Washington Goes to Mr. Zuckerberg

Given this timeline of "Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy," it is not surprising to see Senators Charles Schumer, Michael Bennet, Mark Begich, and Al Franken writing to the social network's site CEO, Mark Zuckerberg that their could be legislative consequences for the company's shifting attitudes about user agreements with customers. According to a Reuters story, "Senators tell Facebook: tighten privacy policy," new corporate guidelines "would allow personal information to be viewed by more than friends, and options on other websites that would allow third parties to save information about Facebook users and friends."

Senator Schumer's website prominently featured his objections, which he explains lead him to pursuing the matter with the Federal Trade Commission as well:

Today, U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer urged the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to provide guidelines for social networking sites, like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter on how private information submitted by online users can be used and disseminated. Schumer’s call to the FTC comes on the heels of recent reports that Facebook has decided to provide user data to select third party websites and has begun sharing personal profile information that users previously had the ability to restrict access to. These recent changes by Facebook fundamentally change the relationship between the user and the social networking site. Previously, users had the ability to determine what information they chose to share and what information they wanted to keep private. Recent policy changes are fundamentally changing that relationship and there is little guidance on what social networking sites can and cannot do and what disclosures are necessary to consumers.

Under new policies, users must go through a complicated and confusing opt-out process to keep private information from being shared with third party websites. Additionally, Facebook has also created a new system whereby ‘interests’ listed by users on their personal profiles are automatically aggregated and shared as massive web pages. Users used to have the ability to keep this information private if they chose. These new common interest pages are a gold mine of marketing data that could use by used for spam and potentially scammers, intent on peddling their wares.

“Hundreds of millions of people use social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter every day,” said Schumer. “These sites have helped reconnect old friends, allow families from far away to stay in touch, and created new friendships; overall they provide a great new way to communicate. As these sites become more and more popular, however, it’s vitally important that safeguards are in place that provide users with control over their personal information to ensure they don’t receive unwanted solicitations. At the same time, social networking sites need to provide easy to understand disclosures to users on how information they submit is being shared.”

Franken's website also highlights the issue. In contrast Begich and Bennet gives little of the virtual real estate on their websites to the dispute.

You can read the actual letter to Zuckerberg here. The letter notes that the company's stated goal at one time was to create "open and transparent communities." Although they are taking up the matter with the FTC, they encourage the company to take "swift and productive" action beforehand. Note also the number of times that the word "concern" appears in the document.

On Easy Tweet

TechPresident reports on the Twitter beat for political reports here.

Who Is Watching the Store?

Yesterday's State of the Union Address was also measured by viewers online in a MoveOn.org second-by-second response poll. The seismic patterns of the rating ups and down can be seen on the group's website here.

There was certainly a sense of temporality in the President's address, which mentioned "by the time I finish speaking more Americans will lose their health insurance." There were also a number of references to new forms of federal recordkeeping and accountability testing available online, as this section of the speech shows:

That's what I came to Washington to do. That's why – for the first time in history – my Administration posts our White House visitors online. And that's why we've excluded lobbyists from policy-making jobs or seats on federal boards and commissions.

But we can't stop there. It's time to require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with my Administration or Congress. And it's time to put strict limits on the contributions that lobbyists give to candidates for federal office. Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that's why I'm urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong.

I'm also calling on Congress to continue down the path of earmark reform. You have trimmed some of this spending and embraced some meaningful change. But restoring the public trust demands more. For example, some members of Congress post some earmark requests online. Tonight, I'm calling on Congress to publish all earmark requests on a single website before there's a vote so that the American people can see how their money is being spent.

The Republican rebuttal from Bob McDonnell included a plug for the Internet as well, since "many of our proposals are available online at solutions.gop.gov, and we welcome your ideas on Facebook and Twitter." This year the "You lie!" shouter from last year, Joe Wilson. actually decided to respond to the President on Facebook.

To commemorate the events of yesterday, Obama's Wordle is here and McDonnell's is here.

