Here.
Category: Policy
Unless there’s a successful appeal to the Supreme Court of today’s Court of Appeals decision, May 14, 2007 is the deadline by which your broadband and VOIP provider must provide law enforcement with a means to listen in on your conversations.
The Court of Appeals decision isn’t so appalling as is what the FCC’s done here, as a culmnation of its reclassification efforts. It’s essentially blown up the common carrier model in favor of a regulatory scheme by the only thing that is asked of a communications provider is that it ensures that the government has access to the consumer’s private information, on demand. In return, the providers are essentially freed of all obligations (e.g., open access, support for universal service, etc.).
The House Committee on the Judiciary just finished a very informative hearing on the issue of net neutrality. I’m going to wait until I can get a hold of the Q&A to go into detail, but I say this right now – I hope more and more organizations get Tim Wu to deliver the message of the importance of net neutrality. I’ve been familiar with Tim’s academic and policy work for a while, but until this year, I’d never heard him speak. He’s very engaging, and if anyone is going to find a way to make this matter accessible to the public, he’s among my top candidates to do it. His prepared testimony is here.
It had never occured to me that the drive through window would be outsourced. According to the NYT article, McDonald’s is experimenting with routing the drive through orders of 40 locations to workers at call centers in Mississippi and Wyoming. The audio is routed from the drive through board mic/speaker to a call center, and the order is sent back to the restaurant over the Internet. I’m rather doubtful that the claimed speed efficiencies justify the costs involved. Minimum wage workers take the order in either place, no? But if you change Mississippi and Wyoming to Kerala and Punjab . . .
Interesting.
I joined what I expect will be pegged at 50,000+ fellow Americans on the Mall today. I, along with everyone else there, went to stand in opposition to the attack on common sense, American values, and basic human dignity that is H.R. 4437. You’ve almost certainly heard a lot of (mis)information about it, but just in case you haven’t, this is a good start. I agree – our immigration system is most certainly broken – but H.R. 4437 and its relations aim only to smash the system to bits.
Instead of listing out the abominations contained in that bill and proposed by its supporters, I’ll offer something different here: hope. The people – the energy – in the march was amazingly positive. While recent protests such as Operation Ceasefire were full of passionate believers in freedom and decency, there was a palpable sense of futility, of raging against the wind. This? This was very different. I had forgotten what it was like to hear “U.S.A! U.S.A!” chanted with hope, instead of fear and anger. It was the same excitement about America that I heard on a flight so long ago. It was the sound of people thinking that the America we know and love will win this one.
SÃ, Se puede. Yes.we.can.
In addition to picking up some interesting ideas and wisdom from the F2C folks, I also seem to have picked up a rather nasty cold that has really slowed me down. So I’m a little . . . slow.
In response to comments on the previous post – Geddes hasn’t convinced me that pushing for Net Neutrality legislation is *necessarily* a bad idea right now. As Susan Crawford notes, we need more evidence before we can make a fully informed decision on the matter. But I remain worried that by the time we get that information, it may well be too late. One of the few things I think Powell got right in his speech was pointing out that there is usually a very narrow window of opportunity in which proponents of a regulatory action can make a real difference. And I while I’m not sure that we’re in that window right now, I certainly don’t want to wait until the RBOCs have slammed it shut.
In the end, I’d prefer to serve the values motivating the Freedom to Connect crowd through competition in an open marketplace. But that’s the key – it requires an open marketplace. And I don’t think that its continued existence is at all a given. As Tim Wu’s review of the historical behavior of common carriers has shown, they’ve rarely passed up an opportunity to distort a market. And with all that practice, they will likely be able to accomplish it before the public has even understood what’s happened.
Noted via Atrios:
The U.S. State Department has changed its stance on a new Brazilian security process for U.S. citizens entering the South American nation. Washington is now urging Brazil to alter its new process of fingerprinting and photographing U.S. visitors. “We have told the Brazilians that we think that these are measures that provide tremendous inconvenience to travelers and that they need to be changed,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Tuesday.
Just last week, Boucher’s deputy — J. Adam Ereli — said the United States understood Brazil’s new policy. “This is their sovereign right to do if they want to do it.” Ereli said.
Brazil’s program began after a similar process was announced for the United States. The US-VISIT program began January 5 and applies to any visitor, including Brazilians, who are required to have visa to enter the United States. Visitors from most European nations are excluded.
Original story here.
This is naked pandering. Well-timed, I might add. Worth noting on this is that it not only amounts to an amnesty program for the immigrants (people who will remain here anyway, and Bush gets goodwill votes for assisting them), but also a free pass for the employers who have been exploiting them and creating the market for illegal immigrant labor.
Compassionate conservatism – we take care of our own.
A little over 10 years ago, in Frankfurt, West Germany, I boarded a Pan Am flight with my sister. It was bringing us to “the States”, that place we’d stopped by a few times as my father moved us around the world. It was where my mother was from, and where we’d be living for the foreseeable future (three years?). I wasn’t terribly thrilled about leaving Germany, but hey, I’d be living in the place where you could buy Now & Laters, T&C shirts, and see first run movies.
But as far as I could see at the time, those were really the only advantages. I mean, in the end, it’s all the same, right? Just a little difference in language, store hours, and things you could buy. It was with these thoughts that I boarded that flight.
Andrea and I ended up sitting next to another “unaccompanied minor” on this 747 packed full of strange people leaving also leaving Frankfurt. She was fairly quiet, but we slowly moved into conversation as the night passed.
