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Would it be in line with the tough language of McCain’s Issues page:

John McCain Will Protect The Creative Industries From Piracy. The entertainment industry is both a vital sector of the domestic economy and among the largest U.S. exporters. While the Internet has provided tremendous opportunity for the creators of copyrighted works, including music and movies, to distribute their works around the world at low cost, it has also given rise to a global epidemic of piracy. John McCain supports efforts to crack down on piracy, both on the Internet and off.

… or the more relaxed posture of their nominating convention, which played music without the permission of the recording artists, who are angry about it? Protesting are:

Van Halen (Right Now): Used for McCain’s big entrance last night. Permission was not sought, and would have been denied.

Heart (Barracuda): Used last night when Palin joined McCain on stage after his speech. The copyright holder has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the campaign.

This is not the first time McCain has taken a generous view about sharing others’ copyrighted material. For example, there was an issue earlier this summer with¬†Franki Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.” Warner Music sent a takedown notice to YouTube, where a video montage mocking Obama had been posted on McCain’s official channel.

Digital copyright law is crazy to be sure (that’s our Chapter 6). You have to wonder whether McCain has any idea how crazy, or whether he thinks it applies only to teenagers so he doesn’t need to worry about it.

As previously discussed here, the FCC recently chided Comcast for interfering with the flow of data packets to its customers based on the content of those packets — a violation of the principle of “network neutrality.” Net neutrality is an important value, but it isn’t the law. In fact, while it’s easy to give some examples of violations of the principle — delivering email from the RNC more efficiently than email from the DNC, let’s say — it’s actually hard to give a detailed, operationally useful definition, one that is clear about all possible service proposals Internet Service Providers might propose. Nonetheless, the FCC declared, on a split vote, that what Comcast was doing was plainly wrong.

Comcast has now filed a challenge to the FCC’s ruling. Part of its argument is on the details, but part of it is on the law: Comcast claims that Congress never gave the FCC authority to regulate the Internet.

Much as I applaud the FCC ruling, Comcast may actually be right about the FCC’s lack of authority. The laws may just be too old to have anticipated the importance of Internet communication and to embrace this technology in its definitions. If so, this case could be a 21st century reprise of Herbert Hoover’s struggles with radio broadcasters, the courts, and Congress in the 1920s, to gain control over the radio waves (a story we tell in Chapter 8).

Rather than explaining what’s at stake in my own words, I’ll just close by quoting a blog post from law professor Susan Crawford from a couple of weeks ago.

The network access providers [would] like to be able to charge what the market will bear for each Internet transmission, watching carefully what people are doing and choosing how to treat particular traffic.  The FCC’s action last Friday, while a noble and necessary first step, won’t make that kind of behavior illegal.  We need structural change to the law that will allow Americans’ instincts about the importance of basic nondiscriminatory transport to shape legal reality.

It looks as if public concerns about private discrimination have once again mounted towards the place that drove this country to adopt the original paradigm of regulation in the telecommunications field: administrative oversight of an industry providing nondiscriminatory services.  That paradigm disappeared in a rush of deregulatory fervor over the last twenty years or so, leaving all general-purpose communications services private and free to discriminate.  Traditional phone services (which aren’t allowed to discriminate) are disappearing, as people drop their home phone subscriptions and companies rip out regulated copper wires.

Over the same period of time, there has been tremendous consolidation in the network access provider market.  Most Americans have very few choices when it comes to buying highspeed Internet access.

The battle over nondiscriminatory Internet access is far from over.  But the outcome of this initial skirmish is the right one for our shared future.

Political contributions have long been a matter of public record in the U.S. But there’s “public” and there’s “very public.” With the Internet, they are now very public.

In Chapter 2 of Blown to Bits we mention a couple of sources for campaign contribution data. But the Huffington Post’s is just outstanding. Click on the link, type in your Zip code, and you immediately see a neighborhood map decorated with little blue donkeys and red elephants, which you can click on and mouse over to reveal your neighbors’ names, who they’ve contributed to, and how much. (Or, if you live in my neighborhood, blue donkeys with no red elephants.)

It’s very invasive, even though in principle there’s no more data disclosure than there was in the days when you had to go to the Town Hall and ask to see the files.

