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… but they still face trial, as things stand.

Judge George O’Toole, Jr., not the judge who imposed the gag order on the MIT students who intended to present their research about security problems of the MBTA’s fare system, has allowed that order to expire (CNET story here). The judge did not rule on First Amendment Grounds. He simply decided (correctly) that one of the legal conditions justifying the imposition of the TRO had not been met. To wit: He doubted that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which the students were charged of violating, actually applied to the oral and written communication of research results between human beings. (The law actually governs sending codes to a computer for fraudulent reasons.) The MBTA also failed to show that the students had actually cost it any money.

The MBTA is thinking about what to do. As we argued earlier, they should tend to their business and stop trying to criminalize the messenger.

NebuAd, as we discussed earlier, extracts information from the individual data packets reaching you to help target advertising to you that will be relevant to your interests. Depending on how you look at it, this deep packet inspection is either a frightening invasion of your privacy — many people are not happy to think that anyone is keeping track of what web sites they are visiting — or a service that will benefit everyone, Internet users by not showering them with ads they don’t want to see, and ISPs by helping them make more money from advertisers (some of which, they argue, would be used to improve their services).

The subject has come up in Congressional hearings, where Rep. Ed Markey is talking about a federal Internet privacy law. Part of Markey’s proposal would be a requirement that customers opt-in to such privacy-infringing practices. Not needed, argues Cable One, which has already deployed this technology on a trial basis. As reported by Multichannel News, the company explains,¬†‚ÄúCable One customers opted in to our monitoring of their Internet usage and content consistent with this third-party test when they agreed to our AUP.” That is, the fine print in one of those endless “I agree” documents you have to click on in order to get Internet service implied that the company was free to collect such tracking information, and customers should have nothing to complain about.

No doubt we all click on those forms too quickly. But if there are only one or two choices of Internet Service Provider in your neck of the woods — and almost every neck of the woods is exactly like that — what good would it do to fully understand the implications of the fine print? In the absence of competition, the communications companies have much freer rein. They are inviting federal regulation by such see-no-evil pretenses.

Off at my summer home on a mountain lake, I am trying to read about anything but bits. So I’ve read two good books — Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers and Jules Tygiel’s Past Time. A history of secularism in America and a history of baseball. Unaccountably, each has a paragraph about the social consequences of improvements in communication technology. And the two paragraphs make closely related points. And the same issues are with us today, and relevant to the debates about whether the Internet can be a democratizing technology, what influence private carriers have over public understanding of the truth, and whether the unlimited availability of information will mean that we will in the end become more isolated through our ability to pick and choose the reality we wish to believe.

Jacoby discusses the influence of early radio on the secularism movement.

The farmers who rode fifty miles across the prairie to hear [famous agnostic orator Robert] Ingersoll in the 1890s were likely to be found in their own living rooms, listening to their own radios, in the 1920s — and radio sponsors did not spend their money to ¬†promote attacks on the God of the Bible. Freethought ideals did survive the disappearance of the freethought movement, but — unlike religious evangelism — they were ill suited, because of their emphasis on facts rather than emotions, to the new mass communications media. (p. 263)

Tygiel talks about how radio spelled the end of public scoreboards in cities, where crowds used to gather to see the telegraphed play-by-play of baseball games posted for public view.

The radio had, in a very important sense, democratized major league baseball, transmitting a more intimate sense of being at the game to millions who could never attend. Yet the process had become more familial or individualistic, replacing the communal experience with a more isolated one. Radio made baseball, more than ever, a national sport, but in a context far removed from earlier meanings of that term. (p. 73)

One of the big points of our book is that the digital explosion is not inevitably either good or bad. More capacity to communicate information does not automatically lead to greater enlightenment and greater democratic empowerment. The future depends on who has the power to control the communication media and how they use it. It’s important for us all to realize that nothing is inevitable — we need to understand, and to watch, what may seem to be struggles over obscure technical points, because the way the future will look may depend on choices being made today.

The FCC held hearings at Harvard last spring in which Comcast was challenged on its practice of manipulating the data stream reaching consumers — a bald violation of network neutrality, or, depending on your point of view, a reasonable business plan by a private enterprise. Some alarms were raised about Comcast’s bona fides when it turned out they had paid people who had no interest in the hearings to fill the classroom. This is a huge issue — McCain and Obama both mention neutrality specifically in their technology policies. (Obama is for it, McCain opposed.)