You Know Where They Sit in the Lunchroom

Yesterday I was one of the respondents to John Palfrey's talk as part of the "Youth & Digital Culture: A Workshop & Discussion" sponsored by the Center in Law, Society, and Culture. Palfrey is the co-author of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives and the Co-Director of Harvard's Berkman Center, where I had the privilege to speak last May. Palfrey's work is well known for its collaborative spirit and appeal to public audiences, and this international project looking at the intersection between social science and policy with digital youth around the world was first developed at a collaborative website. Palfrey's own blog is here.

With his collaborator Urs Gasser, Palfrey describes himself as part of a group of "academics who want to speak to the policy debate" about young people online. He has often been at the center of some of the most heated debates about cyber-predators and legislation targeted against them, as the chair of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. These can be difficult debates to be involved in, because -- as I write in the opening chapter of the Virtualpolitik book -- members of both political parties are eager to score points by seeming tough about Internet crime and are willing to overlook both civil liberties and the reality that most sexual abuse is committed by parents and other loved ones who exploit their power in face-to-face situations. Too often, Palfrey said, Internet policy is shaped by "response to fears," and even lawyers like himself should acknowledge the limits of the law in governing social conduct, especially when conduct like downloading music illegally has become a cultural norm.

He apologized for being only able to give an overview of his "deep dives" that involve fieldwork in Bahrain, Shanghai, and South Korea, but he did announce his intention to use his brief talk to "bust a bunch of myths" that are popular in the mainstream media about kids born after 1980, whom he judges to be the "most empowered" by the digital revolution.

He opened his talk with an image of a pair of hands recognizable to almost all in the audience that show a close up of Barack Obama with his Blackberry, as an emblem of how interaction with computational media now had certain iconic representations associated with political authority, so complete has the transformation of society become. (It's an image that I would argue is suppressed in the current visual rhetoric of the White House, where Blackberries are to be checked at the door and instead Obama is shown repeatedly on a traditional corded phone.)

In a section called "I Blog Therefore I Am: Digital Identity," Palfrey noted the convergence of online and offline life for many young people, and -- as he showed images from Global Kids -- he observed how the avatar experience could be one of seeming power and control, and yet an onlooker might assemble their identities in ways that they might not imagine.

He also questioned how the rhetoric of multitasking was being promulgated and expressed his own preference for the term "switch-tasking," while also noting the possible unanticipated consequences of wiring classrooms not only to productivity but do the learning community's dynamic.

He even described how his own four-year-old daughter used a box camera on a vacation and how she was puzzled by not being able to see the pictures to delete bad shots and asked "Daddy, where are the pictures."

Although he granted that keyword searching habits could lead to information literacy problems and that media were not always as shareable as they appeared, he still pointed to syndication and aggregation technologies as those created by young people for young people that engaged them with code production, hacker culture, and the creative feedback loop, even if a "sophistication gap" still existed.

He then launched into several cluster concept areas in the book, starting with "Security," which in the mainstream media is associated with "stranger danger, bullying, hacking," although there has actually been a decrease in sexual predation since the online revolution. This was followed by a cluster around "Privacy" that included parental fears about "unintended audience," "persistence," "replicability," "searchability," and "unintended contributions" that are highlighted in popular journalistic accounts, although for Palfrey the real dangers lie in "identity theft," "digital record," and "continued erosion" of the privacy held dear by both young people and adults. He argued that the perception that teens didn't care about privacy anymore, since they seem to share everything from their personal lives in an exhibitionistic culture, actually didn't match the behavior and attitudes expressed by young people in his study.

His next cluster focused on the issue of "Intellectual Property," where "copyright issues" and "remix issues" take center stage. Palfrey warned that not only had the social norm of downloading become so strong that legal enforcement wouldn't change it, but that confusion about the complexities of copyright law and its four tests were encouraging many not to experiment and test the boundaries of fair use. This was followed by a "Credibility" cluster with "misinformation," "cheating," and "hidden influences" in its constellation, and then "Information Overload."

Palfrey argued that each issue presents both opportunities and costs, and that there were significant potential gains in expression as young people explore identity and media literacies and are empowered as creators and information generators. He also argued that this creativity could benefit what he called the "semiotic democracy" in which social production becomes more inclusive and accessible, which has consequences for knowledge creation, equity, democratic participation, autonomy, and cross-cultural community building, even if such a system may not directly lead to conventional forms of political participation or protest.

