“Information wants to be free,” claim those who decry the overpowering grasp of copyright law. But they cannot mean what they say. Information wants nothing at all. The epigram speaks not to what information wants, but rather to what people want: people want information for free.
So restated, the catch-phrase still rings true. Who would not prefer to get information–that increasingly vital good–at no cost? But, alas, information never comes for free. We can only account for its costs as fully as possible, try our best to minimize them, and allocate them fairly.
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In February, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the following about the REAL ID Act: “If we don’t get it done now, someone is going to be sitting around in three or four years explaining to the next 9/11 Commission why we didn’t do it.”
Alice Lipowicz of
Washington Technology reported on REAL ID today:
[Chertoff] and other DHS officials have said that older drivers present a lower terrorism risk and, therefore, might be allowed more time to switch to Real ID licenses. According to the Washington Post, DHS might extend the deadline to 2018 for drivers older than 40 or 50. Moreover, states will have more time to implement the act, Chertoff said.
DHS had previously extended the statutory May 2008 deadline for beginning implementation to December 2009 and recently set 2013 as the deadline for full implementation.
2013 is more than 5 years from now – 2018 is more than eleven. For all Chertoff’s urgency at the beginning of the year, has the Department abandoned its mission to secure the country?
Of course not. But Chertoff and the DHS were clearly trying to buffalo the Congress and the American people on REAL ID earlier this year. They haven’t succeeded.
Happily, this national ID system doesn’t add to our country’s security as its proponents have imagined. We are not unsafe for lacking a national ID. I explored all these issues in my book
Identity Crisis.
If REAL ID were a sound security tool, pushing back the deadline for compliance would be a security risk, of course, as would reducing the quality of the cardstock used to make REAL ID-compliant cards – another measure DHS is considering.
Forget security, though. DHS is straining to get the program implemented just so it can claim success and save some face.
“[T]hose who are singing a funeral dirge, I think they’re singing the wrong tune,” Chertoff said November 6th. Alas, as before, Secretary Chertoff is the one more likely to sing a different song.
Ryan Singel points out even more problems with Joe Klein’s follow-up post on his train wreck of a column:
In his two follow-up blog posts, Klein compounds his errors and valiantly argues he is right that the Dems are coddling terrorists because a bill passed by the House says that if the NSA targets a foreigner or group of foreigners who will likely communicate with someone inside the United States, the spies need to get court approval.
Klein says this gives foreign terrorists the same rights as Americans.
But, this restriction is only true when the nation’s spies are wiretapping fiber optic cables, telecom switches and web mail providers INSIDE the United States.
Klein continues to miss this most crucial distinction in the debate, which is why THREAT LEVEL, paraphrasing Klein’s column, continues to believe that Klein is well beyond stupid. He’s dangerous.
Outside the United States, such wiretapping isn’t even defined as surveillance and it never has been.
If the NSA is listening in on cell phone calls in Iraq, they don’t need a warrant nor do they need court approval of their techniques.
If the Iranian cell phone user they are listening in on calls an American, they don’t have to stop and get a warrant. Instead they follow long-established minimization procedures that disguise the American’s name, unless there’s a good reason not to.
Wiretapping inside America is the whole reason various bills are being debated. After a secret spying court decided last spring that the government’s wiretapping inside America without having particularized warrants was illegal, the Administration began pushing for new powers from Congress. The administration then scared Congress into rush passage of a bill that massively expanded the government’s spying powers outside and inside the United States, without any real expansion of oversight.
But Klein can’t grasp this simple point, which may be why he defends himself by saying that bills are hard to read and details are unimportant
I can write half-baked articles about subjects I don’t understand. Where’s my
Time column?
Scott Cleland over at The Precursor Blog is an ideological ally on many issues, most prominently, network neutrality. Scott has come out strongly against government intervention on a host of issues, but the Google/Doubleclick merger is not one of them. Last week Scott posted a long set of talking points supporting Senators Kohl and Hatch who have called for heightened scrutiny of the deal.
But the blackboard economics that are being applied to the deal just don’t relate to reality. A brief look at recent history should stem any worries that Scott and the incredulous Senators may have.
The history of the Internet is littered with former giants like AOL, AltaVista, and Lycos that lost significant market share or went bust because they couldn’t keep innovating. Yet these companies were also labeled monopolies or, more euphemistically, as “market dominant.” In 1999 the
Motley Fool called Yahoo! “the dominant brand of the Internet.” Recently, Boston Business Journal recounted that “Lycos Inc., once one of the biggest Web portals on the planet, is now a shadow of its former self with a mere 70 employees in Waltham.”
