Category Archives: Government

Blocking Civil Suits: Telecoms Lobbied White House Hard for Immunity

burgess07-1a.jpg Well, it seems the telcos are a bit worried about those lawsuits:
The Bush administration is refusing to disclose internal e-mails, letters and notes showing contacts with major telecommunications companies over how to persuade Congress to back a controversial surveillance bill, according to recently disclosed court documents.

The existence of these documents surfaced only in recent days as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by a privacy group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The foundation (alerted to the issue in part by a NEWSWEEK story last fall) is seeking information about communications among administration officials, Congress and a battery of politically well-connected lawyers and lobbyists hired by such big telecom carriers as AT&T and Verizon. Court papers recently filed by government lawyers in the case confirm for the first time that since last fall unnamed representatives of the telecoms phoned and e-mailed administration officials to talk about ways to block more than 40 civil suits accusing the companies of privacy violations because of their participation in a secret post-9/11 surveillance program ordered by the White House.

At the time, the White House was proposing a surveillance bill—strongly backed by the telecoms—that included a sweeping provision that would grant them retroactive immunity from any lawsuits accusing the companies of wrongdoing related to the surveillance program.

— Just Between Us, Telecoms and the Bush administration talked about how to keep their surveillance program under wraps. by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, TERROR WATCH, Newsweek, Apr 30, 2008 | Updated: 6:09 p.m. ET Apr 30, 2008

It’s sad to see professional military men like Lt. General Ronald L. Burgess, Jr., Office of the Director of National Intelligence, shilling for an administration that is so blatantly protecting itself and big corporations against justice for its own wrongdoing. White House stonewalling over first the existence of these documents, and now, since a judge ordered them to reveal that, release of the documents, isn’t about any “war on terror”. It’s about protecting lawbreakers and control of the people: Continue reading →

Hamlet in DC: To Legislate or Not to Legislate, That is the Question

EdwinBoothasHamlet.jpg The U.S. Senate takes up net neutrality again, to legislate or not to legislate:
At a Senate Commerce Committee hearing entitled “The Future of the Internet” on Tuesday, Democratic politicians argued for passage of a law designed to prohibit broadband operators from creating a “fast lane” for certain Internet content and applications. Their stance drew familiar criticism from the cable industry, their Republican counterparts, and FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who said there’s no demonstrated need for new rules, at this point.

— Net neutrality battle returns to the U.S. Senate, by Anne Broache, C|Net News.com, 22 April 2008

Some of the senators seemed to think the Comcast debacle indicated there was need for legislation:
“To whatever degree people were alleging that this was a solution in search of a problem, it has found its problem,” said Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). “We have an obligation to try and guarantee that the same freedom and the same creativity that was able to bring us to where we are today continues, going forward.”

Kerry is one of the backers of a bill called the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, chiefly sponsored by North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan and Maine Republican Olympia Snowe, which resurfaced at the beginning of 2007 but has gotten little attention since. A similar measure failed in a divided Commerce Committee and in the House of Representatives nearly two years ago.

Unsurprisingly, Martin says he doesn’t need a law to enforce, because he can make it up as he goes along: Continue reading →

Nacchio Gets New Trial and Judge

nacchio.jpg All guilty counts thrown out, and not just a new trial, but a new judge:
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned the guilty verdict in the criminal insider trading case of former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio and ordered a new trial before a different judge.

The 2-1 decision cited U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham’s exclusion of expert testimony by Northwestern University law professor and private consultant Daniel Fischel.

Fischel was allowed to testify on Nacchio’s behalf about the facts behind his stock sales, but was excluded from providing economic analysis.

— Nacchio conviction overturned, By Andy Vuong, The Denver Post , Article Last Updated: 03/17/2008 10:33:03 PM MDT

What else will a new trial reveal about the government’s dealings with Qwest about warrantless wiretapping?

-jsq

Jettisoned: 8 Centuries of Common Carriage Law

puzzle-grey-data-header.jpg Someone at CAIDA (presumably kc Claffy by the writing style), went to
an invitation-only intensely interactive workshop on the topic of Internet infrastructure economics. participants included economists, network engineers, infrastructure providers, network service providers, regulatory experts, investment analysts, application designers, academic researchers/professors, entrepreneurs/inventors, biologists, oceanographers. almost everyone in more than one category.

— internet infrastructure economics: top ten things i have learned so far, by webmaster, according to the best available data, October 7th, 2007

and wrote up a report including this summary of the political situation:
…and it turns out that in the last 5 years the United States — home of the creativity, inspiration and enlightened government forces (across several different agencies) that gave rise to the Internet in the first place — has thoroughly jettisoned 8 centuries of common carriage law that we critically relied on to guide public policy in equitably provisioning this kind of good in society, including jurisprudence and experience in determining ‘unreasonable discrimination’.

and our justification for this abandonment of eight centuries of common law is that our “government” — and it turns out most of our underinformed population (see (1) above) — believes that market forces will create an open network on their own. which is a particularly suspicious prediction given how the Internet got to where it is today:in the 1960s the US government funded people like vint cerf and steve crocker to build an open network architected around the ‘end to end principle’, the primary intended use of which was CPU and file sharing among government funded researchers. [yes, the U.S. government fully intended to design, build, and maintain a peer-to-peer file-sharing network!]

