Twitter Tool Allows Centralized Censorship

The social networking service Twitter announced a new tool today that allows it to selectively censor users’ tweets based on a host of criteria.  This has taken a lot of heat from some critics but there’s another side to this that deserves attention.  The company’s trademark 140 character messages have taken the Internet by storm, but there are many complications when it comes to laws restricting speech around the world.  What’s legal to say in one country is illegal in others.  This new tool allows more people to see what people have to say, because it can filter messages by country.  ”Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world,” Twitter wrote in a blog post. “We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.”  That’s a major improvement over the old design, even if it does lend a hand to repressive regimes.  But some countries have legitimate reasons for imposing speech restrictions, while others are less so.  The United States reserves the right to restrict speech that incites violence and France and Germany prohibit any speech that involves Nazis and related hate groups.  Those seem perfectly reasonable to me, but are still censorship.

The thing is, Twitter has to play by a lot of different rules and it’s not always easy to walk that line.  Jillian York, who works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, had this to say on her personal blog:

Let’s be clear: This is censorship. There’s no way around that. But alas, Twitter is not above the law.  Just about every company hosting user-generated content has, at one point or another, gotten an order or government request to take down content.  Google lays out its orders in itsTransparency Report.  Other companies are less forthright.  In any case, Twitter has two options in the event of a request: Fail to comply, and risk being blocked by the government in question, or comply (read: censor).  And if they have “boots on the ground”, so to speak, in the country in question?  No choice.

So, to all those who are getting ready to protest Twitter tomorrow with a Wikipedia-inspired blackout, go ahead, but your efforts might be better targeted at the countries actually dictating the restrictions.  Twitter is, literally and figuratively, the messenger.  They have some social responsibility in helping to open the world to more dialogue, but it’s not their mandate.

Thoughts?

Supreme Court: GPS Tracking Requires a Warrant

Today marked a big win for privacy advocates.  The U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling on the question of whether it was Constitutional for police to attach a GPS tracking unit to someone’s vehicle without their consent, and without a warrant.  The answer, in United States v. Jones was a resounding NO, even though that isn’t immediately evident from the 5-4 decision.  It turns out that, while there were five votes affirming the lower court’s decision to overturn the Antoine Jones’s conviction, the other four also would have voted to overturn it, but on different grounds.  It owes to the complicated nature of Supreme Court decisions, but the end result is that police must show reasonable cause before remotely monitoring a suspects movements for weeks on end.

“We hold that the government’s installation of a G.P.S. device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search,’ ” said Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor joined the majority opinion.

As mentioned above, however, the other four justices didn’t so much vote against overturning the conviction, as they argued that it should be overturned under a different Constitutional principle than the one used by the majority.  Rather than finding that the placement of the tracker violated the defendant’s right against unlawful search and seizure under the 4th Amendment, they contend that the 28+ days when the defendant’s movements were tracked violated his reasonable expectations of privacy under the 14th Amendment.  Justice Sotomayor’s opinion appeared to walk the line between Justice Scalia’s and Justice Alito’s concurrence, arguing that the act of physically placing the device on the defendant’s vehicle was sufficient grounds for her to find his rights violated.  But, she went on to explain that as such physical intrusions became less necessary in the digital age, there would be ample room for the concurrence’s argument to take hold. “People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers,” she wrote. “I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year.”

This opinion should serve as a warning to law enforcement, since all nine justices expressed their concerns about the use of GPS technology, but we’ll have to wait for another case to find out just how far they will be willing to go to protect citizens’ privacy from the government’s use of technology.

What a week it has been for that little anti-piracy bill known as SOPA.  Together with her sister bill in the Senate, PIPA, these two bills took a considerable drubbing.  They appear, for all intents and purposes, to be completely dead in their current form.  House Speaker John Boehner declared that further votes on SOPA had been delayed indefinitely and Representative Lamar Smith, the chief sponsor of SOPA, said on Friday that he was pulling the bill “until there is wider agreement on a solution.”

