Short form
I’ve had a Twitter account for a while, and at the beginning of this month I started writing feverish tweets about OneWebDay progress - I’d been told that was essential.
Well, last night on a call someone said: “I don’t email any more. I don’t IM. I don’t blog. It’s all Twitter.” And then that person made sure that I had a special *OneWebDay* Twitter account, so that people would be following the DAY rather than me. And I dutifully followed her into a wild (for me) world of Twittering - the OWD Twitter account is following almost 700 people, and hoping to soon be followed by just as many. Come watch at http://twitter.com/OWD! I’m watching all the tweets go by, myself.
But that’s just the beginning. There’s Twhirl, for running multiple Twitter accounts (that’s me). There’s Twemes, for aggregating all of those tweets.
And, most beguiling of all, there’s Twistori, to lose a few hours over. (ht: Cory Ondrejka)
I have been blogging since September 2003, and I know I’ll enjoy getting back to it once I have a bit more time to reflect. (Right now, we’re busy here at the Susan Crawford blog.) All those tweets have to link to something. But I can see the tremendous appeal of the short form.
Here’s a fan site - note the long list of twitter-puns.
CFP08
The Yale Information Society Project recently posted its 9.5 Theses for Technology Policy in the Next Administration:
1. Privacy. Protect human dignity, autonomy, and privacy by providing individuals with control over the collection, use, and distribution of their personal information and medical information.
2. Access. Promote high-speed Internet access and increased connectivity for all, through both government and private initiatives, to reduce the digital divide.
3. Network Neutrality. Legislate against unreasonable discrimination by network providers against particular applications or content to maintain the Internet’s role in fostering innovation, economic growth, and democratic communication.
4. Transparency. Preserve accountability and oversight of government functions by strengthening freedom of information and improving electronic access to government deliberations and materials.
5. Innovation. Restore balance to intellectual property rules and explore alternative incentives to better promote innovation, freedom, access to knowledge, and human development.
6. Democracy. Empower individuals to fully participate in government and politics by making electronic voting consistent, reliable, and secure with voter-verifiable paper trails.
7. Education. Expand effective exceptions and limitations to intellectual property for education to ensure that teachers and students have access to innovative digital teaching techniques and educational resources.
8. Culture. Ensure that law and technology promote a free, vibrant and democratic culture, fair exchanges between different cultures, and individual rights to create and participate in culture.
9. Diversity. Limit media concentration and expand media ownership to ensure a diverse marketplace of ideas.
9.5 Openness. Support innovation and fair competition by stimulating openness in software, technological standards, Internet governance, and content licensing.
As Michael Zimmer says, the idea was to post some “guiding principles from which specific tactics can be formulated.” And to get people talking in advance of CFP2008, which will be held May 20-23 in New Haven, Conn.
Pangea Day
Via GlobalVoices, description here. Inspiring. It’s all happening on May 10.
This is the kind of thing I had in mind for OneWebDay, and it’s my hope that (in time) we’ll have a similar uprising around the world on September 22. Access to the internet, and connectivity generally, is becoming more important to life - whether through mobile devices, personal computers, or public kiosks. The idea behind OneWebDay is to facilitate the creation of a global constituency that cares about the future breadth-depth-accessibility of online resources.
Now that Earth Day is over for this year, OneWebDay is getting advice from Earth Day organizers - once Pangea Day runs (hugely successfully), we’ll be talking to them too.
FISA
eWeek reports that House Republicans are planning to force a vote on the Senate’s version of the FISA amendments - the version that would guarantee retroactive immunity to the telcos that cooperated with the NSA.
(Here’s a useful CRS report comparing the House and Senate bills more generally.)
Someone suggested today that I go back and read the Church Committee reports on the NSA’s Shamrock and Minaret programs (link) and the legislative history of FISA. It is astounding how infrequently the Church Committee backdrop to the entire FISA discussion is mentioned. So I’ll mention it here.
Statutory immunity for the telcos would be a belt-and-suspenders effort - AT&T itself concedes that “Current law … provides a complete defense to any provider who in good faith relies on a statutory authorization,” or some other governmental promise. So what’s the downside of judicial review of the legality of the telcos’ actions? We should know what happened and why - there is so much to understand about surveillance in this country. Plug: Eric Lichtblau’s new book, Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice.
It’s been a busy week - sorry for the sketch-like posts. We’re marching towards the end of classes.
This week in the white spaces
The battle lines are being drawn:
[Only a] licensed approach to new services in the TV bands white spaces would provide accountability and regulatory certainty to stakeholders and best protect incumbent users from harmful interference.
(FiberTower Corporation and the Rural Telecommunications Group, Inc.)
We are concerned with the potential effectiveness of devices that rely solely on spectrum sensing techniques to avoid interference to mobile radio systems operating on TV Channels 14-20.
