Fascinating article in the WSJ today: “To Sketch a Thief: Genes Draw Likeness of Suspects In the Field of DNA Forensics, Scientists Identify Genetic Markers for Traits Revealing Appearance and Ethnicity.”
Forensic experts are increasingly relying on DNA as “a genetic eyewitness,” says Jack Ballantyne, associate director for research at the National Center for Forensic Science at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, who is studying whether a DNA sample can reveal a person’s age. “We’d like to say if the DNA found on a bomb fragment comes from the young man who carried the bomb or from the wizened old mastermind who built it.”
The push to predict physical features from genetic material is known as DNA forensic phenotyping, and it’s already helped crack some difficult investigations. In 2004, police caught a Louisiana serial killer who eyewitnesses had suggested was white, but whose crime-scene DNA suggested — correctly — that he was black. Britain’s forensic service uses a similar “ethnic inference” test to trace murderers and rapists.
It goes almost without saying that the first impulse of many is to ban this evolving area of technology:
Worried about the ethical and social challenges, Germany doesn’t permit the forensic use of DNA to infer ethnicity or physical traits. Nor do a handful of U.S. states, including Indiana, Wyoming and Rhode Island. The U.K. and the Netherlands allow it.
The main downside I can see to the use of this technology in crime-fighting is that it would be disastrous for the genre of crime fiction. While it certainly
sounds like something out of GATTACA (my favorite movie of all time), it would have killed the plot: The genetic-GESTAPO probably would have known that our genetically-defective hero Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke) was not in fact, the genetically-engineered-but-crippled superman Jerome Morrow (Jude Law) he claimed to be—and the whole plot would have gone up in smoke. How much fun would that have been?
Interestingly, it seems Hulu once made the entire film available online but no longer does so. Fie on them and their conspiracy to suppress the future! Damn it, Hulu, don’t you know that “There Is No Gene For The Human Spirit?”
I’ve been working closely with PFF Adjunct Fellow & former ICANN Board member Michael D. Palage on ICANN issues. Michael had this to say about the ongoing saga of ICANN’s attempt to create new gTLDs.
During the recent ICANN Board meeting in Mexico City, the Board authorized the creation and funding of an Implementation Recommendation Team (IRT). This team was to be comprised of “an internationally diverse group of persons with knowledge, expertise, and experience in the fields of trademark, consumer protection, or competition law, and the interplay of trademarks and the domain name system to develop and propose solutions to the overarching issue of trademark protection in connection with the introduction of new gTLDs.” This IRT is tasked to produce a report for consideration by the ICANN community at the Sydney meeting.
The IRT consists of 24 members:
- Chairwoman Caroline G. Chicoine; and
- Seventeen members; and
- Six ex officio members: Four IPC-elected officers and two-GNSO elected Board Directors (Bruce Tonkin and Rita Rodin Johnston).
I have a number of friends and colleagues serving on this team and I wish them well in their important endeavor.
I’ve previously proposed a number of rights-protection mechanisms that IRT should consider. Today, I offer a few suggestions that I hope will guide IRT as they embark on their important work tomorrow. In particular, I hope they’ll implement some of my suggestions intended to make the IRT process more transparent-so the rest of the global Internet can follow along with their important work and provide constructive input where possible.
Continue reading →
Chris Soghoian has responded to my recent post lauding his Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (or “TACO” – documented and downloadable here). We’re agreed in the main on user empowerment. The interesting stuff is on the margin: He disagrees with me that blocking third party cookies as I do (and he does too) is a satisfactory approach to suppressing tracking by advertisers.
There are a couple of points worth making about the discussion.
The first has to do with our slightly differing objectives. Chris is deeply focused on advertisers and his dislike of being tracked by advertisers. Though it is not absolute, I have a preference against tracking by anyone other than sites that I know, like, and trust. I’m no more worried about advertisers than any entity that would track my surfing – and there are many.