How did we get here when a week ago these bills had super-majority support?  Unless you’ve been living totally off the grid, momentum started to build against them when President Obama threatened a veto if SOPA went forward with the most controversial provisions that would allow private companies to shut down any website using a court order if the target site linked to a site that linked to a site with infringing content.  The President railed against this as a serious impediment to free speech and a major giveaway to special interests.  Yet despite his opposition, with over 60% of Representatives and more than 80 Senators potentially in favor of their respective bills, there was a possibility that SOPA and PIPA could have survived.

The President’s move brought some attention to the issue, but the real game changer was  the Internet blackouts led by Wikipedia on Wednesday.  Suddenly everyone was talking about SOPA.  An administrative assistant stopped me in the hall to ask about it, saying that she and a number of other people had been discussing it earlier.  Moreover, all those who couldn’t find the simple information they’d come to expect from Wikipedia began inundating their representatives with calls.  Democracy in action!  It was beautiful.  Suddenly, supporters of the bills scattered away from it like roaches from a flashlight until it was pulled by its sponsors.  But the fight isn’t over.

The dying media industries whose business models have been upended by the Internet and the new technologies are not going to give up this fight easily; not when there is so much money at stake.  As I explained earlier, this bill is less about piracy than it is about political economics.  For those unfamiliar with the term “rent-seeking,” this as an example of the age-old practice of mustering government power to protect one’s position in a way that economically benefits a few at the expense of the many.  SOPA could potentially be used to shut down sites that offer content in ways that, while legal, aren’t as profitable for studios and record labels as the compact disc or DVD.  The old revenue model, as explained in exquisite detail on the latest podcast from the Planet Money team at NPR, is gone and a whole new (and highly profitable) system is replacing it.  The only problem is that these profits are in the heretofore neglected areas such as live concert tours, licensing and merchandising.  One thing to note, other than scalped or counterfeit tickets, live concerts are pretty difficult to pirate online.  Furthermore, economists will point out that the people who would be willing to take the time to download a pirated copy of a movie or music album are probably people who would not have bought the product legally because they did not value the work as highly as the price attached.  I won’t bore you with an explanation of deadweight loss, but it is a significant economic factor to consider.

The bottom line is that SOPA was a badly written bill that needed to die.  Few will publicly mourn its passing, but that doesn’t mean that copyright infringers are free to continue their nefarious ways, either.  At the same time that people were marching in protest of SOPA, the Feds were storming the homes of a massive piracy ring centered around the website, Megaupload.  There are probably other operations gathering strength as we speak, because if we’ve learned anything, it’s that whenever you take down one piracy site, another springs up to take up the slack.  That’s the thing about piracy, it’s really freaking profitable.  But it also shows that there are plenty of perfectly good laws on the books right now for going after and stopping infringers.  What effect could a law that’s designed to stop online infringement have against the biggest source of illegal content, counterfeit DVDs sold on every street corner in China and India?

As if that weren’t enough to keep track of, a new bill designed to curb infringement but without the massive threats to Internet freedom comes in.  Known as OPEN, or the Online Protection & ENforcement of Digital Trade Act, the bipartisan bill sponsored by Ron Wyden and Darrell Issa (the guy responsible for car alarms) makes several welcome changes that should have been no-brainers for SOPA, including a changed mission and focus to sites “dedicated to infringing activity.” but should still be considered a starting point.  The biggest difference is the shift from using courts to enforce take-down requests to the International Trade Commission.  Why would handing the reins over to a non-US site be a good thing? There are plenty of reasons, but I’m exhausted.  I’ll talk about it more if it gets off the ground.

