The social and political impact of the Internet is growing at a rapid pace.  After all of the successes credited to President Obama’s social media campaign network in last fall’s election, we still find ourselves at the earliest stages of development of the social layer of the Net.  Still, some are quick to dismiss the activist power of the Internet and still are not convinced that this medium will continue to change the way the world organizes around issues.

Take a piece in today’s Washington Post by Monica Hesse, which commented on the “trendiness” of online activism and discounted these “click to join” groups as nothing more than numbers on a Facebook page.  This completely misses the impact that social networks have had on increasing the awareness of many issues and building communities around these issues.  As we gear up for our nation’s 233rd birthday, we are reminded of how colonists planted seeds of activism and organized against oppressors from abroad.  Instead of Facebook fan pages, they had militiamen; instead of asking others to click a link, they asked them to help gather supplies; instead of Twitter feeds, they used horses to get messages across.  From top to bottom, they created organization that allowed supporters to thrive in any role or level they chose.  The mother who allowed soldiers to sleep in her cabin, was as vital to their success as the soldiers themselves.  It didn’t matter what a supporter of the revolution was doing, their support alone was enough.

Today there are groups on Facebook aimed at gathering supporters for just about any cause.  Just like any other advocacy effort, supporters join for a variety of different reasons.  That’s where the Hesse piece really misses the mark.  The assumption is made that to participate in any activism online, one must be willing to fight hard and organize physical results to be “worthy” of being a supporter.  This claim ignores the power of community building and the very essence of grassroots advocacy.  My support of a specific issue is not measured by how much I donate or how many rallies I attend.   To discount followers of causes on social networks engaging in conduct that is a “trendy and easy virtue” ignores the impact that supporters have on social networks at every level of involvement.  The person simply receiving message updates on the issue is just as vital to the success of the cause as the top-level organizer who sends tasks and ideas to the group’s followers.
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News stories are reporting that the federal judge in the Lori Drew “MySpace suicide” case has thrown out Ms. Drew’s conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.  Although what Ms. Drew did was horrible, we have long thought that her federal indictment was a gross distortion of the law.

The judge will issue a written order soon, and then we will know exactly why the case was tossed out.  But based on comments the judge made a few weeks ago, we are hopeful that the court will broadly reject the government’s effort to criminalize violations of “terms of service.”  We will report back once the opinion comes out.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about one of the upgrades in the iPhone 3.0 software update that allows the Safari browser on iPhone to be location-enabled. Firefox had previously implented something similar in a beta version of the browser, and now that functionality has been released to the world. Firefox 3.5, released on Wednesday, is fully “location-enabled.”

What this means is that Web sites can now ask Firefox for your location, and the browser can now deliver it. Initially, Google has signed on as the default “location provider” for Firefox. As a Firefox user, suppose you pull up a Web site that wants to use your location. Firefox will gather some information about WiFi access points near you and send that information to Google. Because Google maintains a database that maps WiFi access points to actual physical locations, it can use this information to calculate your location. That location gets sent back to your Firefox browser, and the browser forwards it on to the Web site that originally requested it. The accuracy of the location depends on a number of factors, but can be within a handful of meters in densely populated areas.

Firefox and Google have taken a couple of excellent steps to protect the privacy of Firefox users throughout this process. The location information gets transmitted over an encrypted connection so it can’t be sniffed en route between the browser and Google or vice versa. Firefox doesn’t provide Google with any information about the site that made the location request, so Google doesn’t learn anything extra about your browsing habits. Google also de-identifies the information it receives from Firefox two weeks after it’s collected.
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The federal agencies responsible for administering the broadband stimulus program have announced their initial grant criteria, and the news on the openness front is good.

In comments filed in April, CDT urged that broadband services supported by stimulus money should connect users to the full Internet and the full range of Internet-based content and applications, as selected by users and without discrimination.  After all, the core policy rationale for supporting broadband is that it serves as crucial basic infrastructure, much like roads or electricity.  Basic infrastructure is so important precisely because it enables so much other activity, much of which cannot be anticipated at the time the infrastructure is laid and is initiated by users of the infrastructure rather than the infrastructure’s operators.

In a “Notice of Funding Availability” (NOFA) released yesterday, the agencies (NTIA and RUS) handling the broadband grant programs embraced the view of CDT and other advocates that broadband grantees should be subject to nondiscrimination requirements that go beyond the FCC’s 2005 broadband Policy Statement.  The NOFA says that grantees must “not favor any lawful Internet applications or content over others,” a requirement that “ensures neutral routing.”  This explicit nondiscrimination requirement should provide much better protection against the risk of network operators playing favorites than relying exclusively on the FCC Policy Statement, as some parties had urged the agencies to do.

The NOFA goes on to permit reasonable network management, as it should.  It doesn’t try to spell out precisely what this entails, but the language suggests that technical measures aimed at service quality should be “generally accepted” — perhaps a hint that, as CDT has argued, congestion management techniques should be consistent with basic networking standards.  The NOFA also points to caching and “application-neutral bandwidth allocation” as examples of techniques that would be permitted; hopefully this is meant to suggest that application-specific tactics, like Comcast’s interference with BitTorrent traffic, will be frowned upon.
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Given how much advertising we all see, especially online, you know it means something when the entire advertising industry gets together to make an announcement. Today, the advertising industry, as represented by a cohort of trade associations, joined together to publish their own self-regulatory principles, with an aim toward increasing privacy protection for online behavioral advertising.

