A pair of stories from today’s papers put the promise and peril of the digital explosion squarely before us.

The FCC is set to release its National Broadband Plan on Tuesday. There is good reporting on it in both the New York Times and Computerworld.The key catch phrase is “100 million squared”—get 100Mb/s broadband into 100 million homes by 2020. This is NOT an overly ambitious goal, though it may look to some as extravagant as it must once have looked to bring electricity, and then telephone service, to every rural farmhouse in America. Electricity and telephony were not just conveniences of civilization to which some political theorist thought agrarians should have the same access as city dwellers. They were engines of workplace efficiency and economic growth. The nation made investments, and supported private investments, in connecting Americans to these resources because it was good in the long run for everyone for everyone to be part of the network. So it is with broadband Internet today. Nor are the numbers ridiculous. Remember, Google is accepting applications to bring gigabit broadband, ten times faster, to some lucky community.

So the connectivity plan is all good. And it is also good that the plan anticipates broadband Internet being the mother of all media in the future, gobbling up telephone and television.

But somebody has to pay for it, and this is a lousy time to be asking taxpayers to foot the bill. If you think that the incumbent Internet providers are going to do the job anyway, think again. Verizon is slowing down its deployment of FIOS broadband. There is not enough competition to stir demand (though I would love to think that the Google initiative would create some).

The FCC can collect some money by re-directing the Universal Service Fund, the proceeds from a tax that supports telephone service to those Kansas farms. But a big chunk of the money has to come from elsewhere. And a likely candidate is spectrum auctions: Recovering underutilized parts of the spectrum from incumbent broadcasters, putting the spectrum up for auction to raise money, and also using some of the spectrum for connectivity and some for so-called “unlicensed” uses. Excellent.

The incumbent broadcasters, needless to say, hate this part. They see the writing on the wall and have their own plans for a vertically integrated Internet. The proposed Comcast-NBC merger is a perfect example of that: Put the content provider in bed with the content carrier. If that sounds like the way forward for connectivity, read the section of B2B where we talk about how Western Union’s exclusive deal with the Associated Press worked out for news dissemination in the 19th century.

Moreover, the incumbent broadcasters don’t see any reason to give up any of their spectrum. Except, of course, to paraphrase Scott Brown, it isn’t their spectrum. It’s the people’s spectrum. All the laws about the broadcast spectrum are clear about that.

What isn’t mentioned in the current reporting on the Broadband Plan is Net Neutrality. That may be just one too many battles for the FCC to take on—the scalding letter it received from the telecomms may have scared the Commission.

Now for the bad news.

The Texas Board of Education has adopted new standards for the state’s Social Studies Curriculum, rewriting history through a series of party-line votes on individual amendments. OK to mention Martin Luther King, but you have to talk about the Black Panthers in the same breath. Phyllis Shlafly and the Moral Majority are required subjects. “Capitalism,” curiously, is out—you have to say “free enterprise system.”

But this is the worst:

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone.

Oh my god, if you will pardon the expression (and even if you won’t). Aquinas unseats Jefferson in the Texas school system?

First of all, though the story says that the new curriculum “will put a conservative stamp on history,” this isn’t conservatism. It’s revisionism with a political agenda. These so-called conservatives are simply finding common cause with the reviled critical studies movement, skeptical that any ideals represented as products of the life of the mind are anything but a political power play. There should not be more dentists than historians on a panel rewriting history.

But where is the Bits angle in this story? It’s in this paragraph:

The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual state.

So I guess this is good news. If the citizens of Texas want their children to be ignorant, the digital revolution has created the technological support for their preferred version of American history. The textbook publishers no longer have to aim for the consensus view.

No more E pluribus, unum, in other words. We can just stay the many rather than becoming one through communication and education.

Homophily rules. Universal connectivity won’t bring us together; it will simply create the opportunity for likeminded souls, no matter how extreme and ridiculous their views, to come together in their own ignorant corners of the Internet. Or the nation. And that is How We Could Know Less, #2.

“There needs to be some legislative changes to the definition of what matter is,” the head of the Massachusetts District Attorneys said yesterday, after the Supreme Judicial Court read the state laws very closely and agreed with the defense that lewd text messages were not “matter” as defined in state law. It’s a great example of how hard it is to write laws that both stay current as technology changes, and are not so over-broad, in an effort to cover cases no one has yet thought of, that they unintentionally wind up criminalizing innocent activities.

Here is the heart of the statute (MGL Chapter 272, Section 28):

Section 28. Whoever disseminates to a minor any matter harmful to minors, as defined in section thirty-one, knowing it to be harmful to minors, or has in his possession any such matter with the intent to disseminate the same to minors, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than five years ….