(American Petroleum Institute, Enterprise Wireless Alliance, USMSS)
[F]ully utilizing TV “white space” as a low cost alternative for improving broadband and mobile phone coverage in rural areas [such as Vermont] may well require a simultaneous deployment of what the Commission has termed “fixed/access” and “personal/portable” uses. TV “white space” could be used to support individual handsets, as well as backhaul of wireless traffic through fixed devices.
(Vermont Telecommunications Authority and the Vermont Department of Public Service)
From the NAB’s point of view, . . . potentially having unlicensed portable devices on white spaces interfere with television-broadcast signals was completely unacceptable, and no amount of testing by the Federal Communications Commission could change the NAB’s mind.
(Speech by Kelly Williams, senior director of engineering and technology policy for the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), reported here.)
NSL
Several civil liberties groups are supporting legislation this week that would provide better oversight for the use of National Security Letters. Glen Greenwald, of Salon.com, spelled out the entire story last month.
A state constitutional right to privacy
This story by Tom Hester of the New Jersey Star Ledger is fascinating.
Federal Fourth Amendment protection of non-content information online doesn’t exist in the U.S. — the idea is that because you’ve given that information to your ISP (a third party) in order to “complete the call” (in telephone terms), you don’t have any reasonable expectation of privacy in it. The Stored Communications Act allows ISPs serving the public to give that non-content information voluntarily to any private person, and it doesn’t take much process for the government to compel its disclosure.
But the New Jersey Supreme Court, reading the New Jersey constitution, thinks that’s not enough protection. Here’s a nice quote from Lee Tien of EFF:
“Obviously, the federal law is terribly weak in this area because of bad decisions in recent years,” Tien said. “The federal Fourth Amendment is inadequate for modern privacy issues. New Jersey interprets its constitution to be along the line that ordinary people have a fundamental expectation of privacy.”
This decision isn’t saying that law enforcement can’t obtain subscriber information. But subscribers in New Jersey, under New Jersey’s constitution, have a reasonable expectation that their identity information won’t be disclosed absent some substantial process - here, a subpoena issued by a grand jury. It’s a decision in a grand tradition of states reading their constitutions to provide guarantees greater than those available under the federal constitution.
A constitutional right of privacy - something we haven’t seen in a while.
White spaces
Today’s communications law class focused on the 700 MHz auction, the white spaces, and a discussion of the relative roles of Congress, the FCC, and the courts in communications law.
I did my best to convince the class that the white spaces proceeding is really exciting. Huge! Lots of spectrum, potentially available for portable, unlicensed uses! A whole world of opportunistic, clever devices will open up!
They were polite about it. One student wisely said that he thought the Commission would stall until after the new president has been inaugurated. Nothing’s going to happen, he said. It’s too political and difficult right now.
He’s probably right. Sprint, T-Mobile and rural carriers recently said that the white spaces should be used only for fixed, licensed purposes (provision of backhaul). CTIA is claiming that the results of the 700 MHz auction indicate that licensed use of the white spaces would be appropriate:
Many advocates for white space unlicensing . . . tout in-home networking and improved WiFi as likely uses of the spectrum. Filling up the white space with low-power, short range services like these would be wasteful and inefficient, however. Indeed, the white space is “overqualified” for such use, which “would amount to using land in downtown Tokyo to grow rice.” A far superior approach would be to optimize the opportunity for long-range services. While such services typically require significant investment, an unlicensed environment offers no protection from low-power devices and competing uses in the band. An unlicensed environment significantly deters potential investment in infrastructure necessary for long-range service – indeed, even with several hundred MHz of unlicensed spectrum already set aside, a nationwide unlicensed network has never been built.
But the whole point of the unlicensed idea is that it doesn’t have to lead to the construction of a national network to be wildly successful - 802.11 hotspots aren’t a national network, yet they’ve changed the way we use PCs and dual-band phones.
Let’s hope the next administration will get this idea.
Blog break
The Susan Crawford blog will be on hiatus until Monday, April 21. Enjoy the sunshine, those of you who are on the East Coast of the U.S.
Net neutrality in Canada and the U.K.
And they said net neutrality was an American issue. Hah.
Robert Guerra has forwarded these links re Canada:
Net Neutrality Canada
Michael Geist commentary
CRTC To Face Net Neutrality Issue as CAIP Demands Bell Cease and Desist Its Throttling Practices
Robert lets us know that “the Canadian Association of Internet Providers, Canada’s largest ISP association, has filed a Part VII application with the CRTC [regulator] asking it to direct Bell Canada to cease and desist from throttling its wholesale Internet service.”
And Cory Doctorow is taking on Virgin Media, his London ISP.
Neil Berkett, the new CEO of Virgin Media (my ISP at home in London, along with BT) has announced that he considers Net Neutrality to be “a load of bollocks” and he’s promised to put any website or service that won’t pay Virgin a premium to reach its customers into the “Internet bus lane.” As a Virgin customer, I’m not paying to see those services that bribe Virgin to reach me, I’m paying to reach the entire web, whichever bits I think are useful, as quickly as Virgin can deliver them.