Very positive reviews of the book have appeared recently on Slashdot and the Linux Gazette. The latter in particular really gets what the book is about.

Google has changed its terms of service for its new Web browser so that it no longer claims the right to use your content in its advertising. This fixes a problem about which we blogged yesterday. CNET story here. It seems the old language was just cut and pasted — with specific intention or not — from those for some other Google services.

Fewer and fewer people pay their bills by writing checks and putting them in the mail; the payments go electronically. The bills themselves arrive electronically if you want; that’s certainly the way your utility and credit card companies would prefer, given the price of postage. Your daughter in Omaha certainly doesn’t send you a postal letter, unless you are both quite mature; she sends you email, or texts you.

But postal mail still arrives. From your plumber, probably. Your real estate tax bill hasn’t gone electronic either. Official legal and business communications aren’t trusted to email, for very good reasons. Unless email is encrypted, it’s not secure, and it’s spoof-able.

Of course, paper mail demands postage and the slaughter of trees. But another problem, more serious sometimes, is that you may not be there to receive it. You could be at your summer place, or on a long business trip, or even on an extended stay in a hospital. And that creates a business opportunity.

As David Pogue reports in a terrific column in today’s New York Times, there are now services to turn your incoming postal mail into bits and deliver the bits to you electronically (not by insecure email, but through log-in to a secure web site). Bingo. One of the services,¬†earthclassmail.com, scans just the envelope first and asks you whether you want them to open the envelope and scan the contents. You can have the physical mail forwarded to you, recycled, or shredded.

Of course, you have to give your correspondents your earthclassmail address, which can be a P.O. box, or a nice office address in New York or San Francisco. (That costs a little more money, but not nearly as much as a nice office would cost in New York or San Fran.)

These services (the competing service is¬†paperlesspobox.com) fill a special niche. Depending on the price, I might consider using one of them myself, so I don’t miss anything important while I’m away on vacation. But the niche seems to be a momentary fracture caused by the digital explosion — in five years, I’d guess, business and even personal correspondence practices will have evolved in some way that will make these services irrelevant. Right now we’re at a sort of wrinkle in time, where the physical world has not fully evolved into its parallel bits universe.

Google has released a new web browser, called Chrome. I haven’t tried it yet (at the moment only the Windows version has been released). David Pogue has a rundown in the New York Times. It sounds great.

In the spirit of watching what your bits are doing, I thought I’d note one interesting clause in the Chrome Terms of Service (the legal prose to which you have to agree before you can download the software):

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.

Perhaps there are similar clauses in the agreement you have to click before you can use Internet Explorer; I don’t know. But my non-lawyerly reading of that says: If you use our browser to upload to Picasa the cute picture you took¬†of your roommate¬†at the party¬†with a jug in each hand, we can use that photo in our national advertising campaign. Not privacy-friendly, and I’m surprised that Google thinks it’s necessary to assert such a sweeping right to use your text and images for commercial purposes without asking your permission at the time.

Thanks to Ina Fried of CNET for pointing this out.

In important ways, this is really the first digital presidential campaign, and the news about Sarah Palin provides some thought-provoking examples.

First, the McCain campaign explains that the disclosure of her daughter’s pregnancy was required to dispel the wild rumors being circulated by liberal Internet bloggers about who was the mother of her own four-month-old. Someone needs to trace back who started this on the Internet. I quickly looked at the Daily Kos and both the rumor and skepticism about the rumor are discussed there. (By the way, wouldn’t a birth certificate have sufficed to put that rumor to rest? But I digress.)

The official reaction of the McCain campaign is that this is the sort of thing that happens to families. Some conservative columnists are turning this news into another way in which the Republicans can identify with ordinary Americans. That is post-Internet Republicanism. At another time, they surely would have done there best to hide it.

But you can’t hide stuff any more, as we repeatedly explain in Blown to Bits. Not your silly college-dorm photos (that’s Sarah Palin looking like the college student she was, with a T shirt that reads “I may be broke but I’m not flat busted”). Not the Facebook silliness of the boy who got your daughter pregnant (from the NY Post; thanks to Richard Bradley for point this out). We are all silly when we are young, but having all the silliness permanently recorded and universally accessible is something new.

