China is ‘demanding’ information about what the NSA is up to, wink wink. Because they’re totally, 100%, absolutely not in cahoots with Snowden or anything, of course not.
I hope these SWATters are found and get prison time.
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Unnecessary legislation watch: House Democrats (and a Republican) want to meddle in the matter of employer access to Facebook. Sure, a lot of people aren’t smart about Facebook, but that’s no good reason to expand government here. Let’s not micromanage. We just went over this with ECPA.
How can we trust new government regulations of Cybersecurity, Obama-style, when heavily regulated utilities are doing so poorly? That’s why we need a light touch, low on regulation, CISPA-style.
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Sorry for missing Tech at Night on Friday. After that near-miss with a cold, I decided to start the weekend a little early that night. But we’re back. So with five days of news to catch up on, let’s see what we have here.
Here’s a reminder of why Net Neutrality was a terrible idea. Making people pay for what they use creates opportunities for innovation. If ESPN wants to negotiate bulk rates for wireless data, let them!
And yet that John McCain would add more regulations. We need less micromanagement of cable, not more.
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Crime Watch: Lulzsec bigshot gets taken down in Australia, and an Anonymous gang member is on trial for multiple rape at an Occupy event. Bad week for anarchists. Heh.
Democrats tuning their rhetoric for the moment: IMMEDIATE ACTION needed on Do Not Track, even as it’s taken YEARS to do anything on outdated ECPA email rules which now may include a warning requirement, and it wasn’t even Jay Rockefeller who got off his tail to get that done.
Read More »CNN Marketwatch offers a glimpse of our paper-pushing future under ObamaCare: If you thought nothing could be more tedious than filling out your tax forms, just wait until you try to apply for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s new exchanges. The draft of the paper application is 15 to 21 pages, depending on whether someone is applying individually or for their family. And | Read More »
Here we go again. The Weekend-at-Bernies-ificatoin of Aaron Swartz continues. He made an example of himself to become an anti-copyright martyr, and now we’re supposed to degrade property rights online to give him his way anyway. Pass.
Computer Fraud and Abuse is a problem, but foreign threats are an issue, too. That’s why we also need to pass CISPA which started off as the low-regulatory, small-government alternative to the Democrat power grab, if you recall. Funny how the so-called libertarians only rally agains the GOP proposal, and stayed silent against Lieberman-Collins last time.
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I meant to post over the weekend, but with RedState so active for Easter, I decided just to cancel the Friday Tech.
Hey folks, here’s more evidence: Population density matters for Internet speeds. Wealth also matters. Those who don’t adjust for these factors, and tell you US Internet speeds are slow or bad, are selling something. Usually government.
And yes, it’s still a problem that the Obama administration isn’t doing enough to oppose global Internet regulation through the ITU. Some say the administration was duped, but I think they just don’t oppose global regulation and governance. Obama wants to bow to foreign countries by letting global tyrants hijack the Internet from the free peoples of the world.
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The evidence mounts that we need to respond to Chinese attacks on American industry. But what do we do about it when we have few tools short of military attack? Hit them back in kind, I would think.
Of course, Seton Motley says Barack Obama is attacking our Internet access with his illegal, overreaching regulations. Remember: the courts have already pointed out his NLRB efforts have been flat out illegal, and the FCC’s Net Neutrality efforts have also been overturned once before.
Read More »A few years ago, Google was deeply in bed with the left wing activists like Moveon.org and Free Press pushing for Internet regulation. When Obama was elected, Google got even more deeply embedded with both the left and the government. At this point, Republicans began paying more attention to Google and Google realized it had a political problem.
So, after years of lining up with the left to demand more government regulation of the internet, Google changed course. (“Google cozies up to the GOP”) Google promoted their Republican lobbyists, hired Republican consultants, sucked up to conservative organizations and even hired a squishy Republican, Susan Molinari (R-MSNBC) to run their DC office.
But if they were playing footsie with Republicans, Google was still sleeping with the Democrats.
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So, the President and other Democrats seem to think more government is the answer to our cybersecurity problems. the Chinese are attacking us, and will continue to do so going forward. Hard to see how more regulation on our wend will help that. Fighting back might make more sense, so long as we don’t make the Internet unusable in the process.
Of course, some threats are domestic. Gangs like Anonymous need to be found and jailed. Again, regulation isn’t the answer there. Police work is. Especially since this Anontard attack was on… the Federal Reserve. Oops.
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An activist is dead, by his own choice. He also chose to commit crimes to push his agenda. Nobody denies he did it. They only deny that he should have been prosecuted.
I can understand the man’s family and friends feeling grief, and lashing out. But for anyone else to attempt to use this event to push an agenda, discredits his agenda. If you need to use the suicide of a criminal in order to advance your policy goals like a vulture, your policy goals probably don’t have much going for them.
And that’s all I have to say about that for now.
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Message to The New Republic: The left-right antiSOPA coalition isn’t getting back together because the right half still opposes Internet regulation, while y’all keep pushing stuff like privacy regulation and Net Neutrality.
Also, in case you missed it, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai returned to RedState, this time to talk about government’s oversized spectrum holdings.
Here’s a brief conversation with Marsha Blackburn about tech policy.
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Hey La-Mulanites! I’m Neil, and let’s play Tech at Night.
Anyway. Yeah, I took a break, as you may have noticed. It turns out between Christmas, New Year’s and the Fiscal Cliff, not much happened for me to cover, anyway! So let’s get started.
Two legislative notes: the outmoded video privacy law passed, while the so-called Marketplace Fairness Act is dead in the water. I always said its best chance was President Romney and a Republican Senate, but now that’s not happening. Poor Amazon, bargaining with states on the assumption this would happen.
And in case you forgot, a Cybersecurity executive order would be a bad thing, per Marsha Blackburn and Steve Scalise.
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Hello again. Having been traveling from Wednesday to Friday for my employer, I did my best to get this out Friday night, but I crashed about a third of the way into my backlog of links. Then over the weekend my email server died. So, we catch up with Tech at Night on Monday!
We’ll start with the International Telecommunications Union. Reports came out that ITU anti-liberty proposals were backing off, but the effort is going in the wrong direction. A big chunk of the Anglosphere is against it, including the Obama administration.
The President is getting credit for this position from industry and House Republicans, but consider this: if the ITU’s secretary general didn’t see the Obama opposition coming then just how muted were Obama’s efforts to fix the treaty to begin with? This is a failure of the President to lead internationally.
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They told me that if I voted for Mitt Romney, that corporations with ties to the President would offshore billions of dollars to avoid paying taxes! Did Obama and Schmidt even feel guilty as Obama said one thing, while working with Google who was doing the opposite?
Because remember: as I’ve been saying all along, The global Internet regulations the ITU is threatening is in the spirit of the Obama- and Schmidt-backed Internet regulations we’ve seen the last four years!
And let’s be clear: the Obama administration isn’t done regulating now that the second term is coming.
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