As he concluded, Palfrey focused the audience's attention on the "construct of a learning environment," one that might be less like the library of Oliver Wendell Holmes than traditionalists would prefer, but one capable of rich interactions and meaningful educational experiences.

He closed with a remarkable video created by one of the students working on the Digital Natives project about "Digital Dossiers" that highlights the importance of adaptation as a multimodal composition skill.



In response, I took issue with the rhetoric of the digital generation that I feared might cause policymakers to overestimate the computer literacy of the young and assume that learned behaviors were only expressions of natural facility.

In her comments, Mimi Ito provided a brief history of digital youth as the subject of analysis both in the academy and the mainstream media. She talked about the ongoing back-and-forth between "boosters" and critics and said that all three panelists were trying to present a more nuanced and complex representation of the digital youth landscape. She also said that her own research showed that both the boosters and the detractors were right, if they studied different populations of young people and that both Palfrey and I represented her favorite group to study: "geeks," who needed advocacy and understanding from the broader culture.

Moderator Mona Lynch has done a lot of interesting work about the Internet and capital punishment and the justice system, including work about "jailcams" and the push for online viewing of executions.

Glass Houses

Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation has made the argument that transparency should be the chief virtue of government and worries that everything from hard-to-strip fiscal data in PDF files to the locations of senate hideaways creates an environment of obfuscation and secrecy.

Recently, she noted on her Twitter feed that the DMV offices in the Washington D.C. area offer live webcams in their Georgetown offices to allow citizens to assess how long the lines might be at any given moment. DMVs in Alaska offer the same service to their online potential customers. Of course, the question is whether the person reading People magazine in the waiting room or picking his nose realizes that he is being immortalized for unseen others, as convenient as these portals into bureaucratic spaces to be occupied in the future may be.

The Sunlight Foundation has also sponsored a number of applications that I have downloaded to my iPhone, which include Real Time Congress. Unfortunately, many of these programs don't make use of the iPhone's ability to use geospatial data or capture live sound, which many of the most interesting applications do. Even their Recovery.gov application for Layar isn't particularly exciting, since it is difficult to get a sense of how money is being spent, either well or badly. Naturally, to discourage impulsive vigilantee action or attacks on people in power, there are reasons not to always have real-time geo-location. Nonetheless, the people at Sunlight Labs keep up the work on new applications and may come up with a compelling iPhone application yet.

Cracks in the Adobe

The Sunlight Foundation has posted an editorial that asserts "Adobe is Bad for Government" and questions the hypocrisy involved in how this proprietary software company is adopting the popular language of "open" government on websites like Adobe Opens Up in order to promote its products. However, transparency advocates at Sunlight complain that even the Adobe PDF format makes it difficult for health care legislation to be searchable and remixable.

So next week, Adobe's having a conference here to tell Federal employees why they ought to be using "Adobe PDF, and Adobe® Flash® technology" to make government more open. They've spent what seems to be millions of dollars wrapping buses in DC with Adobe marketing materials all designed to tell us how necessary Adobe products are to Obama's Open Government Initiative. They've even got a beautiful website set up to tout the government's use of Flash and PDF, and are holding a conference here next week to talk about how Government should use ubiquitous and secure technologies to make government more open and interactive.

Here at the Sunlight Foundation, we spend a lot of time with Adobe's products-- mainly trying to reverse the damage that these technologies create when government discloses information. The PDF file format, for instance, isn't particularly easily parsed. As ubiquitous as a PDF file is, often times they're non-parsable by software, unfindable by search engines, and unreliable if text is extracted.

As a recipient of mail for "Adobe Government Solutions," I can attest to how special tutorials and workshops for government employees are direct e-mail marketed. Next week I can attend a session on Photoshop Lightroom 2 for design savvy civil servants on matters of such civic import as creating "proper digital exposure," importing images, and making virtual copies. (See above.)

Thanks to Michael Powers for the link to the Sunlight editorial.

