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Cato Daily Dispatch for July 7, 2003

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(Links to outside sources were active as of the date of this dispatch; however, not all news sources maintain links to current stories indefinitely. Some links also may require registration.)

MIT Researchers Turn Tables on the Government

"Annoyed by the prospect of a massive new federal surveillance system, two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are celebrating the Fourth of July with a new Internet service that will let citizens create dossiers on government officials," reports The Boston Globe.

"The system will start by offering standard background information on politicians, but then go one bold step further, by asking Internet users to submit their own intelligence reports on government officials -- reports that will be published with no effort to verify their accuracy."

"Chris Csikszentmihalyi, assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab, and graduate student Ryan McKinley created the Government Information Awareness (GIA) project as a response to the US government's Total Information Awareness program (TIA)."

In "Total Information Awareness for the Ages" Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., director of technology studies, writes: "An aggressive TIA project will threaten privacy and chill healthy civil disobedience. Ironically, the project could also increase security risks. Even the Pentagon's resources are limited: Most people are not terrorists, and it can be a costly diversion to attempt to monitor the torrent of chatter that will be generated by this misguided program. Because terrorists will resemble ordinary people, TIA inevitably means magnifying-glass surveillance of ordinary folks, wasting more time, all in a vicious, misdirected circle."

Chinese, South Korean Leaders Meet to Discuss North Korea

"The leaders of China and South Korea vowed today to work to bring reclusive North Korea to the negotiating table to peacefully resolve a deepening crisis over the communist North's nuclear weapons programs," according to Reuters.

"Chinese President Hu Jintao and his visiting South Korean counterpart, Roh Moo-hyun, said they agreed it was important to maintain the momentum of diplomacy to keep the Korean peninsula peaceful, stable and nuclear free."

"But neither leader specified the timing or format for any future talks to follow up on an initial meeting between China, North Korea and the United States in April. Washington has pressed the North to agree to expand future talks to include South Korea and Japan, but Pyongyang wants two-way talks with the United States."

In "Enlisting China: The battle for nuclear-free Koreas," Senior Fellow Doug Bandow writes that the United States should point out to Beijing that although some believe the North Korean nuclear crisis is America's problem, aiding Washington in dealing with North Korea is in China's best interest.

"Better would be to point out the adverse consequences to the PRC as well as America if Pyongyang does not desist," Bandow writes. "For instance, it is not in China's interest for North Korea to destabilize the peninsula, risking economic ties with the South and inviting U.S. military action."

Under Pressure, Microsoft Makes Licensing Changes

"Microsoft, in response to prodding from the Justice Department, has made a series of changes intended to make it easier and less expensive for industry competitors and partners to license technical information from the company," The New York Times reports.

"But despite the easing of some licensing restrictions, the government and several states said in a court filing Thursday that they remain concerned by certain Microsoft practices and planned to address those concerns in a scheduled conference with a federal judge on July 24."

"Thursday's court document was a status report on Microsoft's compliance with the settlement agreement that ended the long-running federal antitrust case against the company."

Cato Senior Fellow Robert Levy has used the mistreatment of Microsoft as one justification for the repeal of U.S. anti-trust laws. "Because of murky statutes and conflicting case law, companies like Microsoft can never be quite sure what constitutes permissible behavior," writes Levy in "Microsoft: The States' Last Hurrah," an op-ed in Cato's e-newsletter, techknowledge. "If the company can't demonstrate that its actions were motivated by efficiency, conduct that is otherwise legal somehow morphs into an antitrust violation."

Jonathan Block, editor, jblock@cato.org