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Watching the results come in from the Indiana primary I was reminded of the difference between public information and accessible information. Quantitative changes can have qualitative impacts. Information that was always nominally public, but nearly impossible to retrieve, is now completely accessible.

In the case of Hillary and Barack, the obvious example is FEC records. The Federal Elections Commission provides detailed information on who gave money to whom. Go to www.fec.gov and take a look at the interactive maps for the presidential election. They did a great job presenting information that was always public – but not readily accessible. Now, if you want to check on your neighbors, it’s a piece of cake.

Some people play both sides. Bill Gates gave the maximum ($2,300) to both Hillary and Barack. We always had the legal right to know. Now the information is just a mouse click away and that changes everything.

Campaign contributions arent’y the only example. My daughter bought a condo a while ago and was uncomfortable when all of her co-workers starting asking what she had paid. Why bother asking? Just go to Zillow, or any of its competitors and this traditionally public information is now readily accessible.

Lots of communities post property tax data. It used to take a trip to city hall. Now, no gas required, a couple of mouse clicks and you are there.

Curious about your neighbor’s house? In my case you can go to the town website and find everything from the property valuation to the kind of roofing material they used. This information was always public, but making it easy to retrieve has utterly changed our sense of privacy.

Careful. Snooping on your neighbors can be habit forming.

Try whozat.com. I learned things about myself I didn’t know. Seriously. And now I’m checking on you.

 

ComputerWorld reports today:

The Chinese government is demanding that US-owned hotels there filter Internet service during the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing, US Senator Sam Brownback has alleged. The Chinese government is requiring US-owned hotels to install Internet filters to “monitor and restrict information coming in and out of China,” Brownback said Thursday.

This is an odd story. China is demanding that the hotels filter bits during the Games—as opposed to what happens the rest of the time? “The great firewall of China” already keeps lots of bits out of the country. The story doesn’t explain what extra protection the hotels are supposed to provide.

Anyone going to China should try going to a few web sites or doing a few searches. You can get some of the effect just by sitting at home and using google.cn for awhile rather than google.com, but that won’t give you the experience I had in Shanghai last year, of mysteriously losing the Internet connection in my hotel room because I had asked the wrong question.

The OpenNet Initiative web site has a great deal more information about what is filtered where, and how the ONI researchers have gotten those answers.

I say: the hotels should comply with whatever the Chinese are demanding, and make sure their clients understand why they are doing so.

Yesterday afternoon I was in the offices of one of my large corporate clients Рa financial services company.  I needed to go online to gather some information and enlisted the help of one of their IT staff members to get me access.

The first thing I did was go to check my email.¬† I use Google’s Gmail client when I check mail on the web.¬† I like its user interface.¬† No luck!¬† I entered www.gmail.com and received a giant red warning “You are trying to access a site that is FORBIDDEN!”¬† Interesting.¬† My helpful IT guy said “oh, I forgot to tell you, we monitor every single thing that you do when you’re on the web.¬† We control what you can see, what you can’t see.¬† We read all your email.¬† We’re watching.”

Now, if I’d picked up the phone to make a call I’d have some measure of assurance that no one was listening.¬† Not so in the land of bits. I might just as well have been in China searching for Falun Gong.¬† Little Brother is alive and well.¬† You don’t need to be a government to impose surveillance and thought control.

Now this particular client isn’t a mom and pop operation.¬† The assets they handle exceed the gross domestic product of most nations. So maybe they think of themselves as a government, even a totalitarian one. But even so, I found the notion that they were watching my every move, controlling the websites I could access and hence the information I could receive, reading my email, a bit creepy.

It was one more reminder that technology had moved faster than the laws intended to manage its impact on our lives.  When telephones arrived we put in place legal protections for the privacy of our communications using them.  At some point, we will need to do the same for the bits that carry the substance of our lives.

I used to think that conservatives would oppose ubiquitous government surveillance. I figured it was the left that would be watching to make sure I was not smoking in the wrong place or saying something bad about the wrong people. That image of the politics of surveillance is outdated.

Today it is the right that wants the government to have carte blanche to listen in on our conversations. The rationale, of course, is that the government will keep us safe from terrorists if only we let it know everything we are saying. We should like being watched, to paraphrase Blown to Bits, because it means we are being watched over.

