The National Journal’s Sarah Lai Stirland reports that “[t]he Senate Judiciary Committee is likely to seek a role in reshaping telecommunications law, according to a committee aide.”
At least three panel members are concerned about some of the issues addressed in the telecommunications bill crafted by Senate Commerce Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and unveiled last week, the aide said. “Net neutrality is something we have significant jurisdiction over,” the aide said…
Three senators on the Judiciary panel also are concerned about antitrust, copyright policy, distance learning and rights-of-way issues presented in the telecom bill. They include Judiciary ranking member Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Herb Kohl, D-Wis.
Stirling notes that interest among Senate Judiciary members “echo[es] recent jurisdictional concerns voiced by House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis.” who is “seeking a sequential referral on the telecom legislation approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee last month.”
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 7:59 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Harold Feld over at Wet Machine picks up on themes I raised earlier today regarding the connection between the “neutral vs. two-tiered” Internet issue and the health of our democracy. Harold also digs more deeply into specific net neutrality proposals than I did. Here are some excerpts where he addresses the fundamental issue:
It is quite possible that the most important piece of campaign finance reform to pass in 2006 will be Senator Wyden’s “Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006.” Until now the internet did not require candidates to raise huge amounts of money to pay for the ability to reach voters. Without Net Neutrality, all that changes. The internet will increasingly come to resemble radio, television and cable, where the well-funded buy their way onto your screen and the rest get crowded out. Not because of any evil corporate conspiracy or antidemocracy cabal, but because of the iron rules of economics.
If companies can make money charging political speakers for premium access, they will. If that’s bad for democracy and free speech, too bad. Companies aren’t in business to promote democracy, but to maximize value for shareholders. If that means that well-funded candidates and talk radio hosts can buy “premium” access while independent bloggers and pod casters can’t, that’s what will happen. Too bad about that democracy and free speech thing. Nothing against it you understand but, y’know, it’s just business.
Until now, the internet has acted as a medium that levels barriers for speakers by allowing anyone to speak directly to anyone else at anytime and on the same terms. Bloggers and podcasters speak to audiences as small as a few friends or as large as millions, all for the same cost. People email each other video and audio clips or flash animation. Candidates and interest groups from the most progressive to the most conservative continue to experiment with news ways to use the internet to reach people that traditional media makes prohibitively expensive.
But if such “high bandwidth” traffic slows to a crawl unless the speaker pays for “premium” delivery, the same thing will happen to the internet that happened to television and cable. Well funded candidates and special interests will pay to have slickly produced “content” and “issue ads” that download at super-speed in movie quality. Independent blogs and podcasts that can’t afford the extra fee will be crowded out. Once again, the need for big money will “blind the eyes of the righteous and pervert the words of the wise” (Deut. 16:19) by driving candidates to court big donors at the expense of public policy and put fund-raising ahead of public service.
Perhaps most importantly, what happens to the ability of people to use the internet to research candidates and positions, or who want to forward useful or amusing political speech to others? According to this study by the PEW Center for American Life, people used the internet to talk to their friends about political issues, visit websites that provided greater details than available offline, and were more likely to participate in political discussions and check out alternate points of view. If it costs someone extra money or becomes frustratingly slow to use the internet for these purposes, they stop; and we as a society go back to getting all our political information through sound bites.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 6:06 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Since we’re discussing the political process and political issues more than usual today, it seems like a good time to raise the issue of electronic voting. And it turns out there’s a recent post at Freedom to Tinker that may be even more scary than the NSA snooping stories. Here are some excerpts (the whole post is worth a read, including the comments):
A report by Harri Hursti, released today at BlackBoxVoting, describes some very serious security flaws in Diebold voting machines. These are easily the most serious voting machine flaws we have seen to date…
The attacks described in Hursti’s report would allow anyone who had physical access to a voting machine for a few minutes to install malicious software code on that machine, using simple, widely available tools. The malicious code, once installed, would control all of the functions of the voting machine, including the counting of votes…
In addition, compromised machines would be very difficult to detect or to repair. The normal procedure for installing software updates on the machines could not be trusted, because malicious code could cause that procedure to report success, without actually installing any updates. A technician who tried to update the machine’s software would be misled into thinking the update had been installed, when it actually had not. On election day, malicious software could refuse to function, or it could silently miscount votes.
The post and the comments that follow it discuss and debate particular issues but, regardless of the specifics, the clear message is that: there are big problems with the Diebold voting machines; for the sake of our democracy, something should be done to address them; and that not much is being done by the powers that be to make that happen.
Like Internet-delivered video, this is a key arena where the electronic underpinnings of 21st century democracy are evolving (or devolving) and need the attention of political leaders (and also plenty of “sunshine”), but where trust is not being earned and is therefore eroding.
