Author Archives: John S. Quarterman

Duopoly Spies

Mike_McConnell.jpg Well, I had been waiting to post something about the telcos and domestic wiretapping until more news came out, since much of it was still hearsay. But now National Intelligence Director and former National Security Agency Director Mike McConnell has confirmed it:
Now the second part of the issue was under the president’s program, the terrorist surveillance program, the private sector had assisted us. Because if you’re going to get access you’ve got to have a partner and they were being sued. Now if you play out the suits at the value they’re claimed, it would bankrupt these companies. So my position was we have to provide liability protection to these private sector entities.

— Transcript: Debate on the foreign intelligence surveillance act, By Chris Roberts, ©El Paso Times, Article Launched: 08/22/2007 01:05:57 AM MDT

Ryan Singel points out in Wired’s Threat Level blog that this is even though the same McConnell signed a sworn declaration in April saying to reveal that NSA and Verizon had such a relationship “would cause exceptionally grave harm to the national security.” Continue reading →

Achille’s Dark Heel

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Raymond Kelly

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John Arquilla

“The Internet is the new Afghanistan,” [New York police commissioner Raymond] Kelly said, as he released a New York Police Department (NYPD) report on the home-grown threat of attacks by Islamist extremists. “It is the de facto training ground. It’s an area of concern.”

The report found that the challenge for Western authorities was to identify, pre-empt and prevent home-grown threats, which was difficult because many of those who might undertake an attack often commit no crimes along the path to extremism.

The report identified the four stages to radicalization as pre-radicalization, self-identification, indoctrination, and jihadization, and said the Internet drove and enabled the process.

— Internet is “the new Afghanistan”: NY police commissioner, By Michelle Nichols and Edith Honan, Reuters, Wed Aug 15, 3:51 PM ET

Nevermind that this makes about as much sense as saying “the telephone is the new Afghanistan” or “talking is the new Afghanistan”. Of course the Internet enables that process! The Internet enables every communication process.

Let’s look beyond communication and information to what people think they know because of those things:

As the information age deepens, a globe–circling realm of the mind is being created — the “noosphere” that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin identified 80 years ago. This will increasingly affect the nature of grand strategy and diplomacy. Traditional realpolitik, which ultimately relies on hard (principally military) power, will give way to the rise of noöpolitik (or noöspolitik), which relies on soft (principally ideational) power. This paper reiterates the authors’ views as initially stated in 1999, then adds an update for inclusion in a forthcoming handbook on public diplomacy. One key finding is that non–state actors — unfortunately, especially Al Qaeda and its affiliates — are using the Internet and other new media to practice noöpolitik more effectively than are state actors, such as the U.S. government. Whose story wins — the essence of noöpolitik — is at stake in the worldwide war of ideas.

— The promise of noöpolitik, by David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla, First Monday, volume 12, number 8 (August 2007)

This sounds almost like what the NYPD is saying. Continue reading →

Malamud Court Gadfly

gadfly.jpg Carl Malamud is at it again. After getting patents and SEC filings and Congressional subcommittee hearings available online, now he’s going for court case law.
Last week, Mr. Malamud began using advanced computer scanning technology to copy decisions, which have been available only in law libraries or via subscription from the Thomson West unit of the Canadian publishing conglomerate Thomson, and LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier, based in London.

The two companies control the bulk of the nearly $5 billion legal publishing market. (A third, but niche, player is the Commerce Clearing House division of Wolters Kluwer).

He has placed the first batch of 1,000 pages of court decisions from the 1880s online at the public.resource.org site. He obtained the documents from a used Thomson microfiche, he said.

— A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free, By JOHN MARKOFF, New York Times, Published: August 20, 2007

Markoff refers to Malamud as a gadfly. Hey, Socrates was a gadfly, too. Not bad company.

Now what happens if the Internet first mile access duopoly decides to give Thomson and LexisNexis and Wolters Kluwer high-speed high-quality transit and deprioritizes the Internet Archive?

