Technology Can't Solve Voting Problems -- But You Can!

Posted by Larisa Mann at 12:00 AM | Comment Now | Permalink

Last week the Bay Area hosted a symposium: "Majority/Minority State: Turning Power in Numbers into Power at the Polls in 2008," on the future of electoral politics in California. The starting point for the conference was: population numbers don't automatically lead to power, or to representation, especially in elections.

For example, although Latinos dominate California in number and in population growth, many are currently under 18, and many others are not citizens. Neither of these groups is eligible to vote, so Latinos who live here, depend on our education and health systems, and contribute in many ways (especially working and paying sales tax) are not represented. The age issue will fix itself, as time goes on, but even then, being old enough to vote is not the same as being registered to vote, which is not the same as being able to vote.

A popular controversy in voting politics right now is about voting machines -- there is a huge amount of evidence that computerized voting is unsecure (often easily able to be hacked) and possibly unreliable, and often un-checkable (since the machines are owned by private companies who use trade secret law to prevent anyone from examining how the votes get counted or from checking on errors).

However, non-technological problems are the most powerful barriers to voting, especially for the poor and people of color. A workshop on voter protection issues brought all these issues into the bright light of day. What was intense about this workshop was the time spent by the speakers on simple, undramatic ways people can be denied the right to vote. Many of these are not planned or malicious (unlike, say, the Voter ID movement), but they hit people of color and the poor, as well as other disadvantaged groups, especially hard. One story from the Berkeley polling station during the recent primaries illustrated the kinds of problems that are most common:

Despite being in the middle of a town that you might think would be pretty politically savvy, by around 3 p.m. on the day of the California primary, the Berkeley polling place was turning people away. Not because people hadn't registered, but because the polling place had simply run out of ballots. Unprepared for the higher turnout, the workers simply had to wait for more ballots to arrive, and turn people away in the meantime.

Amazingly, there were apparently no poll observers there other than the poll workers, who could have reported the issue more widely. The ballots were back at 5 p.m., but who knows how many people didn't vote that day because of such a simple mistake? In fact, 14 precincts in Alameda county alone ran out of ballots on February 5. This is a shame for everyone, but of course people who can't afford to take more time off from work are especially unlikely to get the chance to vote, since they can't wait around.

In addition, the amount of ballots and voting machines is based on past turnout -- places where not so many people have voted get fewer machines and ballots. Since low turnout can come from low registration, as well as from people's feeling they are not being represented, the current election's focus on new voters plus the presence of candidates that will likely motivate especially the Black population, means many places may be unprepared for an increase in turnout. This is what happened at the primary, but some of that newfound political energy went to waste.. we must help our polling places do better when the election comes around in November.

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Correction and Clarification: Download a Song -- Lose Your Loan?

Posted by Larisa Mann at 1:59 PM | Comment Now | Permalink

On December 2, 2007, Wiretap published a blog post in which I warned our readers about the implications of the part of the bill H.R. 4137 called "Section 494(A): CAMPUS-BASED DIGITAL THEFT PREVENTION" of the "College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007."

I suggested that the penalty for schools that failed to enforce anti-file sharing requirements would be loss of federal funding, increased school fees and the like.

After my December post, Wiretap was contacted by the office of the chair of the House Education and Labor Committee, Chairman George Miller (D-CA), (who approved that bill), arguing that the risks were far fewer than I suggested. The Deputy Communications Director Rachel Racusen wrote in an email to Wiretap on December 20:

" ... The fact is that these provisions would not cause any student or any school to lose federal financial aid, would not punish colleges, if illegal downloading happens on their campuses, would not require colleges to purchase any specific programs or legal downloading services, and would not ask colleges to report student violations."

Wiretap disagrees with the Chairman's office over whether the current language in the provisions threatens college funding. Wiretap argues that it could.

However, on further research and consultations with experts in the field, I should have said that schools could -- rather than would -- lose their funding. What we are dealing with here are the typical grey areas in legislative language. Wiretap is happy to make this correction and provide further clarification on what is at stake.

