I’m excited to write such a scary headline. The irony is the person spying on you is – You.  A new bill making its way through Congress will require any operator of a wireless network to maintain records of IP addresses for up to two years.  This means every cafe, park, and homemaker would suddenly have massive data requirements.

Of course, this is all done, really, to protect the child.  Senator John Cornyn summarized the importance of the bill:

While the Internet has generated many positive changes in the way we communicate and do business, its limitless nature offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children. Keeping our children safe requires cooperation on the local, state, federal, and family level.

The bill is even titled the Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth Act or Internet Safety Act. Creative. A similar bill was introduced three years ago.

Of course, this bill will do nothing to protect children. Instead, it will put an undue burden on businesses and individuals to maintain huge records of unneeded data.  Jonathan Zittrain wrote about the inefficiency of data retention laws back in 2002.  Forcing so much data retention makes it harder to find the information you need.  Michael Masnick puts it, we need better data, not more data.

Senator Diane Feinstein added an odd amendment to the stimulus package aimed at forcing ISPs to regulate copyright infringement (and child pornography) on their networks.  The content filtering amendment has been pushed off the stimulus bill, but more for procedural issues than merits making it likely we’ll see it again.

Feinstein’s amendment is a dream for copyright holders with little regard for consumers and service providers (ironic Feinstein’s from California, right?). Her amendment calls “for reasonable network management practices such as deterring unlawful activity, including child pornography and copyright infringement.” These being the most heinous things one can do online.  Congress almost regularly puts up these “stop child pornography” bills that chill free speech and are struck down by the courts, but no members of Congress are likely to vote against protecting our children.

Content filtering, for all the grandstanding done by copyright holders (and attorney generals against child pornography), are wholly ineffective.  No technology has been shown to know what’s copyrighted material or even pornography, legal or otherwise.  So this reasonable network management is pie in the sky meant to put the responsibility of policing everyone on ISPs who are protected under various safe harbor provisions.  The only way they could even attempt this is with deep packet inspections which lead to serious privacy concerns.  Public Knowledge brought great attention to the issue, which is quiet for now, but likely to return again.

The bailout’s for the banking industry are a failure.  I say this because we don’t have a set of goals to accomplish.  The government just hands over billions of dollars to the same people to messed up the financial industry and says, have fun, don’t fuck up.  As investors in these banks, the public has no oversight, transparency, or accountability all of which the government promises.  This is, of course, nothing new with our government, and is why I partially blame the news media.

I was optimistic when David Cay Johnston wrote about how journalists need to change their approach to the financial crisis, saying “let’s not make the same mistakes as were made with the run-up to the Iraq War, and the PATRIOT ACT that so eroded our credibility, in terms of how we cover this financial crisis.”  But nothing changed.  The news media was incapable of covering such a complex and nuanced story.  Same for our politicians.  For eight years, politicians and news media have been teaching the public to accept one liner answers and he said/she said narratives.  No filter, no analysis, no answers.  Should we go to war, not go to war. Should we protect ourselves from terrorists or not protect ourselves from terrorists.  The financial crisis couldn’t be broken down to simple platitudes making it impossible for 24-hour news channels (and many newspapers) to fully inform the public.

Without a news media, there is no accountability in democracy.  Sure people can vote every couple of years in the polls, but that doesn’t change the system.  Public shaming is a powerful tool. That’s why accountability in the bailout matters.  AIG has already spent billions on vacations and retreats for the same executives who wasted billions before.

I’m late to the bailout bashing, but felt there are still lessons to learn and things to do, especially since there’s more bailing out to be done (credit card companies, the second round of mortgage failures). First, let’s understand the goals of any bailout.  If it’s simply to save jobs, then save jobs (most of the banks and car companies are already having massive layoffs even after bailout payments).  But let’s have some publicly stated goals so we, the public and news media, can judge progress.  And have the news media follow up on politicians passing these bills.  Create websites to follow who’s getting money (banks and politicians) so the public can see the full story.

I’m not expecting change as the same people who screwed up before are still in power, at the banks, in government, and at news organizations.  But I still have hope for change.

YouTube has rejected Senator John McCain’s request for the video website  to consider fair use when responding to DMCA takedown requests.

McCain posted campaign ads with clips from CBS and Fox news broadcasts. The two networks sent YouTube takedown notices, which according to the DMCA, they are legally obliged to respond to immediately in order to maintain safe harbor protections.  McCain voted for the DMCA in 1998 and now has to deal with the consequences.