The spread of this kind of stuff can be childish and mean. It raises the question of whether McCain’s staff was aware of the Internet materials like these that turned up very quickly after the announcement of his VP pick.

But the exposure of these personal details does seem to be making politics less distant. This campaign has so much else going on with it that it’s going to be hard to separate out the effect of the Internet from other factors. But it seems certain that politicians are going to be unable to be quite so pretentious in the future. Too much will be known about them too quickly — especially if they, like Sarah Palin, were born after 1960.

And the public is going to have to decide what it thinks about the disclosure of things it rarely used to find out about. As we say in the book, we really don’t know what we think about privacy any more.

We’ve blogged before about the advantages to advertisers to know your search habits, and more generally, what sort of thing interests you, as those preferences are revealed by your Internet usage. NebuAd is a pioneer in “deep packet inspection,” opening the “envelopes” of data being sent to you to report back to the ISP what’s in them. The privacy issues surrounding this practice have come up for congressional scrutiny; see previous blog posts here and here.

The AP reports good news today: the pressure is working. ISP’s are deciding not to renew their arrangements with NebuAd in such numbers that the company’s financial status is touchy. Boston Globe story here: Privacy concerns may derail web tracking venture.

Once again, if there were competition and full disclosure, the federal government would not have to get involved. But neither operates robustly enough to restrain the industry, and the technology for this kind of unexpected snooping on our behavior is getting better and better. So laws are going to be needed, in spite of this apparent short-term victory.

Terrorists use the Internet just like the rest of us. Probably moreso. They email each other. They post stuff on web sites. They have discussions about what they are planning. All the big things we know about the Internet — that it can spread information quickly and cheaply, that it is an effective tool for cooperative action by widely dispersed participants — are value-neutral. The Internet’s capabilities can be exploited for either good or evil.

The U.S. government understands this, and watches what happens on the Internet as part of its war on terror. Two recent news items show different ways this can be done.

The online edition of the German magazine Spiegel has a fascinating profile of SITE and IntelCenter, two companies run by young Americans. Essentially all they do is to sit in front of computer screens at their offices and watch what the terrorists are saying and doing. Sometimes they have to create fraudulent identities and obtain passwords to do so. They often need translators. But in essence, these companies are just bit processors. Though they don’t disclose all their tricks in the article, it seems that their staff just shows up at their offices in the morning (at undisclosed locations), pull bits in and push a few out, all day long. They use no shoe leather or even cell phones. They pass along what they have learned to parties who pay them for the information.

They are an important source of information to the CIA, FBI, and other American security and defense agencies. Their discoveries are used by news agencies as well. The Federal government has developed some similar capabilities internally, but got into the business later and is still catching up.

A success story for private enterprise and the small-business entrepreneurship, and for sensible cooperation between the federal government and the private sector.

Another part of the federal government’s anti-terror intelligence operations is the use of so-called National Security Letters (NSLs). These orders require (among other things) Internet Service Providers to turn over electronic communications, usually without disclosing that they have done so to the communicating parties or to anyone else. NSLs are provided for in the PATRIOT Act, and have long been resented by civil libertarians. Hundreds of thousands of NSLs have been issued, almost all accompanied by gag orders.

A small ISP (which one is itself being kept secret) took the government to court on First Amendment grounds. The ISP claimed that the requirement that it keep quiet even about the fact that it had received a NSL was an infringement of its constitutional right to free speech, as the gag order made it impossible to protest the government’s action. A lower federal court agreed with its claim that this provision of the PATRIOT Act was unconstitutional. The matter is now before a federal appeals court, as Reuters reports. It appears that the court is skeptical of the government’s arguments, to judge from this passage from the Reuters story:

The government argues [gag orders] are in place for national security concerns, such as keeping terrorists from learning what they are investigating.

“You can’t tell me that any terrorist is going to make anything out of the fact you issued NSLs to AT&T and Verizon,” said Circuit Judge Sonia Sotomayor, using a hypothetical example.

The technology is neither good nor bad. It’s all about what you do with it, and we should all be thinking about the choices the government makes.