The question of how likely the loss of federal funding can happen is a question of politics, not legal requirements -- to understand what can potentially happen, we need to know who are the players and who has the power.

Wiretap deliberately chose to alert the public to the threat posed by this language since the anti-file sharing language is consistent with the aggressive campaign by the entertainment industry against college students. Our caution is especially driven by the fact that this anti-file sharing provision is in a college funding bill. If you are not planning to use college funding as a potential "stick" to enforce the law, why would you put it in that bill in the first place?

However, it is true that the actual language of this bill is vague about enforcement and doesn't mention penalties at all. So what is a reasonable penalty to expect?

One opinion on reasonable penalties comes from an organization seeking to benefit from this kind of requirement -- the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), whose Washington house counsel, Fritz Attaway, recently said to the Federal Communications Bar Association:

"When the government is subsidizing universities ... and it discovers that those universities are spending a lot of taxpayers' money to build digital networks that are being used primarily to allow college students to traffic in infringing content, I think it's perfectly legitimate for Congress to say, wait a minute, if we're giving you money, we don't want it to be used to help college kids infringe copyright."

So at least one of the powerful parties involved thinks withdrawing federal education funding is an appropriate penalty.

Back in the real world, what penalties actually exist for schools that fail to comply with a federal education funding law?

For more specific information, I contacted Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, familiar with Washington procedures on this issue. Sohn described the enforcement mechanism that always exists (when nothing else is named) -- college accreditation.

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Up For Grabs: Our Right To Govt. Info

Posted by Larisa Mann at 5:30 PM | Comment Now | Permalink

When you apply for or pay down loans, check healthcare costs, or look for your tax information, you'll be reminded of some of the ways Congress can affect your life. Debates in Congress and in committees, and their outcomes in bills and laws, are technically public documents that we can have access to. However, not all are available online, and those that are, are hard to sort through, and lack contextual information like the lobbyists involved with those people whose words we can read.

Luckily for us, there are some new online tools that can help us extract and collect this information. This is good because we need to know when those in powerful public positions are charging off on harebrained schemes to monitor our every move, hand them over to our bosses or cave in to corporate interests in the allocation of federal funding for education and even (de)regulation of media.

When a bill is put before Congress that affects the cost of education, health care affordability or the right to express ourselves using available technology (or any other issue you might care about), it helps to know what's happening in those meetings, and how much money is backing the various arguments. More importantly we need to know what our government officials are doing, and where they get their money from.

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Download A Song -- Lose Your Loan

Posted by Larisa Mann at 5:00 AM | 1 comment | Permalink

(Editor's Update: On Dec. 20th, WiretapMag.org was contacted by the staff of Chairman George Miller (D-CA) to request a correction. From an email by Rachel Racusen, Committee on Education and Labor:

"The fact is that these provisions would not cause any student or any school to lose federal financial aid, would not punish colleges if illegal downloading happens on their campuses, would not require colleges to purchase any specific programs or legal downloading services, and would not ask colleges to report student violations."

Wiretap has opened an investigation to review our interpretations of these provisions and we will publish our findings shortly.)

Glory be, the big copyright owners have found yet another way to threaten students' access to education -- this time by going for the biggest support of higher education -- federal funding.

On Nov 22 the House Education and Labor Committee approved H.R. 4137, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act (COAA). The name sounds like something everyone can support -- but the devil is truly in the details.

Page 411 of this 747-page bill is "Section 494(A): CAMPUS-BASED DIGITAL THEFT PREVENTION" wherein the bill's meaning takes a serious detour from its title. To prevent college students from illegally accessing copyrighted material, the section says all schools shall (when you see the word "shall" in a law, it's a requirement, not a suggestion):

1) Have "a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property"

and

2) Have "a plan to explore technology based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.”

The real eye opener: noncompliant schools could lose all of their federal funding, for all of their students. No more Pell Grants. No more federal financial aid. No more student loans. This is not just draconian punishment for students who break the law, this punishes all students at that institution even if they did nothing!