This shows McCain and few in Congress truly understood the effects of the DMCA and likely the same can be said for most complex laws put on their desks.  The DMCA includes the excellent safe harbor provision that protects platforms from being liable for what users do (like YouTube shouldn’t be liable for copyright infringement of its users).  But the takedown notices have become an abused system stifling free expression and negative opinions. This is not to mention how anti-circumvention laws violate upheld fair use rights and stifle innovation.

When first passed, Congress probably thought they were protecting intellectual property. Their intentions might even have been noble. But these under-thought, one-sided laws are going to hurt innovation and creativity. And you could argue it’s hurting democracy. McCain can’t even get his own campaign ads on YouTube because the site is too scared of being sued over copyright infringement (too late).

Too often laws are passed to pander “look what I did” rather than look what we accomplished.  Did the admittedly rushed Patriot Act (which many politicians never finished reading) compromise our rights too much to keep us safe? How much is the new PRO-IP law’s Copyright Czar going to stop piracy? And when is this bailout bill going to turn my 401k into 401 million?

McCain shouldn’t be looking for special treatment from YouTube.  He wants to be president, so why doesn’t he act like a leader and champion changing a bad law? I don’t want a politician to have their own class of laws; I want them to make the laws we all have better.  We’ve got to stop and smell the roses, before we accidently ban them.

Like a 14.4k modem, broadband is crawling into the nation debate as an actual issue. Barack Obama reminded voters of his plan to use tax money to expand broadband lines to rural areas (where the government is almost discouraging expansion), though John McCain disagrees. Also, the Senate passed a bill on Friday to improve broadband competition. The bill just scratches the surface, adding a question on internet access to the Census and charging the FCC to gather data on telecommunication services annually. A similar bill passed the House last year.

Obviously this bill does very little and I’d love if Obama would push this broadband agenda which, along with green energy, are growing markets that would create jobs, capital, and innovation. Plus it’s an issue McCain doesn’t even know exists. Except when he invented that Blackberry Obama loves so much.

The Senate Judiciary Committee passed S. 3325, the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Act of 2008, a scary bill that will make the Justice Department a legal resource for media companies and copyright holders.

The law is the evolution of the PRO-IP Act, which the House passed in May, and the PIRATE Act in the Senate and remains just as one-sided to Big Content as before.  The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Act increases damages for infringement while adding an Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator to advise the president and oversee IP enforcement over various federal agencies.

The scariest aspect of this law is granting federal prosecutors the power to bring civil suits against copyright infringers.  This makes the Justice Department, normally in charge with protecting the U.S. and its citizens, will be protecting one industry’s obsolete business model in court, wasting taxpayer money and turning over any awards to those media companies.  What’s worse is if someone is falsely prosecuted, they cannot sue for legal fees like they can against non-government plaintiffs.

Several amendments were removed including raising penalties for circumventing DRM, but the worst still remain and will likely be passed by huge margins.  The reason: Big Copyright funds elections while consumers pay the price.

Congress has passed the Higher Education Act with special provisions requiring universities to push the content industry’s agenda on its students.  In order to get funding for students, universities will have to advertise commercial downloading services to students and educate them on a one-sided view of file-sharing and piracy.

The controversial provisions were added partly on the basis of the MPAA’s admittedly flawed research that claimed 44 percent of piracy occurred on college campuses - the number the MPAA later admitted was 15 percent.

So why are universities suddenly mouthpieces for a specific industry?  Even with flawed research, what makes universities responsible for the content industry’s obsolete business models.  The fact that these companies can’t track all the file-sharing makes me wonder how universities are expected to do better? Some artists want their content shared, others don’t, so leaving filtering up to a third parties will lead to overzealous blocking and can also affect educational uses for file-sharing tools.

Universities and consumer groups were able to block this bill last year when the MPAA included requiring filtering technology in its wishlist. William Patry points out that the content industry likely postponed filtering technology - doing it all at once caused too much backlash.

What concerns me is the silence among academic, from administrations and students.  College campus are the front line in the content industry’s Save Our Obsolete Business Model campaign simply because it’s easy to pick on students. There’s a reason the RIAA avoids suing students at Harvard.  Unfortunately, most universities are letting a lone industry and the government turn places of education into propaganda mouthpieces with a rare few standing up for their student’s rights.  Regardless of your position on file-sharing, universities should not be responsible for doing what the content industry already can’t do itself.

And universities need to stand up for themselves and student’s rights. What better way to educate than to lead by example.