November 23rd, 2009
Internet: A threat to government or the other way around? (Part 4)
Justice systems around the world had their entire world turned upside down over the past several years because of the Internet. The basic sets of laws, often founded on a nation’s constitution are being used in ways that many forefathers never anticipated or envisioned. Republic, Dominion and Socialist government institutions around the world are all facing the same issues - often without any clear path of legal precedent.
One of the challenges facing courts is jurisdiction. Because of the very nature of the Internet, legal systems are now faced with new roadblocks that did not exist 10 years ago. Traditional methods of law enforcement and legal treaties do work and continue to be the basis of process and dealing with prosecution and trials. Interpretation of existing laws and applying them to Internet-related cases has not been a significant challenge in many cases. But there are some new aspects of what is admitted into court.
Evidence
What has shocked the system is how Internet-based materials are now used in the courts as evidence. Everything from ISP logs, website blogs, and social media sites (among others) are now being used in ways that prosecutors and jurists have never had to deal with in the past. It is also becoming a battle ground for several areas of law, particularly the integrity of evidence. This has many in the legal world concerned. It’s becoming clear that this will be an area of significant debate and will have far-reaching consequences. Internet evidence does not have look and feel of traditional evidence and, in many cases, has yet to be challenged as to its validity. Prosecutors are faced with a dilemma that impacts how and what they prosecute. This in turn has created a new source of political initiatives that are not only questionable, but in some parts of the world viewed as extreme.
Don’t have a Law yet? We’ll make one
The evolution of law and how it is created has traditionally been a slow and low priority part of the political system. No longer is that the case. Government ministers and cabinet officials appear to be fast-tracking new laws, specifically because of the Internet at a rapid pace of late. Politicians are practically tripping over themselves drafting new bills that claim that they know how to fix the problems of cybercrime and abuse. These ideas are moving at such a rapid pace that often few people actually have read the fine print. What concerns many is the advice politicians are getting on how Internet law should be created. Governments all over the world will have significant impact on such issues as free speech, Net neutrality, news, crime and governance of institutions.
Prosecution
There is not much sympathy for the courts in many parts of the world. That may soon change as news travels across the multimedia world of the Internet. Attorneys general throughout the United States are political and create their own priorities and thus control what is heard before the courts. This may have significant consequences as to the timing of how the Internet evolves and impact the economics of the service that potentially influences it’s usage for decades. In the United Kingdom, the courts will have to take into account European treaties and the European Parliament. Canada’s magistrates may strike down or uphold newly created laws that may wind up creating in-balance that could take years to reverse.
Rules await the Internet
Regulators such as the CRTC, FCC, OfCom are charting new territory in communication rules and regulations. Lawmakers are beginning to micro-manage this process. No one yet knows what the impact these new elements will have on the judicial system. It will take years before this is known and goes through several rigorous tests of the court system. Case law may take a decade or more before any true outcomes are known. By that time, a nation will have changed political administration and have new agendas that reset the cycle before some true outcomes are known. Net Neutrality will be debated and wind up before the courts in jurisdictions around the world. The results will vary like your bandwidth speed and access to content.
Global perspective
Laws of a nation are now being combined in many parts of the world. The very essence of a sovereign nation set of laws is slowly being merged into a single set by which it will adhere to. This is particularly true in Europe where the European Parliament is attempting to create laws specifically surrounding the Internet. This has the potential to create political and legal challenges for courts in how they make decisions. The consequences have significant long term impacts on how courts operate and what order of Appeals and jurisdiction as they enter cyber space with profound outcomes yet to be decided.