The Protect America Act, a six-month extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA, expired recently. Here is one of the recent conservative rants on this subject, by Cliff May: “The law that gave America’s intelligence agencies the authority to freely monitor the communications of foreign terrorists abroad expired in February. A bill to restore that authority passed the Senate by a solidly bipartisan 68-to-29 majority. A bipartisan majority in the House would almost certainly vote in favor of the same measure but Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) —for more than two months—has used the power of her office to stop members from voting.” Another of the same ilk, by Robert Novak, describes the law as making it possible for the government to “continue eavesdropping on suspected foreign terrorists.”What such capsule summaries fail to mention is that the laws make it possible to eavesdrop on foreign terrorists by legalizing eavesdropping on anyone at all, including Americans, talking about anything at all, as long as the bits cross the US border. As EPIC’s summary explains, “[The Protect America Act] permits the warrantless surveillance of Americans when the surveillance is ‘directed at’ someone believed to be outside the United States—whether that person outside the United States is an American or not.” That means your emails and VoIP conversations with your family traveling abroad. And don’t think they don’t have enough agents to be listening in on you talking to your spouse—automated voice recognition is good enough now to recognize when you are mentioning bombs or Islam, however humorously.The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, but it does not require ceding to the government the authority to listen to Americans talking to Americans when they have done nothing to arouse suspicion. The conservatives should be ashamed of themselves for advocating that we surrender our Fourth Amendment rights by implying that these proposals don’t apply to us. They do.The limits of government surveillance should figure into the presidential campaign. Would the Dems take a stand on privacy and liberty? I’ll bet they wouldn’t, and that if any debate moderator were to pose the question, they too would tell us, in so many words, that the only way to keep us safe from terrorist attacks is to empower Big Brother to the max.

Sometimes its not what you say, but to whom and how you say it. And in the post-digital-explosion world the possibilities are utterly transformed.

Consider what happened with James Karl Buck.

On April 10th he was arrested in Egypt while covering an anti-government protest.¬† As he was being led off to¬† an uncertain future he sent a single word message to the Twitter.com blogging site.¬† In case you’ve¬†never looked at it, in their own words “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co‚Äìworkers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question:¬†¬† What are you doing?”
When I first encountered Twitter I had two conflicting reactions.¬† The first was “you’ve got to be kidding, will anybody actually do this?”¬† The second was “why not?”¬† After all, I had witnessed inumerable¬†cell phone conversations that had no more content than the central twitter question “what are you doing.”
  
But I digress.
  
Jim Buck sent his single word message “ARRESTED” to his friends¬†via Twitter, and it was enough to make all the¬†difference.¬†¬†You can read the whole story on the web here.
 
From the Blown To Bits perspective this is a classic example of the fundamental transformation that the digital explosion¬†has wrought.¬† Information moves everywhere.¬† The degree of connectivity, the ability to convey information¬†broadly, is staggeringly different from what was available in the pre-explosion era.¬† Twitter didn’t get Jim¬†out of jail, the collective efforts of his friends did.¬† But in the absence of the web, his fate could well have¬†been quite different.¬†
 
Had the designers of the Internet not created a system that¬†could be adapted for use in ways that were not imagined by those very creators, had they not produced, in Jonathan Zittrain’s lexicon, a “generative¬†technology” James Buck might well be in an Egpytian jail today.
       

It’s been a long time since I’ve been at a protest. I went to a few against the Vietnam War in 1969. I’ve observed some protests (hey, I was a dean). I’ve negotiated with protesters and counter-protesters (once managed to keep the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine students respectfully apart at opposite ends of Harvard Yard). I’ve even been protested against. But I’ve never suggested organizing one.

There’s always a first time.

J. K. Rowling will be Harvard’s Commencement speaker on June 5. She’ll get an honorary degree in the morning and be the principal speaker at the afternoon exercises.

So? Everyone loves her, don’t they?

Rowling aggressively protects the Harry Potter books, which is certainly her right. No reason why she has to put out a Creative Commons version (as we will do, once Blown to Bits has been in print for a while).

¬†But she is suing a librarian named Steven Vander Ark to prevent him from publishing a Harry Potter lexicon. Her claim that putting out the lexicon will ‚Äúopen the floodgates for anyone to lift an author’s work and present it as their own‚Äù is absurd. There are countless examples of published indexes and concordances. They do the authors no harm and probably do them good. I could not have read Joyce without my handy Skeleton Key to Finnegan‚Äôs Wake.¬†Ironically, Rowling used to think that Vander Ark‚Äôs site was swell. Probably she‚Äôs now decided to write a lexicon of her own and doesn‚Äôt want the competition.¬†Copyright law is out of balance, as we explain in Blown to Bits. The imbalance often takes the form, as it does in this case, of heavyweights using the law to sit on the little guys. But the analogies apply at all levels. Farhad Manjoo has blogged about the Harry Potter lexicon, pointing out that taking Rowling‚Äôs argument to its logical conclusion would prevent Google from indexing the Web and making advertising money from the index, unless it got explicit permission from each web site.¬†So I‚Äôm in favor of protesting Rowling‚Äôs anticompetitive abuse of copyright law. Unfortunately, your authors can‚Äôt organize the protest, since two of them will be busy in their official roles organizing Commencement itself!¬†