The real competition to Google-DoubleClick may not even exist yet—Google itself was a grad student science project a decade ago. Startups can grow exponentially in a short time on the web. Look no farther than Facebook, a $10-billion gorilla today, that didn’t even exist four years ago.
Ultimately, concerns about online market consolidation are unfounded. They depict the web advertising market as static—yet the last decade has shown the dynamic nature of Internet commerce. How can one claim to find an iron-clad monopoly in a market that is best described as hyper-competitive?
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I had fun just now looking over the Northern Virginia Technology Council’s upcoming dog-and-pony show promoting the REAL ID Act. It’s a big business opportunity for Washington, D.C.-area technology vendors – nevermind that this national ID law is dying because of nationwide disapproval.
Why fun? Because clicking on the link to Gold Sponsor Wiley Rein LLP, I saw the promotional blurb below their Web banner: “‘Demonstrates a high-caliber command of privacy’ issues. – Computerworld” (It rotates through blurbs – you might have to hit reload once or twice to see it for yourself.)
You can’t promote REAL ID and claim a command of privacy issues. So which is it gonna be?
And what other promotional blurbs might go there? Let’s see ’em in the comments. A few to prime the pump, after the jump.
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The most frustrating thing about the Klein fiasco is that I can think of a number of people who actually know a lot about the FISA issue and could have provided Time‘s readership with useful information about the state of the debate. At a minimum, they should be able to find someone who can at least take the trouble to read the text of the legislation he’s writing about.
The RESTORE Act is about 20 double-space pages long. You can read it in under an hour. I did it when I was writing up the story for Ars. Ars has a lot fewer readers than Time, and I guarantee you that Klein got paid more for his column than I got paid for my article.
There’s been a lot of commentary of late blaming the Internet for undermining the high journalistic standards of the mainstream media. Well, it doesn’t get more mainstream than Time. So why didn’t the magazine’s vaunted editors notice that Klein’s “summary” was riddled with errors? If Klein couldn’t be bothered to read the bill, shouldn’t Time have assigned a fact-checker to do so? And how do we explain the fact that Internet-centric journalists like Greenwald and Singel (not to mention up-and-coming journalists like Julian) can run circles around Klein on the FISA issue?
Last week, Joe Klein penned a column purporting to show that the Democrats still didn’t “get” national security issues. It included this charming paragraph:
There is broad, bipartisan agreement on how to legalize the surveillance of phone calls and emails of foreign intelligence targets. The basic principle is this: if a suspicious pattern of calls from a terrorist suspect to a U.S. citizen is found, a FISA court warrant is necessary to monitor those communications. But to safeguard against civil-liberty abuses, all records of clearly nontargeted Americans who receive emails or phone calls from foreign suspects would be, in effect, erased. Unfortunately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi quashed the House Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan effort and supported a Democratic bill that — Limbaugh is salivating — would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only. In the lethal shorthand of political advertising, it would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans. That is well beyond stupid.
Now, as Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Singel ably explain, virtually every word of this is false. In fact, it’s so confused that it’s hard to figure out what he’s even talking about. I have no idea what the “House Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan effort” is supposed to refer to (Greenwald and Singel are equally confused), but it certainly doesn’t require warrants for overseas surveillance, which has always been outside the purview of domestic laws. And the RESTORE Act specifically exempts domestic wiretapping of foreign-to-foreign calls from the reach of the FISA courts.
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New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera penned a lengthy column on the potential dangers of a la carte regulation over the weekend. He summarized why–as we have pointed out here before–despite the best of intentions, a la carte regulation is certain to backfire:
À la carte. It sounds so appealing, doesn’t it? Instead of having to accept — and pay for — all the channels bundled by your cable company, you could pick from a menu and pay for only the ones you watch. … Yet as appealing as the idea might seem at first glance, there is a reason that Congress has not taken the bait and passed an à la carte law. À la carte would be a consumer disaster. For those of you who yearn for it, this is a classic case of “be careful what you wish for.”
Nocera goes on to show that, contrary to what a la carte regulatory advocates believe, prices for most customers would rise in the long-run:
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This Arsticle goes through the details. Which I don’t understand. And that makes me all the more certain that Al Qaeda will get their hands on dark-energy observation tools and use them to establish a Muslim caliphate!
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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.