The Supreme Court
Supreme Court decisions have not had an impact on the Internet - but likely will. Major court decisions at local, state, and provincial levels are being appealed and many will eventually be argued before the Supreme Court. That draws concern because of how many governments nominate and select jurists to be a part of the Supreme Court framework. In general terms, the institution is politically driven and has the potential to create decisions that may in fact be contrary to the very principles that many of us take for granted. It also works in the other direction. Many a government has had policies and laws overturned by the courts. Key segments will be privacy, Internet access and tracking - along with content management tangled with identity security. It could be argued that elected government officials are not a threat to the Internet, the courts are. The counter point is that will force parliamentarians to change the law, a task far easier said than done. Compounding the problem is that the highest courts around the world have (almost) unlimited tenure until death. Jurists that will have profound impacts on the stance of governments surrounding Internet issues are in China, Pakistan, India, Russia, and the Middle East. China is unique in that it will have to eventually deal with treaties in which it is a signatory to, but no one has yet to appeal any government policies. It may soon have to. If WTO treaties are before their court system, the Internet could be next.
The court system in most democratic nations has dynamics rarely resulting in quick decisions. It may take years before government’s leaders and the lawmakers truly understand what they are dealing with. Some will fail in creating new laws that are considered extreme by many; others may actually pass the litmus test of a Supreme Court decision. History awaits the outcome.
Epilogue - it will never have an ending
So here we are; some of the files are out in the open, more need further decryption, understanding and updating. The pace of the discussion is increasing and appears to be moving along with few delays. 2010 promises to be the start of a new decade that has a few fundamental issues to resolve. The debate has begun and could be a pivotal point in how society uses and government manages the Internet.
November 22nd, 2009
Internet: A threat to government or the other way around? (Part 3)
Part III
From 1959 to 1975, the era of demonstration (Vietnam War) was to protest on the lawns and parks of universities and public venues. The Kent State shootings by National Guard troops in May of 1970 was not the first demonstration against government, but it certainly was the event that ignited further demonstrations at universities all over the United States. Demonstrators had no defense against armed troops and the toll was significant both in political values and individual trust in government. News organizations covered every demonstration nationally from that event onwards until the end of 1975.
There are more Internet Packets than there are bullets
Almost 40 years later, some government officials and elected official are pushing agendas that have long term consequences to its people that have similar overtones of big brother control. Today the landscape is very different. If people don’t like what they see potentially becoming Law, they have a new tools without fear of an M-16 being pointed at them. At one extreme end of protest, several protests went directly onto the offensive and have launched cyber war attacks against government institutions such as Estonia. It has been alleged that a U.S. Congressman suggested cyber attacks should be ordered against North Korea. I investigated this claim and could not find a single article verifying its authenticity, but it’s been reported all over the internet. A request for an interview was declined by the Congressman’s office.
It doesn’t stop there; non government groups are also launching political cyber attack campaigns against (VANK vs. Japan) each other. Emailing an elected official was the first step. Media tools which are now at the disposal of anyone, is an arsenal that has far more power than any individual or group in government can defeat. Instead of thousands of journalists covering a story, there is potentially billions of people reporting bits of news that are crisscrossing the globe that nobody can stop - for now. There is the potential for citizens to protest by using the internet to attack their own government, particularly in the United States and the U.K. and may believe it is their right to do so. This is not the kind of digital divide that government knows how to deal with either. The days of the Boston Tea party are long gone and we know what happened two years later and that is not a scenario that will unfold or be repeated.
Governments have seen this potential and are developing applications and systems that can defend and attack any Internet event, foreign or domestic. This is not (just) about firewalls and creating offensive capabilities, but also about proposing new laws, which many believe are the beginning of a new era of government knows best.
Information is power
Many fear this could behold a future that dictates who holds control over the Internet. Early indications are that this view has some validity. Several nations (United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China, and Russia) are already monitoring and archiving significant information about their constituents. There’s nothing new in knowledge that databases exist containing information about its citizens. Here’s what is new: the scale and ultimate purpose. Public safety agencies are encouraged to share multiple databases of information. That has created a new culture in police enforcement and created a new breed of police officer that simply has far more information than they need or should have available to them upon which to make an appraisal or use with valid merit. We have witnessed new variants of stereotype and investigation methods police officers use which are wrong in its outcome. England’s decision to maintain DNA records of individuals, even if found innocent has already caught several police officers making snap decisions that a suspect must be guilty of ’something’ - is a classic example that happens routinely.
