Tag: Internet

Will the Government Be the New King of All Media?

By
Jim Harper

Howard Stern swore off free broadcast radio in 2004 in part because of federally mandated decency rules. The self-annointed “king of all media” may have stepped off the throne in doing so. Them’s the breaks in the competitive media marketplace, contorted as it is by government speech controls.

Some would argue that a new king of all media is seeking the mantle of power now that the Obama administration is ensconced and friendly majorities hold the House and Senate. The new pretender is the federal government.

And some would argue that the Free Press “Changing Media Summit” held yesterday here in Washington laid the groundwork for a new federal takeover of media and communications.

That person is not me. But I am concerned by the enthusiasm of many groups in Washington to “improve” media (by their reckoning) with government intervention.

Free Press issued a report yesterday entitled Dismantling Digital Deregulation. Even the title is a lot to swallow; have communications and media been deregulated in any meaningful sense? (The title itself prioritizes alliteration over logic — evidence of what may come within.)

Opening the conference, Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press, harkened to Thomas Jefferson — well and good — but public subsidies for printers, and a government-run postal system, model his hopes for U.S. government policies to come.

It’s helpful to note what policies found their way into Jefferson’s constitution as absolutes and what were merely permissive. The absolute is found in Amendment I: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”

Among the permissive is the Article I power “to establish Post Offices and post Roads.” There’s no mandate to do it and the scope and extent of any law is subject to Congress’ discretion, just like the power to create patents and copyrights, which immediately follows.

I won’t label Free Press and all their efforts a collectivist plot and dismiss it as such — there are some issues on which we probably have common cause — but a crisper expression of “dismantling deregulation” is “re-regulation.”

It’s a very friendly environment for a government takeover of modern-day printing presses: Internet service providers, cable companies, phone companies, broadcasters, and so on.

Topics: 
Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

New at Cato Unbound: Ten Years of Code

By
Jason Kuznicki

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig’s seminal work on Internet law, turns ten this year. To mark the occasion, Cato Unbound has invited a distinguished panel of Internet law experts to discuss the book’s enduring significance: What did it get right? What did it get wrong? And where do we go from here?

Joining us will be Adam Thierer, Jonathan Zittrain, and Lawrence Lessig himself. The lead essay, up this morning, is by Declan McCullagh. Readers of Code will recall that McCullagh was called out by name in the book’s final chapter, and his “do-nothing” cyberlibertarian views were criticized at length. Ten years later, is it time to reconsider? Join us and find out.

Topics: 
Cato Publications, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

Justice Scalia Makes Sense; Law Professor Responds by Instructing Class to be a Collective Jerk

By
Jim Harper

In January, Justice Antonin Scalia made some remarks about privacy at the Institute of American and Talmudic Law. The AP reported:

Scalia said he was largely untroubled by such Internet tracking. “I don’t find that particularly offensive,” he said. “I don’t find it a secret what I buy, unless it’s shameful.”

He added there’s some information that’s private, “but it doesn’t include what groceries I buy.”

In response to this commonsensical provocation, Fordham University law professor Joel Reidenberg had his class compile a 15-page dossier on Scalia, “including his home address, the value of his home, his home phone number, the movies he likes, his food preferences, his wife’s personal e-mail address, and ‘photos of his lovely grandchildren.’”

Reidenberg apparently sent the file to Justice Scalia, eliciting this response:

I stand by my remark at the Institute of American and Talmudic Law conference that it is silly to think that every single datum about my life is private. I was referring, of course, to whether every single datum about my life deserves privacy protection in law.

It is not a rare phenomenon that what is legal may also be quite irresponsible. That appears in the First Amendment context all the time. What can be said often should not be said. Prof. Reidenberg’s exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any.

Being a jerk to Justice Scalia didn’t help Professor Reidenberg make his point, whatever it may be.

According to the Above the Law blog, Reidenberg believes that “technological constraints should be built into the infrastructure of online networks in recognition of users’ privacy rights.” He may also think the Nile should flow the other direction, but having his students dig up graves in Egypt won’t advance that cause.

Topics: 
Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

Awesome, Fearsome, Awesome - Or Maybe Silly

By
Jim Harper

This video is making the rounds because Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) muses in it that perhaps the Internet shouldn’t have been invented.

He immediately grants, “That’s a stupid thing to say” - perhaps for political reasons, or perhaps because he recognizes that the Internet makes us much better off despite every risk it carries and security flaw in it.

