Fourth Amendment Being Breached?

Click here to view a video of the NSA whistleblower being questioned by House Member Dennis Kucinich about Bush's potentially illegal wiretapping of US citizens.

Georgetown Civil Disobedience

Alberto Gonzales spoke before law students at Georgetown today, justifying illegal, unauthorized surveillance of US citizens, but during the course of his speech the students in class did something brave. They got up from their seats and turned their backs to him.

To make matters worse for Gonzales, additional students came into the room, wearing black cowls and carrying a simple banner, written on a sheet. Fortunately for him, it was a brief speech, followed by a panel discussion that basically ripped his argument to shreds.

And, as one of the people on the panel said:

"When you're a law student, they tell you if say that if you can't argue the law, argue the facts. They also tell you if you can't argue the facts, argue the law. If you can't argue either, apparently, the solution is to go on a public relations offensive and make it a political issue ... to say over and over again "it's lawful", and to think that the American people will somehow come to believe this if we say it often enough. In light of this, I'm proud of the very civil civil disobedience that was shown here today." --David Cole, Georgetown University Law Professor

Stop Private Interests from Taking Over the 'Net

America's big phone and cable companies want to start charging exorbitant user fees for the supposedly-free internet.

From Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy:

(The Nation) - The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.

Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency.

According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets -- corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers -- would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.

Under the plans they are considering, all of us -- from content providers to individual users -- would pay more to surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.

To make this pay-to-play vision a reality, phone and cable lobbyists are now engaged in a political campaign to further weaken the nation's communications policy laws. They want the federal government to permit them to operate Internet and other digital communications services as private networks, free of policy safeguards or governmental oversight. Indeed, both the Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are considering proposals that will have far-reaching impact on the Internet's future. Ten years after passage of the ill-advised Telecommunications Act of 1996, telephone and cable companies are using the same political snake oil to convince compromised or clueless lawmakers to subvert the Internet into a turbo-charged digital retail machine.

The telephone industry has been somewhat more candid than the cable industry about its strategy for the Internet's future. Senior phone executives have publicly discussed plans to begin imposing a new scheme for the delivery of Internet content, especially from major Internet content companies. As Ed Whitacre, chairman and CEO of AT&T, told Business Week in November, "Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"

The phone industry has marshaled its political allies to help win the freedom to impose this new broadband business model. At a recent conference held by the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a think tank funded by Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and other media companies, there was much discussion of a plan for phone companies to impose fees on a sliding scale, charging content providers different levels of service. "Price discrimination," noted PFF's resident media expert Adam Thierer, "drives the market-based capitalist economy."

Net Neutrality

To ward off the prospect of virtual toll booths on the information highway, some new media companies and public-interest groups are calling for new federal policies requiring "network neutrality" on the Internet. Common Cause, Amazon, Google, Free Press, Media Access Project and Consumers Union, among others, have proposed that broadband providers would be prohibited from discriminating against all forms of digital content. For example, phone or cable companies would not be allowed to slow down competing or undesirable content.

Without proactive intervention, the values and issues that we care about -- civil rights, economic justice, the environment and fair elections -- will be further threatened by this push for corporate control. Imagine how the next presidential election would unfold if major political advertisers could make strategic payments to Comcast so that ads from Democratic and Republican candidates were more visible and user-friendly than ads of third-party candidates with less funds.

Consider what would happen if an online advertisement promoting nuclear power prominently popped up on a cable broadband page, while a competing message from an environmental group was relegated to the margins. It is possible that all forms of civic and noncommercial online programming would be pushed to the end of a commercial digital queue.

But such "neutrality" safeguards are inadequate to address more fundamental changes the Bells and cable monopolies are seeking in their quest to monetize the Internet. If we permit the Internet to become a medium designed primarily to serve the interests of marketing and personal consumption, rather than global civic-related communications, we will face the political consequences for decades to come. Unless we push back, the "brandwashing" of America will permeate not only our information infrastructure but global society and culture as well.