Muzzling Up to the Opposition

This is an interesting example of YouTube rhetoric from the congressman who shot to national prominence by shouting "You lie!" during the president's speech to the joint session of Congress about health care reform.

Hide and Seek

In today's New York Times there is an item about presidential signing statements, "Obama's Embrace of a Bush Tactic Riles Congress," which discusses a topic that has been of great interest to this blog from an information design perspective. I must say that seven months into the Obama administration I am discouraged by the navigation offered on the White House website to materials with signing statements, despite their promises to offer transparency upon the workings of the federal government and use the affordances of Internet technology to do so.

First of all, there is no category for "signing statements" in "Presidential Actions," even though such statements effectively nullify provisions in congressional legislation. Second, a curious citizen could not find substantive information about the five signing statements Obama has issued by using the White House search engine. By the principle of redundancy, one would hope that both searching and browsing could offer fruitful results to those looking for information on a website, but to be able to offer Internet users neither is truly shameful.

The terrible quality of the White House search engine is particularly shameful. Typing in "signing statement" or "signing statements" fails to even bring up "Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies - SUBJECT: Presidential Signing Statements" in which the keywords are in the title of the electronic document.

Pay to Play

Mike Allen of Politico.com broke a major story about his former employer, The Washington Post, this week after a health care lobbyist shared an incriminating flier that showed that the prestigious newspaper had included on their invitation to an "intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon" during an "off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth" a promise to provide "a collegial evening, with Obama administration officials, Congress members, business leaders, advocacy leaders and other select minds" for $25,000 each or $250,000 for all 11 planned "salons." Now Politico is reporting that the embarrassed publisher has canceled its plans for the dubious influence-peddling pitched for the event. They were too late, however, to forestall the inevitable YouTube parody of the event.

Twittering Copyright

I'm accustomed to following hearings about digital rights through live streaming video feeds, so it was strange only to be able to keep track of what was happening in real-time via Twitter as witnesses testified, although apparently audio recordings were also made of hearings about exemptions urgently needed to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for educators, computer scientists, and creative artists. I had actually submitted a letter several months ago in response to a call for evidence of the pedagogical unworkability of the current system. Coverage was also available through the Media Education Lab, although the Twitter feed of Wendy Seltzer focused on recording some of the best lines and exchanges. (Click photo to enlarge.) See Seltzer's blog entry about what she calls the "theater of the DMCA anticircumvention hearings" for more details. Of course, Twitter has some advantages over videorecording, because it creates a text record that is more easily searchable, but the 140 character limit makes it difficult for live blogging and approximate transcriptions.

Tweet on Congress

Trebor Scholz points out the launch of Tweet Congress, which represents a possible improvement on the online petition process that now has become so ubiquitous that legislators rarely respond with meaningful initiatives. Furthermore, the one-way character of such petitions from constituents to lawmakers discourages any meaningful dialogue between legislators and citizens and promulgates a culture of political reaction that growing legions of online affinity groups have only intensified.

The group's "about us" page explains their rationale acting as discrete citizens as follows:

We built this site to scratch our own itch. While searching for our local congressmen on Twitter we were amazed at how many folks on the Hill aren't tweeting.

This site is a grass-roots effort to get our men and women in Congress to open up and have a real conversation with us.

A search engine on the site allows voters to find their representative on Twitter, so they can follow their tweets and perhaps pressure non-tweeters to be more vocal in their microblogging.

If your elected representative isn't on Twitter, as in the case of Henry Waxman, my own congressman, you can petition your lawmaker to join Twitter and post updates.

However, even after using the microblogging service for a month, I'm still not quite sure how it could effect political change, although friends in both activist and bureaucratic cadres have assured me that it could play a role in high-stakes diplomatic negotiations and other kinds of political horse-trading.

Congressional Rick Roll Call

Yes, one has to ask about the wisdom of choosing the cheezy computer-generated animation of the Capitol dome fly-in as an opening and Pelosi's sloppy use of language in her sentence about the "importance of utilizing technology."