SOPA UPDATE 4: Wikipedia to Go Offline for 24 Hours in Protest of SOPA

The Wikipedia community announced late yesterday that it would initiate a site-wide blackout of its English language encyclopedia beginning at 5:00 UTC (whatever that is) on Wednesday, January 18, 2012.  The announcement was made in banner ads across the site and explained on the Wikimedia Foundation site.  In response to some early criticism about the move, Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director stated in her post that, “although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not.”  This appears to be exactly the sort of dispute that prompted President Obama to announce his opposition to the Stop Online Privacy Act and PROTECTIP Act.

What will happen to people when they lose access to the enormous repository of information found in the crowd-sourced encyclopedia?  Hopefully it will inspire them to read more about the proposed legislation and its potential impact on the very framework of the Internet.  Ideally, they will find their way to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s list of reasons why SOPA must be rejected.  It seems fairly clear from the language in the bill that, if powerful media interests in Hollywood didn’t ghostwrite the thing entirely, that they had a supporting role in the drafting phase.  The desperation to root out piracy is palpable.  Yet, we’ve learned from the success of iTunes, Spotify, even Napster’s rebirth–and the abject failure of DRM technology–that Draconian measures to stop piracy are neither necessary nor good business.  People are willing to pay (a lot of) money for content if they feel they are getting a fair deal.  Ninety-nine cents for a song is a now a no-brainer and we’re not far off from a similar standard in visual media.

Technology companies like Apple, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and Google are just  starting to figure out how to profit from video content.  Why would anyone risk computer viruses and identity theft from bit torrents when they can just toss a few bucks at the nearest tech company for high-quality all-you-can watch content?  There still be people out there who want to cheat the system, but they’re moving to the fringes, not the mainstream.  Back when I was in college, everyone I knew who studied abroad in China came back with binders full of DVDs that they bought on the street.  I bet none of those discs has been touched in five years because watching Netflix on your iPhone is so much more convenient.

What I’m trying to say comes down to two things: First, I hope the Wikipedia protest is successful or at the very least unnecessary due to the President’s opposition to the bill; Second, I hope that people also start to realize that piracy is a bugbear that groups like the RIAA and MPAA like to drag out in an effort to scare people into preserving their dying business model.  You can’t force people to buy products they don’t want.  CDs and DVDs used to make a lot of money for studios and chains like Tower Records, but the future is in the cloud. A bill like SOPA that could vaporize the cloud must not be allowed to strangle the fundamental right of people to freely access information.  Laws protecting dying industries may temporarily ease the pain for those special interests, but they cannot stop the inexorable march of technology and the freedom that springs from it.

UPDATE 3: SOPA Likely Dead on Arrival, Due to President’s Opposition

Yesterday, President Obama dealt yet another blow to the faltering, studio-backed anti-piracy bill known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and Protect IP Act in the Senate.  Already on the ropes after legislators moved to strike SOPA provisions that would block or reroute traffic to websites that offered or linked to unlicensed, copyrighted material, the bill continued stir controversy.  According to the New York Times, President Obama felt that the bill could ultimately pit technology companies in Silicon Valley against media conglomerates located a few hundred miles down the California coast.  While the intense lobbying from the two sides could have been useful for representatives looking to raise all the cash they can find in an election year, a drawn out debate would ultimately cause more harm than good.  Markets prefer certainty and it certainly moves things in that direction.  

Free speech advocates and internet entrepreneurs should also be happy to see SOPA on the ropes.  The bill, as mentioned in earlier posts, was so vaguely worded that it could have potentially blocked access to all of YouTube or Facebook. It could have allowed censors to block or reroute access to entire sites if any infringing content was found there.  These flaws were not unknown, but ways to work around them appear to be rather difficult to formulate. Punishing piracy is one thing, but giving some government agency the power to police the internet and control which ones people can access smacks of the Great Firewall that aids the totalitarian Chinese government’s control over all information within its boundaries.  Fears that SOPA would give content owners incredible power to censor the internet now don’t seem that unwarranted.  The President, according to the Times, asserted that any IP protection bill “must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet.”  The costs of piracy, while in the millions or possibly billions, pale in comparison to the incredible benefits that free and unfettered access to global information provides to humanity, no matter where you are.