It’s encouraging to see the advertisers move into the privacy fray here (although not entirely surprising). For nearly a decade, the self-regulatory space has been dominated by the Network Advertising Initiative, which has historically included only third-party ad networks, which comprise just a small sliver of the industry. But when the FTC issued its own suggested self-regulatory principles earlier this year, the guidance from the agency wasn’t limited to any particular advertising sector. The advertising associations appear to have gotten the message, and have tailored their principles in rough accordance with the FTC’s recommendations.
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Chinese authorities today delayed implementation of the much-disparaged Green Dam-Youth Escort filtering mandate, just one day before the July 1 implementation deadline.

Since the Green Dam directive was made public, we have learned that the filtering software does not work as proposed or publicized, may create serious security vulnerabilities, may contain stolen code, and likely violates China’s WTO obligations. The filter targets far more than sexually explicit material and is capable of shutting down a variety of applications when politically sensitive keywords are triggered. Independent analysis has also revealed that security flaws in the software could make millions of PC users in China vulnerable to a variety of malicious attacks
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Happy Conclusion to Remote DVR Case

I noted at the beginning of the month that the Solicitor General had advised the Supreme Court not to reconsider the important Second Circuit case giving the green light to Cablevision’s “remote storage digital video recorder” (RS-DVR). I’m very happy to report that the Supreme Court has followed that advice. Yesterday the Court “denied cert” — meaning that it won’t take the case and that the Second Circuit’s decision will remain the final word on the matter.

This effectively puts an end to the serious threat posed by the original 2007 District Court decision, which held that the RS-DVR would infringe copyright based on the physical location of data storage. As CDT explained in a 2007 policy post and legal brief (http://www.cdt.org/copyright/20070608cdt-cablevision.pdf), the implications of that ruling for cloud computing could have been hugely damaging. Ditto the court’s finding of liability based on transitory buffering — something all digital devices do.

CDT and its allies spent a great deal of time to make sure the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and later the Solicitor General’s office would understand and appreciate what was at stake here. Thankfully, the final outcome is a strong appeals court decision rejecting the idea that using remote storage and buffers should expose service providers to extensive copyright liability. This was a big win, and a major bullet dodged!

The Congressional Research Service is a $100 million a year think tank that researches and writes informative and non-partisan reports on topics suggested by members of Congress. The catch–and the reason you might not have read their work–is that CRS reports are only made easily available to members of Congress. Citizens can request these reports from lawmakers, but without a public index, they can’t request something they don’t know exists. The CRS Reports currently rank first on CDT’s Most Wanted Government Documents. In an ongoing effort liberate these documents, CDT runs Open CRS, an online repository of public CRS Reports. To spotlight these reports, I will be writing “CRS Report of the Week” posts and feature a relevant report each week. These reports are informative in both that they serve as excellent primers to political issues and that they offer a degree of insight into what information is circulating around Congress.

Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative: Legal Authorities, Policy Considerations
#R40427
March 10th, 2009

A standing question about cybersecurity is the respective roles of the executive and legislative branches. President Obama has made cybersecurity a priority in the White House; his commitment to the issue came early when he asked for top-to-bottom governmental review of cybersecurity efforts. Another example of Obama’s interest in making cybersecurity a primary issue is his announcement to create a “Cybersecurity Czar” in the White House. Meanwhile, some in Congress have gone their own way, for example, with the introduction of the Cybersecurity Act of 2009. Although the executive branch might seem like the logical place to have cybersecurity authority, this CRS Report suggests that the President’s cybersecurity authority could be disrupted (or reaffirmed) by Congressional action.
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Yesterday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued an excellent decision in a focused-but-important appeal dealing with “Section 230,” which provides vital protections to service providers who facilitate online speech and users’ ability to control their Internet experiences.

The case involved a less familiar aspect of Section 230, which is commonly applied in free speech rulings that shield (for example) a social network from liability based on content posted by its users. Section 230 also protects service providers from liability from efforts to control offensive content. The Zango v. Kaspersky decision, however, dealt with a third and lesser well-known component of 230 – protection afforded to companies that make tools that users can use to control their own online experiences (such as filtering software).

The Zango case raised the question of whether an anti-spyware vendor (Kaspersky) would be shielded from liability under this third part of Section 230. Zango had argued that 230 only applied to tools that filter adult content, rather than more broadly applying to tools that allow users to control content such as spyware.
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An article in the Washington Post today outlines how some senior U.S. officials are leaning on trade issues to pressure China on its recent mandate that all computers sold in that country must come pre-installed with Web-filtering software.

Computer experts that have examined the Chinese developed Web-filtering software have found a laundry list of problems, from security holes to questions about the breadth of the filtering process. U.S. computer makers are rightly concerned about having to pre-install a piece of virtually unknown and untested software that could damage their product on every machine sold into China.

In letters to the Chinese government, both the U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke linked China’s mandate to install the web filtering software, known as “Green Dam,” to U.S. trade policy.

USTR Kirk is quoted in the Post piece saying the Chinese demand “poses a serious barrier to trade.”

We have long held the position that there is an important role for Congress to play in ensuring that Internet freedom be fully incorporated into U.S. human rights and foreign policy and that it is a central focus of diplomacy, trade and foreign aid. However, there is considerable “policy incoherence” between the U.S. positions on human rights and its policies on trade and aid.

A good example of this “policy incoherence” is giving “most favored nation” trade status to countries such as China and Vietnam, both with poor human rights records that relentlessly pursue state-sponsored campaigns of Internet surveillance and censorship.

If Internet freedom is to be given a high priority in foreign policy and trade, as we believe it should (Secretary Locke and USTR Kirk’s statement to China are encouraging steps), then it will be critical for the U.S. to have the political will to take on its current culture of “policy incoherence” and deliver a message that doesn’t reprimand with one hand and reward with the other.