A week after the Cambridge FCC hearings, a peculiar opinion piece appeared in the Harvard Crimson. It was written by Mel King, a long-time Boston community activist and sometime mayoral candidate. The piece called the FCC hearings a “dog and pony show” and adopted a strong anti-net-neutrality posture.

I didn’t know King cared so deeply.

Turns out he does have a history of caring about the issue. He had previously come out IN FAVOR of net neutrality, which would be the politically natural position for him, given his previous history of social activism. But CNET’s Declan McCullagh figured out that he now works for the “Law Media Group,” which represents corporate interests on media issues. As LMG’s web site explains, “LMG uses a ‘political campaign model’ that integrates expertise in the subject matter, message development, aggressive, research-driven paid and earned media, on-the-ground coalition building, preparation of analytical and other policy papers, and a host of next-generation services such as viral and online campaigns.¬†¬†Our goal is to dominate the media environment on behalf of the client.”

“When asked about the details of the op-ed,” McCullagh writes, “King replied: ‘You can talk to Kevin Parker, he’s at the LawMedia Institute.’ Parker is¬†listed on the Naymz networking site as a ‘senior advisor’ to LMG.”

King signs his Crimson piece by noting only that he used to teach at MIT. And oh yes — whoever ghostwrote King’s piece seems to have done the same for Jesse Jackson, as several of the sentences in King’s piece are virtually identical to sentences appearing elsewhere over Jackson’s signature.

Comcast and its brethren must be worried, if they are prepared to stoop to this level to get public voices behind their leave-us-alone campaign. The question is, have Americans gotten so cynical about the way arguments get made that even the Harvard Crimson will shrug its shoulders about this level of misrepresentation?

We have an op-ed in the Providence Journal about social adjustment to geolocation technologies.

There is also a transcript on-line of an interview that will be published in Architecture and Governance Magazine, which is oriented toward information technology managers.

In Blown to Bits, we stress that search is a new form of power. You have to hand it to Google; they recognize that sharing the power is good for everyone. Google Insights (http://www.google.com/insights/search/#) empower everyone to find out who is looking for what.

The site pitches itself as a set of business tools — figure out who your customers are, predict demand, etc. But you can use it for anything. For example, where are people most interested in “anthrax”? Iraq. (Locations are determined by IP addresses; there’s no way to know who’s actually doing the searching. The people in Iraq who are interested in “anthrax” could well be Americans.) How about “Nuclear bomb”? Pakistan, though the U.S. is right behind, and interest everywhere is waning. (The data go back to 2004, but you can choose a different time frame.) The next two lovely examples are courtesy of Ethan Zuckerman. “Email Extractor Lite 1.4” — a tool for extracting email addresses from large quantities of text — has most interest in the west African countries of Cote d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso. You don’t suppose people there want to use it to produce spam, do you? And “keygen” — a source of digital keys for unlocking pirated software — is of most interest in Cambodia, Russia, and Belarus.

Have fun. Your level of worldly experience — and perhaps the sickness of your mind — are the only limits to what you can learn about the interests of our fellow members of the human race.

The Washington Post reports (picked up by the Boston Globe) that many police forces are attaching GPS devices to cars to track suspects’ movements. When charged with a crime, suspects have challenged the evidence on the basis that it was obtained without a search warrant. Courts have accepted the explanation that no warrants were needed because this is just a technological version of what the police could have done by following the suspect in person.

Koan 5: “More of the Same Can Be a Whole New Thing.” It sure feels that way, doesn’t it? GPSs are expensive now, but getting cheaper quickly, like all digital technologies. Suppose they cost only a few bucks. Then if a crime is committed in a neighborhood, and the police want to see who from that neighborhood returns to the crime scene, they could just attach GPS’s to everyone’s cars, and close in on the one that goes to the crime scene. Without any worry that the rest of us could take umbrage at the police tracking us without probable cause to think we had committed any crime.

