Hello. The longer the Democrats are in Washington, the more the mask slips with respect to their true beliefs regarding freedom online. They claim they don’t want a government takeover, they claim they don’t want to regulate content, they claim they don’t want a kill switch, they claim they want to respect privacy, but time and again all of these issues just keep coming up. Witness the new disaster coming out of the White House which would force private firms like Facebook, Skype, and RIM to assist the government with spying on you. They are to cripple, deliberately, any safeguards they have on your privacy to make it easier for government snoops. Remember: already nothing prevents them from listening in on the Internet. What they are demanding now is a huge expansion of power to require encryption in America to be crippled for the benefit of domestic Internet spies. Or at least, that’s the phrasing the left used throughout the Bush administration, so I’m going to throw it back in their disingenuous faces every single chance I get. Remember when fining Janet Jackson’s breast was the worst thing going on in Washington with respect to this stuff, and how horrible that was? As the sign goes, “Miss me yet?” Of course we’re not licked yet with respect to any of this stuff, which is why Seton Motley wrote an open letter to the FCC laying out to the commissioners just how radical and unpopular the Free Press Net Neutrality agenda really is, and how they need to give themselves an out from this stuff instead of marching off the Cliffs of McChesney. It seems like many on the right have realized just how terrible Free Press really is, so we have more and more people writing about that neo-Marxist organization. Mike Wendy asks if they’ve lost their minds but as he points out, when their co-founder Robert McChesney called America “the leading terrorist institution in the world today,” the time to ask that may have been long, long ago. Again, Free Press and its pet commissioners on the FCC don’t have legislative support for what they’re doing, which is why they’re so hot for the “third way” of deem and pass Title II Reclassification, ignoring the courts and the Telecommunications Act to do whatever they want. More proof of their lack of Congressional support comes from reports of Henry Waxman (D-CA) and his new Net Neutrality bill . But much as with the Google-Verizon proposal, this bill will give Free Press and other Communists serious heartburn. It (quite sensibly) treats (typcially franchise monopoly or duopoly) wired ISPs differently from (highly competitive) wireless ISPs. It also discriminates on content, only requiring neutrality to apply to lawful traffic , which again would allow ISPs to kill switch a great deal of BitTorrented traffic in this country, a dagger to the heart the “I want stuff for free online” crowd. It also has mild transparency requirements. All in all, my reading of the Waxman proposal (which is very short by the way, just three pages) makes it come off as even less intrusive than the Google-Verizon plan as it only discusses Internet access, and not any private managed network access which an ISP might still provide. Those would seem to remain relatively unregulated. So yes, if we keep up the pressure, the education, and the noise, we just might beat the Communists on this one.
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Tech at Night: Domestic Internet spying, FCC, Free Press, Henry Waxman, Net Neutrality
Good evening (it’s still Monday night for those of us in the west at least). Let’s start off tonight by remembering when Barack Obama and the democrats complained about so-called domestic spying under the Bush administration? Well, a team of organizations went after the FBI for watching possibly terrorist Islamic organizations. The FBI responded by saying they don’t need to already believe an organization is breaking the law in order to begin preliminary spying on that organization. Now I’ll be blunt: I think this IPS news service is bunk. But it makes me laugh to remember that using modern technology to gather information about terrorists was supposedly a horrible thing when George Bush did it, but now that Barack Obama is using actual live, in-person spies you have to go to radical fringe groups to find out it’s even happening and see the progressive outrage. Wouldn’t it be easier, safer, and more respectful of our rights just to tap the phones of foreign terrorists, than to send people into houses of worship on false pretenses? Moving on to more actions that would be screamed out as a gross disrespect of the Bill of Rights if Bush did it, but since Obama’s doing it you don’t hear a word from the left: the FTC wants to control speech online . According to Reason, we have to hope that the FTC will show forbearance and not use the power it’s claiming to its fullest extent. Hmm, where have we heard that before? In a great disappointment to some, iOS jailbreaks have been newly affirmed to be legal under the DMCA, but the leading iOS jailbreak developers are choosing not to break version 4.0.2 , essentially allowing Apple’s new fixes to win out, and give Apple the control over the platform the firm seeks. Just another case of having the right to do something, but without the something being the right thing to do. One last item tonight: Facebook’s already been under a great deal of pressure and criticism for failing to respect the community, but the firm is yet deciding to go after an organization of teachers to shut it down , siccing a team of corporate lawyers after them, rather than find some benevolent way to fix it while looking like the good guys. Apparently Facebook thinks they can do what they want with your data and that they need to own the word book despite its long history in the English language. I can’t conceive of how this is the right move when Google is surely going to make another run at promoting Google Buzz when possible.
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Tech at Night: FBI, Facebook, FTC, Free Speech, Apple
