Conches

Barack Obama on Technology

With this post, I am officially endorsing Barack Obama for president.  I fully expect this news to blanket the blogosphere in the next couple of  hours.     

Co-Sponsoring an amendment to FISA to eliminate telecom immunity because  telcos need to responsible for their role in protecting our civil liberties.

clipped from firedoglake.com Barack Obama Statement on FISA                     By: Jane Hamsher Monday January 28, 2008 10:00 pm           Photo via -ART-. Statement of Senator Obama: I strongly oppose retroactive immunity in the FISA bill. Ever since 9/11, this Administration has put forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. No one should get a free pass to violate the basic civil liberties of the American people - not the President of the United States, and not the telecommunications companies that fell in line with his warrantless surveillance program. We have to make clear the lines that cannot be crossed. That is why I am co-sponsoring Senator Dodd's amendment to remove the immunity provision. Secrecy must not trump accountability. We must show our citizens – and set an example to the world – that laws cannot be ignored when it is inconvenient.

Advocating for Net Neutrality on freedom of speach grounds...

clipped from www.techcrunch.com

November 14 2007

Barack Obama’s Google-Friendly Technology Platform

Erick Schonfeld

Supports Net Neutrality  (Google will like this plank.  But Obama also argues for it on the grounds of protecting free speech.  Interesting.)

A key reason the Internet has been such a success is because it is the most open network in history.  It needs to stay that way. Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet.  Users must be free to access content, to use applications, and to attach personal devices.  . . . Because most Americans only have a choice of only one or two broadband carriers, carriers are tempted to impose a toll charge on content and services, discriminating against websites that are unwilling to pay for equal treatment.  . . . Such a result would threaten innovation, . . .. It would also threaten the equality of speech through which the Internet has begun to transform American political and cultural discourse

Telecom Immunity, Yeah Di Fi, Boo Clinton and Obama

First, a vote passed to table (kill) the wiretap bill that had no immunity provision.

clipped from www.tpmmuckraker.com

Senate Votes Down Anti-Immunity Bill

By Paul Kiel - January 24, 2008,  2:30PM

Well, one down. The Senate just voted to kill (table) the Senate Judiciary Committee's surveillance bill, which did not contain retroactive immunity for the telecoms. The vote was 60-36 to table, with a number of Dems crossing over. As we said earlier, a number of other amendments will also go up for votes this afternoon.

Among the Democrats voting to kill the SJC bill were Sens. Mark Pryor (AK), Daniel Inouye (HI), Claire McCaskill (MO), Mary Landrieu (LA), Ken Salazar (CO) and Tim Johnson (SD).

Update: The final tally was actually 60-36, not 60-34, and the full list of Dems voting to kill were: Sens. Evan Bayh (D-IN), Tom Carper (D-DE), Daniel Inouye (D-HI), Tim Johnson (D-SD), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Mark Pryor (D-AR), Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), and Ken Salazar (D-CO).

While 12 democratic senators voted with the republicans, Senator Feinstein, voted "Nay".  So, my previous post, "Three Reason's Why Feinstein is a Republican", must now be ammended to only two reasons.

Additionally, Senators Clinton and Obama where no where to be seen.  This is incredibly disappointing and speaks to a lack of courage and authenticity.  I'm still voting for Barrack Obama as I am learning to be a realist but I am seriously disappointed.  I hope he reads this :).

Canadians choose not to "filter" the Internet

An interesting post on how the Canadians have chosen to part ways from their southern colleagues, and not sniff their networks for specific content.

clipped from www.theglobeandmail.com Canadian ISPs won't block content: expert MATT HARTLEY Globe and Mail Update January 24, 2008 at 5:07 PM EST Although some Canadian ISPs such as Bell Canada and Rogers Communications Inc. “shape” traffic travelling on their networks by various means — such as limiting the amount of bandwidth allotted for peer-to-peer transfers — they have stopped short of blocking traffic for those users suspected of sharing copyrighted material. While providers in the United States such as Comcast Corp. and ISPs in other countries have begun to test the waters of content blocking, Canadian ISPs are unlikely to follow suit, analysts say. Even the Canadian wing of the recording industry isn't seeking such measures from the government's forthcoming copyright legislation.

FISA and Telecom Immunity

Please take a minute to go over to the Daily KOS and to find out about the FISA bill and telecom immunity for illegal wiretapping.  Live updates from KOS here.   

clipped from www.dailykos.com FISA Update by mcjoan Thu Jan 24, 2008 at 09:59:34 AM PST This vote will proceed on a simple majority--51 votes and it passes. There is no agreement that it has to meet a 60-vote threshold, so when the Republicans move to block that bill, the vote will be held on a 50-vote threshold. If this bill fails, which is looking likely, then the debate and amendments will revert back to the Senate intelligence committee's bill, which has a retroactive immunity provision. Then the fireworks will start with a number of amendments, among them Sens. Chris Dodd's (D-CT) and Russ Feingold's (D-WI), which would to strip the immunity from the bill. Reid says that he supports this bill. Additionally, Reid reiterated today that Republicans will have to actually filibuster if they want to stop any of the amendments from getting a simple majority vote:

Needless Public Confusion vs. Informed Citizenry

You make the call. 