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 2:39 PM | Print | Comments (0)After thinking more about the Dallas Morning News article Cynthia cited in her last post, I thought I’d add a little more to my comment on that post.
Here’s an excerpt from the article that discusses the campaign for mayor of Plano, TX:
Airtime fees for the 30-second Gilliam ad on local cable have ranged from $7 to more than $100 per spot, Mr. Lambert said. But e-mailing a link to the video is free. In Ms. Evans’ case, producing the video was free. Friends recorded her campaign video, and then she e-mailed it to supporters and posted it on her Web site. “It’s really inexpensive if you can do it with just someone with a camera, and it can be so easily circulated,” Ms. Evans said.
A group of Plano teenagers led by Jennifer Goebel sparked another Evans video. Jennifer, a 14-year-old freshman at Jasper High School, first met Ms. Evans through a National Junior Honor Society project. Jennifer invited students from across Plano to record the video at her home. She and her dad edited the spot, posted it on Google Video and got the word out via e-mail and MySpace.com…Jennifer said the video had received 4,681 Web hits as of Tuesday.
You gotta love it. But its not a given that video will get to realize its potential as a tool of invigorated grassroots democracy.
In my comment I raised the question “if campaigns (or any participants in the political process) have to pay a premium to obtain video-capable bandwidth to deliver their message, doesn’t this work against this democratizing trend?”
Wouldn’t it mean that voters willing to pay access providers for video-capable bandwidth wouldn’t have comparable access to the messages of less-well-funded campaigns that couldn’t afford the cost of “fast-lane” carriage for their message? I can imagine how this could end up mirroring the unhealthy (to democracy) imbalances we’ve seen in the broadcast-centric world of modern politics. Campaigns backed by big-moneyed interests would be streaming slick HD-quality messages, while messages supported by people and organizations without lots of money might be relegated to jerky, low-bit-frame thumbnail videos.
Reading the story about the Plano election reminded me of a point in the 2004 primary season when I was considering the various Democratic hopefuls and got an email link to a relatively long and relatively high-quality (at least for the web at that time) video message from the candidate I was leaning toward supporting. I remember watching it several times, rewinding and replaying some segments and scrutinizing the candidate, sizing him up as a person and as a leader. I then invited my wife, who has a healthy aversion to too much politics, to watch the video with me. She proceeded to do her own version of sizing up the candidate. Along with a lot of other web-based research on the candidate and the issues, this web-video-mediated “person-to-person” encounter with the candidate helped both of us decide that this was a person who had the smarts, vision, integrity, courage and personal skills to justify our active support in the primary. Normally we just vote, but this time we ended up getting a lot more involved, including helping to organize local Meetups, blogging and sending strategy memos (never read, I’m sure) to the national campaign.
Part of what was refreshing and valuable about that “political video moment” was that our experience of it felt so much more personal and in our control than the video exposure we’d become so used to in broadcast-mediated political campaigns—the endless and often repulsive 30-second spots, the increasingly inane, ever-shorter and endlessly repeated sound-bites, and the “gotcha” interviews by TV journalists too focused on scoring points against politicians and their competitors at other news outlets.
This diet of political video junk-food has, I believe, contributed to Americans general distrust of political figures and to the latter’s reliance on manipulation and communication style rather than substance, leadership and honesty. In comparison to it, the simple video message we pondered that evening on my PC monitor was an intimate, inspiring and informative experience of political communication.
So, I return to the final point of my earlier comment:
This suggests to me that the issue of access-tiering, as favored by telcos, has potentially large political implications beyond the question of whether Google and other web-based service providers pays AT&T a fee for fast-lane access. Given the current state of our democracy and its importance to our future, I think these kinds of issues need to be a central part of the current debate over Internet policy.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 1:40 PM | Print | Comments (17)
The Internet has changed political campaigning in ways that are only now — in this mid-term election season — becoming clear. From the biggest to the smallest political races, web video, social networking and, of course, email, are reshaping the TV ads-print-yard signs methods of pitching candidates.
This piece from the Dallas Morning News highlights a local contest in Plano, TX that is leveraging inexpensive video production and Google Video to get the world out. Ken Lambert and Pat Evans are running against each other for Mayor of Plano, and their respective campaigns are using the web.
Lambert’s campaign has produced two videos for a paltry $6,300 and is emailing the video pitches to voters. Evans’ supporters (high school students no less) made a video for the candidate and posted it on Google Video.
