Privacy in the Digital Age

Jim Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology gave a lecture at Google about the ramifications for privacy in an increasingly digital world. What I found most interesting was the different levels of protection for different content.

For example, a variety of Supreme Court cases have established that "communication on the wire" is protected by the 4th Amendment but that "data at rest" has a much lower level of protection. That is, an email in transit is Constitutionally protected, but when archived on a third-party service, it is not. Statutory protections, like those for medical, financial or education records may, however, exist.

Another interesting dichotomy is that between "content" and "signaling or routing data." The first is more heavily protected than the second. So, the To: field and IP address can be harvested while the message in an email may require a warrant.

There are a lot more good points and the speech is embedded below:

The Question of the Intermediary

The Internet was supposed to empower. It allowed anyone to contribute to global knowledge. It allowed anyone to mine it for the collective wisdom of all. We seemingly had an incredible ability to act through democratized tools for speech and other political motivations.

But I fear some of that is changing as users become more dependent on intermediaries in their Internet use. While I might be able to garner unprecedented information from the net and while I might be able to connect and collaborate with users across the net, those benefits are increasingly dependent on third parties. Importantly, in US v. Miller, it was decided that individuals lost their "expectation of privacy" when they turned information over to a third party (a bank in that case). More and more, users are handing information to third-parties without recognizing the implications.

In the past, the Internet's intermediaries were obvious: telecommunication companies like ATT or Verizon controlled the wires through which packets travelled. However, regulation, such as the "common-carrier" provision or DMCA safe-harbor attempted to ensure their neutrality and non-interference. Recent developments, however, suggest that this may not last forever.

In addition to the traditional intermediaries, the shift to Web 2.0 web services presents a whole new slew of intermediaries. Email and Facebook, widely used web services present interesting case studies.

Say the government would like to see what emails a suspect was sending. They used to need access to a desktop email service - thus the suspect's computer. The Fourth Amendment was clearly in play and a warrant would be needed. Now, as people increasingly use webmail like Google's GMail, they are handing potentially private data to a third-party and trusting that firm with ensuring the security of their information. Questions of illegal complicity (such as ATT in wiretapping) or technical folly (such as TJMaxx data leaks) are suddenly in the hands of another firm.

Or take the example of Facebook, as Jonathan Zittrain does today. In the past, computer programs ran locally, on a person's hard drive, but today programs are being hosted by Facebook or other websites. As Zittrain points out, the intermediary has an overwhelming ability to control access and distribution.

Nick Carr's new book, which I reviewed here, discusses the implications of cloud computing and while he doesn't discuss the legal protections or vulnerabilities in depth, it makes clear that this is a radical change which will have profound effects.

Who knows if these profound effects will limit the freedom which the Internet has enabled so far?

Update: As always, the EFF is ahead of me. Cindy Cohn, the Legal Director of the EFF, has a great speech at the University of Chicago about the intermediaries and their importance.

MediaDefender vs. the Pirates

One of the more interesting stories in the copyright realm over the past couple months has been the ongoing story of MediaDefender which is a firm of questionable legality which does business with a number of major content companies. MediaDefender markets itself as an anti-piracy firm which tries to fight illegal downloaders through a number of tactics.

As you can imagine, this bothers a number of people including the guys over at The Pirate Bay. Anyways, a couple of months ago, internal emails were leaked showing the oftentimes juvenile and vindictive management of the company. Portfolio now has a great article covering the controversy with exclusive access to the teenage hacker who leaked the documents.

ATT Wants to Filter the Whole Internet

Much has been made of ATT's recent announcement that it may work with content owners to filter the entire Internet for copyright infringement. Even though the EFF and American University have shown that technology is not a good way to enforce copyright, ATT thinks that it can support the broken business models of the RIAA, et al through technological methods.

Tim Wu, professor of law at Columbia University has a lucid article on Slate explaining why this may be economic and legal suicide for ATT. Check it out.

"Open Source is a Legitimate Business Model"

Critics of open source software tend to see it as anti-capitalist. After all, people work outside of a traditional command-and-control firm and do not receive wages for work. However, as the digital economy of nonrivalry and nonexclusion takes hold, more and more examples are developing to show why peer production is of great value - both socially and financially.

IBM has shown that Linux can create billions in revenue. Firefox has shown volunteers can create a browser with revenue in the tens of millions. Now, Sun Microsystems in purchasing the open source database MySQL for $1 billion. According to CEO Jonathan Schwartz, they plan to invest in the community and architecture of the most popular database software in the world.

People are beginning to recognize that humans are diversely motivated beings and that ultimate control is not a prerequisite to value.

(And this, for the record, is post 200. Thanks for reading.)

The Pirate's Dilemma

The Pirates Dilemma

From: mattjamesmason, 1 week ago

| View | Upload your own

A short talk on my book The Pirate's Dilemma, which looks at how youth culture can gives clues about new ways to share information, and why competing with pirates is often better than fighting them.


SlideShare Link

Death of DRM

Though it might cling to life in various forms for movies or ebooks, according to BusinessWeek, the last major record label is set to drop DRM from its music. SonyBMG will join Warner, EMI and Universal if it removes the digital locks which frustrate consumers and music fans. Amazon will become the first digital music purveyor to have music from all the major labels without DRM.

See more coverage of DRM here.

Public Domain Books for Print

Even though the public domain in America won't expand for years due to retroactive extensions, there is still a wealth of information available in books published prior to 1923. Google Book Search, the Internet Archive and other digital projects have scanned many of these books. For the first time that I know of, you can now use an easy service to get reprints of these books.

Public Domain Reprints grabs the PDFs from the aforementioned services and then prints them using Lulu.com. For those of you who like to read off screen, this is a nice service.

However, I wonder how long it will be around: The PDFs available of public domain books digitized by Google include, among others, these "usage guidelines:"

"+ Make non-commercial use of the files: We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for personal, non-commercial purposes.
+ Refrain from automated querying: Do not send automated queries of any sort to Google’s system: If you are conducting research on machine translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help. "

The creator of this service does insist that it is noncommercial, but he would seem to run afoul of the second guideline. Though Google does not own the copyright to the materials and cannot legally enforce these guidelines through copyright, it is their service and I wouldn't be surprised if they interfered with the automatic querying.

[via Blogoscoped]