SOPA Update 2: Vote Delayed Until After New Year

Engadget is reporting that the U.S. House of Representatives committee charged with evaluating the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and revising it, if necessary, has put the hearings that were scheduled to resume today on hold until after the Holidays.  Guess they’re too busy making sure the lights will still be on when they come back to care about whether there will be pirate pirated movies floating around the Internets.  It other news, apparently a petition demanding that President Obama veto the bill reached its goal of 25,000 signatures.  Stay tuned for further updates after the New Year.

Follow-Up: Congressional SOPA Hearings Available for Live Streaming

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is the controversial bill that would make it illegal to show search results to or serve ads on websites suspected of being homes to pirated content.  The protests have come in hard and strong from ISPs, search engines and ad delivery companies, chief among them Google and Yahoo!.  But the major record labels and Hollywood studios are fighting for the bill’s passage just as hard.  It seems like the only winners are K Street lobbyists; but then, when are they ever not winners in Washington?  If you’re interested in seeing how the sausage is made, the House Judiciary Committee is live-streaming the committee hearing that started this morning.  It’s available here.

If you want to read more about the controversy, check these links below:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57343637-501465/house-committee-votes-on-sopa-today/

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/technology/lines-are-drawn-on-legislation-against-internet-piracy.html?_r=1&ref=technology

http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/16/google-facebook-twitter-and-others-speak-out-against-the-stop/

Analysts Pessimistic About Zynga’s Growth Potential Ahead of IPO

Perhaps the most well-known social gaming company is getting ready to launch its initial public offering (IPO) later this week and analysts are already tamping down expectations.     Forbes reports that predictions of the Farmville parent company will ”slow to 20% and 17% in 2012 and 2013, respectively, versus growth of 156% in 2010 and (estimated) 37% in 2011.”  That’s a pretty steep drop off, but makes sense when you figure that nearly all of its games are the same just with different themes (i.e., farms, cities, castles).  For all of its meteoric growth, especially once it partnered with Facebook, perhaps its most notable liability is that same Facebook partnership.  Facebook remains the dominant force in social media, but growing pressure over its privacy and security problems and competition from Google and Twitter might slow its growth as well.  Zynga’s decision to use Facebook Credits as its main source of income also limits its independence and ability to adapt to changing market forces (I could get into analogies about developing countries pegging their currency to the dollar, but that might get a little too wonky, but I can always elaborate in the comments if you’re really interested).  For now, we’ll watch the IPO and marvel at another Internet startup raking in millions, but I, for one, will be keeping my real dollars in my real wallet.

Minnesota’s Anti-Bullying Statute: Weakest in the Nation, Slated for Revision

I’ve been saying it for a while now, but a new report by the U.S. Department of Education confirms that Minnesota’s anti-bullying statute is the weakest of the forty-six states it analyzed (four states, however, lacked state-wide polices altogether).  At a mere 37 words, it’s no secret that the law needs to be re-written.  As it stands, Minn. Stat. § 121A.0695 instructs local school boards to enact a written policy on bullying, but lacks any suggestions for what to include beyond the fact that electronic bullying should be considered in the policy.

Fortunately, this report, and a recent push by state Attorney General Lori Swanson to pass a revised version of the law that models its language on North Dakota’s, which was passed earlier this year with bi-partisan support and wide acclaim from anti-bullying watchdogs like www.bullypolice.org.  The proposed law provides model language and requires school districts to report bullying incidents and investigate them if/when it takes effect on January 1, 2013.  The law will also include mandates for reporting possibly criminal acts to law enforcement and preventing retaliation against those who report bullying.