This text image was clipped from Google Books.

clipped from www.tpmmuckraker.com EPA Asserts Executive Privilege against Embarrassment By Paul Kiel - January 21, 2008, 12:13PM Bliley gave three reasons for invoking that privilege (you can read his letter in full here). The first is a familiar one: a supposed "chilling effect" that would result from disclosing internal deliberations "in a broad setting." But the second reason is one I haven't seen before. It deserves to be quoted in full: Second, further disclosure could result in needless public confusion about the Administrator’s decision that EPA will be denying California’s request. That is, many of the documents are pre-decisional and thus do not reflect the Agency’s full and complete thinking on the matter. Indeed, final decision documents have not yet been completed and made available to the public through publication in the Federal Register, so the public, if given access to the pre-decisional documents, would effectively be denied access to the full, complete rationale by the Agency.

AT&T: what are they thinking?

Evidently asking the telco's (AT&T in particular) to self-regulate their network neutrality stance isn't going to work.  Already seeing absolutely no repercussions for their role in the NSA wiretapping (other than not getting paid for the illegal service), AT&T is now eager to sniff traffic for copyrighted material.

clipped from bits.blogs.nytimes.com January 8, 2008,  7:07 pm AT&T and Other I.S.P.’s May Be Getting Ready to Filter By Brad Stone Tags: at and t, CES, content filtering, Copyright, digital fingerprinting, NBC, piracy UPDATED For the last 15 years, Internet service providers have acted - to use an old cliche - as wide-open information super-highways, letting data flow uninterrupted and unimpeded between users and the Internet. But I.S.P.’s may be about to embrace a new metaphor: traffic cop. At a small panel discussion about digital piracy at NBC’s booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and the telecom giant AT&T said discussed whether the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.

clipped from www.slate.com

jurisprudence: The law, lawyers, and the court.

Has AT&T Lost Its Mind?A baffling proposal to filter the Internet.

By Tim Wu
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2008, at 10:15 AM ET

Chances are that as you read this article, it is passing over part of AT&T's network. That matters, because last week AT&T announced that it is seriously considering plans to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of U.S. intellectual property laws. The prospect of AT&T, already accused of spying on our telephone calls, now scanning every e-mail and download for outlawed content is way too totalitarian for my tastes. But the bizarre twist is that the proposal is such a bad idea that it would be not just a disservice to the public but probably a disaster for AT&T itself. If I were a shareholder, I'd want to know one thing: Has AT&T, after 122 years in business, simply lost its mind?

A new lens for philanthropy

In a recent meeting with a bunch o' foundation folks, we were talking all around the issues relating to impact.  The conversation moved in a lot of different directions talking about things like philanthropy markets, and identifying a "unit of good", and how it is impossible to identify a unit of good, and accountability and transparency and who is accountable to whom and who needs to be transparent...  As the conversation rambled, I began to crystallize how I think about this.

The End Game
A just and equitable world without suffering.  To understand if we are moving in the right direction we need a lot of data and we need to all (philantropists, nonprofits, clients, and observers) be the solution we want to see.

A Reference Grid
I believe that we need to fight against the reflex to apply a financial metaphor to understand comparative good.  The financial metaphor is attractive because it gives us the ability to compare the goodness of one organization with the goodness of another.  However, this comparison is only relevant from the perspective of a donor.  And, it is only relevant to a donor that is concerned with the specific effect of his unique contribution.  It is this paradigm that drives the marketplace metaphor where product is packaged to be digested by the consumer.  Unfortunately, in this paradigm, the consumer is the donor; therefore, the product is marketed to him.  The goal is to create an environment where everyone is focused squarely on solving social problems without the noise that is created when two masters (donors and progress towards solution) compete for attention.

So, what I have tried to create in the graph is a way to examine efficacy along a three dimensional grid.  Efficiency speaks to transactional cost.  Impact speaks to social outcomes.  And, transparency speaks to an individual's or organization's ability to play well with others.  The more transparent you are, the better able you are to collaborate on solutions, to iterate through possibilities and improvements and to aggregate data so that regional and global progress can be made visible. 

The nexus of the grid represents zero where there is no Efficiency, Impact or Transparency.  The negative side is also important to examine.  For example, the negative end of the transparency spectrum moves from opaque to obfuscation.

We can plot an individual or an organization on this grid or it can be used as a way to understand more generalized progress towards solutions.  It is critical that we move beyond the granular approach of following a dollar from privilege to impact where accountability structures focus on the transactional layer, completely missing the donors and only tangentially focusing on solutions to problems.  Instead, we need and hold everyone as accountable to creating solutions.  We can only be successful if we are all impactful, efficient and transparent.