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One of the fondest hopes for the Internet is that it will re-energize the democratic spirit, by making it easier for citizens to participate in the democratic process. Senator Obama is thought to have profited in particular from the mass participation of Internet users.

An Obama supporter ¬†has used the Obama Facebook group to organize opposition to the senator’s position on FISA (previously discussed on this blog). It’s a lovely example of the double-edged sword. Conventional wisdom requires that modern campaigns be well controlled. (Good grief, the Dems are so focused on image control that they are dictating the colors of the food on the plates at their convention, and the percentage of fruits and vegetables – do they really want us to think that is the way they will run the country?). The control instinct runs counter to the spirit of participatory chaos that the open Internet also supports. I’ll bet that in four years this conflict will have been sorted out a bit better in the political campaigns, at a cost to that spirit of individual entrepreneurial power that is so invigorating right now.

There is a good short article on the NYT Business page today about the ways in which Microsoft and Google have made network effects work to their advantage. A network effect is simply a situation in which having more people use your product makes it more valuable for other people to use it too, causing its popularity to snowball. Bill Gates is credited as the master of network effects, having built the Microsoft empire on the foundation of Microsoft’s operating system. Google has no such single control point, goes the argument, because of the Internet’s open standards, but has nonetheless been quite successful at exploiting “softer” network effects.

As I was cleaning up some old files I ran across a compelling example of the way network effects have changed the personal computer industry. In early 1984, as personal computers were becoming common at Harvard, I did a campuswide survey to find out what machines students had. 54 students said they owned personal computers and 32 of those said they had them at Harvard. These numbers are surely underestimates; the survey was unscientific and there was no reward for participating. But the distribution is fascinating:

8 Apple; 10 IBM; 4 Tandy; 4 Commodore; 5 Atari; 1 Zenith; 4 TI; 3 DEC; 2 Osborne; 4 Kaypro; one each HP, Sinclair, Brothers, Actrix, Corona, Ohio Scientific, Sol20, Timex, and NEC. I remember preparing the report itself on a Heathkit Z80 machine I built at home.

Now that was a Cambrian period in the evolution of the industry. This was 9 years after Microsoft had been founded, and there was still plenty of competition. But the incompatibilities made fertile ground for de facto standards to emerge, and Gates’ company tilled that earth with amazing skill.

The data about YouTube viewing that Google must turn over to Viacom, described in yesterday’s post, includes data from all over the world. So the viewing habits of individual Frenchmen and Italians will be there for the analyzing. A nice piece of reporting by Bloomberg’s Stephanie Bodoni points out an interesting side-effect of the judge’s order: it may breach some important and delicate international trade agreements.

As discussed in Chapter 2 of Blown to Bits, privacy standards in the EU are higher than privacy standards in the US, where free expression rights (happy Independence Day, everyone) tend to trump privacy rights. This creates a problem for the transfer of personal information out of the EU to the US. While the US government never signed on to EU privacy rules, a “safe harbor” was created for individual American businesses that could certify their compliance with European standards. US businesses with multinational operations have to demonstrate their compliance with seven principles for handling personal information, including security, access controls, and the like, in order to be able to import personal information about Europeans.

The judge’s order that Google must turn over that personal information to another US company, whatever deal Google may have struck with the EU, is a breach in these international privacy agreements. And the Europeans are gearing up to complain.

One has to wonder whether the judge was aware of the international dimensions of his order, or didn’t care about them.

The worlds of copyright and privacy collided on Tuesday to cause a massive, privacy-shattering digital explosion. A judge ordered Google, which owns YouTube, to turn over to Viacom all its records of who has watched what videos. What clip, under what name, and from what IP address. Viacom is suing Google for accommodating its copyrighted materials on YouTube, and the judge dismissed privacy arguments Google tried to mount as “speculative.” The story is here and the judge’s order is here. (Thanks to Wired’s blog for these.)

Readers of Blown to Bits will recall how easily “anonymized” search records were de-identified, so there is serious reason to doubt that the fact that YouTube users are free to choose non-identifying login names will really protect their privacy.

The logs themselves comprise twelve TERABYTEs of data. There are lots of things that can be done with that data and there are lots of ways it can go astray ….