“Matter” is defined elsewhere as “any handwritten or printed material, visual representation, live performance or sound recording including but not limited to, books, magazines, motion picture films, pamphlets, phonographic records, pictures, photographs, figures, statues, plays, dances.” Now that list was drawn up with some care–it obviously includes everything they could think of at the time, which seems to have been several technological generations ago. I wonder if anyone has similarly challenged whether DVD’s constitute “motion picture films”?

In his opinion, the judge noted that the legislature had changed the law a few years ago to lengthen the prison term to five years, but didn’t bother to change the list of media. So, he concluded, computer to computer communications aren’t covered, and the court has to assume the legislature didn’t intend to include them. The omission is easily remedied, but  it’s not up to the court to do that.

So one creep at least dodged a bullet, and the legislature will no doubt change the law going forward. But it’s a great reminder that the law is a statement of rules, not intentions.

And that it gets stale, not just because of technology changes. Until I was browsing the state’s web site, for example, I didn’t know that adultery was still illegal in Massachusetts (MGL Chapter 272, Section 14):

A married person who has sexual intercourse with a person not his spouse or an unmarried person who has sexual intercourse with a married person shall be guilty of adultery and shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than three years or in jail for not more than two years or by a fine of not more than five hundred dollars.

Fornication (“sexual intercourse between an unmarried male and an unmarried female”) is still illegal too, but less serious (“punished by imprisonment for not more than three months or by a fine of not more than thirty dollars”).

Any criminals out there?

I’ve now both listened to and read Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s speech on Internet freedom. (That’s a link to the State Dept. home page, where it is still featured. I imagine it will move off shortly.)

It’s a good speech, I think. At least it was good enough to annoy the Chinese. A columnist for the People’s Daily snorted that Google had been reduced to an “ideological tool” of the US government and noted, correctly, that Google is losing the competition with the native Chinese search engine, Baidu. (Note: You can compare for yourself the search results returned by the US version of Google, the Chinese version of Google, and Baidu. But be aware that the link for Chinese Google takes you to servers inside the US, while the link for Baidu takes you, I think, to China. The result is that you may not see google.cn, the Chinese version, as the Chinese experience it. When I tried Googling “Falun Gong” inside China, I lost the Internet connection to my hotel room.)

The China Daily simply denies that Clinton is telling the truth. [A Foreign Ministry spokesman] “said the speech indicated China restricts internet freedom. ‘It is a far cry from the truth,’ he said.” And the People’s Daily accuses the US of hypocrisy. “It is common practice for countries, including the United States, to take necessary measures to administer the Internet according to their own laws and regulations. The Internet is also restricted in the United States when it comes to information concerning terrorism, porn, racial discrimination and other threats to society.” The paper goes on to cite Steve Ballmer as one of the good guys. “Noting that most countries exert some sort of control over information, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said Friday his company must comply with the laws and customs of any country where it does business.”

In fact, in her speech, Clinton, after stirring invocations of the US First Amendment and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, conceded the point about Internet freedom having its limits. Here is the crucial paragraph:

Now, all societies recognize that free expression has its limits. We do not tolerate those who incite others to violence, such as the agents of al-Qaida who are, at this moment, using the internet to promote the mass murder of innocent people across the world. And hate speech that targets individuals on the basis of their race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation is reprehensible. It is an unfortunate fact that these issues are both growing challenges that the international community must confront together. And we must also grapple with the issue of anonymous speech. Those who use the internet to recruit terrorists or distribute stolen intellectual property cannot divorce their online actions from their real world identities. But these challenges must not become an excuse for governments to systematically violate the rights and privacy of those who use the internet for peaceful political purposes.

Now that passage contains a remarkable juxtaposition. A grand buildup.  A concession that there are limits to expressive freedom. A citation of the example of mass terrorism. OK, I’m listening. The next examples are the usual nondiscrimination categories, presented as hate-speech categories. Now I am getting worried; what counts as hate speech is so often in the ears of the listener. To be sure, it is easy to imagine a Tibetan rant about Chinese oppression that the Chinese could reasonably tag as ethnic hate speech. This is beginning to sound like a list of exceptions to freedom big enough to put almost anyone in shackles. Then there is the “issue” of anonymous speech. Secretary Clinton has nothing good to say about it, and then in a flat declaration puts Osama Bin Laden in the same box with millions of American teenagers—in the box of “those use the internet to recruit terrorists or distribute stolen intellectual property.” At this point I think the speech loses its operative edge. It leads inevitably to the conclusion that the speech control tools aren’t the problem—they are necessary in fact—only the way they are used.