This raises a number of more substantive questions for me, not the least of which involves the use of a third-party commercial site for content in the public domain that is supposed to be "transparent and accessible." Many scholars who have done work on YouTube, such as Geert Lovink and Alexandra Juhasz, or on Google, such as Siva Vaidhyanathan, might feel uneasy with having legislators tacitly promote the agenda for media dominance of a single company, when the regulation of monopolies and placing checks on media consolidation are part of the federal government's mission. Just as few questioned the previous prominence of the trademarked RealPlayer interface on government websites, despite the fact that the company was owned by the Senate's own Maria Cantrell, no one now seems to be calling for more open formats for online video showing state business.

This week YouTube is promoting the channels for the House and the Senate and describes this access as a "backstage pass." This appeal to youth sensibilities does suggest that a model for pseudo-participatory culture in which celebrity legislators perform while constituents are little more than fans.

While Republican Mitch McConnell is presenting his content with some gravitas at his Republican Leader channel, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is posting fluff based on frivolous Internet memes rather than her usual more substantive -- if partisan -- digital materials. In particular, "Speaker Pelosi Presents Capitol Cat Cam" vies with outgoing President Bush's Barney Cam in inanity. As a stupid pet trick, there is little difference between Pelosi's felines and Bush's canines. One could argue that she signals her self-consciousness about the limitations of the format by concluding with an incongruous "Rick roll," but viewer comments on the video seem to indicate that most see this as a lame joke at the taxpayer's expense.



One viewer summarized the general irritation as follows: "did she just have one of her aides look on youtube for five minutes and report back that cat videos and rick astley are popular with the young'uns?"

Basic unanswered questions include how comments will be moderated on these channels and how constituents' "reply" videos would be approved.

The Glass Piggy Bank

As many who follow financial markets point out, the website of the Secretary of the Treasury has been one of the few good sources of information about where money from the huge economic bailout designed to unfreeze credit markets and prevent further economic instability spreading from the mortgage meltdown and large-scale investments in risky unregulated derivative products, such as credit default swaps. Transaction reports for the TARP or Troubled Assets Relief Program can be reached through the Emergency Economic Stabilization link near the top of the front page, and a map of where the capital purchase program is being implemented is also shown. Of course, financial journalists and university economists have been pointing out that this information also shows that much of the money that taxpayers are providing is going to healthy institutions that are often engaged in mergers and other forms of consolidation rather than the troubled institutions that the bailout was supposedly meant to serve. Also linked from the Treasury website is Mymoney.gov, a site from the federal government designed to promote "financial literacy" and better management of household finances at the level of the individual citizen.
The Treasury site also links to a Federal Trade Commission site for kids that offers the online game "You Are Here" to teach young people about targeted marketing. The game is set in a mall where the player is exposed to a number of pitches for trendy status products like cell phones or high-end sneakers. There are a few things worth noting about the game: 1) its praise of consumer choice and free market capitalism often seems to work against its point about the powers of advertising, 2) I couldn't help but wonder if the player's inability to get the section of the game with the anti-merger activist to work was an accident, and 3) the "game" is a disconnected set of experiences that often involve staples like matching games that give young people little access to the database, mapping, and simulation capacities of computational media for understanding the workings of government and other complicated systems.

Stagecraft for the Small Screen

In "Making a point in Washington? You'll need a prop," a reporter from the Los Angeles Times argues that stunts on the Capitol steps have become more prop-driven in the age of YouTube as congressional representatives draw out dead fish, live wolves, and fuel efficient cars to score political points that translate well to YouTube and other distributed media news sources. Some pols argue, however, that this stagecraft risks highly publicized failure if it is not a perfect virtuoso performance.

"Political theater still has a role in highlighting a cause or issue, but . . . it's important not to get buried in the part," said Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union. "Given the wealth of online video, for example, a failed publicity stunt can be seen by millions instead of just a roomful of people."

I wasn't entirely convinced, however, by the article's argument for a new media connection, given how difficult it was to find the videos described using popular Internet search engines that look for content that is heavily trafficked and frequently viewed. The video below is one exception, which also highlight a DIY rhetoric that is often important for an Internet appeal as this elected official shows how a border fence could be built as modular units by using a small model.