Political candidates have experimented with multimedia for years, particularly in national and statewide races. In this year’s race for Texas governor, incumbent Rick Perry’s site has a video welcome from the candidate, iconoclast Kinky Friedman offers animated KinkyToons, and dark horses Carole Keeton Strayhorn and Chris Bell link to broadcast video coverage of their campaigns. But with more people now using digital video equipment and high-speed Internet connections, multimedia ads are becoming more commonplace in local campaigns. “We’re starting to see the true convergence of video, television and the Web,” said Darren McDougal, president of MCD Communications in Dallas, which produced Mr. Lambert’s videos.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:40 AM | Print | Comments (2)
Yesterday’s revelation that the Federal Government has been engaging in massive collection of customer calling records on millions of citizens is just now reverberating through the media and blogosphere. The LA Times’ Joseph Menn and James S. Granelli have this piece today about the specter of government snooping.
“This is the most comprehensive surveillance of the American public ever undertaken by the American government,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Information Policy Center. Said attorney Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “There is simply no legal process for this kind of wholesale invasion of privacy. What they claim to be doing with the data is irrelevant because the fact is they could do whatever they choose without any oversight.”
The EFF has been on this case since January when it filed a suit against AT&T for violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the NSA. The lawsuit contends that AT&T has simply opened up its facilities and databases to the NSA for data retrieval, a chilling thought — no judge involved, no subpoena, no protection of any kind. (The LA Times had earlier reported that AT&T maintains a room dedicated to the NSA in its San Francisco office with of all e-mail and digitized voice traffic transmitted through the site.)
What’s striking is that so many press reports, as well as the EFF itself, have warned about the collaboration between the telcos and the government, and yet the issue has only caught fire now. I suspect the average citizen is more concerned about identity theft by scammers than they are about government tracking of their phone calls (to be fair, the data collection is intended to identify “patterns” and not individuals, although the phone numbers amassed can be used to track down individuals).
But, all of this news should be very disturbing to everyone — the power of a simple two-bit thief (or even an organized ring of thieves) is nothing in comparison to the Federal Government. And in these post-Katrina days, who can trust bureaucrats to behave responsibly with the data they receive?
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:55 AM | Print | Comments (0)It wasn’t a good day for the Bush Administration or for the nation’s three largest telcos. After reading and watching the torrent of news coverage of the NSA phone-call database triggered by a USA Today story by Leslie Cauley, I found myself wondering if this latest development might have some effect on the network neutrality debate.
What struck me was that this time, it wasn’t just the President and his former NSA chief and current CIA director nominee Michael Hayden telling the American people “we can’t really tell you what we’re doing (and if we did we’d all be in grave danger from terrorists) but, trust us, its not illegal and its good for you.” But this time, joining the Administration in this trust-straining mantra, which has helped push the President’s approval rating to new lows, were three of the four RBOCs—Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth. Now, there may be good legal reasons for the RBOCs’ stonewallish response to reporters’ inquiries, but my point here is not so much about the substance, but more about appearances and perceptions.
As I said in a recent post entitled “We Really Do Want Our Internet”, I’m getting the sense that more and more American citizens and businesses value the principle of network neutrality and are growing increasingly skeptical of telco assurances regarding the benign implications of their two-tiered Internet plans.
Watching three of the four RBOCs lumped together with the NSA in today’s news coverage, I couldn’t help but think that this can only increase public skepticism of their basic message on the net neutrality issue: “trust us, our tiering plans don’t threaten the Internet you know and love and have come to depend on.” It sounds an awful lot like the Administration’s message on preserving civil liberties in the war on terror: “trust us, our secret NSA operations don’t threaten the freedoms you know and love and have come to depend on.”
I’m not equating the substance of the two issues here, only speculating about how today’s events might impact public perceptions of them and the players involved.
Senate Judiciary Committee chair Arlen Specter (R-PA) reportedly intends to haul RBOC executives before his committee to answer questions about the NSA database. That could give them a chance to better explain their actions—or, alternatively, to sink deeper into the quagmire of distrust.
It’s worth noting that, according to Cauley’s story, Qwest executives refused to provide data to the NSA, based on doubts about its legality and concerns that the company might be subject to heavy fines for illegally divulging calling information. According to Cauley, the NSA “pushed back hard” when Qwest refused to cooperate.
Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest’s patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest’s refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.
In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest’s foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.
Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest’s lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused. The NSA’s explanation did little to satisfy Qwest’s lawyers. “They told (Qwest) they didn’t want to do that because FISA might not agree with them,” one person recalled.
In June 2002, Nacchio resigned amid allegations that he had misled investors about Qwest’s financial health. But Qwest’s legal questions about the NSA request remained. Unable to reach agreement, Nacchio’s successor, Richard Notebaert, finally pulled the plug on the NSA talks in late 2004, the sources said.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 1:43 AM | Print | Comments (1)
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