At the Safe Internet Alliance event earlier this week there was a surprising amount of agreement on one aspect of sharing information on the Internet: eliminating the fear factor.
“Facts, not fear” was a meme throughout the event. Rep. Boucher discussed how comprehensive privacy legislation encourages Internet use because consumers don’t need to fear how their information is protected. And Josh Gottheimer of the FCC cited a study that shows that one of the main reasons why people don’t have broadband is due to, as he called it, the “fear factor.”
For increased use and adoption of the Internet and online services, cutting through the fear is key. That’s why I stressed why one of the main goals of a group that’s discussing privacy-related public policies should be to distinguish between legitimate concerns versus overreactions.
For online safety, there was a period just a year or two ago where we saw a lot of rhetoric, but not a lot of facts, about the real risks and likely threats kids face when online. Today the discussion is less fear-based, and as a result is much more productive for making the Internet safer. The NTIA OSTWG report stressed this fact-based approach.
Today privacy is where the online safety debate was a few years ago. There’s a similar danger of overreaction where rhetoric may crowd-out productive solutions. But there’s also a risk of being too glib on each side: pro-regulatory privacy advocates may not value the need for legitimate revenue models while businesses may sometimes dismiss legitimate privacy concerns.
Ultimately it may come down to a question of who decides. Whether it’s default settings or what is personal information, is it government, companies, or consumers that decide? I’ll tip my hand here: I think the key is for consumers to on the one hand understand the decisions they make, and on the other hand be allowed to make decisions.
Fear not, NetChoice looks forward to working with the Safe Internet Alliance and policymakers on privacy issues.
The House and Senate have now both passed bills aimed at encouraging telework in the federal government. As anyone who has had to commute to work in the Washington DC area knows, the national capital area could probably use a good dose of telework to relieve traffic congestion.
According to Joe Davidson’s column in the Washington Post, “The inability or unwillingness of supervisors to manage staff members they can’t see has long been cited as a major reason” more federal employees don’t telework. This fits with what I’ve heard from some current or former federal managers. “I have enough trouble getting work out of people when they’re in the office,” one remarked.
The legislation offers some simple solutions: Tell federal agencies they have to allow all employees to work remotely unless there’s some reason a position isn’t conductive to telework. And accompany that with training so that managers will be better equipped to manage employees who aren’t in the office.
I’m a big fan of telework. But one of the keys to making it work is holding employees accountable for results instead of inputs like time on task or time hanging around the office. It’s possible to do this even when the desired results are hard to measure. Universities, for example, evaluate professors based on the quality of their teaching and research, not the number of hours they spend preparing for class or writing. This system is hardly perfect, and some places do this better than others. But on balance, it works much better than telling professors they’ve fulfilled their obligation by showing up at the office 40 hours a week.
So the key question in making telework work in the federal government is, “How well do agencies hold individual employees accountable for results?” Here, the federal government has a few handicaps to overcome. It’s hard to fire people for poor performance. Pay is set by the federal pay scale, which does not necessarily create a direct link between pay and the value of the employee’s accomplishments to taxpayers. And agencies do not always create a clear understanding of how the individual employee’s contribution affects the results the agency is supposed to produce.
Granted, the federal government is probably better at dealing with some of these challenges now than it was 20 years ago, especially for the senior executive service. But most federal jobs are still a long way away from at-will employment with clear performance measures tied to the organization’s goals. This is a change that requires not just “more training” or “cultural transformation,” but also a redefinition of the terms of federal employment.
Given those circumstances, I think federal managers are justified in their concern that giving most employees the automatic right to telework could reduce productivity. I can think of two ways to make telework work in the current federal employment environment:
1. Make people earn it. Employees who show they can get things done without a lot of supervision in the office are the most obvious candidates to be effective working remotely.
2. Mandate a trial period and evaluation. If you think it’s fair to guarantee the opportunity to telework to most employees, mandate only that it must be offered on a trial basis. Continuation depends on performance.
These are, of course, second-best solutions. And there may be others.
Taxpayers Against Earmarks is a new effort to rid the federal legislative process of some of its most acute horse-trading: earmarks. Find it at the cleverly named URL, EndingSpending.com.
