Last week on The Diane Rehm Show, Susan Crawford, former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology, and innovation policy, claimed that China “makes us look like a backwater when it comes to [broadband] connectivity.” When she was asked how this could be, Ms. Crawford responded:
It happened because of [Chinese industrial] policy. You can call that overregulation. It’s the way we make innovation happen in America.
Ms. Crawford is wrong on the facts and the philosophy. Continue reading →
Jane Yakowitz Bambauer, associate professor of law at the University of Arizona, discusses her forthcoming paper in the Stanford Law Review titled Is Data Speech? How do we define “data” and can it be protected in the same way as free speech? She examines current privacy laws and regulations as they pertain to data creation and collection, including whether collecting data should be protected under the First Amendment.
In June, The Guardian ran a groundbreaking story that divulged a top secret court order forcing Verizon to hand over to the National Security Agency (NSA) all of its subscribers’ telephony metadata—including the phone numbers of both parties to any call involving a person in the United States and the time and duration of each call—on a daily basis. Although media outlets have published several articles in recent years disclosing various aspects the NSA’s domestic surveillance, the leaked court order obtained by The Guardian revealed hard evidence that NSA snooping goes far beyond suspected terrorists and foreign intelligence agents—instead, the agency routinely and indiscriminately targets private information about all Americans who use a major U.S. phone company.
It was only a matter of time before the NSA’s surveillance program—which is purportedly authorized by Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act (50 U.S.C. § 1861)—faced a challenge in federal court. The Electronic Privacy Information Center fired the first salvo on July 8, when the group filed a petition urging the U.S. Supreme Court to issue a writ of mandamus nullifying the court orders authorizing the NSA to coerce customer data from phone companies. But as Tim Lee of The Washington Post pointed out in a recent essay, the nation’s highest Court has never before reviewed a decision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, which is responsible for issuing the top secret court order authorizing the NSA’s surveillance program.
Today, another crucial lawsuit challenging the NSA’s domestic surveillance program was brought by a diverse coalition of nineteen public interest groups, religious organizations, and other associations. The coalition, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, includes TechFreedom, Human Rights Watch, Greenpeace, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, among many other groups. The lawsuit, brought in the U.S. district court in northern California, argues that the NSA’s program—aptly described as the “Assocational Tracking Program” in the complaint—violates the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution, along with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Continue reading →
This afternoon, Berin Szoka asked me to participate in a TechFreedom conference on “COPPA: Past, Present & Future of Children’s Privacy & Media.” [CSPAN video is here.] It was a in-depth, 3-hour, 2-panel discussion of the Federal Trade Commission’s recent revisions to the rules issued under the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
While most of the other panelists were focused on the devilish details about how COPPA works in practice (or at least should work in practice), I decided to ask a more provocative question to really shake up the discussion: What are we going to do when COPPA fails?
My notes for the event follow down below. I didn’t have time to put them into a smooth narrative, so please pardon the bullet points. Continue reading →
Patrick Ruffini, political strategist, author, and President of Engage, a digital agency in Washington, DC, discusses his latest book with coauthors David Segal and David Moon: Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet. Ruffini covers the history behind SOPA, its implications for Internet freedom, the “Internet blackout” in January of 2012, and how the threat of SOPA united activists, technology companies, and the broader Internet community.
Alexander Howard has put together this excellent compendium of comments on Mike Rosenwald’s new Washington Post editorial, “Will the Twitter Police make Twitter boring?” I was pleased to see that so many others had the same reaction to Rosenwald’s piece that I did.
For the life of me, I cannot understand how anyone can equate counter-speech with “Twitter Police,” but that’s essentially what Rosenwald does in his essay. The examples he uses in his essay are exactly the sort of bone-headed and generally offensive comments that I would hope we would call out and challenge robustly in a deliberative democracy. But when average folks did exactly that, Rosenwald jumps to the preposterous conclusion that it somehow chilled speech. Stranger yet is his claim that “the Twitter Police are enforcing laws of their own making, with procedures they have authorized for themselves.” Say what? What laws are you talking about, Mike? This is just silly. These people are SPEAKING not enforcing any “laws.” They are expressing opinions about someone else’s (pretty crazy) opinions. This is what a healthy deliberative democracy is all about, bud!
Moreover, Rosenwald doesn’t really explain what a better world looks like. Is it one in which we all just turn a blind eye to what many regard as offensive or hair-brained commentary? I sure hope not!
I’m all for people vigorously expressing their opinions but I am just as strongly in favor of people pushing back with opinions of their own. You have no right to be free of social sanction if your speech offends large swaths of society. Speech has consequences and the more speech it prompts, the better.
Andy Greenberg, technology writer for Forbes and author of the new book “This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information,” discusses the rise of the cypherpunk movement, how it led to WikiLeaks, and what the future looks like for cryptography.
Greenberg describes cypherpunks as radical techie libertarians who dreamt about using encryption to shift the balance of power from the government to individuals. He shares the rich history of the movement, contrasting one of t the movement’s founders—hardcore libertarian Tim May—with the movement’s hero—Phil Zimmerman, an applied cryptographer and developer of PGP (the first tool that allowed regular people to encrypt), a non-libertarian who was weary of cypherpunks, despite advocating crypto as a tool for combating the power of government.
According to Greenberg, the cypherpunk movement did not fade away, but rather grew into a larger hacker movement, citing the Tor network, bitcoin, and WikiLeaks as example’s of its continuing influence. Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, belonged to a listserv followed by early cypherpunks, though he was not very active at the time, he says.
Greenberg is excited for the future of information leaks, suggesting that the more decentralized process becomes, the faster cryptography will evolve.
Free Press is holding its National Conference for Media Reform next week. The conference agenda describes the Internet as “central” to freedom of expression, which is how all mass media technologies have been described since the invention of the printing press ushered in the mass communications era. Despite recognizing that the Internet is a mass media technology, Free Press does not believe the Internet should be accorded the same constitutional protections as other mass media technologies. Like so many others, Free Press has forgotten that the dangers posed by government control of the Internet are similar to those posed by earlier mass media technologies. In a stunning reversal of the concepts embodied in the Bill of Rights, Free Press believes the executive and legislative branches of government are the source of protection for the freedom of expression. In their view, “Internet freedom means net neutrality.” Continue reading →