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Can Phone Companies Shut Down Activists?

Posted by Larisa Mann at 12:54 AM | Comment Now | Permalink

Did you know that phone companies can refuse to allow activists and organizations to transmit text messages to a list of their own members, if they don't like the content? That's the upshot of the recent outrage over Verizon wireless' text message policy.

The story in a nutshell: NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) wanted to allow its own members and supporters to voluntarily subscribe to a text message service to keep them updated on issues in their area. Verizon, the second largest mobile phone carriers in the country told them it “does not accept issue-oriented programs" and refused to allow them to sign up for the service.

After a respectable amount of uproar, Verizon backed down, saying that it was “an incorrect interpretation of a dusty internal policy” that “was designed to ward against communications such as anonymous hate messaging and adult materials sent to children.” This doesn't really explain why they stopped Verizon from sending messages to people who signed up in order to receive them.

The issue here is not whether Verizon is legally in the right, because under the law, they are entitled to set their policies on text messaging as they wish.

Verizon has rights over your actions like Myspace does: as a private company, they can filter or control content on their systems, regardless of how the people using them feel about it. But in both cases, people feel their rights are being violated. Why? Because these feel like spaces for expression that should be free, they are like gathering places – if not fully public places, then places that the public goes and relies on for social purposes.

What's interesting about Verizon is that they couldn't apply the same restrictions on a service that relies on traditional phone numbers (instead of their shortened text message number), because discrimination on the phone system is prohibited by law, as it is considered just one of these commons paces, i.e. a "common carrier".

The question is, should these "common carrier" rules, acknowledging open access to social infrastructure as necessary for a free society and a functioning democracy, be applied to new technological services and "spaces"?

As mobile phone companies re-consolidate, various parts of the country are left with only one or two companies for coverage. Or in some cases one network is much more affordable than the others, or what if everyone you know or all your friends or business partners are on one network? All these things that limit your freedom to choose between networks. How many people can companies be allowed to affect by choosing to deny them access to information on their networks?

Text messages and other networked communications are avenues of communication used by the public – especially young people. They are used for socializing, for sharing information and for political mobilization. The outcry over Verizon's filtering shows that people are expecting to have rights of free expression through these communication networks.

Especially as actual public spaces are shut down or privatized or certain people (teenagers, boys, homeless people, people of color, activists, protestors) are policed out of them, where does the general public, or these less powerful classes get to go, to do what has always been done in public – express yourself, interact with others, communicate, and organize?

Increasingly they go to new communications networks, whether online services or text messaging. So the law needs to recognize the public aspect of these spaces and services (as they have before) and grant us some real rights there.

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School Bookstores Raising the Price of Education - Time to Organize!

Posted by Larisa Mann at 12:00 AM | Comment Now | Permalink

Recently, student, book and public interest blogs have been murmuring over the latest antics of the Harvard/MIT Co-operative Society bookstore ("The Coop), who has been arguing for a vague kind of property right in the ISBN numbers on its textbooks.

The Coop displays the slogan "Students Still Come First with Us" on its website. Apparently this depends on what the student is doing. Students have been coming into The Coop and writing down ISBN numbers (an identification number) for textbooks, to facilitate ordering those books from a cheaper venue, but last week students writing down ISBNs were forced to leave by the cops, on The Coop's insistence.

The Coop's representatives have argued that

1. ISBN numbers are a lot of work to "get," so they are "almost intellectual property"

2. Those making notes are part of an organized act, or by implication a rival business (which the Coop has a right to fight against)

About #1: Intellectual property rights are not based on the amount of work going in (ISBN numbers are not even created by The Coop!), and owning an arrangement of ISBNs is implausible too, since the arrangement itself has to to be non-obvious. The cops themselves made a public statement that no crime was committed, as have numerous IP law experts.