I See Paris

In "Porn in a flash" Salon.com describes how a "troubling surge in creepy 'upskirt' photography" has "lawmakers in a twist," since the photographs that rely on digital cameras unobtrusively hidden in mobile phones are usually taken in public places, albeit from odd angles. Although there are apparently "not many practical, legal remedies available to people who find themselves the victim" of "upskirting" or "downblousing," half of the fifty states in the US either have or are considering legislation that would bar the practice of posting photos of private body parts without the subject's consent.

Of course, one also has to wonder about the motivations of Salon.com for running the story at all, given how its prurient content is likely to garner more eyeballs who will then go in search of this material online armed with the proper keywords that the mainstream media is often so happy to provide. Furthermore, although the story contains the alarming statistic that a "keyword search for 'upskirt' on the photo-sharing site Flickr turns up 36,368 hits," it doesn't note the striking fact that many of these are parodies of what is obviously an Internet meme. Even the Eiffel Tower and the American flag are presented as upskirt subjects.

Webcams Don't Kill People; Things That Can Actually Kill People Kill People

The recent suicide of a Florida teenager that took place on a webcam while others online apparently egged him on is likely to stir further calls for the regulation of social media, although the family of the deceased may not have the political traction that catapulted Suzy's Law to public attention and generated outrage about the alt.holiday.suicide Usenet group.

Unfortunately, the question of whether or not we control young people's access to guns or prescription drugs rarely gets as much media attention. The sordid webcam suicide story, which was covered on CNN and Fox and headlined the New York Post, appeals to tabloid sensibilities, which have been following this week's trial of the MySpace suicide case with similar interest.

Newspaper stories like "Cruelty, cowardice in an online world," which appeared in The Los Angeles Times, are designed to make authoritative pronouncements based on anecdotal evidence and nullify the findings of researchers who are pointing to the Internet's positive effects, as documents released in connection with a recent large-scale MacArthur Foundation study seem to show, by making the cyber-bullying argument. The column opens by raising parental adrenaline in the first sentence.

Parents who felt relieved by the study released this week showing that long hours trolling the Internet can actually improve the social skills of teens might also consider the murkier message being delivered now in a Los Angeles courtroom.

The copy ends on an equally mixed-message note:

Still, I agree with the study's finding: We can't protect our children by standing guard. In fact, we do them a disservice if we try to lock them out of the "common culture" in this increasingly technological world.

But we ought to pay more attention to how it all works because the public nature of their online world makes the lessons they learn and mistakes they make more consequential than they were in my day.

My daughters survived their own online crisis when they were about Megan's age -- but that was a generation ago in computer years. Now online access is so pervasive there are even more ways to hurt yourself and others.

As my girls got older, I learned to trust them to navigate. I've never been on Facebook or even seen their MySpace pages.

That's about to change.

Warning to my daughters: Get ready to "friend" me. Because Mom feels the need to have a Facebook page.

In other words, this parent argues that her children survived online crises without her intervention and had earned her trust over time, but -- irrespective of the evidence presented by her own childrens' behavior -- this mother has decided to invade their private cyberspace.

I think that the LA Times' Sandy Banks is missing one of Ito's larger points about expertise and -- by extension -- how the Internet can facilitate intergenerational communication that may be stymied by enforcing a one-way surveillance paradigm that ignores the very real possibility that a mom may act irresponsibly with a Facebook page as well, which may be the real message of the MySpace suicide case, since a parent was the main aggressor.

Instead, why not take advantage of the collective intelligence that the Internet offers by discussing things like Internet ephemera at the dinner table? This week my younger son is entranced with the physics simulation Fantastic Contraption and the variety of user-generated solutions posted online, and my older son is captivated by music in the public domain, much of which was collected by ethnomusicologists and other field recorders in the American South, some of which is archived at Save Our Sounds, where he would like to intern this summer. Like most people online, I think that my children would rather have my sincere interest and attention to their independent online research than an unwelcome friending in which the discursive exchanges would be a burden.

