Jon Stewart lampoons CNN for its over-the-top “TARGET: USA” coverage.
The media has a significant role in fomenting excessive fear of terrorism and engendering disproportionate responses.
Sign up to have blog posts delivered straight to your inbox!
Jon Stewart lampoons CNN for its over-the-top “TARGET: USA” coverage.
The media has a significant role in fomenting excessive fear of terrorism and engendering disproportionate responses.
Wired News reporter Annalee Newitz has compiled a “top ten” list of privacy debacles.
It’s easy to quibble with the results, but I was delighted to see “The Creation of the Social Security Number” at #1. Our national identifier has used its government backing to push aside all others and enable government and corporate surveillance on a scale that would never have occurred under natural conditions.
In Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood, I discuss how the uniform identification system we’ve built around the Social Security Number is insecure for individuals, making information about them too readily available to governments, corporations, and crooks.
The fix is nothing so ham-handed as banning uses of Social Security Numbers. Rather, it will be necessary to remake our identification systems so that they are diverse and competitive, and thus solicitous of individuals’ interests.
Ars Technica — a wonderful publication with brief, informative, and interesting pieces on technology — is showing a little sloppliness in covering the broadband competition issue. The question whether there is sufficient competition in the provision of broadband Internet service underlies the debate about “net neutrality” — whether there should be public utility regulation of broadband.
Discussing FTC chair Deborah Majoras’ speech at the PFF Aspen Summit, an Ars reporter casually observes, “[M]arket forces really do not exist when it comes to broadband.” That’s at least overstatement. A little more caution would be good given the centrality of the issue.
To show the existence of a duopoly (which is not inherently a competition-free situation), the report links to an earlier Ars piece interpreting a study as showing “not much” competition between DSL and cable. But that conclusion goes only to price competition. And it’s a little overstated, too.
The actual study, from a group called Kagan Research, seems to show that DSL is the low-cost option (and getting lower), while cable is the high-bandwidth option (getting higher in bandwidth while dropping in cost more slowly). That diminishes head-to-head price(-only) competition because each is focused on a different niche. But they’re still in competition.
Boalt Hall Law Professor and Visiting AEI Scholar John Yoo writes in a short piece on the AEI website that we should consider using data mining to pursue terrorists. He makes at least two errors: one historical and one statistical.
Discussing the recent vogue for making U.S. law more like Britain’s, Yoo writes:
[I]ncreasing detention time or making warrants easier to come by merely extends an old-fashioned approach to catching terrorists. These tools require individualized suspicion and “probable cause”; police must have evidence of criminal activity in hand. Such methods did not prevent 9/11, and stopping terrorists, who may have no criminal record, requires something more.
It’s hard to put aside that the vogue for making U.S. law more like Britain’s would undo part of what the Revolutionary War was fought for. And Yoo’s placement of the phrase “probable cause” in quotes — I hope that’s not to suggest that the language of the Fourth Amendment is quaint.
But putting all that aside, Yoo’s first error has to do with more-recent history. He argues that traditional investigative methods “did not prevent 9/11.” But traditional investigative methods weren’t applied to the problem.
Have blogs become part of the mainstream? Consider the evidence of a front-page story in Saturday’s New York Times, which reports on reaction to the federal court ruling that the NSA wiretapping program is illegal. The first three legal experts quoted are bloggers; two of the quotes are from the blogs, one appears to be from an interview with a lawyer-blogger. Stop writing those law review articles, legal scholars, and get thee to Blogger.
A lot is happening in the world of wireless telecommunications these days. And a lot is not. First, let’s look at a couple things that are happening:
WiMax is poised to move forward as a significant new platform for broadband. “WiMax” is the popular name for the 802.16 wireless metropolitan-area network standard. It’s like WiFi but can travel a lot farther. It easily traverses the “last mile,” the complicated and expensive rights-of-way that create a high barrier to entry for competitors to DSL and cable.
Recently, Intel announced that a line of its chips will support WiMax. Intel also invested $600 million in leading WiMax provider Clearwire. Clearwire recently pulled back from an IPO, though, fueling speculation that Clearwire and WiMax are not all they’re cracked up to be. Since then, Sprint Nextel has announced that it would spend up to $3 billion to build a WiMax network. Nothing is certain, but WiMax looks pretty good right now for bringing more competition to broadband.
Here’s another thing happening: The Federal Communications Commission is amidst an auction of wireless spectrum. In 1993, Congress gave the FCC the authority to use competitive bidding for allocating rights to use radio spectrum. This beats comparative hearings and lotteries by a mile, because companies that have paid good money for spectrum tend to be well focused on making good use of it. This redounds to the benefit of consumers and the public through new, competitive wireless services.
A big story on the front page of the Washington Post Style section is illustrated with a beautiful, stylized photo of new CBS anchor Katie Couric. In tiny letters almost invisible to the naked eye, the photo source is identified as CBS. In other words, it’s a publicity photo, not a news photo. There’s another glamorous CBS photo dominating page 8, where the story jumps.
Would the Post print a corporate news release? Not likely, though smaller papers do. Is that different from using a corporate photo? Perhaps. Should the Federal Newspaper Commission look into the use of corporate photos and corporate news releases? Oh, right, we don’t have a Federal Newspaper Commission, because we have a First Amendment.
Why, then, is something called the Federal Communications Commission investigating the use of “video news releases” by television broadcasters (as reported on the front page of the Business section the same day)? Oh, right, because somehow the First Amendment doesn’t give broadcasters the same free speech rights that newspapers enjoy. Prodded by the anti-free-speech lobby Center for Media and Democracy, the FCC wants to know if broadcasters clearly label “video news releases” produced by corporations when they are used on local news programs. CMD is well within its rights to criticize the use of VNRs. But when it calls for government regulation of what can and must be shown on news broadcasts, it’s calling for censorship. And censorship is far worse than “fake news” about new products on local television broadcasts.