Again, TLF readers, I ask you to try setting your browser to query you before setting cookies. It’s a real insight into the dozens of entities getting a look at you as you surf, including a bunch of social networks and news sites.
If “advertisers” are what you seek to harness, that seems like a group that can be captured through some kind of centralized control mechanism. (I don’t think it actually is.) But if your goal is privacy as against all comers, you don’t attempt to centrally plan or decide who is good and who is bad. Responsibility rests with the end user.
Let the goal be “advertisers,” though. And I ask: Those social networks and news aggregators – are they “advertisers”? If you’re going to require a subset of Web communicators to obey opt-out cookies, you have to be able to define that subset – a problem Chris doesn’t seem to have thought about yet.
Lots of different publishers, sites, and networks have data that is entirely fungible with the tracking data advertisers collect. What do you get if you push down on the “officially advertisers” part of the balloon? Workarounds.
But I’ve backed into the second point – the means to these ends. Chris soft-pedals how he would get at tracking, but as far as I can tell it’s a law that says “advertisers” have to obey opt-out cookies. Continue reading →
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased print publication this week to focus solely on the Web, a transition that frightened some in the publishing business, coming so shortly after the Rocky Mountain News shut down. However, as many in the tech industry are aware, this is simply a form of “creative destruction” that should boost both choice and economic activity in the longer term.
“Creative destruction,” a term coined by Joseph Schumpeter in his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, means exactly what it says — the process by which a new technology
or structure replaces the old and builds a new infrastructure. This is how progress happens and capitalism moves ahead. For a clear example, think back a century or so, when Henry Ford released his first prototype automobile, relegating the horse and buggy, and the buggy whip industry, to obsolescence.
Most would agree that such creative destruction resulted in a good outcome for society. Yet, not everyone is willing to let such revolutions take place without a fight. Indeed, some politicians have proposed bailing out newspapers, as the federal government has done for failing automakers.
“The media is a vitally important part of America,” said Frank Nicastro, who represents Connecticut’s 79th assembly district and advocated for a state government bailout of The Bristol Press. Likewise, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is hinting at federal intervention to help the embattled San Francisco Chronicle.
Read more here.
Yochai Benkler ponders the death of the newspaper:
Critics of online media raise concerns about the ease with which gossip and unsubstantiated claims can be propagated on the Net. However, on the Net we have all learned to read with a grain of salt between our teeth, like Russians drinking tea through a sugar cube. The traditional media, to the contrary, commanded respect and imposed authority. It was precisely this respect and authority that made The New York Times’ reporting on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so instrumental in legitimating the lies that the Bush administration used to lead this country to war.
This is a fantastic insight, and indeed, it’s precisely the insight that we libertarians apply to the regulatory state. That is, just as a decentralized media and a skeptical public is better than the cathedral style of news gathering, so too are decentralized certification schemes and a skeptical public better than a single, cathedral-style regulatory agency “guaranteeing” that businesses are serving consumers well.
Most of the time the regulators will protect the public, just as most of the time newspapers get their stories right. The problem is that no institution is perfect, and the consequences of failure are much more serious if you’ve got a population that’s gotten used to blindly trusting the authority figure rather than exercising healthy skepticism. Regulatory agencies are single points of failure, and in a complex economy single points of failure are a recipe for disaster.
Will Wilkinson makes the related point that journalists are prone to journalistic capture that’s very much akin to the regulatory capture that plagues government agencies.
Worried that decentralized news-gathering sources won’t be able to do the job the monolithic newspapers are leaving behind? Jesse Walker has a great piece cataloging the many ways that stories can get from obscure city council meetings to popular attention.
What a victory for privacy and personal responsibility is Chris Soghoian’s Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (or “TACO” – documented and downloadable here). It signals to the 27 ad networks with well-configured opt-out cookies that you don’t want them to track you.
It’s a technical solution that empowers (and places responsibility with) the user to exercise dominion over his or her personal information. No need for law and regulation. No need to go pleading to politicians and bureaucrats for help.
