Bill's Big Diamond Blog

Score Two for Net Neutrality, FCC Changes

Richard Bennett reacts to Susan Crawford being chosen to join the Obama FCC transition team.  Score one for net neutrality.  Score another, he says, for hiring an “internet person.”

Kevin Werbach, who has also been named to the FCC transition team, has some ideas of his own.

“It occurred to me that with a new administration coming into office, it might be time to re-open the issue of how vendors like Comcast resell access to something that doesn't belong to them, the Internet. It seems there ought to be some rules about what they can and can't do, since they don't behave reasonably on their own.”

Isn’t that a refreshing POV?

Back from Data Hell

Been in computer hell for last couple of days... laptop was not seeing its hard drive... now I am finally backed up and hoping for the best.

TSP: Will It Make Watergate Look Like a Prank?

While we’re parsing the sentences uttered, under oath, by the Attorney General, let’s once again consider the program that is under scrutiny. The “Terrorist Surveillance Program” (named in ad-speak, like the “Blue Skies Initiative,” which actually allowed more pollution), or TSP, involves both electronic eavesdropping on domestic-international telephone calls and also another element, data mining of e-mail, telephone records, and other databases.

We know that the part of the TSP that involved tapping calls was not exactly worrisome to the cabal of civil liberties invaders who oversaw the program. It was the data mining, probably the most innocuous-sounding part of the program, that was the most contentious, prompting the likes of John Ashcroft, no fan of individual privacy, to fight the program from his hospital bed.

What does this tell us about the dimensions of the “data mining?” I’d say it tells us a lot. That these guys were willing to resign if it were not stopped— the then-Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General and other top officials— this points to a very serious invasion of our Constitution. The fact that there is still so much focus on fighting additional disclosures, via Executive Privilege claims, despite the three-year time frame since the program was curtailed, the fact that the deputy AG actually had to enlist the FBI Director himself to keep him from being physically evicted from Ashcroft’s hospital room while Gonzales and Card tried to twist the AG’s groggy arm: these facts should inform us of something wider and darker about the TSP than we are aware of.

As Josh Marshall writes:

The only reason (that they will still fight its
disclosure) that suggests itself is that the political
and legal consequences of disclosure are too
grave to allow.

In fact, the Washington Post today points out how much more sinister the program is beginning to appear:

…the NSA surveillance operation was far
more extensive than has been acknowledged
by the Bush administration, which has
consistently sought to describe the program in
narrow terms and to emphasize that the effort
was legal.

I suspect that the dimensions of the domestic spying involved, when finally understood (if they ever are), will be devastating.

Net Neutrality Alert

If you’re reading this, odds are you know what Net Neutrality is. There are only four days left to tell the FCC your story about it.

If you think it won’t matter, read some of the examples of companies already intentionally downgrading your ability to access competitors and opposing points of view on the web.

del.icio.us

I’m playing with del.icio.us, the social networking site that saves web bookmarks and makes keeping a record of blogs and other information easy to do, portable between computers, and social, in the sense that once you’ve saved a site, you can easily see which other users have saved the same sites.

I’ve just started using del.icio.us this morning. I’m curious about user experiences with it, since it strikes me as a great way to reach out to people who share interests in similar content. I see that John Murtha’s interview on MoveCongress.org, about using the power of the purse to reign in President Bush’s escalation of the war in Iraq is already spreading quickly on the site.

Del.icio.us's ease of use is an especially appealing feature, making an immediate update of your saved sites simple and providing easy tagging to describe each one. Maybe I’ll sour on this, but right now it’s a new toy and I like it. Google del.icio.us and let me know what you think.

Net Neutrality Alert

The Snowe-Dorgan Amendment to support Net Neutrality comes up for a vote in the Senate today. Click here to see if your Senator is still undecided. If so, make a call to the number listed.

Support for the amendment will keep Congress from giving control of the internet away to corporate interests and keep your access unfettered. Your calls do make a difference!

Net Neutrality Rebounds in Congress

If it’s important to you to access information on the internet from whatever source you trust, you’ll want to know about Net Neutrality. It’s a concept I’ve written about and one that’s getting some traction in Congress. Bipartisan legislation is being introduced to ensure that the telcoms treat third party sources as they would their own sites when allocating bandwidth.

For a little explanation of this non-sexy sounding topic, here’s an excerpt from my April post on the subject:

…What this means is that all traffic used to be given the same
rights on the internet by all ISPs, which were regulated by the
government and prevented from letting you get fast access to,
say, Verizon websites, while choking back or cutting off traffic
to another company’s site, say Google’s site. No more. Now
that cable provides a huge percentage of the service for broad-
band, the FCC and the Court held that there are no restrictions
on what an ISP can do to make traffic faster to one site than
another--- or even to cut off traffic to a site, maybe Moveon.org,
or a competitor’s service site, if the company doesn’t like it.
(see this short audio explanation at My DD)

At the time this was written, it didn’t look good for advocates of Net Neutrality. But during the last month, some of the big corporations that use the net have squared off against the big corporations that own the net’s pipes, creating an opportunity for advocates of an open internet to be heard clearly. Now Reps. Conyers and Sensenbrenner (two names you don’t often see together on legislation) will introduce the Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006 today. It’s a good moment to learn a bit more about Net Neutrality while it still exists.

Net Neutrality— A Term to Learn and Support

Net Neutrality isn’t a term you’ve likely heard, but it’s a term we should be learning before it goes out of existence. Until recently, internet traffic speed has been unfettered by the profit motive of the individual service provider (ISP). However, the Federal Communications Commission and the Supreme Court recently struck down traditional regulations that prevented your cable company from interfering with a website's traffic speeds or quality of service.

Huh? Please explain.

What this means is that all traffic used to be given the same rights on the internet by all ISPs, which were regulated by the government and prevented from letting you get fast access to, say, Verizon websites, while choking back or cutting off traffic to another company’s site, say Google’s site. No more. Now that cable provides a huge percentage of the service for broadband, the FCC and the Court held that there are no restrictions on what an ISP can do to make traffic faster to one site than another--- or even to cut off traffic to a site, maybe Moveon.org, or a competitor’s service site, if the company doesn’t like it. (see this short audio explanation at My DD)

The head of SBC, Ed Whitacre, has discussed the creation of “premium lanes,” which would get faster access. How? SBC (now AT&T) would charge websites for faster access. Or put another way, they could blackmail any site that doesn’t pay the premium charge by choking back access speeds to their site. He wants to use the company’s ISP lanes as an opportunity to decide who gets unfettered traffic to their sites (those who pay him) and who doesn’t (those who don’t, or can’t afford to).

If you thought that the internet was supposed to be open to all— and that this kind of traffic choking should be illegal, then you should support the efforts of a small band of legislators to pass legislation that would enshrine “Net Neutrality” into law. See TPM Café and the post by Art Brodsky from Public Knowledge for more on this.

A Hat Tip to Susie at Suburban Guerrilla for the heads-up.

Primary Footnote: Andrew Rasiej and a Wireless New York

I met Andrew Rasiej on election eve. It was an oddly appropriate meeting, since he was the New York City Public Advocate candidate who staked his entire campaign on getting New York City to ‘go wireless.’ I was reading e-mail on my Treo as I walked to the polling place and almost ran headlong into him.

While Rasiej’s campaign suffered badly at the polls this week, his ideas about internet advocacy in New York City may have taken hold. Let’s hope so. For a city as wedded to the future as New York is, the fact that so little of our public debate has gone towards digital democracy is pretty shameful.