What's funny about #2 is that while some individual students have been writing down ISBNs, there has been an organized effort, but that organization (or rival business) is run by Harvard's own Undergraduate Council - seeking to get cheaper textbooks for students at Harvard, also raising money for building a school in Zambia, and funding other UC projects. Funny, it almost sounds like a student cooperative!

Although a sadly familiar argument in the music industry, the argument that you get to use the law to restrict access to legally available goods is not sound, legally or otherwise. ISBNs are not property, and competition in retail is a fact of life. In this case, the 'competition' is also on the side of increasing access to education, so they should be praised.

College bookstores (increasingly managed by large corporations) are making it harder to comparison-shop, and in this case even trying to use the law to do so. Meanwhile, publishers even try to stop professors from finding out the prices - to prevent them from considering students' ability to pay for course readings! A Massachusetts-based Public Interest Research Group recently released a report describing the difficulty in discovering textbooks prices: "77% of the [287] professors surveyed found that publisher sales representatives rarely or never volunteer the price, and even when professors directly asked for the price during a sales meeting, only 38% reported that the sales representative would always disclose the price."

If publishers try to prevent comparison-shopping, and bookstores also try to make it harder to do it, academia becomes still more expensive and exclusive --even now students spend around $900 per semester on course materials.

To fight this, students have to organize! In 2004, UCLA math students worked with their department to pressure the publisher to get a 20% reduction in their calculus books, while others, like Crimsonreading, take matters into their own hands --much like the founding circumstances (seemingly forgotten) of the Harvard Coop itself. As Jonathan Zittrain (of Harvard's own Berkman Center for Internet and Society) pointed out, trying to arrest or ban students who organize to make education cheaper and better "sort of takes the 'co' out of 'Coop'"

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A close-up from Jamaica

Posted by Larisa Mann at 3:07 PM | Comment Now | Permalink

I'm clinging to the edge of the digital divide in Kingston, Jamaica this summer. The office I'm in today is air-conditioned and wi-fi'd enough to suit anyone (although the connection slows + stops fairly regularly). But step outside and go a few blocks and it's a different story. And if you go down to South Camp Adult Correctional Center or Tower Street General Penitentiary or Fort Augusta A. C. C. it's as far different as can be.

The project that took me here is the Rehabilitation Through Music program in the Students Expressing Truth Foundation (SET Foundation). Working with the Department of Correctional Services, the SET Foundation is a Jamaican nonprofit that provides and coordinates external support for a prison-inmate group called Students Expressing Truth. In three prisons in Kingston, SET has built computer labs, organized trainings for inmates and staff in typing, desktop publishing, music production, audio engineering, recording, and video editing. Especially impressive is that the entire SET executive board is inmates, and the members are inmates and some staff. All the trainings are given to the SET executive board (and anyone interested) first, and then they train the members. SET organizes events for inmates such as quiz competitions (which are entirely researched and organized by inmates, down to them making buzzers from scratch) and spelling bees. Most recently, with some funding from UNESCO and more support from the SET Foundation, SET built SET FM a radio station that broadcasts 4 hours of inmate-produced radio to the prison community.

Since I was sent down by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, I've been thinking about the relationship between the work that's happening here in these prisons and the concept of "Internet and Society." Although we are still working on an internet connection for the inmates, it hasn't come yet. But what would the presence of internet mean here? How is it making its presence known in places where the digital divide is so pronounced? My guess is that by itself, new technology doesn't automatically change people's relationships or self-image. But here both of these things are changing, and technology is being demanded as part of it (by the inmates). That's the cool thing -- the technology is in use, every day, and the effects are impressive for individuals at least: One young guy joined SET four years ago and was barely literate, and yesterday I watched a music video he composed, sang, played, shot and edited (with titles too). This guy has been transformed, and so has his relationship to technology. Watching the radio team at Tower Street has been amazing as well, they are a team of people, really identifying with the project and the radio station, and they are impressively dedicated and focused.

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Who defines our privacy rights? Old laws, google, or you?

