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Over at the Tech Liberation Front, Cord Blomquist points to a speech the Attorney General nominee made in Europe almost ten years ago, while addressing the issue of child pornography:

First, … certain data must be retained by ISPs for reasonable periods of time so that it can be accessible to law enforcement,

Second, we must respect the right to privacy and laws protecting it and we should use proper legal process to obtain data – but we must also make sure that those laws are not so strict that effective enforcement is not possible. In some cases, changes to privacy laws may be required to recognize the new technological reality we now confront.

This is a classic can’t-have-it-both-ways dilemma. We don’t want Google and Yahoo! hanging onto our search queries forever, and we don’t want ISP’s hanging onto records of our Internet behavior, as much as all these good folks would love to use the data to extract information about our behavior that would be valuable for engineering and commercial reasons. No, we don’t want the data to be leaked, subpoenaed, or just snooped. Just get rid of it, please, once you’ve given us what we asked for.

For law enforcement, the more data is retained, the better. It may turn out that an important needle is buried in that haystack. Just think about this report on Carey Anthony, the mother of the missing Florida toddler:

Someone using the Anthonys’ home computer used Google to search for “neck breaking,” “how to make chloraform [sic]” and “household weapons.” Someone also Googled peroxide, acetone, alcohol and “lost numbers.”

Someone also used Wikipedia to search for “inhalation,” “chloroform,” “acetone,” “shovel” and “death.”

A computer forensics report from a Sheriff’s Office detective states that on March 21, someone used other Web sources like sci-spot.com, druglibrary.org and instructables.com for the words “making weapons out of household products,” “chloroformhabit,” “how to make chloroform,” and “chloro2.”

All that seems to have been gathered from inspecting the computer itself, but the same information might have been obtained from an ISP if it had retained the information, as the British are now proposing to do.

You might think we, the consumers, would have a say in these data retention policies, but Blomquist ends with a realistic prediction: “this question won’t be settled through competition in the free market, but instead though competition between regulators.” And in a battle between privacy regulators vs. law enforcement regulators, I think we know who’s going to win.

The ever-provocative Chris Soghoian raises that interesting question. Here’s the background.

If you buy an Adwords ad from Google — those are the text ads that appear to the right of the organic search results on the main search page — you’re not allowed to mention any trademark you don’t control. So Coca-Cola can’t buy an ad that says “Coke is better than Pepsi.” It can’t even buy an ad that says “Coke begins with C and Pespi begins with P,” even though that is plainly true as a matter of fact, not allegation or opinion.

Now the problem is that if you’re an activist or have a political cause that involves some corporate entity, it’s hard to advertise yourself if you can’t mention your adversary. So a group favoring the return of ROTC to Harvard couldn’t buy an ad that read, “Bring ROTC back to Harvard,” since “Harvard” is a trademark of the university. In practice, Google waits for the trademark holder to complain, and then takes the ad down, no further questions asked. (Actually, all ads — Harvard would just have to send one email and all ads mentioning Harvard would be taken down.)

There is nothing unlawful about Google’s policy — in fact in the unpredictable world of trademark litigation, it may be exactly what Google’s lawyers want, so that the company stays out of the middle of disputes in which it has no real stake.

But in a world where more and more information reaches the public through Google’s window, it’s a serious question whether this policy will impoverish the public discourse. In Chris’s case, he was unable to keep up an ad stating the true fact that AT&T had contributed to a particular political candidate, because AT&T — not the candidate — complained to Google. Should we care that Chris has lost this inexpensive, effective means to get his message out? Will this contribute to the tyranny of the majority, as we call it in Chapter 4 of Blown to Bits?

A brief postscript on the release of Blown to Bits as a download under a Creative Commons license. First, by popular demand, we’ve posted the book under the Download tab both as chapter-by-chapter PDFs and as a single 22MB PDF of the whole book. And second, we should have mentioned that this download is the third printing, which corrects a variety of small errors in the original (the first and second printings were identical). The third printing should be appearing in bookstores soon (I haven’t yet seen a bound copy myself).

Opinions differ about whether digital technologies transformed the Obama campaign into something inclusive and empowering that had never been seen before, or whether it was really an old-style, top-down campaign that made masterful use of the new technologies to get its message out and to coordinate the troops, while making them feel included.

Either way, no one seems to be disputing that the McCain-Palin campaign was much less clued in on how to use the technologies. And the evidence continues to accumulate after the campaign is over. The campaign auctioned its Blackberry phones without wiping the memory clean — so those who bought them bought phone numbers of donors, lobbyists, and journalists too. Apparently they were not amused when the purchaser called them up.

As we explain in Chapter 3 of Blown to Bits, it’s not hard to reset a phone by pressing a few buttons — though even following the vendor’s instructions may not really wipe the memory clean enough to keep the information out of the hands of a determined snoop.

Today first: The New York Times has a very affirming editorial about the opportunities the Internet promises, and Obama’s opportunity to use national Internet diffusion as an economic driver for the nation.

And exactly 100 years ago today: The New York Times reported that the government, having considered the opportunities presented by the new pneumatic-tube communication technology, had decided not to “purchase, install, or operate” pneumatic tubes. Here is a scan of the original NYT story, and here is a brief summary.

Somewhere, perhaps Senator Stevens is laughing.

A tip of the hat to TheSync for pointing this out on Slashdot.