My project WashingtonWatch.com has worked to generate earmark transparency. Here’s the earmarks main page, and you should expect to see FY 2011 earmarks there soon.
There’s little doubt that many spending earmarks are part of a subtle—or not-so-subtle—quid pro quo in which federal legislators buy votes by directing funds to favored home-state or home-district interests. Taxpayers Against Earmarks has a well-produced web site that invites people to sign up and join the anti-earmark effort.
Earmarked spending is a small part of the overall budget, of course, but earmarking is emblematic of the “favor factory” that Congress has become as the federal budget and federal power have bloated. Federal spending is appropriate in the small number of cases when it provides national public goods that benefit the country as a whole, but refurbishing local museums, funding projects at state universities, and requiring the military to buy from a particular defense contractor do not benefit the general welfare. Taxpayers Against Earmarks is working to begin the process of getting federal spending under control.
I’d like to recommend Sonia Arrison’s recent article on the need for updating the Electronic Privacy Communications Act (ECPA). She makes a good case why citizens should feel a bit worried about the ability of government to invade their privacy when they keep data in the cloud. And citizens are customers, so online businesses are worried if people may use less of their services. But here’s another angle for why we need to update ECPA…it’s to promote online safety. From an excellent analysis by Becky Burr, ECPA reform:
Would establish uniform, clear, and easily understood rules about when and what kind of judicial review is needed by law enforcement to access electronic content; and
Would, by clarifying the applicable rules, enable business to respond more quickly and with greater confidence to law enforcement requests and to avail themselves of hosted productivity technology.
Right now the law is muddled, and online services have a hard time determining legitimate requests from those that are overreaching. When the law is clarified, businesses and law enforcement can (with appropriate legal process) share information that can help find sexual predators and other online miscreants.
I’m sorry to report that the Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF) announced today that it was concluding its 17-year run and ceasing all operations immediately. The organization had been through some tumultuous times recently with 5 presidents in 5 years and steadily declining support during that period. Thus, the decision was made to close the doors.
Founded in 1993, PFF’s mission was to study the digital revolution and its implications for public policy while advocating a philosophy of limited government, free markets, property rights, and individual sovereignty. The organization’s scholars and researchers penned tens of thousands of editorials, papers, special reports, books, filings, amicus briefs, and blog posts during that stretch. PFF also convened numerous policy fora, including its nationally recognized annual Aspen Summit, which brought together leading thinkers and policymakers in the field.
It’s been a great honor to be with PFF for the past five years and I’m extremely proud of everything the organization has accomplished. When PFF was formed, it was quite literally the only market-oriented institution focused on the digital revolution. Today, there are dozens of such institutions, many which PFF helped to inspire. Thus, in a sense, PFF has served its purpose by focusing both intellectuals and policymakers on the need to keep cyberspace free from excessive government control and interference and it’s my hope that the impact of PFF’s work will live on for many years to come.
As for me, well, as the old country song goes… “it’s time to stop thinkin’ and start drinkin’.” I’ll still be blogging here on occasion, but for now, I think I will enjoy a few weeks of unemployment and fill my time with bourbon, cigars, and marathon video game sessions. Or maybe I’ll get back to writing that book I just can’t seem to finish.
Based on two (1, 2) previous cyber security bills, a draft bill that has been circulating around town backed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would give the White House sweeping new powers over companies that operate “covered critical infrastructure” or (CCI). And more than that, the bill would eliminate a vital aspect of the governmental process: a right to a day in court.
People often think of critical infrastructure as power plants, dams, and public safety communication networks. On the Internet, modems, routers and other specific network equipment could be designated as CCI. But this bill is written broadly, so that the Administration could even designate online services—such as e-mail and cloud computing services—that use the Internet but are not themselves network infrastructure.
All businesses want to keep Americans safe and protect infrastructure that supports the American economy. But what happens if a company (or an industry) wants to challenge their CCI designation? Typically, what makes America work is that we can question authority and even challenge our government in court when we think it’s wrong. But this legislation explicitly denies businesses their right to challenge a CCI designation in court.