This is clearly a great step in the right direction, but what troubles me is the proposal’s  lack of any mention of cyber-bullying and harassment through social media, online worlds or other Internet services.  The prevalence of this form of bullying is one of the main drivers in the movement against bullying, since kids don’t realize how harmful it can be to tease another person through the Internet.  Their still-developing brains can’t fathom how inescapably permanent and devastatingly public the mean things they say or do through the Internet can be.  Clearly, school districts and their administrators are ill-equipped to deal with acts that take place far beyond the four walls of the classroom or the school yard.  Some states have justified far-reaching policies on the grounds that outside behavior that affects other students’ school performance becomes the district’s business, but there are dangerous Constitutional waters.  A policy that polices what students can say to each other privately through email, text message or on non-public chat rooms could quickly run afoul of privacy and 1st Amendment concerns, even though students’ 1st Amendment free speech rights are far narrower than those of adults (see, e.g. Tinker v. Des Moines).

I’m glad to see that the problem is continuing to gather attention and that the states appear to be responding to growing national pressure.  It still seems to me, however, that a national law addressing cyber-bullying and online harassment needs to be considered because of the cross-border, decentralized nature of the Internet.  We continue to shoehorn state and local laws into online behavior with the incomprehensible philosophy that local laws should govern local actions.  That’s fine for real-world actions, but leaves far too much ambiguity when it comes to online behavior of this nature.  Would the district of the victim or the bully govern the punishment?  What about people from out of state?  What about behavior that starts at home and then resumes in school?  Is it a problem if a child doesn’t know what the policy is in the neighboring township or school when she posts derogatory remarks about another person?

As Bob Collins at Minnesota Public Radio’s News Cut blog noted, the first time the Minnesota legislature passed its bullying law, there was no debate and barely any public input.  I doubt that will be the case this time.  It’s a good thing.  Our children deserve a well-though-out policy that has a clear enforcement strategy and a welcoming demeanor. Let’s home they get it.

Is Your Bank Tracking Your Movements: Bait and Switch Journalism Wants You To Think So

I received a link to this story from Huffington Post this morning with the apparently outrageous news that Ally Bank was somehow tracking its customers’ movements and using that information to bolster its profit margins.  This seems like a major breach of personal privacy, especially since this practice isn’t disclosed in their privacy policy.  The only problem with the story is that none of the most shocking details are actually true.

It’s a practice as old as time: the bait and switch.  I learned all about it in my 9th grade English class–you say something shocking and outrageous or announce an incredibly good deal to get the reader’s attention, only to steer them to something unrelated.  This article capitalized on the growing use (and fear) of location and other behavioral tracking as a way to generate more targeted advertising.  The practice of using your location to send you ads for places in your vicinity is just the latest way for companies to attract customers.  I shouldn’t be surprised that this headline got my attention, but I’m annoyed that I was played for a fool.

A spokeswoman for Ally Bank, formerly known as GMAC before the automaker’s financial unit changed its name after the TARP bailout in 2009, said that the company uses location information to help customers who visit its website find the nearest ATM.  She went on to say that the site does not store the information, nor does the company use that information for any other purpose.  Many apps and programs use location information, it’s getting to be a part of life.  It stands to reason that surreptitious monitoring is something to be concerned about, such as when it’s law enforcement doing the tracking.  A recent case before the U.S. Supreme Court presented this very question.  Arguing that it violated the 4th Amendment’s warrant requirement for police to attach a GPS tracking device to monitor every movement over the course of a week or more, the petitioners case hangs on that fundamental right to be left alone.  It’s hardly appropriate for the government to know (or try to know) where everyone is at all times–the founders would be appalled.

Putting those two diatribes aside for the moment, the last thing I will say is that, while I enjoy some of the services that utilize location tracking, and even volunteer some of that information from time to time, it’s essential that consumers continue to demand that any service that wants to transmit your location explicitly seek your consent.  They also need to let you know, up front, for how long and for what purposes your information will be used.  A 15-page privacy policy isn’t what I’m talking about, either.  It has to be fewer than three lines long so people can read and comprehend it, regardless of whether they’re on a desktop computer or mobile device.

In the end, I’m thankful for the HuffPo’s bad journalism.  At least they’re keeping us on our toes.