So I finished the speech feeling good; it’s certainly better than a speech that emphasized cooperation at all costs, and that might have been expected. On the other hand it leaves me unconvinced that the administration actually has a consistent point of view on cyber-freedom.

One ironic footnote. The streaming video comes via a service called Brightcove. If you click on the “Information” icon on the video window while the speech is playing, you get Brightcove’s who-knew? privacy policy, which explains that “By using the Site, you agree to the terms and conditions of this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree to the terms and conditions of this Privacy Policy, please do not use the Site.” Much of the privacy policy does not apply to visits to the state.gov site, which requires no login and hence generates no personal information. But of course viewing the Internet Freedom video does send Brightcove your IP address, which Brightcove treats as “Non-Personal Information.” And, it says, “we reserve the right to share Non-Personal Information with affiliates and other third parties, for any purpose.” So Brightcove could, for example, sell Harvard University the information that I watched the Internet Freedom video via the wired jack in my Harvard office. Freedom does have its limits, but I might have hoped they fell a bit farther out than that.

Google’s stated rationale for threatening to pull out of China is the withering barrage of cyberattacks it has experienced, apparently aimed at getting access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents. In an article that appeared this morning, Rebecca MacKinnon presses on another aspect of the Google-in-China drama: China’s insistence that Google censor its search results. That was, of course, what created the dilemma for Google in the first place, and caused the initial controversy. A part of me thought that pulling out because of the cyber-attacks—happy though it made me—was a bit of a cop-out, suggesting that it would be happy to keep on censoring if only the Chinese crackers would cut out their attacks.

In China, if companies fail to track and remove content or block conversations that regulators deem violate laws or regulations (a court or judge is almost never involved), they risk heavy fines at best and permanent shutdown at worst. …

To operate in China, Google’s local search engine, Google.cn, had to meet these “self-discipline” requirements. When users typed words or phrases for sensitive subjects into the box and clicked “search,” Google.cn was responsible for making sure that the results didn’t include forbidden content. …

Ever since Google.cn launched in 2006, I’ve occasionally run tests to see how its compares to its homegrown competitor Baidu. Google.cn consistently censored less than Baidu did. This is how Google executives justified the ethics of their presence in China: Chinese users, they argued, were still better off with Google.cn than without it.

Things changed for Google in 2009, however. Regulators demanded that it ramp its self-censorship up to Baidu’s level. The Chinese state-run media attacked Google numerous times for failing to protect youth from smutty Web sites when — horror of horrors — those innocent kids happened to type in smutty words and phrases.

Now the important message in MacKinnon’s column is the effectiveness of self-censorship, and how hard it is to fight—and that for that reason, other countries are trying their own versions.

From France to Italy to the United Kingdom, the idea of holding carriers and services liable for what their customers do is seen as the cheapest and easiest solution to the law enforcement and social problems that have gotten tougher in the digital age — from child porn to copyright protection to cyber-bullying and libel.

“Not Your Father’s Censorship,” to use the title of a piece I wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Ed last year. The argument for open publication, and holding the intermediaries blameless for the sins of the authors, is not an easy one. Before anyone goes down that path in search of a safer society, it is worth taking the Chinese example to heart.

Depends on who you talk to.

In Blown to Bits, we talk about citizen vigilantism—people taking vengeance on people they see doing bad things, or just snapping pictures of crimes being committed, pictures that may help identify the culprits. The digital explosion has engendered a lot more of this, for both better and worse—we once did not all have cameras on us all the time.

Of course, a technology generation later, we all have not just still cameras, but audio recorders and video cameras too—in cell phones and even iPods. And people are whipping them out when they observe arrests being made, and are using the recordings to embarrass the the police, or to help in the defense of the party being arrested.

Except now, as the Boston Globe reports,  the police are increasingly fighting back, accusing those making the recordings of illegal surveillance, under wiretapping statutes. It’s a fascinating story. Some of the convictions are standing up in Massachusetts—the Supreme Judicial Court ruled in a split decision that the wiretapping statutes apply, unless the recording was made in a public manner. So people hiding the microphone in their sleeve or the camera in their coat may well be in trouble. Chief Justice Margaret Marshall was in the minority, opining

Citizens have a particularly important role to play when the official conduct at issue is that of the police. Their role cannot be performed if citizens must fear criminal reprisals when they seek to hold government officials responsible by recording, secretly recording on occasion, an interaction between a citizen and a police officer.

