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Anyone who wants to work in the new administration has to fill out a questionnaire with 63 extremely intrusive questions. Obama is doing everything he can to avoid surprises, like the Clinton nominees with their under-the-counter nanny payments. But many of the questions are questions only being asked because of the digital explosion and the resulting permanence of detailed information. Here are a couple of my favorite queries (emphasis mine):

Writings: Please list and, if readily available, provide a copy of each book, article, column or publication (including but not limited to any posts or comments on blogs or other websites) you have authored, individually or with others. Please list all aliases or “handles” you have used to communicate on the Internet.

Electronic communications: If you have ever sent an electronic communication, including but not limited to an email, text message or instant message, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe.

That is, “Of course, your potentially embarrassing private emails may not disqualify you, not at all. But please tell us about them. And thank you for these details! We always wondered who ‘hilarysux2008’ was, glad to know.”

NYT story here.

Seems to me there are three possibilities here. Either people are not going to work in the administration because of these disclosure requirements. Or the ones who do will be adventureless people who have never taken a risk or had much fun.

Or they will be liars.

Whatever it is, in 10 years, I’m betting, the balance will be struck in a different place.

Chris Soghoian has a fascinating article about filtering of search engine results in Argentina. This is different from what we write about that happens in China, where the lens is distorted. In Argentina, if you search for certain people using Yahoo!, you get back nothing at all. And it’s not because of official government policy; it’s because of private litigation. Someone simply goes to court and asks the judge to make them disappear, the judge enjoins the search engine company, and disappear they do. Google responds differently than Yahoo!, and there are many easy workarounds for those who experiment, but it seems to be a great leap forward in treating search engines just as a manipulable tool, not a public utility.

Blogging will be spotty this week as I am traveling. I’m giving two book talks en route, thanks to local Harvard Clubs — Wednesday in Greensboro, NC and Thursday in Chapel Hill.

Next Wednesday, November 19, I will be speaking at the Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany, NY — a public event organized by the Harvard Club of Eastern New York.

In a blog post entitled “Windows 7 knows where you are,” Ina Fried goes through the location-tracking capabilities of Microsoft’s next-generation operating system. It will have API’s — hooks for application programmers to grab onto — that will return device’s spatial location, whether revealed through a GPS, triangulation of cell phone towers, or other technologies. That will make it easy to write location-sensitive search engines, for example — so that if you search for “pizza,” you get links, sponsored or not, to pizza parlors near where you actually are, rather than to the world’s most popular pizza chain.

Of course, there are huge privacy issues here — might Microsoft, or the search engine, keep tab on your movements, for analysis or marketing purposes having nothing to do with your searches? Microsoft acknowledges the problem, and has built in some switches the user can turn off. But it sounds to me like the convenience of good searches and the entertainment value of letting your friends know when you are near them will lead most young people, at a minimum, to leave all the switches on all the time. And the controls that are supplied aren’t exactly what you’d probably want — you might like to leave the location-tracking on for an app that gives driving directions, but off for a social networking app. Can’t be done — it’s all or nothing — due to intrinsic limitations of Windows.

Microsoft does give a range of control options, such as turning off location services by default, as well as the ability to limit such services only to specific users or only to applications, as opposed to services that run in the background. However, the operating system doesn’t allow users the option of letting only certain applications access your location. So, for example, if you turn it on for a mapping program, any other Windows application running could also access that information.

The reason, Microsoft officials say, is that Windows doesn’t have a reliable means of determining that an application is what it says it is, so any attempt to limit the location to a specific application would be easily spoofable ‚Ķ.

As we’ve written before (here and here), geolocation is the new cultural frontier.

The change.gov site lays out the science and technology agenda of the new administration. Sounds good for the most part, but let me parse it.

1. Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality. Excellent, especially as the very first bullet.
2. Obama will encourage diversity in the ownership of broadcast media. Ugh. The right way to do this is to re-engineer spectrum use so the value of a broadcast station declines precipitously, and no one gets excluded. Somehow I’ll bet that isn’t what he has in mind, and we will have some kind of set-aside or affirmative action for minority ownership.
3. Protect Our Children While Preserving the First Amendment. Fine to say, but there is a certain point beyond which these really are inconsistent objectives. There is too much lip service paid to the dangers to children here; there isn’t really any evidence that children are any more endangered in the Internet era than they ever were. So this bullet is favoring motherhood; no one could be opposed to either. The devil will be in the details.
4. Barack Obama will strengthen privacy protections for the digital age. Again, a fine idea, but what does it mean? Will the feds still be able to seize and hold my laptop at the border without any suspicion that I’ve done anything wrong?
5. Open Up Government to its Citizens. This bullet really goes right at Bush’s obfuscations. The promise of transparency is very welcome. It will require a major cultural change in the executive branch, but change is what we were promised!
6. Obama will appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Though I worry about symbolic gestures, on balance, I think this is a good idea — depending on who it is. (I hereby declare my availability.)
7. Obama and Biden believe we can get true broadband to every community in America through a combination of reform of the Universal Service Fund, better use of the nation’s wireless spectrum, promotion of next-generation facilities, technologies and applications, and new tax and loan incentives. Exactly right.
8. Barack Obama and Joe Biden support a trade policy that ensures our goods and services are treated fairly in foreign markets. Again, a bit of motherhood here, but that sounds protectionist to me, and anti-free-trade. But we shall see.
9. Invest in the Sciences. Thank goodness. If there is one thing I hope for from Obama, it is a return of rational judgment after too many years of politically motivated decisions.
10. Invest in University-Based Research. How could I be against that? But seriously, I hope for the sort of enlightened investments in fundamental research that gave us the Internet.
11. Protect American Intellectual Property Abroad: The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that in 2005, more than nine of every 10 DVDs sold in China were illegal copies. The U.S. Trade Representative said 80 percent of all counterfeit products seized at U.S. borders still come from China. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will work to ensure intellectual property is protected in foreign markets, and promote greater cooperation on international standards that allow our technologies to compete everywhere. Any bullet that starts by quoting the MPAA is bad news. This is the same group that persuaded Congress that if the copyright on Mickey Mouse were not extended from 70 to 90 years, Disney would just fold up its tents and not make any more movies, because it couldn’t see the point if people would start making a profit on their creativity 71 years from now. Knowing that Biden has a bad history with technology regulation, I fear that “international standards” will be crippling hardware fixes, broadcast flags, etc., that will make digital devices less generative. Here is one where the explicit mention of Biden’s name makes me worry that Obama has been hanging around with the wrong people.
12. Protect American Intellectual Property at Home: Intellectual property is to the digital age what physical goods were to the industrial age. Barack Obama believes we need to update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated. Actually, “fairness” is not the point. “Intellectual property” has many properties that make the metaphorical comparison with physical property very imperfect. The limited monopoly is not meant to be “fair” to creators, just to give them an economic incentive to create. “To promote the progress of science and the useful arts,” as the Constitution says, not “to be fair to inventors and artists.” I see this as another special-pleading by the entertainment industries.
13. Restore Scientific Integrity to the White House. Amen, and good for them for coming right out and saying that they don’t plan to consult with church leaders on every scientific question.