Posted by Larisa Mann at 12:22 AM | Comment Now | Permalink

On May 29th, Google revealed their latest development: Street View. In California, Google contractor Immersive Media drove vans with 360-degree-range cameras on their roofs, through city streets generating panoramic, zoomable, street-level pictures. Google says: "users can virtually walk the streets of a city, check out a restaurant before arriving, and even zoom in on bus stops and street signs to make travel plans"

Google's press release only highlight's the technology's positive attributes. But some users may choose less-than-savory uses for the service; some already have: zooming into car windows to catch women bending over, or focusing on sunbathers, or couples making out on park benches.

Already, some folks find this development creepy.

Some of these concerns may seem remote since the public sites aren't constantly filmed, and the images are only refreshed once in a while. But filming will become cheaper and more ubiquitous (since information is valuable), we need to set guidelines now, and be assertive about our privacy rights.

Imagine if your parents, teachers, bosses -- those with the power to judge or punish -- were to take your presence at a certain location out of context, and then interrogate those moments caught on camera -- at the free healthcare clinic, the LGBT youth center, or Good Vibrations?

Also, people have reason to feel vulnerable in public spaces already, especially those targeted because of their appearance or some visible aspect of their identity. If a public space becomes exponentially more public -- because millions of people can view it remotely-- easily identifiable citizens are especially at risk. They have rights too!

In fact, Google already concedes there are standards to be respected by not filming battered women's shelters. In recognizing that there are some cases where privacy trumps photography, Google opens the door to a public discussion of who gets to decide what is OK or not to capture on film. It was right for Google to exempt women's shelters. But why is it alright to film any individual citizen? Who gets to decide who deserves privacy rights? Why is Google (or technology design itself) the arbiter of what we deserve when it comes to privacy?

Those folks who say "don't worry" make several flimsy arguements that miss the point:

"People can see you all the time when you are out in public" Direct, focused attention through a window or directly in front of a sunbather would get a real person a smack, or at least a "bug off, creep". When someone stares at you, most of the time you can see them too. Also, they are not storing your image for a length of time, nor are they making it available to millions of people remotely.

"Taking pictures in public (noncommercially) is legal now" Generally true, although zooming into people's windows is illegal in some states. However, the laws were written when you could observe someone photograph you, and the images were not in networked, searchable databases. (Flickr, as such a database should raise some similar concerns.)

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Can you buy freedom? Corporate funding and universities

Posted by Larisa Mann at 12:01 AM | 3 Comments | Permalink

I normally blog about direct relationships between technology and rights, but I'm stepping back to talk about an indirect relationship, one that's cropped up in my own backyard, at UC Berkeley, although they're relevant to anyone connected to a university in this day and age.

Careful readers might have noticed a theme in my posts: the connection between our rights and who holds the purse strings for new technology. Well, there's no need to do any sleuthing at UC Berkeley, these days -- the university has recently announced a half-a-billion-dollar deal with BP to found an Energy Biosciences Institute to research "economically viable alternative energy sources." Following the money has never been so easy!

So what's the big deal about this big deal? Universities get tons of money from corporations (especially while the Federal government blows billions overseas rather than give it to education), right?

Robert Reich, faculty (and former Labor secretary under Clinton) said "this could be a feather in our caps, or a noose around our necks." So what should we be speaking up for; to make sure it's our caps and not our necks on the line?

1. What happens to academic freedom in the direction of research?

Defenders of the deal say the right to take BP's money is an academic freedom, but that depends what other choices are available. Unless we know what the contract looks like, we don't know how much control the corporation has, while the availability of such a large fund for some research can itself alter the focus of department attention. If BP, as a private company, must support research into products it can sell, what will happen to researchers interested in the impact of consumption patterns (who want us to change them), or the larger ecological impact of particular energy sources? The first is against the business model itself, and the second is something BP has a rather poor track record on. So how will the department maintain research on competing or contradictory tracks, when its funding is mostly dependent on one track?

