice” Ashcroft is looking for here is the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment. The fundamental principle of the Fourth Amendment is that the judicial branch, not the executive branch, gets to decide when a search is “authorized.” No matter how many executive branch officials “review and approve” a search, the search isn’t constitutional unless it’s approved by a judge.

But actually, if I were in Congress I would be willing to call Ashcroft’s bluff. I’d support immunity legislation on the condition that the president appoint a special prosecutor that would commence a top-to-bottom review of all the wiretapping programs the White House has undertaken, and bring criminal charges against the relevant administration officials (including, ahem, Ashcroft himself) if he finds that any of them ran afoul of the law. Of course, the White House would never consent to that. Because they don’t really believe that executive branch officials should “deal with the consequences” of the decisions they make. To the contrary, I suspect one reason the White House is pushing so hard for immunity is that it would be embarrassing if a court found participation in its programs was illegal. They don’t believe anyone should suffer consequences for breaking the law.

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Yochai Benkler’s Apocalyptic Rhetoric

by on November 3, 2007 · 17 comments

Matt is clearly right that geek activists are lousy at political organizing, and Internet utopianism may lull some of us into a false sense of security. But I think that, if anything, Benkler’s writing demonstrates the opposite tendency: his pronouncements tend toward the apocalyptic. For example, he says:

I think there are certain well-defined threats to this model. If we end up with a proprietary communications platform, such as the one that the FCC’s spectrum and broadband policies are aiming to achieve; and on that platform we will have proprietary, closed platforms like the iPhone, then much of the promise of the networked environment will be lost.

Now, I’ve written before that I think Benkler overhypes the potential of a spectrum commons. I won’t belabor that point, but I think his comments about the iPhone are particularly interesting. It’s certainly true that advocates for open standards like Benkler (and me) have much to criticize in the iPhone. But it’s a mistake to view the iPhone as a step backwards for open networks without looking at the broader context.

In the first place, Apple’s attempts to lock down the iPhone have sparked an enormous customer backlash and that backlash may have spurred Apple to release an SDK for the phone. I would bet money that the iPhone will be a de facto open platform within five years, with a thriving community of third-party developers.

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Citizendium Turns One. Point Still Unclear

by on November 1, 2007 · 0 comments

Larry Sanger has an essay touting Citizendium’s accomplishments over the last year. Apparently they’ve amassed a whopping 3,200 articles over the last year, and are adding about a dozen new article per day.

He puts a brave face on this, but it’s really hard to see how this is success. Wikipedia has 2 million articles, about 500 times as many as Citizendium, and it’s growing a lot faster. I decided to check out the articles on a few topics I’m interested, and most of them didn’t exist. No articles on the Cato Insititute, libertarianism, F.A. Hayek, or even copyright. There is an article on Milton Friedman, but it’s extremely short and frankly not very good. Take the first sentence: Friedman didn’t consider himself “a leader of American Conservatism in its libertarian aspect.” He called himself a liberal. The corresponding sentence in Wikipedia is “His political philosophy, which Friedman himself considered classically liberal and consequentialist libertarian, stressed the advantages of the marketplace and the disadvantages of government intervention, strongly influencing the outlook of American conservatives and libertarians.” That’s much more accurate and informative. The Wikipedia article on Friedman is also more than twice as long as the Citizendium article.

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Bloggingheads.tv

by on October 31, 2007 · 4 comments

The media business in general and punditry in particular are currently seeing an explosion of clever new ways to deliver content. One of the most intriguing is bloggingheads.tv, a “diavlog,” meaning a blog featuring videos of pairs of talking heads. For example, my friend Will Wilkinson had a fascinating discussion with BH.tv founder Robert Wright about libertarianism and what’s wrong with Ron Paul. (Incidentally, everything Will says about Paul is true, but he’s still head and shoulders above the other candidates)

What prompted me to plug them here, though (aside from the shameless hope that sucking up to them will land me an invitation to participate) is that they’ve recently had a significant technology upgrade. They ditched the irritating WMP-based format they had before and replaced it with a Flash-based video player. Meaning that at least Mac users can watch videos without having to install proprietary plugins. (Linux users might still be screwed). They’ve also introduced “dingalinks,” which are permalinks for video. Awesome.