(4) Final appeal.—A final decision in any appeal under this subsection shall be a final agency action that shall not be subject to judicial review except as part of an enforcement action under section 306(b)(7). [emphasis added]
This part of the bill has to be amended to allow judicial appeals to make it fair for the businesses that will pay for it. Continue reading →
If you follow the Tech Liberation Front, you’ll no doubt have run across the weekly podcast I post here on Mondays. It’s called Surprisingly Free and it features in-depth discussions with an eclectic mix of authors, academics, and entrepreneurs at the intersection of technology, policy, and economics–including some of the TLF gang.
We’ve now released over three dozen episodes and we couldn’t have done it without our listeners. For that, I want to thank you. We now want to redouble our efforts to improve the show so that we can grow our audience from hundreds to thousands. To do that, we need your help.
If you don’t subscribe to the show on iTunes, how about giving it a shot here. If you do already listen to it, I’d like to ask you to please take this two-minute survey. To make the show better, we need to know what you think. Do you like the topics? Do you like the guests? What do you think of the length? What would you change? Keep the same? Your feedback would mean the world to us. And again, the survey only takes two minutes (a bit more if you want to give us written comments, which we would appreciate).
So, thank you so much for listening to the Surprisingly Free podcast, and thanks for helping us spread the word and make it a better show.
Clear’s coverage map shows service in many cities and plans to expand to many more. Competition is rendering moot the call for public utility-style regulation of Internet service in the name of ‘net neutrality. I expect to hear soon about how unsatisfactory competition is under triopoly conditions.
If you blinked, you missed it. Heaven knows, I did. The OECD privacy guidelines celebrated their 30th birthday on Thursday last week. They were introduced as a Recommendation by the Council of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on September 23, 1980, and were meant to harmonize global privacy regulation.
Should we fete the guidelines on their birthday, crediting how they have solved our privacy problems? Not so much. When they came out, people felt insecure about their privacy, and demand for national privacy legislation was rising, risking the creation of tensions among national privacy regimes. Today, people feel insecure about their privacy, and demand for national privacy legislation is rising, risking the creation of tensions among national privacy regimes. Which is to say, not much has been solved.
In 2002—and I’m still at this? Kill me now—I summarized the OECD Guidelines and critiqued them as follows on the “OECD Guidelines” Privacilla page.
The Guidelines, and the concept of “fair information practices” generally, fail to address privacy coherently and completely because they do not recognize a rather fundamental premise: the vast difference in rights, powers, and incentives between governments and the private sector. Governments have heavy incentives to use and sometimes misuse information. They may appropriately be controlled by “fair information practices.”
Private sector entities tend to have a balance of incentives, and they are subject to both legal and market-punishments when they misuse information. Saddling them with additional, top-down regulation in the form of “fair information practices” would raise the cost of goods and services to consumers without materially improving their privacy.
Not much has changed in my thinking, though today I would be more careful to emphasize that many FIPs are good practices. It’s just that they are good in some circumstances and not in others, some FIPs are in tension with other FIPs, and so on.
The OECD Guidelines and the many versions of FIPs are a sort of privacy bible to many people. But nobody actually lives by the book, and we wouldn’t want them to. Happy birthday anyway, OECD guidelines.
An interesting and thought-provoking piece by Malcolm Gladwell over at The New Yorker this month takes a look at the intersection between true civic activism (the kind that could get you killed) and “social networking” activism (the kind that only takes a retweet or hitting the “like” button on Facebook).
Gladwell’s piece starts off retelling the story of how the Civil Rights “sit-in” movement of the early 1960s spread like wildfire among the younger set without the aid of, god forbid, Facebook or Twitter. Contrast that historical example with the more recent happenings in Iran and the Twitter Revolution, where it seemed that tens of thousands of Twitter users stood in solidarity with the protesting Iranians, some of who were literally dying in the streets. The point Gladwell is making, and one with which I concur, is that for all the hype regarding social networking tools, relying on said tools to advocate significant change will end up in a losing battle or inefficient result.
A big reason, Gladwell postulates, is that social networks are at their core good at increasing participation but inefficient at execution. It’s easy to hit the “like” button on Facebook to agree that “I support Darfur victims,” or “down with big government,” but it’s another thing to put your literal neck on the line — as the protestors in South Carolina and Iran did.
Continue reading →
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Posted in: Inside the Beltway (Politics), Privacy, Security & Government Surveillance 
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