-jsq

Heck of a Job, Stickler

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Richard Sticker ((ABC 4 News))
What practical difference does it make when a president appoints political commissars as heads of departments and agencies, enforcing ideologicallines instead of doing their job?
Also coming to light, is the fact that Stickler’s nomination to head the mine administration was twice rejected by congress and rejected when republicans were still in charge. Rejected reportedly by senators who were concerned about Stickler’s safety record when he operated mines. After his nomination was twice rejected by the Senate, President Bush gave Richard Stickler the mine safety job with a recess appointment. That’s a presidential appointment made when congress is not in session.

Finally, congressional investigations and hearings are now expected to look at a key provision of federal mining law, one which requires the U.S. Government to be the main communicator when an accident occurs. ABC News now notes it took the mine safety administration two days to take public control of the Crandall Canyon Mine. ABC also adds, “Others were irate that [mine owner Bob] Murray was allowed to publicly predict success and contradict MSHA itself while agency officials quietly looked on.”

— Federal mine safety official’s credentials questioned, Chris Vanocur, ABC 4 News, Last Update: 8/20 2007 8:00 pm

Dead people in mines. Dead people in Hurricane Katrina. Postal rate hikes for small publications. Wireless spectrum handed over to a few big companies. And of course massive consolidation of first mile Internet ISPs in the hands of companies that aren’t delivering on their promises and that indulge in repeated political censorship while cooperating with the government in wiretapping.

The stakes going forward are even higher, including economic competitiveness, control of information, and political discourse and with it the survival of a political system.

At least the traditional media finally noticed the problem with the appointment of the Mine and Health Safety Administrator. Imagine if we had more proactive investigative media that might have actually noticed his appointment when it happened. And imagine if we had none, which is a very real possibility with continuing media consolidation and increasing control over the Internet by a very small number of companies.

-jsq

Freedom to Degrade

closed.png BT made an interesting presentation at an IETF meeting in which it described a spectrum whose endpoints are
  • demand side — freedom to degrade others
  • …
  • supply side — freedom to degrade competitors

— re-ECN architectural intent by Bob Briscoe, UCL, BT, 68th IETF, Unofficial Birds of a Feather (non-BoF), Prague, 21 Mar 2007

My, freedom is so degrading. Continue reading →

Rage Against Distributive and Content Control

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And now you do what they told ya,
now you’re under control
The Pearl Jam (and John Butler Trio and Flaming Lips and Rage Against the Machine) AT&T censorship fiasco has reached the attention of an FCC commissioner:
FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, fire-breathing advocate of network neutrality regulation and opponent of media consolidation, has taken a stand on AT&T’s now infamous censorship of Pearl Jam front man Eddie Vedder’s anti-Bush remarks at Lollapalooza. In an interview with OpenLeft.com’s Matt Stoller, Copps supported the idea that there’s a link between AT&T’s deletion of Vedder’s political comments from a webcast of the concert and the network neutrality fight that’s brewing in the halls of Congress.

“Events like this are connected to the larger issue of network neutrality, so it is very very important,” Copps said in response to a question about whether or not AT&T’s censorship of Vedder has any implications for network neutrality. He went on to say, “So when something like the episode occurs with Pearl Jam that you’re referencing that ought to concern all of us… because if you can do it for one group, you can do it to any group and say ‘Well, it’s not intentional,’ and things like that. But nobody should have that power to do that and then be able to exercise distributive control over the distribution and control over the content too.

— FCC Commissioner: Pearl Jam censorship linked to net neutrality fight, By Jon Stokes, ars technica, Published: August 17, 2007 – 01:56PM

And it’s good that Copps sees the connection between this episode and media consolidation. Copps talks a good talk, but will he do more than “grudgingly accept” this sort of thing, like he did the bogus 700Mhz auction rules? Will he vote against, and will he persuade other commissioners to do the same? And can someone persuade Congress to change the FCC’s tune? It’s all very well to rage against the machine, but who’s going to change it?

Or can we get some Internet access competition? Then we could have Internet freedom.

-jsq

AT&T: Net Neutrality Tool?

learnenglish-central-stories-animal-farm-330x220.gif Forbes, normally more of a capitalist tool than a flaming radical rag, keeps covering AT&T’s Pearl Jam fiasco:
AT&T’s “content monitor” hit the mute button during part of Pearl Jam’s “Blue Room” Live Lollapalooza Webcast sponsored by the telecom, depriving viewers of some anti-George Bush lyrics—and handing live ammunition to “net neutrality” proponents in the form of an almost perfect example of what they predict will happen if a few companies are allowed to control the broadband pipeline.

