A recent New York Times article has some precious and prescient commentary about how to address concerns with the abundance of data being collected as we move further into the digital age, something I wrote a bit about yesterday.
Here’s Insight #1:
Can someone remind me what the point of having an opposition party was supposed to be? I’m pretty sure this wasn’t it:
House Democrats plan to introduce a bill this week that would let a secret court issue one-year “umbrella” warrants to allow the government to intercept e-mails and phone calls of foreign targets and would not require that surveillance of each person be approved individually… “Some conservatives want no judicial oversight, and some liberals oppose any notion of a blanket order,” said James X. Dempsey, Center for Democracy and Technology policy director. “So the challenge of the Democratic leadership is to strike a balance, one that gives the National Security Agency the flexibility to select its targets overseas but that keeps the court involved to protect the private communications of innocent Americans.”
In a blog post entitled “Buying regulation,” Susan Crawford wonders about the legality of the FCC reserve price scheme for the 700 MHz rules. (I.e., as long as the $4.6 billion reserve price is met for the much coveted C Block, then open access rules will apply. If the reserve price isn’t met, then the rules go away.) Crawford asks,
Think about it. How can the FCC condition regulations … on the payment of money? And then have the rules dissolve if it doesn’t get the money? This is such a pure quid pro quo – it’s government for sale. Completely screwy. But how do you say “completely screwy” in legalese?
Well, it is certainly a creative gambit by Kevin Martin to make Google put their money where their mouth is, and I don’t have an opinion about whether it’s technically legal. That said, I’m not sure it’s exactly a “quid pro quo.” It’s not as if the highest bidder gets their preferred rules applied to the spectrum block. One can conceive of AT&T, for example, winning the auction at a price above $4.6 billion and therefore being subject to rules it dislikes. What I think the scheme is meant to do is pacify Congress by addressing the concern that given the restrictive rules the spectrum block might fetch much less than the many billions Congress is anticipating (and probably has already spent).
It’s an interesting ‘blog post, but a little over the top. Jeff Jonas of IBM writes about the plausible steps that take us to a total surveillance society – by popular demand!
I think it’s over the top because he doesn’t factor in a number of countervailing trends. I attempted to catalog the (mostly economic) forces that would drive RFID to meet consumer interests (including privacy) in this paper a few years ago, for example. And a few weeks ago, I wrote about a version of privacy self-help touted by none other than Google CEO Eric Schmidt: Turn off your phone!
Jonas raises good things to think about – and it’s certainly the general direction we’re headed – but we aren’t going to end up in the midnight dystopia Jeff describes.
In my comments to the FCC in the 700 MHz proceeding, I addressed the Commission’s insistence that the licensee of a national public safety spectrum license be a non-profit entity. At the time I said,
This is odd since there are several commercial communications companies with the comparative advantage and expertise in designing, building-out, and maintaining wireless broadband networks. A for-profit mission and quality service to first responders should not be considered mutually exclusive ideals.
The Commission’s 312-page final order cited my comment, but sadly as an example of the sort of proposal they weren’t going to adopt. Instead, they decided that they would create a license for 10 MHz of public safety spectrum (worth billions) and give it to a Public Safety Broadband Licensee. And who is the Public Safety Broadband Licensee? They have no idea, but in the Order they lay out the requirements for any entity who wishes to apply to be the Public Safety Broadband Licensee. These include,
- No commercial interest may be held in the licensee, nor may any commercial interest participate in the management of the licensee
- The entity must be non-profit
- The entity must be “broadly representative of the public safety radio user community”
Well, applications to be the Public Safety Broadband Licensee are due this Wednesday, and so far there’s only one applicant, an organization called the Public Safety Spectrum Trust Corporation (sorry, no website). If they are chosen as the Licensee, the PSST will help set the public safety requirements any bidder will have to satisfy in order to purchase the commercial-public safety shared D Block that will be auctioned in January. (Frontline has committed to bid, while Verizon has also shown an interest.) So who makes up the PSST? According to their recent press release,
The PSST Board of Directors is comprised of representatives of the following organizations: the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO); the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials-International (APCO); the Forestry Conservation Communications Association (FCCA); the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP); the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC); the International Municipal Signal Association (IMSA); the National Association of State Emergency Medical Services Officials (NASEMSO); the National Emergency Number Association (NENA); and the National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA).
That is, the lobbying groups for public safety. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of the lobbyists themselves potentially getting a license. Also, these groups supported the Cyren Call plan last year to reallocate spectrum from commercial to public safety use. Guess who they chose last week to be their “Public Safety Advisor“?
In a Cato TechKnowledge newsletter issued today, I’ve updated the world on the status of the REAL ID Act.
One of the more interesting recent developments is the decision by New York Governor Elliot Spitzer to break the link between driver licensing and immigration status. He and the Department of Motor Vehicles commissioner announced the policy September 21st.
Delinking driver licensing and immigration will reduce unlicensed driving, uninsured driving, hit-and-run driving, insurance costs for legal drivers, and roadway injuries. Linking driving and immigration status is a requirement of REAL ID, and Spitzer’s move is another nail in the coffin of this national ID law.
