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Hard on the heels of yesterday’s story about logging all phone calls made, emails sent, and web sites visited in the UK, comes a story about a plan to filter all Internet content in Australia. Users would be able to opt out of the child-friendly level of filtering, but that would only drop you to a level where all illegal content would be filtered.

Problem is, of course, that what’s illegal can’t be determined automatically. Even filters against illegal pornography will inevitably filter much lawful content as well.

And then there is the small problem of encryption. When you make an online purchase using a credit card, no one on the path between your computer and the store’s computer can tell that the data packet being transmitted contains an encrypted credit card number. How could any government filter know that a packet contains illegal pornography (or, in the case of the child-friendly filter, material unsuitable for children)?

What about dirty jokes in obscure foreign languages? What about email discussing illegal acts — does that also qualify as illegal?

Such schemes are absurd, but that does not make them any less scary. There are many more surveillance camera enclosures sold than surveillance cameras. You only have to have people believe they are being watched to change their behavior.

There’s plenty of reason to be angry at Congress today, but the House, at least, has gotten one right. It passed a bill, H.R. 6146, with a very simple text, once you get past the preamble and definitions:

Notwithstanding any other provision of Federal or State law, a domestic court shall not recognize or enforce a foreign judgment concerning defamation unless the domestic court determines that the foreign judgment is consistent with the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

This is aimed at fighting back against libel tourism, which is a product of the Internet and the globalized economy. In Blown to Bits we tell the tale of a lawsuit successfully undertaken in Australia against a magazine published in the U.S., because of an article allegedly slandering an Australian businessman, Joseph Gutnick. Australia decided that the magazine was “published in” Australia because Barrons sent the bits there — that is, you could sit in Australia at your web browser, click a few links, and the story would appear on your screen. Australia follows U.K. conventions about defamation, which are much friendlier to the plaintiff than those in the U.S. First Amendment rights to free speech are so strong in the U.S. that you have to do a lot to say something about someone for which that person could collect damages.

So the bill essentially says that even if someone wins a libel suit against you in his own country, the U.S. courts won’t help him collect the damages, unless his country has the same free speech standards as the U.S. (which few places do).

This bill doesn’t solve the problem by any means. If you’re an American guilty of libel in Saudi Arabia, maybe U.S. courts won’t enforce the Saudi court’s judgment, but you probably don’t want to plan your next vacation for Riyadh, or you’ll get arrested. More seriously, if the defendant is a corporation — Dow Jones, say, which publishes Barrons — this law can’t prevent the plaintiff’s government from seizing its assets in that country, or imprisoning its employees.

Still, it’s a start, as the New York Times correctly editorializes today.

Google’s YouTube is huge, much huger than any other video sharing service. Like Google’s search service, it has become the place to go for a certain kind of information — a kind of information that is rapidly becoming a part of daily life for millions of people, especially the young. Like Google search, there is absolutely no barrier to someone starting a competing service, except for the quality of the product and the snowball effect — people tend to use the service they know other people are using, especially for sharing information.

So when information becomes unavailable on YouTube, it’s interesting to notice, and to wonder what principles govern the decision to remove material at the request of a complaining party. Two recent examples of YouTube takedowns:

The first is an Air Force recruiting video someone posted to YouTube. A blogger for the online edition of Wired Magazine, Kevin Poulsen, linked to it from a short piece about the fight against cyberterrorism. The Air Force issued a DCMA takedown notice to Poulsen, and if you go to the original post and try to play the video, you discover it’s no longer available. The curious thing about this one is that the people of the U.S. own that video. In fact, the Air Force web site on which the video appears (it’s still available there) states,¬†”Information presented on the Air Force Recruiting website is considered public information and may be distributed or copied.” This is a simple abuse of copyright law, a club that the powerful use to whack those who use their creations for no other reason than to comment on them. Even when they don’t have the legal right they claim, the DCMA is an effective tool against small players who would have to hire lawyers to defend themselves.

The second example is a video documentary about Sarah Palin’s church, which YouTube removed not, apparently, because of a copyright complaint, but just because a bunch of people complained about it. It contains some odd segments (“cell phone anointing”?) but there is no apparent fraud; as far as I can see no one claims that the shots are not of what they seem to be. In this case the video is still visible, though not at YouTube (click the link to the article).

Private censorship. It’s perfectly legal; none of us owes YouTube anything, and they can post or take down whatever they want. And they have absolutely no obligation to tell us why they take things down or when they would resist a request to take something down. I would guess that the rule is pretty simple, and it’s like what we say about search engines in Blown to Bits: The objective is to make as many people happy as much of the time as possible, with the ultimate goal of making as much money as possible for as long as possible. Nothing wrong with any of that, but we shouldn’t get carried away with grand thoughts about “digital democracy” and the “triumph of popular culture.” Nonsense — business is business.