I don’t envy the police their job. Hell, I wouldn’t be happy if people were video-recording my  every movement while I was doing my job. But what the police are doing while making an arrest seems to me a public act by definition. In other situations (all those traffic-stop videos we see) the police themselves make sure everything is recorded these days. Can’t see why recording the police arresting someone in the public square wouldn’t fall within citizens’ rights.

I am of libertarian leanings, and I always hate acknowledging that we sometimes need the government to save us from ourselves. I am of two minds about laws against cell phone use while driving — even after a near-death experience las week, when a driver coming down the street in the opposite direction skidded on the ice into my lane of traffic, stopping inches from the front of my car — and never took her cell phone from her ear. (Perhaps she was reasoning correctly that her car was much, much bigger than mine.)

But we really need some regulation on the bright idea of Internet access from our cars’ instrument panels. As the New York Times puts it, Despite Risks, Internet Creeps Onto Car Dashboards.

Not hard to figure how this happened. We should have seen it coming. The technology is getting cheaper. We love the gadgets in our cars, and will trade a perfectly good vehicle for one with a better navigation system, something we never knew we needed. So bingo, we have touch screens with handwriting recognition, so the driver can scribble the name of the band he’s going to hear and get some news flashes about it.

Car regulators, please, please save us from ourselves. Or rather, save the partially sane among us from the idiots who will think they can multitask infinitely with their hands and brains.

Let’s see.

1) A cartoonist in Denmark is nearly killed for drawing some pictures of a guy with a beard.

2) In Ireland, a law took effect banning blasphemy. A person can be found guilty if “he or she publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion.” By that standard, the cartoonist would have been guilty, I imagine. Some atheists are challenging the law; other parties are taking it as a model to be urged upon the U.N. Actually, the UN Human Rights Council had already voted to condemn the “defamation of religions.”

3) In India, just as in China, Google is cooperating with the law by censoring politically objectionable content. In this secular democracy, the line between religious and political speech is thin, and the fears of mass riots are real.

“If you are doing business here, you should follow the local law, the sentiments of the people, the culture of the country,” says Gulshan Rai, an official in the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, who is overseeing implementation of the new law. “If somebody starts abusing Lord Rama on a Web site, that could start riots,” he said.

Note the pattern here. The first case would be an easy call for many Westerners, but the other two plainly involve friendly democracies suppressing a wide variety of speech that most Americans would take for granted as constitutionally protected. I wonder if the U.S. is going to become an outlier state in this way also, or if the strong conservative religious forces in the U.S. will start persuading legislatures to chip away at free speech rights in the name, ironically, of respect for differences.

4) On the good-news side, not only does opposition video footage continue to get bootlegged out of Iran, but film-making culture continues to thrive through underground distribution networks.

Will digital control or digital liberty be the more powerful force in the next decade? I’m betting on liberty, but it sure isn’t going to be obvious.

In the New York Times, travelers and privacy experts present their views on whether the millimeter-wave scanners I discussed yesterday are an unacceptable invasion of privacy. Quoting a Utah Republican who sponsored a bill (which passed the House but not yet the Senate) banning the use of the devices except as secondary screening technology, the story says

“I’m on an airplane every three or four days; I want that plane to be as safe and secure as possible,” Mr. Chaffetz said. However, he added, “I don’t think anybody needs to see my 8-year-old naked in order to secure that airplane.”

Which is to say what, that no terrorist would put a bomb on an eight-year-old? I wonder if there is a name for this rhetorical device, where one transforms a general proposition into a personal insult.

EPIC, which had previously filed suit for more information about these devices, seems to me to have it right.

Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said his group had not objected to the use of the devices, as long as they were designed not to store and record images.

Keep the screens in a separate room (as is done). Disable the recording capability (as is done). Make sure the operator doesn’t have a cell phone camera if you wish (though it is hard to imagine much titillation coming from these images, compared to what is readily available). But yes, check the passengers the way you check their luggage, and the wheel bearings for that matter. And yes, that is a role for government, or government-controlled entities. I don’t think we want a free market here, allowing airlines to trade off security for ticket price and allowing consumers to decide for themselves how much risk they are willing to accept.

Bruce Schneier is a very astute security expert, but I am not sure I follow his logic here:

Bruce Schneier, a security expert who has been critical of the technology, said the latest incident had not changed his mind.

“If there are a hundred tactics and I protect against two of them, I’m not making you safer,” he said. “If we use full-body scanning, they’re going to do something else.”

The millions of dollars being spent on new equipment, he said, would be better invested in investigation and intelligence work to detect bombers before they get to any airport.