Professor of Environmental Science And Policy Management (ESPM) Miguel Altieri said in the Academic Senate: "The field that I study, alternative agriculture, is going to die on this campus. When I retire no more research is going to be done in the field that I represent which is actually an alternative to climate change and industrial agriculture."

2. Will BP's alternate fuel sources make us energy independent and save the environment?

Unlikely. 19 out of 24 of the Institute's research areas on "alternate fuel sources" are biofuels. This is neither sustainable or environmentally sound, as well as being a huge handout to giant agribusiness companies who rely on genetically modified single-crop farms that exhaust the environment, contaminate non GMO crops, and drive up the price of major staple foods for the poor all over the world. In addition, as US gas consumption currently stands, local crops could meet about 12% of our biofuel needs, which would require us to depend on imports (so much for energy independence) and even more affect food access and the environment in the third world. It's these facts that led the mainstream free-market-friendly magazine The Economist to caption an anti-biofuels article "Castro Was Right" (in his opposition to biofuels). Anything that can bring Castro and The Economist together has got to be pretty serious!

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Tangled Web: be wary of MySpace and other online social networks

Posted by Larisa Mann at 12:01 AM | Comment Now | Permalink

So your life's online now? With each click pitfalls await.

I won't rant about newfangled online social network websites making our nation's youth more vulnerable to predators. Fact: adults supervising teens in real life are more likely to abuse them than are random people online, and there's no cases linking participation in these sites with actual harm from sexual predators (in fact myspace has been used to catch ne'er-do-wells, but that's another story).

But what about harm from people with power over you, who don't care about your liberty?

Here's the trouble with MySpace: the more you expand your social life and public face into online situations, the more you lose certain rights in those virtual venues.

Young people are more likely to be engaged in online social networks, so it's key that we question who's pulling the strings.

So here's my list of Reasons To Be Wary of MySpace:

1. It's not private -- in the sense that whatever is on there can be used against you.

   The hardest thing for a lot of kids to absorb is that stuff you post on MySpace can be taken out of context. You may think it's funny, part of a private conversation that's in jest, made-up, or exaggerated, but that picture or quip you upload can be also be viewed by someone with power to punish you for it. This can be the teacher you're mocking on your MySpace blog or a potential employer, or the police who are interested in what they think are threats.

2. Along with being searchable by individuals like those above, MySpace's policies are compatible with parental (for now) spyware, which could be used for a variety of purposes.

3. MySpace is not public -- in the sense that you don't have any constitutional rights like you would in physical public spaces like a library or park. You have no freedom of speech. You have no freedom to associate. Any appeals over behavior are to a totally private organization with few overseers.

4. The appeals are further limited because the End User License Agreement (the contract you have to agree to in order to join) also allows that MySpace can change how it works without warning or consent: it's your responsibility to check up on the website -- they won't actively notify you of the changes. Like when the ability to fastforward through the songs on the MySpace music player suddenly disappeared? What a pain. Was there any chance for public input?

5. This is true for their privacy policy as well: "If, however, we are going to use users' personally identifiable information in a manner materially different from that stated at the time of collection we will notify by posting a notice on our Web site for 30 days."

6. MySpace also disabled the use of programs that allow you to really customize your homepage, if those widgets "engage in commercial activity", although most commonly products are blocked if they "compete directly with MySpace's own offerings".

7. Myspace is not only privately owned, it's owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (Fox Network, IGN, Fuel TV), who assert conservative political and worldviews, and who profit from your participation.
   
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RIAA makes an offer students can't refuse ... or can they?

Posted by Larisa Mann at 8:28 AM | Comment Now | Permalink

Recently the Recording Industry Association of America offered a "deal" to college students on 13 campuses (Arizona State U.; Marshall; North Carolina State; North Dakota State; Northern Illinois; Ohio U.; Syracuse; UMass, Amherst; U. of Nebraska, Lincoln; U. of South Florida; USC; U. of Tennessee, Knoxville; and U. of Texas, Austin) whom they suspect of illegally downloading copyrighted music: "pay us off now, and we'll give you a discount on what you'll be hit with after we take you to Federal court."