It’s also a little more efficient than my method of controlling tracking, which is to take a glance at cookies as Web sites ask to set them on my computer.
(The answer is usually “no,” but it’s very interesting to see who all wants to get a glance at me when I visit any site. It’s a lot more than just ad networks, btw. I have no idea why people think ad-network tracking is bad and tracking by others is a matter of indifference.)
Now, Chris and I
always find something to disagree about, so for good measure I’ll note that I disagree with his goal of switching targeted advertising from opt-out to opt-in. Continue reading →
By Mike Palage, PFF Adjunct Fellow & former ICANN Board Member
TPI’s Tom Lenard and Larry White released a study yesterday entitled ICANN at a Crossroads: A Proposal for Better Governance and Performance (PDF). ICANN is, indeed, at a crossroads: A number of critical Internet governance issues will be decided over the next 6-12 months-such as:
- How to roll out new gTLDs like .BLOG, which I’ve discussed here and here (PDF).
- ICANN’s future as an increasingly independent organization, which I’ve discussed here.
There is an acute need to better educate the public and policymakers about these complex issues and about how ICANN works-something that will be addressed by my upcoming primer on ICANN. For that reason, I welcome TPI’s contribution to this important debate about the future of the Internet. I share TPI’s concerns about the inadequacy of mechanisms currently in place to ensure ICANN’s accountability and the absence of any checks on ICANN’s ever-expanding budget.
But I strongly disagree with TPI’s conclusion that:
ICANN should remain a nonprofit organization, but it should be governed by and accountable to its direct users: the registries and the registrars. The seats on ICANN’s board could be rotated among the major operators in a manner that would reflect the diversity of viewpoints among the registries and registrars.
Having worn many hats in the ICANN eco-system-as a consultant for
both registries and registrars and as a business user and IP attorney-I must say that adopting this model of direct-user control would be suicidal for ICANN. Filling the ICANN Board with registries and registrars would create at least the appearance of a cartel, allowing those opposed to ICANN’s underlying model of public/private-partnership to capture the organization. Neither capture by private interests opposed to the “public” part of the model nor a counter-attack by those who object to the “private” part of the model would be a good thing for Internet users or ICANN stakeholders.
Having invested over 10 years of my life in ICANN’s diverse and inclusive public/private partnership model, I speak from first-hand experience that ICANN is
far from perfect as an organization. I’ve often feared that ICANN is heading in the wrong direction and I’ve never hesitated to say so. But despite these shortcomings, the various stakeholders I work with in the seemingly byzantine “ICANN process” remain as committed as ever to the principles set forth in NTIA’s 1998 White Paper as the foundations of Internet governance. The staying-power of this shared belief in a common set of principles among all stakeholders reaffirms my faith in the public/private partnership-whatever other changes need to be made.
Lenard and White are right about one thing: We
do need a new model for ensuring ICANN’s accountability after the expiration of ICANN’s current relationship with the U.S. Government. But the model they suggest isn’t it—as Steve Delbianco has pointed out.
Earlier this month, Google made news when it announced that its cloud computing productivity suite Google Docs had suffered a technical glitch that temporarily compromised a subset of users’ shared documents. After becoming aware of this glitch, Google notified its users via email and posted an entry to the Official Google Docs Blog that offered a more detailed explanation of what happened.
It turns out that a bug in Google’s permissions code was causing certain documents that had been shared by their author with other users but subsequently unshared to remain visible to those users. By the time Google notified its users, the bug had already been resolved, and Google estimates that only around 0.05% of all documents were vulnerable due to the glitch. As to how many documents were actually viewed by unauthorized parties, it’s unclear at this point.
