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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.

We explain in Blown to Bits that bits crossing entering the U.S. are, under U.S. law, subject to inspection by federal authorities. No matter whether they are in a laptop (see earlier post about new border procedures) or in a fiber optic cable. So the U.S. government claims the right to read the email your daughter sends you while she is in Toronto and you are in Detroit.

According to John Markoff of the New York Times, this law is one of the reasons that Internet traffic is increasingly bypassing the U.S. entirely. Since this is where the Internet started, the U.S. network used to be a kind of hub for the rest of the world; no longer.

It’s not the only reason — there are more Chinese Internet users than American now, so of course it makes sense for other countries to build up their communications infrastructure for purely economic reasons. But this may be an early example of the U.S. driving business away by its incursions into what we used to think of as private information.

I expect that sooner or later some business executive from a friendly foreign country will have his laptop seized and searched at the U.S. border, along with documents of great sensitive value to the business and of no significance to the war on terror. The incident will cause a stink that will lead international executives to suggest that their American counterparts come visit them abroad next time, rather than expecting foreigners to subject themselves to data disclosure by visiting U.S. soil.

The Boston area public transportation system, known as the MBTA or the “T,” got some bad publicity¬†recently¬†for hauling several MIT students into court because they were planning to explain publicly the security ¬†deficiencies of the T’s fare card system. (See my previous blog posts here, here, and here.) Last week,the T finally admitted that the students were right: the security of the fare card system was poor.

In a gesture to use the latest in communication technologies to improve riders’ experience, the T announced that it is working on a new system that will announce the arrival time of the next train¬†on video screens, and maybe even text-message that information to riders’ cell phones. The WCVB report explains, “The MBTA is currently seeking bids for the multimillion-dollar project, which is still several years away from implementation.”

Running any public transportation system is hard work. The systems are antiques, funding is variable, unions can retard progress. So any modernization should be celebrated.

BUT: When I heard this story it reminded me of something. I checked my old email and found this exchange from October 1998 — ten years ago — with David Malan, who was at the time a senior in Harvard College:

David to me:

I thought I’d show¬†you something I finished writing this weekend. ¬†‚Ķ¬† it’s a shuttle-schedule-type program ‚Ķ¬†it’s been used by 150+ students already! ¬†:)

That is, it enabled Harvard students to track the shuttle buses that run around campus so they could decide whether it was faster to walk than to wait. Me to David:

It is neat! Congratulations for your enlightened application of technology in the service of the citizenry.

David went on to get his PhD at Harvard and is now on our faculty, teaching our very popular introductory computer science course. If the T wants to hire someone who is reliable and skilled, and a decade ago did something on a smaller scale that is very much like what they are planning, I’d highly recommend him! And I’ll bet he’d charge fewer multis of millions than the T will wind up paying.

Here is a 1998 Crimson story about Shuttleboy. To be fair, it wasn’t really the same thing as what the T wants now; couldn’t have been, in those days before ubiquitous cell phones and global positioning systems. But text messaging was added to the Harvard system a year ago, and as you can see by looking here, it also now has GPS and shows you where the shuttles are on a Google map.

This problem just isn’t hard enough for the big play the the T is giving it.

A major point of Chapter 6 of Blown to Bits is that copyright protections were so strengthened by rewrites of copyright law over the past decade that it became difficult even to facilitate the re-use of your creations (literary, software, or artistic), unless gave up all claims on your work and released them into the public domain. As we discuss, Creative Commons was an effort (Hal was among the founders) to allow creators easily to specify conditions under which their creations could be re-used by others (for example, that the new creation include proper attribution to the original, and that such “borrowers” must make similar requirements on those who borrow in turn).

But there has always been a bit of discomfort about the legal infrastructure underlying Creative Commons licenses. Suppose I put a CC license on my work and you just use it, ignoring the conditions I stipulated. Have you actually done anything unlawful? The theory has been that in attaching a CC license, I never gave up my copyright, and I could always go after you for infringing that copyright. But it’s a delicate matter of law and, until recently, it had never been tested in court.

Indeed, a Federal District Court in California came to the opposite conclusion about an “Open Source” license — that the creator couldn’t impose a legal requirement on the re-user by attaching the open source license. On August 13, that decision was reversed on appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which is the venue where appeals on intellectual property issues like this get adjudicated. Though it applies exclusively to software, an “open source” license is enough like a Creative Commons license in its intent and in what it requires that there is now much more confidence that CC licenses are legally binding.

The case is that of Robert Jacobsen v. Matthew Katzer and Kamind Associates, and the decision of the Appeals Court is here. The decision is 15 pages, and while you would need legal training to understand the subtleties, the gist of what the parties did and the court’s reasoning about its conclusion are comprehensible to an interested layperson.

A reminder that Ken and I will be teaching “Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion” (with a guest appearance by Hal) in the Harvard Extension School this fall. You can take it in person or as a distance course, and by distance either live or on tape delay. Class meets once a week, 5:30-7:30 Mondays, starting September 15. Here is the catalog information and here is the preliminary¬†course syllabus. Open enrollment — all are welcome!

Mark Rasch is a security expert and lawyer practicing in Washington, DC. He has written two good pieces about important issues on blogged here: The government’s new policy about searching and seizing laptops at the border (which I blogged here), and the case of Mr. Steven Warshak, where the feds have successfully asserted their right to snoop email without a warrant (which I blogged here).