But best of all, they’ve added a feature that lets you watch videos at 1.4 times normal speed. That means I can watch Bob and Will have 75 minutes of conversation in 54 minutes. It’s absolutely fantastic. The biggest flaw with video-based blogging is that it takes so long to watch videos. I can read faster than most people can talk, so it’s an incredibly wasteful way to consume punditry. However, it turns out that people are perfectly understandable speaking at 1.4 times their normal speed. So I saved 20 minutes at the cost of Will’s voice being slightly squeakier than normal.

They post interesting discussions from insightful people several times a week, so I encourage you to check them out.

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The Other Holt Bill

by on October 31, 2007 · 0 comments

I’m a little slow on this, but I’ve finally had a chance to read through Rush Holt’s alternative to the House leadership’s (now shelved) FISA bill, and it’s a real breath of fresh air. It increases executive power in two relatively modest ways: by allowing domestic interception of foreign-to-foreign communications without a warrant and extending the deadline for getting after-the-fact “emergency” warrants from 3 to 7 days. The rest of the legislation is focused where this debate should have been focused from the outset: on ensuring that the executive and judicial branch actually have the resources required to do their job without sacrificing anyone’s civil liberties. It increases the number of judges on the FISA court, authorizes the DNI and the attorney general to hire more lawyers to fill out warrant requests, and requires that the FISA court decide on warrant requests within 24 hours.

Notably, unlike the House Democrats’ RESTORE Act, the Holt bill does not require the executive branch to file a blizzard of quarterly reports on all aspects of its surveillance activities. (It does require the president to immediately disclose to Congress what programs are already being undertaken) It doesn’t require them because they aren’t needed: individualized warrant applications are a much more reliable check on executive branch abuses. The RESTORE Act, in contrast, gave the executive branch much broader discretion to engage in warrantless wiretaps when one end of a call was overseas, and the reporting process was essentially a stopgap to paper over that deficiency.

In a sane world, the Holt bill would be the reasonable compromise between a White House that wanted more authority and liberal Democrats who are wary of a White House with a dismal civil liberties record. Instead, we live in a bizarro world in which the Democrats’ initial offer is significantly more permissive, and the White House is complaining that even that doesn’t give them nearly enough power.

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Sticky Technology and Patent Policy

by on October 31, 2007 · 2 comments

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a Show-Me Institute conference on education policy. One theme that was echoed by a number of conference participants is that after decades of study, researchers have been unable to quantify what makes a good teacher or a successful school. We know that certain schools, such as KIPP, work much better than other schools. But replicating those successes at scale has proven maddeningly difficult. When someone tries to take a successful school and use it as a model for producing a large number of equally successful schools, something invariably gets lost in translation. Generally speaking, a successful school can only be replicated through a labor-intensive process of apprenticeship, in which key personnel for the new school spend several years at the existing school learning the details of how it works. Obviously, that makes the process of replicating successful agonizingly slow.

I’ve read (although I can’t find a good source right now) that development economists in the mid-20th century discovered similar problems when they tried to export American technology to third-world countries. They hoped that if they helped poor countries build American-style factories and sent them manuals and technical advisors to explain how to use them, that those third-world countries could start producing manufactured goods and rapidly increase their standard of living. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out that way. Duplicating American infrastructure overseas turns out to be a lot more complex than anyone imagined.

In short, a central problem in both education policy and development economics is that technology is surprisingly sticky. Merely observing someone do something innovative is almost never sufficient to replicate that innovative activity elsewhere. Policy wonks in both fields would love to find a way to mass-produce successes, but that turns out to be maddeningly difficult. Tacit knowledge turns out to be surprisingly important.

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