Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Luncheon talk by Larry Irving, who was in the Clinton Dept. of Commerce.
Great speaker, really fine content.

Best events of the lunch for me: Waiter at our table strikes up conversation
with us about PGP. We can't answer some of his questions, so I look around
the room for Phil Zimmerman. Can't find him, so I point the waiter--a PGP
user and former BBS Sysop who has distributed PGP--in the direction of
<mnemonic>.

After lunch, as we're working our way out the door, I see Phil walking
towards us, turn, and tell the waiter. He approaches Phil, leading with,
"You're one of my heroes."

This is CFP.
  

    
Great rollicking lunch speech on the persistence of the digital divide,
concentration of media poswer and other issues by Larry Irving, 

"As a member of the Clinton Administration's
technology team, Mr.Irving
played an integral role in developing 
the Administration's Electronic
Commerce, National Information
Infrastructure and Global Information
Infrastructure initiatives."

Irving is a great speaker.  He talked about digital divide, about Hispanic
and African Americans, about the concentration of media outlets and how
oddly enough major TV news organizations did not cover it, and about privacy.

Currently listening to global activists.
  

    
And Bruce slipped in with a cool story!
  

    
Jason Mark from Global Exchange spokesdude telling about their fax 
action web page and its effectiveness, and the WTO protest organizing 
efforts online.  He's talking about face to face as too important to
neglect. 

Earlier Chris Carlsson, one of the creators of Critical Mass, lamented 
the abilty for one person to dominate a listserve and championed 
one on one relationships. 

Heather Mansfield, eActivist.org, a portal for political actions. 
Told of using Craig's list to announce her site and getting a strong
reaction, and of learning what to do.  

This session has familiar online community-discussion issues, 
design issues and learning issues.

A questioner is citing a "2 posts a day rule" as a way to prevent
domination and disruption on lists.
  

    

  The ongoing pretense that the "digital divide" is anything more than
a trivial short-term imbalance really does get tiresome after awhile.
Computers and the internet have penetrated the general population FAR
FASTER than any previous technology advance in all of human history.
I hope there's somebody there at CFP bothering to point out this very
obvious fact in the face of more-of-the-same-hand-wringing over a less
than infinite rate of adoption in some quarters.....
  

    
Bob, I wish you were here.
  

    <scribbled by gail Thu 18 Apr 02 16:43>
  

    
Partly redundant due to slippage!


Right now we're part way through a scenario of an arrest for coding
under the DMCA.  Learned from Barbara Simon that the DMCA was delated
until after 1/1/2000... in case of need for extraordinary recoveries if
the y2k bug struck.


These moot court role play things are a good tradition.
  

    

"delated" is a late delay, if you will.  I am getting sluggy character lag
typing directly into the topic and will take more notes offline.
  

    

  Bruce, I wish I had the funds to be there.  Sadly, I haven't been
able to attend any (after the very first one, of course).   {sigh}
  

    
Barlow is up on a panel.

"I don't think you can steal an idea..."

"Civilization would not exist without..." that exchange.

"Ideas are life forms..."

"How will artists get paid?  I wont to know how they get paid now."

...
  

    
ellen ullman lasted about 35 seconds.

wg
  

    

Steven J. Metalitz, Senior Vice President, International Intellectual 
Property Alliance is countering this now.  He started with a slap at
Barlow for being high. Laws constrain manufacture all the time.  "Every
technology has to operate within a legal framework."   

Mentioned toilets as constratined by laws about manufacture ... 

Barlow is back with "ideas compared to toilets."
He quipped that money to Congress is the major economic effect.

Metalitz states that business models are constantly changing.

They are discussing the digital rights protection measures proposed under
the Hollings bill.  This is an apples and oranges or maybe apples 
and alulvial fans discussion, not exactly a debate.

Barlow talking ecology and civil disobedience.  Metalitz expands on "every
technology has to operate within a legal framework."   

They are adding in other panelists.  Karen Coyle is offering an
interesting librarian/computer science view that locking up copies
digitally may make our culture unavailable in the far future.

A technologically enforced dark ages, don't know if that is her coinage
but what a great phrase. Barlow picked it up.

Metalitz argues that you don't have to lock stuff up if you create for
other purposes, and that the DMCA extends rights to make "unauthorized
copies" for the purpose of preservation, and unlocking obsolete
technology.

Karen says it is complicated, libraires are in the middle, publishers and
authors/distract must be compensated.  
  

    

At the Orwell Awards.

First Darth Vader of Accenture (formerly part of Arthur Andersen) accepted
for the collaborative CAPPS initiative, on airport surveilance technololgy.

The other nominees iwere the Washington DC surveilance camera system and
AAMVA, the initiative for all the DMVs to cooperate and make your driver's
licence a national ID card by default.