In my TechKnowledge piece, I laud the governor’s action as follows:
Spitzer is not willing to shed the blood of New Yorkers to “take a stand” on immigration, which is not a problem state governments are supposed to solve anyway. It’s a welcome — and somewhat surprising — move, to see a Democrat and law-and-order-type former attorney general resist mission creep in a state bureau and hold fast to the federal system devised in the constitution. But he’s done the right thing. Thanks most recently to Governor Spitzer, and to state leaders from across the ideological spectrum, REAL ID is in collapse.
Here’s a great talk by Yahoo’s Ian Rogers:
Eight years later, Amazon’s finally done what was clearly the right solution in 1999. Music in the format that people actually want it in, with a Web-based experience that’s simple and works with any device. I bought tracks from Amazon (Kevin Drew and No Age), downloaded them, sync’d them to my new iPod Nano, and had them playing in my home audio system (Control 4) in less than five minutes. PRAISE JESUS. It only took 8 years. 8 years. How much opportunity have we lost in those 8 years? How much naivety and hubris did we have when we said, “if we build it they will come”? What did we spend? And what did we gain? We certainly didn’t gain mass user adoption or trust, two prerequisites to success on the Internet. Inconvenient experiences don’t have Web-scale potential, and platforms which monetize the gigantic scale of the Web is the only way to compete with the control you’ve lost, the only way to reclaim value in the music industry. If your consultants are telling you anything else, they are wrong. Yahoo! Music demonstrates this scale discrepancy perfectly. Yahoo! is the world’s #1 Internet destination. Hundreds of millions of people visit Yahoo! each month. Yahoo! Music is the #1 Music site on the Web, with tens of millions of monthly visitors. Between 10 and 20 million people watch music videos on Yahoo! Music every month. Between 5 and 10 million people listen to radio on Yahoo! Music every month. But the ENTIRE subscription music market (including Rhapsody, Napster, and Yahoo!) is in the low millions (sorry, we don’t release subscriber numbers, but the aggregate number proves the point), even after years of marketing by all three companies. When you compare the experiences on Yahoo! Music, the order of magnitude difference in opportunity shouldn’t be a surprise: Want radio? No problem. Click play, get radio. Want video? Awesome. Click play, get video. Want a track on-demand? Oh have we got a deal for you! If you’re on Windows XP or Vista, and you’re in North America, just download this 20MB application, go through these seven install screens, reboot your computer, go through these five setup screens, these six credit card screens, give us $160 dollars and POW! Now you can hear that song you wanted to hear…if you’re still with us. Yahoo! didn’t want to go through all these steps. The licensing dictated it. It’s a slippery slope from “a little control” to consumer unfriendliness and non-Web-scale products and services.
I’m frankly not as optimistic as Rogers that the labels will be able to pull out of the tailspin they’ve gotten themselves into. The music labels have decades of inertia pushing them in the wrong direction, and large, bureaucratic institutions rarely show the kind of agility needed to negotiate new technologies in any event. So while it’s great that they’ve finally started to realize what was obvious to some of us years ago, my guess is that they’re going to continue to be five years behind the curve for the foreseeable future, always playing catch-up to other firms who are pioneering new ways of distributing and promoting music.
Ars Technica reports on the latest DRM PR disaster:
BD+ is being rushed out to titles only shortly after the spec was finalized, partly in response to hackers cracking the protection on AACS earlier this year. This wouldn’t be the first time that extra layers of copy protection have harmed legitimate consumers: earlier this year Sony had to recall 20 DVD titles protected with ARccOS that caused problems on some DVD players. When Paramount recently announced that they were switching to HD DVD releases, one of the reasons a spokesperson gave Ars was that the Blu-ray spec was not “market-ready.” Perhaps this is the sort of thing he meant. Fox’s position is that the problem is entirely the fault of the player manufacturers. Steve Feldstein, Fox senior VP of marketing communications, told Video Business that “consumers should lobby their hardware manufacturers to release firmware upgrades post haste” and that “the title was well-reviewed and playing well on updated players.”
Isn’t that charming? It’s worth keeping in mind that only the legitimate customers have to jump through these kinds of hoops. If you’re stupid enough to follow the rules and pay hard-earned cash for your movies, Hollywood rewards you by making you spend a relaxing evening learning how to update your movie player’s firmware. People who break the law and get their movies via a P2P network don’t have to worry about these sorts of headaches, as those files tend to come pre-cracked and in an open format playable on any device.
You thought the center of high tech was the computer industry. Think again:
I ask him about why five blades were better than one or four, and he clicks on a short animated film that shows that the key area in close and comfortable shaving was the elasticity of our skin. If one accepts that two blades in a razor are better than one – another film shows that after the first blade, the hair tries to retract back into the skin, but the second blade catches it before it does – then the critical factor is skin bulge between the blades. Five blades will give you a closer shave (ie cut deeper and deeper into the skin), but only if the cutting surfaces have precisely the correct spacing between them. And after spacing, there is the tricky issue of clogging. ‘Some of my friends and family do really think that I came to work one day and just added a blade,’ Powell says. ‘But walk around and I challenge you to find the Department of More Blades. It’s just not here.’
Of course, like every important development, The Onion was there first.
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