Constructing Biden’s Laws

Declan McCullagh gives a detailed overview of Joe Biden’s positions on a variety of tech laws. He brings out much of what I expected–there may be cause for some worry on a variety of fronts like copyright, privacy, and the “war on terror.” Whether you agree or disagree with his politics, there were a number of interesting responses to some of the laws that he proposed and voted for. I’d call these responses constructions of the law–or actions carried out in response to the law that essentially help “create” it in society.

On privacy, Biden’s record is hardly stellar. In the 1990s, Biden was
chairman of the Judiciary Committee and introduced a bill called the Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Act …
Biden’s bill — and the threat of encryption being outlawed — is what
spurred Phil Zimmermann to write PGP, thereby kicking off a historic
debate about export controls, national security, and privacy.
Zimmermann, who’s now busy developing Zfone, says it was Biden’s legislation
“that led me to publish PGP electronically for free that year, shortly
before the measure was defeated after vigorous protest by civil
libertarians and industry groups.”

“Pretty Good Privacy” (PGP) is a technology that encrypts or locks things and bases the unlocking on trust (the Wikipedia article is a surprisingly engaging read about the technology and history). The point here is that the restrictions created by the legislation played a part in driving PGP’s creator, Phil Zimmerman, to write this extraordinary piece of software.

One day after a bomb in Saudi Arabia killed several U.S. servicemen and virtually flattened a military base, Biden pushed to make posting bomb-making information on the Internet a felony, punishable by up to 20 years in jail, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time. …

Biden’s proposal became law in 1997. It didn’t amount to much: four years after its enactment, there had been only one conviction. …Today there are over 10,000 hits on Google for the phrase, in quotes, “Drano bomb.” … Then there’s the U.S. Army’s Improvised Munitions Handbook with instructions on making far more deadly compounds, including methyl nitrate dynamite, mortars, grenades, and C-4 plastic explosive — which free speech activists placed online as an in-your-face response to the Biden-Feinstein bill.

A long quote, but it says a bit about the laws effectiveness and how people have responded to it.

State of the Newspaper Industry

A couple of longer reads that might be of interest to any newspaper or online news buffs.

  • Out of Print (New Yorker): This is a bit older, but I just got around to reading it today. An interesting historical account of the role of a newspaper in democracy and how the Internet is changing all of that.
  • Death of Print (Valleywag): A look at some of the ways newspapers tried to innovate online, but “botched.”

Newspapers get a bad rap, but I think their role in researching and reporting (not to mention organizing and funding) the important news of the day is undeniable. Once a majority of Pulitzers start going to bloggers, we’ll know things have really changed.

Clearing up privacy and access

You can’t go around correcting the Internet–but you can disagree with arguments.

Google Privacy Practices Worse Than ISP Snooping, AT&T Charges (Wired)

“If anything the largely invisible practices of ad-networks raise even greater privacy concerns than do the behavioral advertising techniques that ISPs could employ, such as deep-packet-inspection,” AT&T wrote.

Wired gets it right in stating, “You pay your ISP to carry your traffic to and fro. It can see everything you do online, unless you take extreme measures,” but an additional factor in Google’s favor is that it’s easy to delete cookies and opt out of services that allow it to track users. There is just no way to do this if monitoring happens at the service provider level. I hope the members of congress see that.

Fairness Doctrine Panic hits FCC, spreads through blogosphere (Ars Technica): A good quick read on the history of the fairness doctrine misses one crucial point–it was created to even access to a limited resource (time on licensed broadcast stations). While some may use it as a political tool, it was designed to keep TV from becoming too one sided or political.

As for the actual prospects of the Fairness Doctrine itself, for the most part it addressed the anxieties of the nine-TV-channel world of the third quarter of the 20th century—a landscape that cable and the Internet has transformed.

“Transformed” is a bit of a strong word. Network and local TV news still command a huge audience, and consolidation and shrinking news budgets have the potential to make balance an issue to many in the public. Cable and the internet are a part of the same media landscape, but shouldn’t weigh too heavily on decisions influencing broadcast.