Some reasons why this deal is bogus:

First: there are many examples of uploading/downloading music that are completely legal: if the copyright holder has given permission, if the music is in the public domain or creative commons-licensed, or if the purpose of the downloading is covered by the fair use exemption of the Copyright Act. Some of these defenses cannot be known without knowing how the file was to be used, which requires more investigation.

Second: there's no way for the RIAA to know which actual student did what on a university computer without filing a lawsuit (which costs them more money) or convincing the university to hand over names (which costs money and time). Just because you got the letter, in other words, doesn't mean you broke the law, or that they know what you did at all.

Third: The fact that they are using legal-sounding letters and threats of to extract information from people (including information that could incriminate themselves or other people in a criminal suit) is something that some have suggested is a potential violation of our due process rights.

This latest round of threats is part of a series of lawsuits and threats against individual music fans that started in 2003 with a suit against 261 people. Since that time, the RIAA has sued or threatened suit in waves, altering their plan each time it is attacked in congress, or a judge rules that their previous plan is illegal.

The scarily high cost of legal representation plus the inflated value of statutory damages for infringement usually leads to staggeringly high numbers facing a student (or anyone) at the outset, since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act specifies minimum damages are $750 per infringement. All of these factors could scare students into settling even if they have a valid legal defense of their actions.

The deeper reason this is terribly bogus is the RIAA's claimed motivation: that downloading is "devastating" to "those who create the music and bring it to fans." Sounds like "downloading hurts artists." But the single greatest ripoff of artists' deserved rewards happens way before the music gets recorded at all, it's during the contract negotiation. Most artists signed to Big Four don't own their copyrights at all, and usually receive a pitiful percentage back from their CD sales, if it's not eaten up entirely by the trickery of the major label system of advances and studio time. The numbers don't lie: artists have been getting ripped off by major labels since before the internet, and even if all downloading stopped today that wouldn't change. So the deal isn't even between the artists (whom students might care about) and the students, but between students and the people who rip off artists. Remind me why you'd want to deal with them?

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Some Power to the Flickrtariat!

Posted by Larisa Mann at 9:02 AM | Comment Now | Permalink

What are we to make of the news that major internet companies are developing a human rights policy? Yahoo, Google, Vodafone, and Microsoft must have had foreign trade policy already, but this is a code of conduct "to promote freedom of expression and privacy rights."

Of course, politically speaking this was brought about through a lot of conversation, lobbying, argument, persuasion and protest. Much praise goes to the organizations involved, especially the Center for Democracy and Technology, Businesses for Social Responsibility, and groups like Human Rights Watch, the EFF, Reporters without Borders, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the Samuelson Clinic for Law Technology and Public Policy. In addition, this Code of conduct looks less stringent that what Congress has recently proposed. The corporate cultures of some of these companies might emphasize good behavior, as well (although whether that survives the departure of the founding personalities is hard to know – HP being a discouraging indicator).

So, this Code could be a PR move where companies promise to regulate themselves (with no threats of sanction if they fall short of the goals they set themselves). But, it could be more meaningful. To begin with, it doesn't seem likely that these media-savvy NGOs will be easily put off. But beyond that, what makes these companies think they have to be sensitive to human rights issues at all? Is PR more important than we might think, and can relations with the public actually have teeth? In this case, perhaps we (the public) can watch the watchmen.

It’s only a thought experiment. But it's sure interesting that companies like Google and Yahoo market themselves as moral (don't be evil), or downright neighborly (yahoo: "a nice place to be on the internet"). It seems possible these might depend a great deal on the goodwill of the people who use them. Being convenient and/or ubiquitous, as well as free, helps them a lot, but their ubiquity is dependent on the willingness of the public to use them for storing publicly made content (like your holiday photographs or blog posts).

For example, at Yahoo’s recent initiative called "Brand Universe" relies less on providing their own content, and more on building Yahoo’s popularity with the public through things like Flickr, through turning them into marketing tools for non-yahoo products. Without the public choosing to participate, these things cannot fly.