That’s right folks: “resource sharing” was the buzzword back then, and every node was supposed to be potentially a peer to every other. Continue reading →

Kaput: What Your Domain Becomes if U.S. Treasury Says So

henrypaulson.jpg What a reputation:
So that’s that. Register your domain name through a U.S. company and your business goes kaput if the U.S. Treasury Department decides it doesn’t like you. It doesn’t matter if you’re based in Spain, your servers are in the Bahamas, your customers are mostly European, and you’ve broken no laws. No warning. Just kaput.

— Just Kaput, Kevin Drum, Political Animal, 4 March 2008

This blogger bases his opinion on a NYTimes story: Continue reading →

Cooperation and Communicators: Would Immunity Make Telcos Cooperate with Government Requests?

jan20_google_mr.jpg On The Communicators on C-SPAN (23 Feb 2008), Marc Rotenberg of Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) made an interesting point. Retroactive immunity for warrantless wiretapping could well mean to telcos that the law could change at the whim of the president, so they might be more apprehensive about cooperating with governmental wiretap requests. After all, the current legal framework says they do have to cooperate if served a warrant, but not without. Such whims could mean they have to cooperate with any old request or face retribution. They may already think that, due to Joe Nacchio of Qwest claiming that his company was denied contracts for not cooperating as part of his appeal against an insider trading conviction, which case itself is bogus if he’s right that he had reasonable expectation of such contracts. It’s a funny thing when you subvert the rule of law and replace it with a “unitary executive”: nobody knows where they stand anymore.

Meanwhile, Patrick Philbin, identified in the on-screen legend only as a “Washington-area attorney” (the introduction did say he was formerly a Bush appointee in various positions), kept claiming that there wasn’t even any proof that any telcos had cooperated without warrants, while arguing that without retroactive immunity they wouldn’t cooperate. In addition to those positions being somewhat contradictory, if I’m not Cheney has said on the air recently that the telcos did cooperate, so I don’t know why Philbin continues this sort of obfuscation. Well, unless it’s the obvious: he’s protecting his former bosses.

The Communicators is very interesting because it one or two people half an hour to say what they mean in their own words. YMMV, but in this case it sure looked to me like Rotenberg was being very reasonable and standing for the rule of law, while Philbin was stonewalling using every legal subterfuge that came to his mind. This impression wouldn’t have been nearly as clear from a few sound bites.

-jsq

Internet Freedom Policy Act

markey-photo.jpg Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Chip Pickering (R-MS) have introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, which will amend Title I of the Communications Act of 1934 to say Internet freedom, commerce, innovation, participation, and speech are the policy of the United States. It’s interesting what this bill does not say. It doesn’t specify any regulations, so that those who oppose net neutrality don’t have a leg to stand on when they say net neutrality is all about regulation. It doesn’t say “net neutrality”: it says “freedom”, “marketplace”, “innovation”, and other positive benefits. (I think I’ll take a cue from Commissioner Copps and start referring to Internet freedom.) It doesn’t say “consumers” except a few times, including once where that word is immediately qualified by
(i) access, use, send, receive, or offer lawful content, applications, or services over broadband networks, including the Internet;
Let’s see, if “consumers” can send their own content, applications, and service, they’re not really consumers in the traditional sense, now are they?

This is all very nice, in that Markey and Pickering apparently get it about what Internet freedom is about. However, why does this bill have no teeth, unlike Markey’s bill of last year or the Snowe-Durgan bill before that? Continue reading →

Comcast Viewed as Great Firewall of China

Camp-lo.jpg Prof. Jean Camp points out that:
This is ironically exactly the mechanism used by the Great Firewall of China. When China does it, we call it “censorship”.

— Re: [IP] Comcast FCC filing shows gap between hype, bandwidth, Jean Camp, Interesting People, 14 Feb 2008

She points to a paper that details that the Great Firewall of China uses exactly the same forged TCP Reset method that Comcast uses, and how to work around such damage: Continue reading →

Temporary Delays? Comcast vs. Access to Content

446px-Ashwin_Navin_by_David_Shankbone.jpg

Aswin Navin by David Shankbone

In an article about Comcast defending against a complaint brought with the FCC about its throttling of Internet content, there’s a larger theme:
Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet, plans to introduce a bill today calling for an Internet policy that would prohibit network operators from unreasonably interfering with consumers’ right to access and use content over broadband networks. The bill also calls for the FCC to hold eight meetings around the nation to assess whether there is enough competition among network providers and whether consumers’ rights are being upheld.

“Our goal is to ensure that the next generation of Internet innovators will have the same opportunity, the same unfettered access to Internet content, services and applications that fostered the developers of Yahoo, Netscape and Google,” Markey said in a written statement yesterday.

— Comcast Defends Role As Internet Traffic Cop By Cecilia Kang, Washington Post Staff Writer, Wednesday, February 13, 2008; Page D01

Markey gets it. Too bad the FCC doesn’t.

Meanwhile, part of Comcast’s defense is: Continue reading →