The rest looks fine too. I am very hopeful.

In the same FCC meeting yesterday in which opening the “white spaces” was approved, there was supposed to be a discussion of changing the rate structure that the telephone companies use for passing calls to each other. This is an amazingly complex and highly regulated business, and what makes it even more complicated is the fact that some of the terminology on which the regulatory structure rests is meaningless in the context of new technology. In the end the FCC just decided to do nothing for the time being.

Saul Hansell of the New York Times does as good a job explaining some of the issues as is humanly possible, I think.

I have an op-ed in the Boston Globe today about Internet Censorship. The FCC proceeding to which the piece refers is Proceeding 07-195 (pdf). Here’s the beginning of the Globe piece:

SUPPOSE that government regulators proposed to read all postal mail in order to protect families from things they should not see. Anything not legally prohibited would be delivered. Any unlawful words, pictures, or videos would be thrown away.

Today is supposed to be the day for an FCC decision on allowing unlicensed use of the “white spaces” between television broadcast channels. The television industry and Broadway have lined up against it — television with predictions of screens going dark all across America because of interference, and Broadway (aligned, improbably, with churches) predicting that their wireless microphones won’t work any more. The FCC engineers have been studying this for six years and have concluded that these fears are exaggerated (cf. Chapter 8 of Blown to Bits). But the entertainment industries are powerful, and so are churches.

A good story in the New York Times on this today, and a good post last week by Susan Crawford. The Times has a good quote from the FCC chairman on this.

“We’re being very cautious about protecting the broadcasters, but at the same time making sure the technology allows us to make greater use of this invaluable resource,” Mr. Martin said.

He added that he thought some opponents, like the broadcasters, were fighting the proposal because they were unnerved by the rise of interactive tools that offered a less passive media experience. “The empowerment of consumers is threatening,” he said.

And it turns out that most of those wireless microphones that churches and Broadway are so concerned about being functional in the future were never operating within FCC regulations anyway. They are essentially arguing that their illegal use of the spectrum should be grandfathered.

So reassures the mother of Daniel Harrington, who apparently lost a memory stick in the parking lot of a pub in England. Harrington works for an IT firm that supplies services to the British government. The flash drive evidently contained not personal records, but source code and passwords that might enable someone to access those personal records. As a result, the “Government Gateway” system has been shut down.

The device was found a couple of weeks ago, and yesterday was turned over to the Daily Mail, which is having a lot of fun with the story. A sample of the reactions:

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said the civil rights group had conducted an audit which showed that the Government had lost 30million pieces of data in the past year.

‘That’s one data bungle for every two people in the country,’ she said. ‘Still they plough on with their Big Brother ambitions; ID cards and the scary central communications database: disasters waiting to happen at our expense.’

Lib Dem MP Norman Baker said the Government were asking for data from taxpayers that they could not protect.

‘The Government cannot be trusted with all this information but they collect more and more,’ he said.

I’ll bet these data breaches are no more common in the UK than in the US, but they certainly have had a bad run of them lately, and you can see why the MP is worried about the government’s plans.

In a development that bears a family resemblance to the deal Google cut with the book publishing industry, Myspace has reached an agreement with one big part of the entertainment industry. Its users will be allowed to continue posting video clips from the Colbert Report and other TV shows without anyone getting hassled with DMCA takedown demands.

When the user posts a video, third-party software will identify it automatically, and place a visual tag on the clip, at the bottom of the screen. Advertising will be posted and the viewer will be given the opportunity to buy the whole episode. The revenue from the advertising and episode purchases will be split up among Viacom, Myspace, and the company that makes the software that identifies the videos. Everybody makes a little money (except, of course, the people who are doing the posting and the people who are doing the viewing!).

This deal is narrow — it affects only MySpace and Viacom. Google’s deal is broader — it is a deal with the group that represents publishers and authors — but the court hasn’t approved it yet. And of course, it covers only Google, not anyone else who might like to create a book search service. Do these deals show the outline of a more encompassing, public solution to the problems with DMCA and the Internet?