But he goes on to overstate cybersecurity risks excessively, breathlessly, and self-seriously. Not quite to the point of stupid - maybe we can call it “silly.”

The Department of Defense, he says, is “attacked” three million times a day. Well, yeah, but these “attacks” are mostly repetitious use of the same attack, mounted by “script kiddies” - unsophisticated know-nothings who get copies of others’ attacks and run them just to make trouble. The defense against this is to continually foreclose attacks and genres of attack as they develop, the way the human body develops antibodies to germs and viruses.

It’s important work, and it’s not always easy, but securing against attacks is an ongoing, stable practice in network management and a field of ongoing study in computer science. The attacks may continue to come, but it doesn’t really matter when the immunities and failsafes are in place and continuously being updated.

More important than this kind of threat inflation is the policy premise that the Internet should be treated as critical infrastructure because some important things happen on it.

Of cyber attack, Rockefeller says, “It’s an act … which can shut this country down. Shut down its electricity system, its banking system, shut down really anything we have to offer. It is an awesome problem.”

Umm, not really. Here’s Cato adjunct scholar Tim Lee, commenting on a report about the Estonian cyber attacks last year:

[S]ome mission-critical activities, including voting and banking, are carried out via the Internet in some places. But to the extent that that’s true, the lesson of the Estonian attacks isn’t that the Internet is “critical infrastructure” on par with electricity and water, but that it’s stupid to build “critical infrastructure” on top of the public Internet. There’s a reason that banks maintain dedicated infrastructure for financial transactions, that the power grid has a dedicated communications infrastructure, and that computer security experts are all but unanimous that Internet voting is a bad idea.

Tim has also noted that the Estonia attacks didn’t reach parliament, ministries, banks, and media - just their Web sites. Calm down, everyone.

But in the debate over raising the bridge or lowering the river, Rockefeller is choosing the policy that most enthuses and involves him: Get critical infrastructure onto the Internet and get the government into the cyber security business.

That’s a recipe for disaster. The right answer is to warn the operators of key infrastructure to keep critical functions off the Internet and let markets and tort law hold them responsible should they fail to maintain themselves operational.

I have written elsewhere about maintaining private responsibility for cyber security. My colleague Ben Friedman has written about who owns cyber security and more on the great cyber security freakout.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

Who Owns Cybersecurity?

By
Benjamin H. Friedman

There is a government brawl underway over cybersecurity.

The Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) is legally responsible for cybersecurity for nonmilitary parts of the government. It is also supposed to help state and local government and the private sector protect their networks. But Shaun Waterman reports that the guy running that center just quit because the National Security Agency (the wiretapping intelligence agency) was basically running his office and taking over its function.

According to Walter Pincus’ article in today’s Washington Post, Strategic Command (the nuclear weapons command) is in charge of offensive cyber attacks and defending US military networks from cyberattack. But the NSA oversees Stratcom’s cybersecurity activities, somehow or other.

The White House is conducting a 60-day cybersecurity review, which is being led by an official in the office of Admiral Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence. Blair wants a bigger role for U.S. intelligence agencies in cybersecurity. Presumably that means the NSA, which employs some of the nation’s leading cryptographers. Meanwhile, Obama is likely to give General Keith Alexander, head of NSA, his fourth star and make him the White House’s cybersecurity coordinator (aka, the cyberczar).

So it sounds like the review may be moot – the decks are stacked for the NSA to take over. The Federal Times, however, reports that Congress may upset those plans.  Congressmen on the homeland security committee still want DHS in the lead.

What about private networks? The White House Review will address that too. Alexander has said that the NSA should play a role. But right now, according to most people, it’s DHS’s job. Pincus writes, “Responsibility of protecting civilian networks currently rests with the Department of Homeland Security.”

I would have thought it rests with the network operators. Missing in this debate, from what I can tell, is any attempt to outline what public goods are at play. Clearly, the federal government should defend its own networks. (Whether it should do so through the leadership of agency recently engaged in vast illegal activity is less clear.) The feds should probably also collect intelligence about cyberattacks, make it available to the public and pursue perpetrators. But providing security to private entities, through technology transfers or consultation, seems akin to providing locks to homeowners. That may be too simple – and the relevant distinction may be whether we are talking about state or non-state threats – but it’s something that the review should consider.

Here’s more on the great cybersecurity freakout.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

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