Why are the Bells and cable companies aggressively advancing such plans? With the arrival of the long-awaited "convergence" of communications, our media system is undergoing a major transformation. Telephone and cable giants envision a potential lucrative "triple play," as they impose near-monopoly control over the residential broadband services that send video, voice and data communications flowing into our televisions, home computers, cell phones and iPods. All of these many billions of bits will be delivered over the telephone and cable lines.

Video programming is of foremost interest to both the phone and cable companies. The telephone industry, like its cable rival, is now in the TV and media business, offering customers television channels, on-demand videos and games. Online advertising is increasingly integrating multimedia (such as animation and full-motion video) in its pitches. Since video-driven material requires a great deal of Internet bandwidth as it travels online, phone and cable companies want to make sure their television "applications" receive preferential treatment on the networks they operate. And their overall influence over the stream of information coming into your home (or mobile device) gives them the leverage to determine how the broadband business evolves.

Mining Your Data

At the core of the new power held by phone and cable companies are tools delivering what is known as "deep packet inspection." With these tools, AT&T and others can readily know the packets of information you are receiving online -- from e-mail, to websites, to sharing of music, video and software downloads.

These "deep packet inspection" technologies are partly designed to make sure that the Internet pipeline doesn't become so congested it chokes off the delivery of timely communications. Such products have already been sold to universities and large businesses that want to more economically manage their Internet services. They are also being used to limit some peer-to-peer downloading, especially for music.

But these tools are also being promoted as ways that companies, such as Comcast and Bell South, can simply grab greater control over the Internet. For example, in a series of recent white papers, Internet technology giant Cisco urges these companies to "meter individual subscriber usage by application," as individuals' online travels are "tracked" and "integrated with billing systems." Such tracking and billing is made possible because they will know "the identity and profile of the individual subscriber," "what the subscriber is doing" and "where the subscriber resides."

Will Google, Amazon and the other companies successfully fight the plans of the Bells and cable companies? Ultimately, they are likely to cut a deal because they, too, are interested in monetizing our online activities. After all, as Cisco notes, content companies and network providers will need to "cooperate with each other to leverage their value proposition." They will be drawn by the ability of cable and phone companies to track "content usage…by subscriber," and where their online services can be "protected from piracy, metered, and appropriately valued."

Our Digital Destiny

It was former FCC chairman Michael Powell, with the support of then-commissioner and current chair Kevin Martin, who permitted phone and cable giants to have greater control over broadband. Powell and his GOP majority eliminated longstanding regulatory safeguards requiring phone companies to operate as nondiscriminatory networks (technically known as "common carriers"). He refused to require that cable companies, when providing Internet access, also operate in a similar nondiscriminatory manner. As Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig has long noted, it is government regulation of the phone lines that helped make the Internet today's vibrant, diverse and democratic medium.

But now, the phone companies are lobbying Washington to kill off what's left of "common carrier" policy. They wish to operate their Internet services as fully "private" networks. Phone and cable companies claim that the government shouldn't play a role in broadband regulation: Instead of the free and open network that offers equal access to all, they want to reduce the Internet to a series of business decisions between consumers and providers.

Besides their business interests, telephone and cable companies also have a larger political agenda. Both industries oppose giving local communities the right to create their own local Internet wireless or wi-fi networks. They also want to eliminate the last vestige of local oversight from electronic media -- the ability of city or county government, for example, to require telecommunications companies to serve the public interest with, for example, public-access TV channels. The Bells also want to further reduce the ability of the FCC to oversee communications policy. They hope that both the FCC and Congress -- via a new Communications Act -- will back these proposals.

The future of the online media in the United States will ultimately depend on whether the Bells and cable companies are allowed to determine the country's "digital destiny." So before there are any policy decisions, a national debate should begin about how the Internet should serve the public. We must insure that phone and cable companies operate their Internet services in the public interest -- as stewards for a vital medium for free expression.