All in all, the Google Docs glitch, while troubling, seems relatively minor as far as bugs go. Nevertheless, the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Mark Rotenberg jumped on the chance to attack Google, as he often does when Google makes news for anything privacy-related. Yesterday, EPIC filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission that called on the FTC to investigate Google’s privacy safeguards, order Google to shut down all cloud computing services—including Gmail, which has 26 million users—pending a thorough privacy evaluation, and force Google to pay $5 million to a fund that would be setup for “privacy research.”
Watchdog activist groups like EPIC can play a useful role in the public discourse on privacy, helping to publicize unsavory behavior by companies and educating consumers about keeping data secure. Unfortunately, however, these groups’ admirable focus on protecting privacy sometimes edges on the myopic, causing them to overreact to data breaches and sometimes even call for regulatory interventions that are decidedly
anti-consumer. EPIC’s latest complaint about Google is a classic example of this.
Continue reading →
TLF reader mwendy points me to this Eben Moglen paragraph, presumably as evidence of his anti-libertarian agenda:
“…Moreover, there are now many organizations around the world which have earned literally billions of dollars by taking advantage of anarchist production. They have brought their own state of economic dependency on anarchist production to such a high level, that they cannot actually continue operating their businesses without the anarchists’ products. They, therefore, now begin to serve as founders, mentors, and benefactors, for anarchism. They employ our programmers and pay them wages. They assist our programmers in gaining additional technical skill and applying that skill more broadly. They allow me to heavily fund a carefully constructed law firm in New York, to train only lawyers to represent only anarchists on only the payrolls of the big companies which produce the money to pay for the legal representation of anarchism. They have to do that. They need anarchism to be legally solid. They do not want it to fail. They want the anarchist legal institutions that we have created to become stronger over time, because now their businesses depend upon the success of anarchist production.
“In other words, we have reached a very important moment, a moment noticed some hundred years ago by my collaborators Marx and Engels. We have reached the moment at which the bourgeois power sources have turned the crank on invention to the point in which they are actually fueling their own downfall. They have created the necessary structures for their replacement and the forces which are speeding up that replacement are their own forces, which they are deliberately applying because the logic of capitalism compels them to use those new forces to make more money, even though in the long run it speeds the social transition which puts them out of business altogether. This is a very beautiful feeling…”
As I said before, Moglen is not the guy I’d pick to sell free software to libertarians. But I don’t think this passage is as outrageous as mwendy thinks. According to Wikipedia, anarchism “is a political philosophy encompassing theories and attitudes which consider the state, as compulsory government, to be unnecessary, harmful, and/or undesirable.” That certainly sounds like a laudable goal to me. I don’t personally think it’s possible to achieve a stateless society, but there are plenty of self-described anarchists who take fundamentally libertarian policy positions.
Continue reading →
Former Washington State Governor Gary Locke will likely face some grilling questions at his confirmation hearing tomorrow in the Senate. But will he face any questions about the future of the Internet?
Senators will likely grandstand over the census, the bailout, and the AIG bonuses. The future of Internet governance, however, will surely be sacrificed at the altar of politics. But as my colleague Mark Blafkin writes in his blog post, Al Gore may have invented the Internet, but the next Secretary will have a large role in determining its future:
As part of the Joint Project Agreement (JPA), the Department of Commerce is set to sever its agreement to backstop the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) at the end of the year. While the Department of Commerce plays no role in the day-to-day management of the Internet, it has played an important role in both holding ICANN accountable for its promises regarding private sector-leadership, and protecting ICANN from institutional capture. We should be thinking about asking these questions:
- Before the U.S. Government gives up oversight of ICANN, how do you believe the security of the core infrastructure of the Internet can be protected? For example, should NTIA agree to ICANN’s plan to take over all security management for the Internet root zone?
- How will ICANN’s accountability be ensured in the absence of Department of Commerce oversight – especially accountability to the private sector stakeholders?
- If ICANN is fully privatized, what can be done to protect ICANN from capture by foreign governments or the United Nations, which has asserted its own right to manage “Critical Internet Resources” – not the private sector?
These questions are of interest to many in the Internet governance community, if not Commerce Committee.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.