So, two important components of internet companies' means of production: content, and goodwill. Combine that with the fact that a large amount of both of these are created by the public (what in an older era might have been called the people controlling the means of production).

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Keeping Big Brother in check

Posted by Larisa Mann at 1:28 PM | Comment Now | Permalink

I've written elsewhere (as have many more eloquent folks) about the privacy and other rights-related downsides to all the exciting new technologies for collecting, sharing, searching and aggregating information about each other. But there is one aspect of life in a networked world that weighs much more clearly on the positive side of the equation: the ability to know what our government is doing. Leaving aside foreign policy concerns for another day, just look at what cool people are doing with technology to create more transparency in politics.

The Sunlight Foundation was founded this month (!) and has several fascinating projects in which they coordinate networked citizen-journalists who gather data about personal, social and financial relationships in Congress, and correlate them with voting and committee data. For example: one project (relying on citizen-journalists) explored which congresspeople had family members working on their staff (one way that congressional campaign contributions end up in member's personal bank accounts). The MAPLight project, based in California (for now), combines two previously unrelated existing databases (from the legislature and from a nonpartisan nonprofit) and correlates information on candidates' campaign contributions and votes in the legislature.

Even our Government itself, or segments of it, while working against transparency in so many ways, is leaking itself online, and tools are being developed to allow us to understand how it works. Congress.org, while no bastion of radical critique, has engines for searching recent votes and bills, and provides a service called MegaVote, a voting monitor system which gives you weekly email updates on how your Senators and Representatives voted that week.

Of course, one aspect of government that we could all probably see as obviously requiring transparency is voting procedures. What more public function is there than the process by which we choose our officials to represent us? However, our government has ceded control of the methods and even auditing of voting machines to various private companies who have proven to be horrifically unreliable (and one is now under a federal ban)… But that's a rant for another day.

It's still true that the capabilities of researchers examining voting machine technology and voting machine manufacturers' auditing and practices are tremendously more powerful thanks to the these new technologies. Since the National Association of Election Directors identifies voting systems with identification numbers, it took one intrepid researcher only a day or so to email people avoters organization and correlate the information with other databases from consulting firms and the like and come up with a rough list of which machines were audited by the banned company. The ease of gathering the data on this stuff even with little cooperation from those who could most easily tell us. It's hopeful stuff! What should be more public than the practices and decisions of our elected government and the mechanisms that put them there? Nothing, that's what.

Larisa Mann writes about technology, media and law for WireTap, studies Jurisprudence and Social Policy at U.C. Berkeley and djs under the name Ripley.

The darker side of participatory, user-friendly technology tools

Posted by Larisa Mann at 12:06 PM | Comment Now | Permalink

The state of Texas is spending 5 million dollars now, and up to 20 million dollars later, for a website and system of cameras that allow viewers -- who login with no particular authentication process or vetting -- to look at the seven (and soon-to-be-70) cameras trained along the Texas border. The site is live and open to the public for purposes of testing the system. You can "report suspicious information" although that's not defined, via their hotline, and, presumably, something will happen, although that's not stated either. It's not clear who sees the reports, or how they will be interpreted. To add insult to injury, it is called "Texas Virtual Neighborhood."

Now, I don't know about you, but my idea of a neighborhood is a place where people know each other, where people will see each other again the next day, so their behavior reflects some level of understanding, trust and sense of repercussion for one's actions. In a real neighborhood, the meaning of what you see is shaped by what you already know about people, and what you do around them is shaped by the knowledge that you will likely see them again.

What a neighborhood certainly isn't is individuals sitting anywhere from ten to a thousand miles away monitoring through a surveillance camera a desert with occasional other people (mostly of a different ethnic group, I'd be willing to bet) showing up. And these monitors have then the power to determine what is suspicious. And the apparent ability to call out armed agents of the law (or vigilantes) to investigate your suspicions, with apparently no repercussions to you if you are wrong.

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