Next award...  3 government officials nominated are Secretary Tommy Thompson
of HHS for weakening medical policy,  John Ashcroft for making the
questioning of the PATRIOT act treasonous, wiretaps, ethnic profiling and
possibly investigating all of us, Gray Davis for vetoing three privacy
bills, and even sponsoring "the California Patriot Act" and institution
Calabama.

And Ashcroft clinches it.  Acceptance speech in the form of a video tape.
The singing video, of course.

Worst Corporate Invader nominees:  Larry Ellison - in the tradition of the
loudmouth billionaire - for proposing we consolidate all local and federal
government databases in the tradition of the credit reporting repository.
"...and we're going to track everything."   Next, US WEST now QWEST -
removal of the requirement to get consent for phone services.  Masters of
"slamming."   Financial Services Coordinating Council --a trade associate of
trade associations.  Fights financial privacy everywhere.

Larry takes it.
  

    

So finally the Lifetime Menace Award:

Admiral John Poindexter...  felonous Iran/Contra shredder.  Author of
NSDD-145 to get private info, and then inventedsensitived but 
unclassified, invented "plausible deniability," and is back at Project Genoa,
aggregating private info for the feds again.  Plus Booz Allen Hamilton --
invented CLEA, Carnivore, Magic Lantern, and the Direct Marketing
Association!

Poindexter takes it.

And now the Brandeis awards, for the champions of privacy:

State Senator Jackie Speier for standing up to the banks with a privacy bill
currently in the works in California.

Warren Leech, who fought for the right to get your own credit bureau and
consumer investigation reports.

San Francisco Chronicle for the quality of their editorials on financial
privacy issues.
  

    
Someone should have mentioned Roger Cochetti's "interesting" interpretation
of privacy to mean that you know who you're talking to, and that what
they're saying hasn't been corrupted, conflating multiple issues and making
my brain hurt.
  

    
I liked Karen's riff on digitizing the Library of Congress and the British
Library: (a) it hasn't been shown there are net advantages from digitizing,
(b) digital storage is more expensive than storing books, (c) although it's
cool that users can search digital texts, the evidence is that they search
and don't read, whereas, (d) librarians are pro the reading of books.

Books for reading! She's such a radical. Loved it.
  

    
I did like the audience query during the DMCA discussions, asking (the guy
from the publishers assn) about using their nifty marketing slogan ("Get
Caught Reading") in conjunction with a photo of Dmitry Sklyarov... :-)
  

    
Karen, with whom I'm staying during the conference, was telling me the other
morning that one of the ebook mfrs, I think questia.com, actually markets
its ebooks with the promise that you don't have to read!  You can write your
papers and pull in quotes anc automatic citations without reading the book!

wg
  

    
Jackie Speier is telling her SB773 story, a saga of trying to get California
to pass significant privacy protection.   She read some articulate comments
politicians received on this issue.  If the legislature doesn't act,  there
will be an initiative in 2004.  She cited a recent poll which showed 91%
support opt in.  Out-out along has support in the teens.

Of course there is a competing decoy bill. There will  be a competing decoy
initiative if it comes to that, too.

A Canadian is asking why this legislation is limited to the "financial
sector" and not all business as in the most of the rest of the world.
  

    

I love that concept, Wendy.  New, improved books you don't have to read!
For use in passing courses when you don't want to have to learn.
  

    

In my prior note-taking post please read "out-out along" as "opt-out 
alone."  That is not a typo in the traditional sense, and it is an 
indication of why I don't like chat and will never apply for a 
court-reporter job.  Are the raw notes of any interest anyway? 
 
For anyone joining in without checking back to the beginning, 
quick summary:  quite a few WELL members are at CFP this week. Computers,
Freedom and Privacy is a remarkable gathering.  Here is today's agenda,
showing some of the hot topics for the conference:
http://www.cfp2002.org/program/friday.shtml
  
  

    
We're in a good session on public records, with some differences of view
among the panelists on the issue of access being good for informing the
public (with some powerful examples) as against privacy being good for
protecting individuals (incl examples of divorce records, ability to locate
spouses to batter them), turning towards various steps that might be taken
(obscuring, redacting, not gathering the info).
  

    

This session is talking about situations when freedom of access to 
public records can fall directly into oppostion to personal privacy, 
(or even personal safety) and where the tension implied in the
the conference title is in play.

There've been serveral recomendations of the work of Daniel Solove
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=daniel+solove+access+aggregation

And Kim Alexander's Cal Voter group is working on a major study of what
different states request and or require on voter registration
applications, out on her site in a few months.

I liked the comment that instead of putting a phone number optional blank on
the voter reg form, states should ask "do you want to be contacted by
campaigns? Would you prefer contact by [] mail [] phone [] email?"
  

    
Up next: Are The Tools The Rules?: The Future of the Digital Commons.