The ubiquitous distribution of bits raises serious issues about children’s access to pornography, a matter we discuss in Chapter 7. As WiFi becomes available in more and more public places, it becomes harder and harder not to be confronted by the prurient interests of others who share those spaces with us. Denver airport, which offers free WiFi (hurray!), adopted a no-offensive-material policy. Who thought that airport officials would wind up in the censorship business?

But now it gets more complicated. American Airlines and other airlines are testing in-the-air WiFi, and the flight attendants’ union wants a similar no-offensive-material policy enforced — filtering the offending bits before they reach the passengers, so the attendants don’t have to adjudicate disputes between bored businessmen on their second martinis and the mothers of teenage boys sitting next to them. There is likely to be some pushback from those paying $9.95 or $12.95 for the service, especially if the filtering is too aggressive (it’s not just porn that would be filtered, apparently — “porn or other offending material,” which might cover a lot of music videos).

What people should be allowed to see is not a simple question for companies in the business of pleasing people, when people have such different views on what they and others should be allowed to see.

A law firm acting on behalf of the Church of Scientology has sent more than 4000 takedown notices over a twelve-hour period this past weekend, demanding that videos and other information critical of the Church be removed from public view. The Church of Scientology is famous for this abuse of the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

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.

We’ve devoted a lot of attention on this blog to Net Neutrality — the principle that Internet Service Providers should, like telephone companies, be barred from picking and choosing what service to provide to whom on the basis of the content of the information being delivered. There is another important information policy issue at stake now, and there is an opportunity for members of the public to weigh in on it directly.

“White space” is a part of the radio spectrum not being used by any broadcaster or other party licensed by the government to use it. As we explain in Chapter 8 of Blown to Bits — it’s really the main lesson of that chapter — the government “owns” the entire spectrum and historically has given exclusive licenses to the choicest parts of it to broadcast radio and television stations. Some years ago, a few white spaces were made available for unlicensed use — over the objections of the incumbent broadcasters, who raised alarms about the risk of interference with their broadcasts but, not coincidentally, had nothing to gain from allowing any competing uses of the spectrum. From that small deregulation, the now-ubiquitous wireless Internet devices emerged.

With the switchover to digital television, vastly greater portions of the spectrum are being opened up for possible reassignment to unlicensed uses. Once again, the broadcast industry is mongering fear about degraded television reception. Public interest groups — and certain private companies, Google in particular — are strongly lobbying for deregulation of these white spaces.

You can get a good sense of the issues from reading the last chapter of Blown to Bits. We urge you to support the move toward freeing up the white spaces by signing the (click on it) Free the Airwaves petition. Every vote counts!

… 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.

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?

The three MIT students are talking a bit more about what they did and did not intend to say at the talk in Las Vegas last Sunday, before it was blocked by a judge’s temporary restraining order. The Globe and the Tech both have informative stories. The slides of the talk itself were distributed to registrants at the conference before the students and MIT had been sued. They are worth perusing (pdf here). You don’t need to parse the cryptography slides to be interested in the photographs of physical insecurities: unlocked doors, unattended equipment, etc.

Yesterday’s Herald story is also well-informed. And the comments seem to be running about 4:1 against the MBTA. Of course, the MBTA is a favorite whipping boy in the Boston area. This is the same organization that earlier in the summer went after Legal Seafoods, the great seafood restaurant chain, for some ads that teasingly compared MBTA conductors to halibut.

Media Nation has the right take on this. “Charles Evans Hughes forgot something when he wrote the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark¬†Near v. Minnesota decision in 1931.¬†The chief justice listed national security, obscenity and the imminent threat of violence as essentially the only three reasons that the courts could ever step in and order someone not to exercise his right to free speech. What he left out: information that could result in the MBTA’s losing some fare money. What a bonehead, eh?” The Media Nation post goes on to note that the judge who issued the TRO has a history of offenses to the First Amendment.

Discussions of security problems at places like DEFCON enhance security. Let’s suppose the T had answered their phone when the students first tried to contact them and the whole thing had gone no farther than that. Then the T would have had the benefit of what those three undergraduates had learned. With a discussion at the conference, they would have had the ideas debugged by many far more experienced security experts too. Openness is the way to the truth; stifling free speech makes matters worse, not better.

Last month, Governor Patrick was being discussed as a possible Supreme Court nominee under an Obama administration. He knows about this case; supposedly he weighed in on it. The MBTA reports to him. He supposedly cares about education, and constitutional liberties. Get going, Mr. Governor. Tell Daniel Grabauskas, the T head, to drop the suit. And to stop complaining about fish jokes, too, and get his organization focused on locking its doors, at least!