As widely reported in the British press (Guardian story, Telegraph story), a UN report considers British libel laws an infringement on basic human rights — the right of free expression. The problem is libel tourism, where a wealthy celebrity can sue for defamation in Britain on the basis of something published elsewhere. The laws in Britain place a much heavier burden on the defense in libel cases. This is a bits problem — any time someone in the UK views a web page, it’s considered “publication” in the UK, wherever the web server or actual content source may be. In Blown to Bits, we talk about this (and in particular the case of Australian businessman Joseph Gutnick, a resident of Australia, where the laws follow the British standard.

Unless checked, libel tourism is going to make U.S. publishers self-censor, trumping First Amendment guarantees. So far down the list of international issues for this political campaign it won’t even be noticed, but a potentially serious issue for the future.

HIPAA is the very strong privacy policy for medical records to which all doctors and hospitals must adhere. As we blogged recently, the Department of Homeland Security has issued guidelines stating that border agents may seize and examine any laptop — even, presumably, the laptop of a doctor who happens to have carried medical data with him out of and into the U.S. (Here are the actual DHS policies. They are extraordinarily sweeping and worth reading.) ¬†A blogging doctor’s explains the inconsistency.

HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is the law that governs the privacy of your medical information. It is very, very detailed, and requires quite a bit from your doctor. You’ve signed a form at the office of every provider you’ve visited that notifies you of your privacy rights. I cannot discuss your care in a hospital elevator. I can’t send you an email regarding your health without making it very clear that any information in the email cannot be considered secure. I cannot disclose your health information to anyone else except under very specific and limited circumstances. HIPAA has radically changed the way we do things with health information (sometimes for the better, sometimes not).

Moving on to Homeland Security—DHS agents may, for any reason or none at all, seize my laptop and demand any security or encryption codes. My laptop not infrequently contains information covered by HIPAA (known as PHI, or Protected Health Information). Because of that, my laptop is secured via HIPAA-compliant security measures. Under the new DHS guidelines, I can be required to hand over my laptop and help officers access the information¬†without any suspicion of wrong-doing. We have a little problem here…

Unlimited government authority is always dangerous. I wonder if Chertoff plans to blow off this medical privacy fol-de-rol as a threat to national security.

We noted yesterday that McCain’s campaign has been promising a technology policy for a long time. It was finally put up on his web site today.

For the most part, it isn’t really a policy. It’s mostly vague, aspirational statements, many of which are in flat contradiction with each other. Example: (a) “John McCain will focus on policies that leave consumers free to access the content they choose”; (b) “He championed laws that ‚Ķ protected kids from harmful Internet content”; (c) “John McCain has fought special interests in Washington to force the Federal government to auction inefficiently-used wireless spectrum to companies that will instead use the spectrum to provide high-speed Internet service options to millions of Americans.” All fine things, if that’s all that is said. BUT the “policy” fails to note that the laws referred to in (b) have been overturned by federal courts because they unconstitutionally make (a) impossible. And the plan referred to in (c) is the one we blogged about several weeks ago, for a public Internet censored so ruthlessly that it couldn’t even carry an email that would be inappropriate for a 5-year-old.

These issues are not simple. Blown to Bits is largely about how hard it is to reconcile conflicting values. They can’t be reconciled by apple-pie rhetoric that leaves doubt the candidate even recognizes the tensions exist. On the other hand, it’s hard for me to complain about this sound bite from the prologue: “In the last decade, there has been an explosion in the ways Americans communicate with family, friends, and business partners; shop and connect with global markets; educate themselves; become more engaged politically; and consume and even create entertainment.” Nice metaphor, there.

Perhaps the most disappointing thing to me is the “policy’s” posture toward intellectual property: that it is something to protect. Does he realize how the explosion happened? McCain seems to be in the grip of the entertainment industry and the law firms. The Internet is the greatest thing ever invented for inventiveness by small businesses, and this is a big-business policy platform. Invention is being choked by our intellectual policy apparatus, and this platform would strengthen it, not relax it. I am not surprised by the absence of actual proposals about democratic empowerment, collaboration, and civic engagement that the Internet might support. But does McCain even realize that digital technology is going to be the wellspring of economic growth in the U.S. — and that won’t come just from making Disney and Comcast yet more powerful?

For an even more intemperate response to this long-awaited policy, read David Weinberger’s blog.