A Wall Street Journal story about a proposed agreement between Google and Internet Service Providers suggests that Google is pulling a double-cross, given its prior commitment to Net Neutrality. Unfortunately the details of the proposal haven’t been made public. But the consensus of the knowledgeable is that the WSJ misunderstands what is going on and that Net Neutrality is not threatened by Google’s proposal. A greater worry is perhaps about the implications of Google’s increasingly monopoly power over bits, but that wouldn’t mean that its packets got delivered faster than those of some minor player.) Thanks to Steve Schultze for pointing me to this collection of comments.

FCC chairman Kevin Martin proposed to make a slice of spectrum available to private companies that would deploy nation-wide broadband Internet service — with the catch that all indecent materials would be filtered out. I wrote about what a bad idea this was in the Boston Globe not long ago.

Under pressure from the White House and members of Congress, Martin has cancelled next week’s meeting at which this controversial plan was be voted. The White House is opposed to complicating the spectrum auction process; Congress doesn’t want the FCC to vote anything that will immediately wind up in court. In any case, only one company had shown any interest in the plan, and in the changed economic conditions, even that one might not have found it a profitable venture.

A bullet has been dodged. Let’s hope that the next FCC doesn’t revive this idea. Here is an excellent post explaining the dilemma that will be facing the Obama administration.

Google prides itself on the objectivity of the algorithm it uses for ranking search results. No payment for placement, and no editorial judgments being made behind closed doors. A recent interview with a top Google executive is creating some buzz that this may be changing just a bit.

Google offers a feature that enables users to re-order their own search results — useful if you expect to search for the same thing again and want it to appear at the top of the list. You would also be able to indicate that you don’t want a particular result to appear at all in the future. These are the faint square boxes to the right of search results — an up-arrow with a horizontal bar over it to promote a particular result, and an X to eliminate a result.

These re-orderings affect only your own subsequent searches. At least that’s the way things work right now. Here is the crucial passage in the TechCrunch interview:

[Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience  Marissa] Mayer also talked about Google’s use of user data created by actions on Wiki search to improve search results on Google in general. For now that data is not being used to change overall search results, she said. But in the future it’s likely Google will use the data to at least make obvious changes. An example is if “thousands of people” were to knock a search result off a search page, they’d be likely to make a change.

Now that raises a couple of interesting possibilities, as reported by two industry critics. The first is that a new front will be opened in the cat-and-mouse game with the search engine optimization companies. Perhaps, for example, you can get your competitor knocked off the first page of search results by getting enough users to do so individually. Google’s engineers are smart enough to counter such simple tactics, but perhaps not slightly more ingenious measures.

The other possibility is that there are human beings reviewing the patterns of movements, and making editorial judgments about which should be incorporated into the general search results. Mayer does say “they‚Äôd be likely to make a change,” and while this is just an interview and she probably wasn’t choosing her words as though she was under oath, it’s an interesting question just how the decision to re-order search results in response to user actions would be implemented.

As we discuss in Blown to Bits, there have long been individual cases of editorial judgment, though most complainants about their placement seem simply to have lousy web sites by Google’s explicit standards. One has to wonder if this latest tweak isn’t going to open a major can of worms. Happily, it’s the sort of thing that can be tested quietly, and abandoned quietly if it doesn’t work out well.

Blown to Bits is now available for free download, under a Creative Commons license. You’ll notice that the tab above that used to say “Excerpts” has been relabeled “Download,” and the Download page has links not just to excerpts but to PDFs of the individual chapters.

There has been a flurry of activity the last few days about a particular image on Wikipedia. I had intended to blog it sooner, and now it has — sort of — resolved itself. But there is a larger lesson that remains important.

The image was on the cover of an album called Virgin Killer, by the band Scorpion. The album was released more than 30 years ago. The cover shows a naked 11-year-old girl with an image of glass, cracked in a star pattern, strategically covering her genitals. Or perhaps, positioned so as to draw the eye to that part of her body. The cover was naughty enough that the music publisher changed the cover in many markets, but apparently no one has ever labeled it illegal child pornography, until this week.

In the UK, the Internet Watch Foundation blacklisted the Wikipedia page that discusses the album, which includes an image of the cover. Now the IWF is not a government organization, but the major ISPs rely on it voluntarily to identify pages and sites containing illegal child pornography. Because of some technicalities that are well explained here, that led to Wikipedia being uneditable from most computers in the UK. There was a furor, the Wikipedia folks refused to remove the image. Today the IWF backed down and unblocked the Wikipedia page, explaining that the image had been around like forever, and more people were viewing it because the IWF had censored it than ever would have viewed it otherwise.

Now there is a lot to be said about this, about how hard it is to censor the Internet and how delicately the whole thing is actually held together. But the most interesting observation is the one Chris Soghoian makes in this editorial. The U.S. has an agency much like the IWF — it’s called¬†The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). That’s the place U.S. ISPs go to get a list of objectionable web sites.

What’s odd about both the IWF and NCMEC is that they are agents of the criminal justice system that operate outside the government. That means their decisions can’t be appealed (though it looks like Wikipedia found some way to appeal the IWF decision). And their procedures can be kept secret — for example, NCMEC is immune from U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

So Chris states in his editorial’s title: It’s time for a child porn czar. Oh god, thought I; another federal bureaucracy. But he’s right, not because it’s good to create bureaucracies, but because we already have one, and it’s accountable to no one. If this censorship function is going to take place, at the request of the U.S. government, then let’s make it part of the government so we can know what it does.

P.S. The Virgin Killer album cover is easy to find; Google will take you to it immediately. I owe it to you to report that someone who should know thinks it really does qualify as child pornography under U.S. law, and therefore illegal to possess, even though in more than 30 years that’s never been charged by any authority. (In addition to which, you may well not like it.)