What’s good for catching the bad guy maybe worse for the upstanding citizen
People realize that information is kept and archived about them. How it is used or manipulated however, is a completely different discussion. Privacy and protection from abuse of such information has now become a priority concern for everyone and currently there is a widespread worry that government simply does not have the trust of people to ensure its safeguarding. Memories of May 4, 1970 may come back to haunt many.
Governments are proposing laws allowing the tracking and archiving where users are on the Internet. These laws have their foundation in protection against illegal downloading of copyright materials and while valid, have far more reaching consequences than that purpose, and most recognize it as such - except many politicians. How much more information is the government going to track - this blog perhaps? I know that the 754th ELSG - Electronic System Group (part of the 554th ESW Wing) of the U.S. Air Force out of Hanscom Air Force Base has visited the blog, as has the Central Intelligence Agency. That doesn’t mean they are monitoring or tracking this blog, but what’s to stop them for doing so (hi guys! *wave*) and creating a file? - Good thing I know they’re the good guys…..
Go to:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 4 in this series
November 22nd, 2009
Internet: A threat to government or the other way around? (Part 2)
Part II
It’s been suggested in many articles that President Obama won the U.S. election in 2008 because his campaign used Twitter, Facebook and other social media effectively over the course of the campaign that spanned two years. But this new instant social media clearly it works both ways: Bad news travels much faster, and with significantly more power, than good news ever does. Face it: People love dirt and passing on bad news more often, with negative results which tend to stick in a voters mind for a longer period of time than good news does.
The snowball effect
There’s more to it than just a story being uploaded and published on a blog or RSS feed. It goes a lot farther, much much farther. Internet news is now available in every language, where anybody who has access to a computer or smart phone is now a potential audience for ‘news’. That has politicians nervous because just how many of these stories are published with incomplete information along with confirmation that the material they are publishing is true. Harder still, once it’s published, how much effort do you put into getting a retraction if the story is inaccurate? And if the politician pushes too far, it may be perceived that there is in fact truth to the article, compounding the problem. Twitter spreads news like a virus and it’s unstoppable and often it doesn’t, if ever, post retractions or corrections at the same velocity. We thought we understood the 7/24 news cycle when the era of 200 television stations became a reality… uh no…not even close were we in understanding what this cycle means - until now.
The Spin
Bad news is also how the opposition takes aim at its targets. Once a story is in the wild, you can bet your opposite is firing out their take on a story, sometimes with twice the venom and quadruple the amount of information that can literately engulf the target. If you thought spam was a problem, political drama is going to crush it in the years to come. One question it raises is: Can we absorb it all? The politician may have an escape route after all. But there’s an old saying: If enough junk is thrown at the wall, some of it is going to stick…
The story
News is also about agendas that elected leaders want to you to vote for. Out go the press releases, RSS alerts, Twitter, blogs and social portal postings. You become engulfed in it. You can’t surf anywhere without it coming at you. Well, you can, but don’t worry; they’ll find you anyway and make sure you listen. As opposing sides pitch you why each respective side is right and the other is wrong, you wonder if they even remember what they represent you for in the first place. This onslaught of political news is ignored, absorbed and debated and the arguments and dilution of substance begins. Often it can be ugly at one extreme to complete blandness at the other. Politicians rarely remember which side of the bed they woke up on, why should it be any different trying to get a bill passed on the floor of the legislature?
What some leaders are starting to realize is that if they are not careful, their constituents will tune out. So far that’s not holding true, with the majority of western world eligible voters having access to the internet and having an email address or a cell phone with a data plan. Most troubling for elected officials are secondary news sources that create perception beyond their editorial control. These secondary sources are your friends that pass on the news, as a tweet, email, blog or text message which are condensed and revised pieces of news. This audience tends to get engaged BECAUSE it came from a source they associate with. The future might hold that people create firewall or filter rules that prevent political messages getting to them, but rarely will they reject these secondary sources of news.
Reaction to government has moved from the lawns of universities and parks to the Internet.