If Americans are to succeed in designing an equitable digital destiny for themselves, they must mount an intensive opposition similar to the successful challenges to the FCC's media ownership rules in 2003. Without such a public outcry to rein in the GOP's corporate-driven agenda, it is likely that even many of the Democrats who rallied against further consolidation will be "tamed" by the well-funded lobbying campaigns of the powerful phone and cable industry.

Support Former State Rep. Perry Clark's Initiative

Filed on May 11, 2005 by State Rep. Perry Clark (D) Commonwealth of Kentucky:

A Resolution Urging Congress To Take Emergency Actions
To Save the Economy and the Auto Industry

WHEREAS, an increasing number and variety of relevant specialists have been joining an international chorus which is warning that an ongoing, systemic economic collapse of the world's monetary system has now entered its terminal phase; and

WHEREAS, certain stop-gap actions must now be implemented to forestall the irreparable damage to our physical economy, which is typified by the presently accelerating crisis of the United States automobile industry; and

WHEREAS, any liquidation of the present structure of the physical productive capacities of the auto industry, especially its machine tool sector, would mean both the end of the United States of America as a leading physical economic power, and related kinds of chain-reaction damage to the world economy as a whole; and

WHEREAS, government must now be mustered to act in accord with the implied constitutional obligation of our modern nation state to promote the general welfare, both for our own republic and in concerted action among nations. Unless corrected, the present crisis would now become far worse than what was experienced in Europe or the Americas during the Great Depression of the 1930s; and

WHEREAS, some of the most essential immediate remedies required must be set into motion through included actions consistent with the combined explicit and implicit Constitutional powers of advice and consent of the United States Senate; since the United States Senate is presently the most appropriate instrument for setting into motion the indispensable steps of remedial action, despite manifest reluctance of some circles of the Presidency to grasp the urgency of the present national and world crisis; and

WHEREAS, our constitutional system, known as the American system of political economy, is premised implicitly on the included role of a system consistent with the notion of national banking, which provides our form of constitutional government with the power of its Executive acting in concert with the separate and distinct authorities of the House and Senate to create relatively vast masses of long-term credit for the immediate and long-term expansion of our national economy; and

WHEREAS the creation of new productive capital can be accomplished, under our system, without interference by private financial interests; and

WHEREAS under our constitutional system, this outpouring of debt-based long term capital must be used chiefly not only to create expanded productive employment, but also to create the long-term capital investment in improved basic economic infrastructure, agriculture, and manufacturing; and

WHEREAS, the principal interest and objective of the United States government in the current panic among leading North America automobile manufacturers is to ensure that the continued employment of the labor force associated with that industry remain as functioning, each and all in their present localities of employment; and

WHEREAS, the loss of the tool-making and related capabilities of that sector of the industry would be a strategic disaster of incalculable chain reaction consequences within our nation and the world; and

WHEREAS, the relationship between the machine tool and related elements, and the much larger mass of technicians and operatives employed downstream in the process is an integral relationship, creating situations whereby the employment of the one cannot be separated from employment of the other; and in which the ratio of less-skilled operatives to highly-skilled machine tool and related technicians similarly cannot be reduced; and

WHEREAS, the only remedy is diversification of the productive potential of the auto industry to a broader mixture of suitable forms of production, shifting large portions of current employment into the domain of essential capital goods of production and basic economic infrastructure; and

WHEREAS, whatever the disposition of the relevant troubled financial corporations in the auto and related industries, the productive potential of the industrial labor force of the industry must be held together intact in their present locations making it necessary for the federal government to create the interim vehicle under which the continuity of physical operations can be continued; and

WHEREAS, the relevant choices of alternative markets for this purpose are chiefly in the category of basic economic infrastructure, such as the need to repair, expand, and improve our national railway systems, to maintain and improve our water management systems, and to maintain other urgently needed infrastructure projects; and

WHEREAS, these actions will result not only in saving our existing industry but also in the creation of large new areas of employment of our citizenry in infrastructure and manufacturing, comparable to the best of the New Deal programs that rescued the nation and the world from the last Depression.