Sherman's March

As details of the government bailout of Wall Street were released for the Treasury Secretary's 700 billion dollar deal requiring congressional approval that would buy troubled mortgage-based assets from investment banks, one of the first legislators to raise the alarm against the plan from the Executive Branch was California's Brad Sherman, congressman from the San Fernando Valley.

Today Sherman was in the news for sending out a mass e-mail inviting legislators to a "skeptics caucus" to explore concerns from elected representatives and their constituents about the plan's lack of oversight, possible excessive compensation for failed executives, and tendency to overlook root causes in deregulation. Surprisingly, however, Brad Sherman's official site says nothing about his very public profile on this issue. Although Sherman's website says little about current plans for public financing to shore up the economy, he does express strong opinions about privatization. For example, one of his rhetorical tools is "Calculate How Much You Will Lose" if Social Security is privatized. According to my input numbers from my own personal finances, Sherman's online calculator predicts that privatization would cost me about four and a half thousand dollars a year in benefits as a senior citizen.

More Corporate Welfare?

The American Library Association is now disseminating the following e-mail about extensions to copyright in the works in new congressional legislation in the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008. Its rhetoric about giving a "gift" to media conglomerates appropriates language about corporate welfare that also appears in other political literature this campaign season.

Section 101 would be an enormous gift of federal resources to large copyright owners with no demonstration that the copyright owners are having difficulties enforcing their own rights. For example, the recording industry has threatened or filed over 30,000 lawsuits against individual consumers. Movie and television producers, software publishers, music publishers, and print publishers all have their own enforcement programs. There is absolutely no reason for the federal government to assume this private enforcement role.

Moreover, in a civil action brought by the government, the defendant loses many of the protections he possesses in a criminal action. The government’s burden of proof is lower – preponderance of evidence rather than beyond reasonable doubt. Additionally, the defendant is not eligible for free legal representation if necessary. Nor does the bill adequately balance this shift against the accused. The proposed offset for civil damages is limited to certain cases, and the bill also explicitly permits the United States and private parties to exact further civil or criminal penalties in addition to those imposed by the Attorney General's civil suit.

This e-mail is also connected to a form letter for petitioning one's U.S. senator. Thanks to Carol Hughes for the link.

Grand Theft Naughty

Onetime legislative pariah in the videogame industry Grand Theft Auto no longer seems to merit speeches on the floor of Congress or proclamations that rail against its existence. According to the New York Times, few have joined the class action suit from those who claim to have been offended by hidden sex scenes in the game. There has been some moral hand-wringing in other countries in response to the latest game in the series. For example, Thailand halted sales of the game after a murder was attributed to a player who had been influenced by its homicidal message.

Death Star Struck

Now that under Sam Zell the writing quality of The Los Angeles Times has degenerated to the point of including this observation that "George Lucas was on Capitol Hill in Washington this week to testify on something or other and when there's no news to be heard, reporters start asking the silly questions," it seems that it would be difficult to assess the impact of events involving technology news at all, if that were one's only newspaper. I would never allow prose this bad in my sixth-graders homework, so I'm baffled to see it appear in a newspaper once known for its Pulitzer Prize-winning staff, even if these clunky phrases were being used to introduce some of the not-so-witty Star Wars-themed banter exchanged between Lucas and the congressional representatives.

Actually, it turns out that the subject matter of the congressional hearing is one that should be of interest to all bill-paying Americans, not just those with a social conscience about computer literacy who are engaged with questions about the so-called "digital divide": universal service schemes promoted by the government and the fees charged for this service to telecommunications customers that too often benefit service providers more than consumers. Ars Technica explains the substantive issues involved in the hearing here.

When I went to Lucas's statement before the House Committee on Telecommunications and the Internet, it was interesting to note that he emphasized the government as an exemplary content-creator for materials on the World Wide Web and singled out the Library of Congress and NASA for special praise. Lucas also talked about the "prosumer" model to explain the digital practices of today's youth, who also want to serve as content-creators themselves.

The testimony of Rey Ramsey is also of interest rhetorically, because it does more than draw attention to the philanthropically beloved issue of "digital youth" by looking about how low income "digital adults" need Internet services for basic e-Government functions and that this population needs connectivity for improved health and financial stability, as well as for educational purposes.