The judge denied various other requests of the plaintiffs, including a request for the source code of the Google search engine itself, supposedly so the plaintiff could check if Google was doing something special to make infringing material more attractive.

But the judge did require Google to turn over every video it has ever taken down for any reason, so Viacom can sort through them and draw their own conclusions about why. So if you ever put up a video while you were drunk and then changed your mind in the cold light of day, it’s part of the evidence in this court case now.

So much for the illusion that watching YouTube is like watching TV. But I’m sure there’s no reason to be worried about all those activity logs. Surely everyone will understand that you were just horsing around when you were watching that stuff ‚Ķ or maybe you were conducting research, yes, that’s what you were doing ‚Ķ.

As the New York Times reported last week, Google now keeps track of what you’ve been searching for in order to show you more relevant advertising. So if you’ve been asking about various islands in the South Pacific and you search for “Java,” you’ll likely get advertisements for travel offers, not for guides to the programming language by the same name.

Google’s technology for achieving this effect involves leaving cookies on your computer. But the article notes that Google already had access to the previously visited site, even without leaving a cookie. That’s a standard part of the HTTP protocol for web browsers. Click on a link, and the browser dispatches to the web server not just the URL of the page it wants, but the URL of the page that contains the link on which you clicked.

That datum is called the “referer.” (Yes, the word is misspelled that way in the HTTP standard. Oh well.) This is what makes possible some interesting customizations of web pages. For example, if Joe’s Books has a site that links to Blown to Bits, we could greet people who visit our page from Joe’s with a distinctive message such as “Thanks for coming over from Joe’s Books!”

Now this is all wonderful and a little disquieting. Such tricks make the experience more personal, and perhaps more informed. But is that what we really want? Do we like knowing we are leaving tracks that others know about? And if not, would we rather have them know about the tracks but not tell us that? 

I spent the last week on Harvard business on the west coast, and managed to work in talks about Blown to Bits at Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Hal joined me at Google, and at Amazon I proudly showed off page 180, where we asked the question, “Does Amazon even have a physical location?” (This is part of the explanation of why public key cryptography is so important, as it enables strangers to agree on an encryption key without meeting.)

I then headed for the hills of northwest Montana to hide from it all. I stopped at a market to pick up the local paper, which usually leads with a story about bears or shootings or the water level on the lake. Wouldn’t you know it, this week it’s a bits story.

“Virtual High School closer to reality at BHS,” goes the headline. Bigfork High tends to lose top students to the bigger district in Kalispell, where they can take more advanced courses. This year they are going to pilot¬†Virtual High School, a Maynard, Massachusetts-based initiative. (If they can get past the various teacher and curriculum certification hurdles.)

Educational technology has had so many failures over the years, starting with educational TV in my youth, that skeptics about Internet-based education should be forgiven. But good for Bigfork for giving this a shot. It may well prove to be the equalizer that rural school districts need, a germ of Internet-enabled enlightenment — and with gasoline more than $4/gallon, a smart way to deliver information to the people rather than transporting people to the information.

At a hotel in San Francisco where I stayed a few days ago, taking a can of Coke out of the fridge automatically puts that item on your room bill. Same if you take a candy bar from the case nearby or a nip from the liquor cabinet. Each item is on top of a sensor which fires when the item is removed. There are no “did you have anything from the minibar this morning” questions at checkout. Instead you are presented with a bill showing, along with the charges for the room and taxes, all the particulars of your in-room eating and drinking self-indulgences.

I asked if I would have been charged if I removed a can of Coke and then decided to put it back (I actually drink only Diet Coke, and can imagine making that mistake with an under the counter fridge). The answer was no — as long as I put it back quickly.

How should I think about the fact that the bits stating that Harry Lewis consumed a can of Diet Coke at exactly 9:22:02 PM on June 24, 2008, will likely be preserved forever, mixed into some data aggregate for analysis purposes, but also retrievable as an individual factoid if there were some reason to do so?

The granularity of the digital explosion is astonishing. Ordinary life is being blown not just to bits, but into microscopic digital dust.

Now that’s a dog-bites-man headline, but the votes in question are the votes that validated the unconstitutional government wiretapping under FISA discussed in earlier posts (here, here, and here). Now it turns out, thanks to excellent research by Maplight.org, that House members who favored immunity for the telcos received on average more than twice as much in telco contributions than those who voted no. Democrats who switched their votes in order to relieve the telcos of responsibility for the wiretaps received 68% more than those who voted against immunity twice.