— AT&T Silences Pearl Jam; Gives ‘Net Neutrality’ Proponents Ammunition, Staci D. Kramer, PaidContent.org, 08.09.07, 7:45 PM ET

Their followup gets even better:
AT&T spokesman Michael Coe said that the silencing was a mistake and that the company was working with the vendor that produces the webcasts to avoid future misunderstandings. He said AT&T was working to secure the rights to post the entire song – part of a sing-along with the audience – on the Blue Room site.

— AT&T Errs in Edit of Anti-Bush Lyrics, By MICHELLE ROBERTS, Forbes, 08.10.07, 10:59 AM ET

While the lumbering dinosaur was working on that, Pearl Jam already had the uncensored version on their site.

And it just keeps getting better. Continue reading →

Yet Less Spectrum

m2z.jpg Not being content with squelching competition in the 700Mhz auction:
The Federal Communications Commission is seeking to shut the door on a plan by a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to offer free wireless broadband Internet service everywhere in the U.S., the chief executive of the group said Wednesday.

M2Z Networks Inc. issued a statement Wednesday in which it said it would take the FCC to court in an attempt to force the agency to conduct a thorough analysis of the plan before it determined whether it would back it or not.

The company has proposed taking 25 megahertz of spectrum that is currently vacant and using it to build a wireless broadband Internet network to provide free service to 95% of Americans within a decade.

— UPDATE: FCC Opposes Silicon Valley VCs’ Free-Broadband Plan, (Updates with comment from Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Cal., in the fifth paragraph.) By Corey Boles, Dow Jones, August 15, 2007: 05:14 PM EST

Why would the FCC object to that? Continue reading →

700Mhz: Duopoly As Usual

710_1_1a_CARRIE_ANN_BAADE_The_Devil_is_In_the_Details,10_x_17..jpg Susan Crawford reads the 700Mhz auction rules and confirms the worst:
1. Those Carterfone protections don’t mean too much. The no-locking, no-blocking requirements are hedged in by substantial limitations: the winning licensee will be able to lock and block devices and applications as long as they can show that their actions are related to “reasonable network management and protection,” or “compliance with applicable regulatory requirements.” In other words, as long as the discrimination can be shown to be connected (however indirectly) to some vision of “network management,” it will be permitted. (Discrimination “solely” for discrimination’s sake is prohibited, but that’s not too difficult to avoid.)

— Many, many devils in the details: 700 MHz rules, by Susan, from Susan Crawford blog, 13 Aug 2007

So it’s ILECs vs. CLECs, round two. Guess who’ll win?

And even supposedly Cmr. Copps “grudgingly accepted” these rules. Seems to me we need a whole new FCC, so we can get some real rules of the road.

And what we really need is some real competition.

-jsq

Chicago’s Most-Read Columnist

georgia10.jpg Why newspapers pay attention to blogs:
Then she’ll post it, under the screen name Georgia10, on the front page of liberal blog Daily Kos (dailykos.com), which gets between 400,000 and 800,000 unique visitors daily. The Tribune’s daily circulation, just for some context, is about 586,000; its Web site gets a little over three million unique visitors per month, which averages out to around 100,000 a day. (The Tribune won’t release stats on how many visitors its blogs or news columnists get.)

— Whois is Georgia10? by Christopher Hayes, Chicago Reader, fall 2006

Georgia Logothetis, now 24, was a 23 year old college student when that article was written, and she was already the most-read political columnist in Chicago. This doesn’t tend to happen in newspapers. It can happen online, where the management pyramid can be mighty flat.

How did she do it? Political connections? Graft? Tokenism? Nope. Many hours of research, and

More than a deft prose style and an outraged disposition, the trait held in the highest regard in the lefty blogosphere is prodigiousness. The more you post, the more readers you attract, and on this front, Georgia10 is the site’s workhorse.
Merit can win online.

-jsq