NOW, THEREFORE, Be it resolved by the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky:

Section 1. The Congress of the United States is urged to intervene on behalf of the national and related interests to ensure that the productive potential of the automobile industry, with its featured high technology and machine tool capability, be held together in place and intact.

Section 2. The United States government must intervene to vastly expand the construction and maintenance of infrastructure projects and related industries in the nation. The impact of this intervention on the Commonwealth of Kentucky will be to provide tens of thousands of productive jobs repairing our infrastructure.

Section 3. The Clerk of the House of Representatives shall send a copy of this Resolution to each member of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives from the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

At least ten million jobs could be created nationally in these endeavors, while at the same time maintaining the auto production of the General Motors Corporation, of the Ford Motor Company and of their respective subsidiaries. This initiative will restore our tax base and increase the standard of living, in physical terms of our citizenry.

Bush's Patent Reform Woes

From the does-no-one-think-these-things-through? dept. at Techdirt:

Joe T. Bradley writes "President Bush, as part of his 2007 fiscal budget, has revived the proposal that the Patent Office be allowed to keep all the fees it collects. Since the USPTO makes a profit, the government has been siphoning off money for years, and many critics claim that letting them keep the money will improve our patent woes. But not so fast, say some: 'If the USPTO relies only on funding from patent applicants, it is beholden to no one but patent holders, and becomes the poster-child example of regulatory capture.'" This is another bad idea from folks who clearly aren't thinking through the real problems at the root of the patent system. This is a "throw more money at the problem" type of solution, without any consideration for the unintended consequences it will lead to. Besides simply encouraging more patents (and more patent applications) it's based on the fundamentally false idea that the patent system can be solved by hiring more patent examiners. The problem, though, is that patent examiners don't scale -- and any system that encourages more patents will overwhelm however many new patent examiners are hired. The patent system needs to focus on making sure that fewer, better patents are granted -- not more problematic patents.

The Republican Raid on Student Aid

From the CDA:

On February 1st, the Republican Congress voted 216 to 214 to cut $12 billion from the student loan programs as a part of the budget reconciliation bill, the largest cut in the history of the loan programs.

Rather than cutting lender subsidies, the bill derives most of its savings by continuing the practice of forcing student and parent borrowers to pay excessive interest rates on their loans and by increasing interest rates for parent borrowers. These cuts will pay for tax cuts for some of the wealthiest Americans. In the same budget bill that authorized these student loan cuts, Congress also called for up to $70 billion in tax cuts that will be finalized this Spring.

Here are several steps to take from here.

1) Write a letter to the editor to your local paper. Legislators must be thanked or chided publicly so they continue to get the right message on our issue.

2) Let President Bush know how you feel! He has openly said he will sign this bill into law, yet at the State of the Union, he called for an increase in our country's academic competitiveness. Which way will he go? It's hard to deny he might not go our way. However, don't you think he should feel the dismay of college students and their families as he makes the decision?

3) Our next move will be the appeal to the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, set up in September by US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. Its aim is to establish a blueprint for higher education into the 21st century. We will ensure that student loan debt and the need to fully fund federal grant and loan programs become top priorities to this commission over the next several months. Look for the tour of two ten foot tall ball and chains labeled 'student debt' as one might arrive at your campus, and take time to send a public comment yourself about the federal role in higher education when you see it.

Congress caught making false entries in Wikipedia

According to CNET's Politics Blog, "the trusty editors at Wikipedia got together and compiled a list of over 1,000 edits made by Internet addresses allocated to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives."

It goes on, "This juvenalia is, of course, thoroughly bipartisan. Another change to the Iraq invasion entry shows that the anonymous congressional editor played up the dubious connections between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein."

I call on both sides to stop this foolishness. Unless you have something both meaningful and true to add to an article, you shouldn't be editing it. Unless the content is unfactual, you shouldn't be mad about it. If you can't prove something about an issue one way or another, don't delete the side you don't support. If your side isn't in the article, add it without changing the other view listed. Remember, America is a democracy and the Bill of Rights applies to Wikipedia just like everything else here.