November 20th, 2009
Friday's Throw out the trash day and Polls for the week of Nov 20th
This week wasn’t a slow one for news, but it certainly had some bizarre stories. Some headlines for you and all the polls that I’ve posted throughout the week are listed here for those of you who haven’t (yet) read all my postings.
Senate Hearing hears testimony that 80% of cyber attacks are preventable. Really?
According to the British Government, they are leading the world in the use of technology. If that’s so then why are they losing so much data? Perhaps they should have senate hearings too….
To prove my point, a doctor in England claims over 100,000 X-Rays went unchecked and were stuck in closet…
But hey if you can’t get a country to create laws to ensure peace and democracy, pay them instead. The EU is giving Nigeria a BILLION Dollars to end corruption. How does this work again?
Polls of the week:
Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ...Website of the Week: Vancouver Winter 2010 Olympic Games Website
November 20th, 2009
Internet: A threat to government or the other way around?
Could the Internet pose a threat to government as an institution and create significant problems that shape how governing in the future occurs around the globe? Or are government a danger to users of the Internet — and vice versa?
The answer is maybe both. The internet has plunged government institutions into a very steep learning curve; creating new frontiers that many bureaucrats believe help how they run the country. For many departments, it’s been a windfall in financial savings such as publishing news, services, and many other programs. But for the actual governors of a country, it’s become quicksand or worse: the death knell for an elected official. The power brokers have found that making deals that used to be done in secret are now just about impossible to do. Getting a deal done, negotiating give and take on a bill is now leaked before the ink has even dried, because a draft is already out on the internet on some blog or news forum - like this one. Senators, Congressmen/women, parliamentarians around the world no longer worry about one single person; suddenly, anyone around them can be the next Deep Throat tell-all informer, straight from their BlackBerry to Twitter, and their career could be over.
It could be argued that the internet is the great equalizer to government and its institutions, preventing them from becoming too powerful. For other agencies, it’s an entirely new battlefront - one which they now must confront - and use.
- The Internet is the great creator and destroyer of current and next generation politicians.
- A journalist does his homework and steadfastly enshrines ethical methods.
These two statements are about to collide in a head-on crash of extraordinary proportions. When U.S. President Nixon resigned from office, it wasn’t a news story covering a week in the life of a President’s downfall. It started in June of 1971 and finally ended when he left office in August of 1974. Newspaper reporters had to maintain constant pressure on information leaking out of the White House and Defense Department for three years. Watergate was covered by some of the most respected journalists in the world and ensured that the facts pertaining to the story followed strict guidelines before publication. Those standards were what ultimately brought down a President.
Standards 2009… I don’t have time for that!
Today, a single story with enough information that is both accurate AND false can wipe out a politician in the amount of time it takes to log into a BlackBerry, type out 140 characters onto Twitter.com and you’re done like tweet….
The amount of retractions and corrections that news organizations have published has skyrocketed over the past several years. I myself have had to correct a story’s accuracy of facts. The speed of the internet has also created a conundrum that existed already in newspapers: Deadlines, which have now accelerated from several hours to ‘hit the press’ to seconds to get it online before the person across the street on his cell phone blogs it. Competition isn’t what it used to be. A single event can have devastating effects that spread and collects unwitting victims that are also elected, thus ending that official’s colleague career.
November 19th, 2009
FCC releases broadband agenda
The FCC released its broadband agenda and supplied a presentation on areas to be reviewed which is due in 90 days. It covers a very broad (no pun intended) area of topics. The statistics embedded are worth reading about. Among them;
- Broadband adoption by adults: 63%
- Smart phone adoption: 31%
- No Broadband available: estimated at 3 to 6 million Housing units
- Cost Estimate that it costs 25 times LESS to have broadband urban areas compared to rural
The presentation is available on the FCC site.
Loading ...November 19th, 2009
Politician wants Twitter banned from use by....wait for it -- politicians!