Her name was Marta, and she was on her way home, too. Turns out she had a much better conception of home than we did. She’d never left before (that was very odd in itself to me), but had been sent away for a couple of months during some “family troubles”. She didn’t say quite what, at first, and I didn’t ask. Probably a divorce or something.
It was a long night, and we ended up talking a long time. As the conversation flowed, it became clear that while she missed her mother, she wasn’t too excited about going home. The connecting flight at JFK that would take her home landed in Haiti. Her “family troubles” were that her grandfather, mayor of some town, had been pulled out of his bed in the middle of the night. A day and a few bullets later, her grandfather was dumped in front of her house. She said she thought she’d rather be living in “the States”.
~
In almost any other circumstance, I wouldn’t have believed her. But there was a certain sincerity to her words that struck me at the time, and I was amazed. Maybe “the States” were a better place to be in some cases.
~
Dawn started to come somewhere over Nova Scotia. People were waking up, repacking the bags that served as makeshift pillows over the night. It was a full flight, and the usual empty-row-as-bed reprise from the discomfort of coach was nowhere to be found. It’s particularly difficult to be anything but crabby at that point on any transatlantic flight.
By the time our final descent started, everyone was up. Some tried to finish off a last chapter in a book, some stared out the windows at the coastline, and others drifted back into sleep. The plane angled sharply, and we would soon be on the ground.
Suddenly there was a chattering. Mostly in languages I’d never heard. Everyone was looking out of the right side of the plane, and Andrea moved back so I could see. Oh, it was the Statue of Liberty. Neat. Are we there yet? Oddly, folks stayed glued to the windows, and the stewardess had to get up and tell them to sit down and put their seat belts on again.
~
The pilot turned the plane again, and leveled out. Shortly, we’d be on the ground, and I was going to have to figure out exactly how to get me and my sister to the Northwest flight to Minnesota. I wondered to myself about Marta, and made sure we exchanged addresses.
The scenery was suddenly rushing by, and passengers all went quiet, that way they do just before a plane lands. And with a screech of rubber, we were back in “the States.”
At least, I’m assuming there was a screech of rubber. I couldn’t hear it. See, the whole plane, almost all 420 passengers, was cheering. Cheering. And yelling, and crying, and damn near everyone was smiling the biggest smiles I’d ever seen. It didn’t stop till long after we’d reached the gates. They were finally in “the States.”
~
I can’t begin to explain how profound the experience of that flight was, or how it’s become the base of my faith in America. It wasn’t a capstone, but a beginning. Prior to that, American was simply the thing that my American family was always telling me I should be more like, and that dammit, I wasn’t English. Or American was the part of me that kept me from understanding cricket, as my English family said.
American was loud, obnoxious, and usually what I distanced myself from. English was a bit easier to digest for most, and anyway, England was closer than “the States.”
This is not to say that the flight was a permanent step into patriotism. Since then, I’ve railed against this country, worked for and with innumerable organizations many would call “subversive”. America manifest is something that occasionally still turns my stomach.
But America the ideal, the one everyone was cheering for that day, the one they recognized before I did- that’s mine. It’s theirs, too. And goddammit it’s yours if you want it.
Don’t treat that as anything less than what that is.
I watched the State of the Union tonight. I almost felt bad for Clinton. Having to walk into that room knowing they were all wondering when they’d be able to feed off of your dead political carcass. Now for a quick rundown (to be cleaned up later, when I don’t have so much work looming in front of me)-
“Let’s save Social Security”- Whatever. Let’s make sure we have enough money to pay for current obligations and let me the hell out. There are all sorts of exceptions to mandatory SS participation (state employees, for example). Let’s give this option to the whole country. I’d still be happy to pay a point or two to “save” the idgits who, in spite of this opportunity, still don’t figure it out by 65. I’m just not happy to pay 7 points.
“Raise minimum wage” – don’t you just love the way an entire half of the room stayed silent on that one? Or are they busy trying to come up with new “dire consequences” like those that never materialized last time?
“More education benefits” Excuse me, Mr. President, how can you stand up there and talk about his when you’ve reduced the net aid available to college students?
“100,000 new teachers!” Kinda like 100K more cops but without the guns? Let’s concentrate on getting *good* teachers.
“End social promotion”. Hell yeah. The summer I taught, I had a fifth grader named Edward who couldn’t write his own fucking name. I cried that night.
“Let’s raise cigarette prices to reduce teen smoking” Please. I don’t care what kind of taxes you put on cigarettes, just don’t pretend like it’ll reduce smoking. Let these idgits kill themselves, and refuse medicare/aid payments for the treatment. They knew the risks when they started, and if they honestly didn’t, they’re probably not going to survive for long anyway.
“Vote on the nominations for judges” Thank you. Republicans clamor and complain about a poor and backed up judicial system. Well no shit- if there aren’t any judges, no cases get heard. Or do ya’ll want to privitize that, too?
The solider from Bosnia got the longest applause out of anyone (including the President). That’s how it should be.
Endorsing the nuclear testing comprehensive ban. Are we *still* waiting on this?
“Pay the UN debt” Uh, hello? It’s not like the UN could ever force the US to take any action. Why must we antagonize over a few hundred million dollars? (I know, Jesse Helms, but I keep hoping he takes up smoking soon).
“Let’s fund the next generation of the Internet” Anyone else notice that absolutely no one in the room had any idea about what he was talking about?
“Let’s pay for the new space station”- While I’m a bit of a realist, I like some wonderment every once in a while. I hope this works out.