 

 

Yesterday, Microsoft delivered the coup de gr?¢ce to MSN Music DRM. May it rest in peace.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the practice of distributing digital content together with control programs that restrict how it can be used. For example, a publisher can distribute music that can played only a designated number of times, or only on designated computers, or that must periodically “phone home” over the Internet for reauthorization and relicensing. Content providers, notably the recording industry, embraced DRM as a way to cope with unauthorized downloading and file sharing.

Blown to Bits argues that DRM schemes are ineffective and anti-competitive and in the long run a bad deal for publishers and customers alike. If you buy music that must contact a license server before it can be played, then the music isn’t really yours ‚Äì if the license server goes away, ‚Äúyour music‚Äù becomes a useless wad of encrypted bits.

That drawback of DRM was driven home yesterday when Microsoft announced that it would be shutting down the license servers for MSN Music, a DRM scheme introduced in 2004 to the fanfare announcement that this would “finally bring digital music to the masses.” Music tracks purchased from the MSN Music store can be played only on computers licensed for that track. You can have at most five computers licensed for a track at once. If you get a sixth computer, you must contact the MSN server to de-authorize one of the five and license the new one. A “new computer” here means not only a new physical machine: if you upgrade your operating system, you need new licenses for all the music tracks.

Microsoft stopped selling new MSN Music in 2006, when it introduced Zune Marketplace. In an email yesterday from the General Manager of MSN Entertainment Services, purchasers of MSN Music tracks learned that the license server will be shutting down on August 31. After then they’ll be stuck: no more licensing new machines ‚Äì replace a computer, or upgrade an operating system after the summer, and their music can’t be transferred to it.

The anti-consumer nature of DRM is becoming increasingly apparent, and publishers are starting to move away from it. And yet, as described in the book, the desire to shore up DRM gave birth to the innovation-hostile anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and new DRM-inspired legislative proposals are still very much alive on Capitol Hill. What can consumers do when the content they purchased phones home, but no one answers? Perhaps they should have it phone Congress.

Google is the #1 brand in the world, according a Millward Brown report, Top 100 Most Powerful Brands ‘08. The ranking formula multiplies “Intangible earnings” by “Portion of intangible earnings attributable to brand” by “Brand earnings multiple.” Others will have to judge whether these three factors are the right ones, whether their values can be determined meaningfully, and whether that is the right way to combine them. I am a bit skeptical. The #2 brand? GE. #3 is Microsoft, #4 is Coca-Cola, and #5 is China Mobile.

If Google is the #1 brand—and that does feel right, whatever calculation produced the result—the implication is astonishing. The top brand in the world is one that almost no one had heard of a decade ago. The earliest reference I could find to “Google” in a search of newspaper archives was a May 31, 1998 column by Bradley Peniston in the Annapolis, MD Capital, entitled “Yahoo for new search engine.” (That’s leaving out all the articles about the Barney Google comic strip.) A week later, in his next column, Peniston had to explain where to find Google—on the Stanford web site!

The New York Times reports this morning that When the Ex Blogs, the Dirtiest Laundry Is Aired. Divorced people are using their personal blogs to let the world know what creeps their former spouses are.

There is nothing really surprising about this. For years people have been worried about the mean, nasty stuff young people say about each other on Facebook, in MySpace, and on blogs. Adults are just catching up to youth culture. It’s also true that teenagers were walking around with MP3 players and earbuds a few years before middle-aged men with briefcases were doing it. One of the women quoted isn’t worried about the impact on her children for exactly that reason. As the Times reports, “It is a generational issue …. We think it will be a big deal, but it won’t be to them. By the time they are old enough to read it, they will have spent their entire life online. It will be like, ‘Oh yeah, I expected that.’ ”

Yet I find the article interesting in several ways, beyond the head-shaking instinct. Why is it apparently mostly women doing this? Is it really a healthy form of catharsis, as a number of those posting comments have suggested?But perhaps most surprising is the statement that 10% of adult Internet users have created their own blogs. I tracked down that number, and it is understated: The actual percentage, from this table, is 12%. Is that level sustainable? The same report says that only 39% of adult Internet users read other people’s blogs! One imagines a strange world in which millions of people are writing blogs about intimate personal matters, and almost no one is reading most of them.