One of the themes of Chapter 8 of Blown to Bits is the importance of the political contributions by entrenched interests, major communications corporations in particular, on freedom of information as the technology makes an open society more feasible. These numbers dramatically show the extent to which Congresspeople will act against the public interest broadly and the civil rights of individuals in order to raise the money needed for their re-election campaigns. It must be pretty demoralizing for the honorable ones among our elected representatives.

At lunch today I did an informal survey.  The question was this:

Is it acceptable for Customs officers to search through the contents of your laptop, look at files, read your email, go through your pictures, pick over your web search history, check to see if you have any illegal MP3 downloads, maybe some movies?

There are actually three parts to the question.

1. Is it legal to search all the electronic stuff you are carrying?
2. Is it legal to do it without any “reasonable suspicion” that you’re doing something illegal?
3. And, most importantly, how do you feel about it?  if it is legal, should it be?

There was 100% agreement, at least among the ten people at lunch today, that it was completely wrong to do so, and they presumed that it was either illegal, or, at least illegal without probable cause and maybe even a search warrant.

Not so.

On April 21, 2008, Judge Diarmuid F. O‚ÄôScannlain issued an opinion in the case of United States of America v. Michael Timothy Arnold.¬† Mr. Arnold, a forty-three year old man,¬† was returning from a trip to the Phillipines.¬† He landed at LAX and went through customs.¬† We’ve all done that – gone through customs that is.¬† They have an important function to peform; making sure that people don’t bring bad stuff into the country, things they haven’t paid duty on, animals, fruits that might harbor insects, contraband, and mostly drugs.¬† Mr. Arnold wasn’t a suspect, nor was he behaving in a suspicious way.¬† He was selected randomly for more careful screening.¬† In this case, the customs agent asked him to turn on his laptop, and proceeded to look through his photo album.¬† The agent found pictures of nude women and called in more experts.¬† They went through all his digital files and found images that they considered to be child pornography.

Mr. Arnold argued that the customs officers should not have been allowed to search his laptop without “reasonable suspicion,” and filed a motion to suppress.¬† The District Court agreed, but that finding was overturned by the Appeals court, as detailed in Judge O‚ÄôScannlain’s opinion.

Contrary to the opinion of my lunch companions, searching your laptop, your cell phone, your flash drive, iPod iPone, Blackberry – reading your emails, looking at your pictures, checking your web surfing history is all just fine – with or without “reasonable suspicion.”

But my point is not to argue the subtleties of the law, it is to recognize that, as we say so often in Blown to Bits, that quanititative changes have qualitative impacts.¬† Looking through your briefcase for undeclared purchases, searching your bag for the cheese you are trying to bring into the country, or for the kilo of cocaine, feels quite different from going through everything on your hard drive.¬† For many of us, our laptops contain a record of much of our lives: years of pictures, enormous email archives (mine’s about 2 GB.), every appointment we’ve had.¬† There is something inherently creepy about the notion of being laid bare in front of a customs agent simply because you are crossing the border.

We have strong legal protections for what we have in our homes.  The Fourth Amendment states that “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . . .” Homes used to be where we kept the record of our lives, the pictures, the correspondence, our entire music collection.  It was inconceivable that you would carry it all about with you. But no more.  You can fit quite a bit if personal history on a 120GB disk drive. The digital explosion blew a big hole in the wall of our house.  Many of us carry our history with us.

Once again our legal structures feel intuitively to be out of whack with the nature of the digital universe.  How profoundly will our privacy be violated if a customs agent can pour through our most intimate thoughts, read our digital diaries, explore our interests and desires, our corporate secrets and health records.

Like all the stories we tell about BITS, this one is not over, but the implication is both clear, and consistent with our other observations: those who make the laws, and those who interpret them need to bring a deeper understanding of the technologies that are so much a part of the fabric of our lives

And not just Ebay — Amazon, the credit card companies, and every small business that accepts electronic payments. In practice, this means that the vaunted housing bail-out bill requires us all to disclose everything about our personal lives to government inspection and analysis.

Read it and weep. I am not exaggerating.