In the Globe and Mail today, a Federal MP (Northern Ontario - NDP) thinks Twitter should be banned from smart phones like BlackBerry’s that politicians use. But why…
Charlie Angus the MP from Northern Ontario was interviewed and said “to save politicians from looking like idiots.”
Is this really the Pot calling the kettle black? Politicians don’t need Twitter to do that, they simply have to hold a press conference and that pretty much does the job anyway. But it gets better (of course), the NDP is not alone, seems every political party has jumped in…
The source of his outrage was a tweet yesterday by Ontario Liberal MP Michelle Simson. She sent out an insulting message about Tory MP Dean Del Mastro, saying he should “grow up (not out).”
She was responding to a comment she didn’t like that he made in the all-party ethics committee. Mr. Del Mastro, the parliamentary secretary to the Heritage Minister and the MP for Peterborough, is a big man and was taunted as a kid with fat jokes. Over the past two years he has lost about 80 pounds.
After Question Period yesterday, Mr. Del Mastro asked for an apology from Ms. Simson. He got one but he got something else, too - support from Mr. Angus, who intervened in the Commons, urging MPs to stop playing with the devices during Parliamentary committees.
“I would like Members of Parliament to put the inane little games away and get down to [the] business of serving their representatives. When I saw that Twitter, I was appalled because I thought it could happen at any of our committees,” he said in the House of Commons.
Twitter is turning into the perfect breeding ground for the press to get some quotes that will wind up in their newspapers. Only time will tell if some of these twits wind up in court with libel lawsuits as CNN is reporting on court rulings against Courtney Love.
Loading ...November 19th, 2009
FCC wants public comment on digital democracy - voting online
Last month I wrote about online voting and the trend to continue to move towards this type of service. The FCC is looking for comments which will influence the FCC’s policy and submit back recommendations to Congress. Online town hall meetings using multimedia applications are also being reviewed. The extent to which voting options are available are not part of the FCC’s review or mandate. Paper ballots and in person voting are not likely going anywhere anytime soon.
It will be interesting to see if the value of online voting is swayed by the economics and accuracy of voter tabulations and participation. There are a lot of arguments for and against electronic and online voting. Another focus area likely to surface is the digital divide - many people simply do not use the Internet, let alone own a computer. As I noted in my previous post, there are other ways it could still be accomplished such as smart phones or kiosks connected to the election service platform.
Submissions are due by December 10 of this year.
Loading ... Loading ...November 19th, 2009
FCC to review regulatory and legal impacts to cloud services and identity management
The FCC is embarking on a review of several innovations that have now gained critical mass, among them, cloud computing, identity management, government data transparency. Cloud computing means so many different things to different groups so the FCC has clarified what areas it will review and raises the question of the definition as part of its review;
a. The National Institute of Standards and Technology defines cloud computing as “a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” Does this definition accurately capture the concept of cloud computing?
b. What types of cloud computing exist (e.g., public, hybrid, and internal) and what are the legal and regulatory implications of their use?
Cloud computing for many is a simple form of outsourcing tasks, applications and services driven by economics and ICT management costs. There is after all nothing magical about cloud computing compared to say Grid computing.
The correlation in all of this, is the information contained in the cloud, and if it is accessible via the internet, exposing potential vulnerabilities to that dataset. This dovetails into the FCC’s review of identity management issues and what regulations require potential revisions.
The review is to be completed by December 9.
Loading ...November 18th, 2009
Royal Navy gets creative in attracting engineers - develop online game
Engineering is not what it used to be. There used to be only 10 or so basic engineering degrees one could graduate with. Now there are hundreds (some even argue it’s triple that) of specialties. Most are in demand all over the world. The technology revolution is moving at a rapid pace and the competition for talent is becoming difficult for some organizations. That problem is significant for the Royal Navy. Students also have the different options other than traditional engineering fields — such as software programming, computer sciences and communications engineering — that offer competitive compensation. There’s only so much time a recruiter can spend with a potential candidate in person and television commercials are only 30 seconds long. The Navy has special needs and is willing to train qualified people to become experts in several different specialties of engineering. They needed a way to seek out people that were considering any one of those options.
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