The last part is surely true. Figuring out the line determining when someone goes on a no-fly list is tricky business. You don’t want any father with a grudge against his son to be able to ground the son by making a call to the Embassy. But it sounds like there were enough other dots to connect in this case to have set off appropriate alerts. I take Schneier’s point to be that the security perimeter at the airport is not the only place, nor even the best place, to keep terrorists off the plane, and the threat model that puts all the energy at stopping them there will be ineffective in practice. That sounds right, but isn’t really an argument against the use of the millimeter-wave technology.

The recent attempt by a Nigerian man to blow up a plane flying into Detroit has brought the subject of millimeter wave scans back into public discussion. These scans use very short-wave radio signals to peek through people’s clothing and see what they may have underneath. Some privacy advocates resist the use of these devices, because they show genitalia, as well as revealing breast implants and so on.

Maybe I am missing something, but I can’t get excited about the fact that a security screener might get a glimpse of an X-ray like image of my private parts in the course of verifying that I wasn’t hiding some explosives there (as the alleged terrorist apparently was). It may not be useful or effective to screen everyone–maybe you’d do some obvious profiling (bought the ticket with cash, etc.) to reduce the workload on the screeners and keep them sharper. But if the image isn’t stored, I don’t see any privacy problem in principle here. In enlightened societies at least, we have mostly gotten past prudery in medical care–not many hospital patients would today insist on having their bedpans emptied only by same-sex attendants. If you want to use the technology of air travel, you need to accept the technology of security (provided, once again, that it really is security-enhancing and not just in place to create a phony sense of security).

By the way, the TSA hasn’t yet fixed the huge security hole, pointed out by Chris Soghoian several years ago, that they check the boarding pass against your ID at the security perimeter and the boarding pass against the electronic ticket record at the gate, but never verify that the ticket matches your ID, unless you check a bag. If you are not checking luggage, the two boarding passes could be different.

Privacy bonus: Canada’s Daily Post has an article about privacy loss, which quotes Blown to Bits and ends with a Christmas-spirit thought that sprung into my head when I was interviewed last week:

Harry Lewis, a professor of computer science at Harvard and co-author of Blown to Bits, said the book was written to get people thinking about how much of their personal information they surrender every day. He worries that the less privacy we enjoy, the more it will discourage social advances.

“The loss of privacy is a socially conforming force,” he said in an interview. “So many social experiments over the course of human history — religious innovations, political dissent — started among small groups of mutually trusted friends who gradually gained acceptance for their beliefs and their behaviours.”

If Jesus’s early followers had a Facebook group, he joked, “they would have been stamped out very quickly.”

Adam Raff, a founder of Foundem, an Internet technology firm, makes the case in today’s New York Times for “Search Engine Neutrality,” which is kind of like network neutrality except that the nondiscrimination policy would apply to the way search engines return their results. As Raff states it, search neutrality means that “search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance.” He objects, for example, to Google favoring its own map service over competing map services. And he objects to the way Google down-ranked his company’s product comparison service, which, he says, severely impacted its business.

Many of the points Raff makes are versions of thoughts in Chapter 4 of Blown to Bits, where we discuss the distorting lens phenomenon and an extreme case of search oblivion at the hands of Google’s ranking. (We also make the point, as Raff notes, that some of Google’s keyword auction technology was the invention not of Google but of Overture.)

But can search “impartiality” and “relevance” really be defined statutorily? I doubt it, or rather, I doubt we would want the hash that Congress or a regulatory bureaucracy would make of an attempt to regulate the semantics of the entire English language (and not just English). And lots of things affect Google’s rankings –see the Webmaster Help page, which includes advice such as not creating pages with little or no original content. I don’t think we want a legal entity judging whether pages were downranked for these or other reasons, or whether Google’s Safe Search filter has improperly omitted someone’s web page entirely.

In the presence of competition, none of this would be a worry. People would choose a search engine based on whether they liked the results it delivered, or perhaps on the basis of quality ratings by an organization such as Consumers Report. They could move if the search company changed their policy. The same is true with net neutrality, actually — the demand would not be so compelling if the number of choices of Internet services were not limited to one or two in so many places.

Monopolies are always dangerous, and this op-ed drives home that point. Not sure I am persuaded about the remedy, though.

Note: Any account written by an agent of a company unhappy about where its name turns up in Google searches should be regarded skeptically. There are lots of possible reasons for Google to downrank a site that have nothing to do with Google trying to gain an advantage in a new business sector, and Foundem’s web page design certainly doesn’t dazzle. Would love to know the full facts here, but I don’t.