Who is Randy Vanderhoof, you say?
More than a year ago, I posted here about a quote Randy Vanderhoof of the Smart Card Alliance had given to Federal Computer Week:
Privacy concerns are all perception and hype and no substance but carry considerable weight with state legislators because no one wants to be accused of being soft on privacy.
Though I’m not sure, I have a vague recollection that someone from his organization called me up or emailed and explained that he was misquoted. All a misunderstanding.
So I was interested in a Q&A Randy Vanderhoof had with David Pogue of the New York Times recently. Asked about the obstacles to adoption of smart cards in the U.S., he said:
It’s the business rules and legal barriers that are the biggest obstacles to overcome, and some cultural norms have to change as well, like the privacy advocates who don’t trust any technology that touches their identities (especially if the government is somehow in the middle).
There may be some privacy advocates that don’t trust any technology touching identity, but maybe it’s that all the technologies touching identity yet seen fail to meet the demands of the public for privacy and data security – especially if the government is in the middle.
I’m all for changing cultural norms. The dismissive culture at the Smart Card Alliance seems to be the right place to start.
In case you’ve been in a pre-holiday daze this week, the blogosphere has been atwitter (not to mention a-twittering) with the news that the Hon. Louis L. Stanton, the Federal district judge presiding over Viacom’s massive copyright infringement suit against YouTube has ordered Google, which owns YouTube, to turn over its viewership records (12 terabytes). Most notably, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has called Judge Stanton a “moron” for failing to appreciate that “handing over user names and a list of videos they’ve watched to a highly litigious copyright holder is extremely likely to result in lawsuits against those users that have watched copyrighted content on YouTube.” Whatever one thinks of the Viacom v. YouTube/Google case, Arrington’s concern is misplaced (if not hysterical) and his logic betrays his ignorance of how litigation actually works. Continue reading →
Via C@L, Glenn Greenwald has thoroughly fisked Senator Obama’s most recent statement on FISA and immunity for telecom providers.
It’s more and more clear that Obama has flip-flopped, reversed course, sold out, and whatever else you want to call it.
Obama himself set high expectations about standing for something, being different, and getting away from “politics as usual.” It didn’t take long for him to demonstrate that he is a typical, disappointing politician.
Does he have time to reverse course again, redeem himself, and build back support? Or has he already handed the election to McCain?
The most popular group on my.barackobama.com, the social networking service that lies at the heart of Barack Obama’s wildly successful online strategy, is now the one titled “Senator Obama – Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity – Get FISA Right.” Created just over a week ago, it now has 16883 members, up from about 7000 members 48 hours ago. That compares to “Action Wire” with 13488 members and “Students for Barack Obama” with just 8704 members.
Social media are a two-edged sword. On the one hand, if harnessed effectively it can be a devastatingly effective way to mobilize large numbers of people toward a common goal. But the flip side is that the people have to
want to be harnessed in the direction you want to go. If you start to betray the principles that attracted all those thousands of enthusiastic volunteers in the first place, they’re able to use the same potent organizational tools to express their dissatisfaction.
Democrats have been running left for the primaries and right for the general election for decades. (And Republicans, of course have done the reverse) Until recently, there simply wasn’t much party activists could do about it. The only organization with the scale and resources to mobilize a candidates supporters was the candidate’s campaign itself, and the campaign obviously isn’t a vehicle for criticizing the candidate. So once a candidate had the nomination in hand, he could safely ignore his “base” and focus on courting centrist voters.
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This article is full of bad ideas. Read to the end and you’ll see why I posted about it, risking that it would emerge from the obscurity it deserves.
Sen. Obama and I faced off in the Kansas City Star last week over the FISA bill. Well, sort of. Here are Obama’s comments in defense of the legislation. And here is my response, lifted from this blog post. So we’ve got Sen. Obama defending the White House position on illegal surveillance, while I got tapped to defend civil liberties. Something to keep in mind next time someone accuses the Cato Institute of being a right-wing think tank.
On Julian‘s recommendation, I’m reading Peter Swire’s The System of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Law, a good treatise on the basics of surveillance law. One of the things I didn’t realize is how rare non-FISA wiretapping actually is:
Comments I have heard in public from knowledgeable persons suggest that there has been ongoing expansion of who is considered an “agent of a foreign power.” Consider an individual who works in the United States for the Cali drug cartel. Is that person an “agent of a foreign power?” The Cali cartel is a highly organized group that physically controls a substantial amount of territory in Colombia. Given these facts, one might well argue that the Cali cartel is more of a “foreign power” than the amorphous Al Qaeda network. If one accepts the Cali cartel as a “foreign power,” and a major smuggler as an “agent of a foreign power,” would a street-level cocaine dealer also qualify as its agent? There is no clear line in the statute stating that the dealer would not be so considered. To take another example, what about the activities of the so-called “Russian mafia?” Many organized crime groups have links to overseas operations. How small can the links back home be to still qualify that group’s actions as on behalf of a foreign power?
These examples, it turns out, go to the heart of whether Title III will continue to be a significant part of the overall American system of electronic surveillance. The threat of organized crime was a principal justification in 1968 for the extraordinary intrusion of performing wiretaps under Title III. Over time, narcotics and organized crime cases have constituted the vast bulk of federal Title III wiretaps. In 2002, for instance, narcotics cases numbered 406 (81%) and racketeering cases fifty-nine (12%) of the 497 total federal wiretaps. Yet an expansion of the definition of “agent of a foreign power” could render Title III wiretaps almost obsolete. Many heroin, cocaine, and other drug cases are linked to imported narcotics. Many organized crime cases in this era of globalization have significant links to overseas activities. FISA orders already outnumbered Title III orders in 2003.302 If most drug cases and organized crime cases shift to the secret world of FISA, then the constitutional teachings of Katz and Berger may have little effect.
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MAPLight.org has compiled some numbers seeking to correlate changes in voting on telecom immunity with contributions from telecom providers.
Targeted by Chairman Kevin Martin’s apparent war on cable, the cable industry has had a tough time at the FCC of late. Being a cable lobbyist at the FCC today is like being a Communist in the State Department in the 1950s. One can just imagine the question: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a user of coaxial technology?”
That said, the cable folks don’t always lose. Just this Friday, they won one – handing a defeat to Martin. The problem is that its one they really should have lost.
The question at hand (addressed ably by Berin Szoka on Friday, and by Adam Thierer earlier) is whether telephone companies should be able to contact customers who have requested that their phone numbers be switched over to a competitor, and try to convince them not to switch. Several cable firms filed a complaint against Verizon over the practice early this year. The practice is anti-competitive, they said, pointing out that Verizon was able to ply customers with “price incentives and gift cards” to convince them not to switch.
In April, the FCC staff said it would side with the telcos on this one. But on Friday the commission voted 4-1 – with Chairman Martin the only ‘no’ vote – to ban the practice.
That is unfortunate. Far from being a threat to competition, being able to fight to keep your customers – and even to ply them with a few incentives – is at the heart of it. The practice is common in other highly competitive industries – just try letting a magazine subscription expire. In fact, as Verizon’s Tom Tauke argues, cable firms have long engaged in similar activity to keep customers from moving to telco video service. Why should it now be wrong for telcos to do the same thing for telephone services?
I don’t say this often, but Chairman Martin was right on this one. Not because cable should lose, but because consumers would win.
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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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.