Bike Rac-Man
For some reason I’ve never been able to not see this.
Public transit and lawful access
Eric King recently posted a link to London’s Oyster Card FAQ page explaining Transport for London’s policy on requests for information from police — it rejects 5-10% of requests for providing insufficient information.
It inspired me to look up Clipper Card’s policy. As I suspected, it doesn’t report any similar numbers, but it says in its FAQ that:
personal information will not be disclosed to third parties, except as required by law, ordered by a court of competent jurisdiction, or where the express written consent of the Clipper cardholder has been obtained.
In the full privacy policy, Clipper notes that it retains personally identifiable information for up to seven years. It also doesn’t include ride patterns as personally identifiable.
MTA’s info for New York City is apparently even less complete. Though the website has a whole section labeled “Transparency”, it’s dedicated to budget and governance issues. In fact, the only privacy policy I could find on the site pertains strictly to use of the website itself.
Even though there’s no obvious policy, MTA info has been publicly used in police proceedings. In 2008 it made the front page of the New York Times when MetroCard data got a suspect off of murder charges. An MTA employee in the article is quoted as saying that there would be a three-month wait time to retrieve the evidence, because “We’re very busy. We’ve got all these requests.”
(Interestingly, it didn’t make the front page when the charge was actually dropped, but the same reporter covered it for the New York section of the paper and the City Room blog. The two articles were released on the evening of New Year’s Eve 2008, and are nearly identical. One of the only differences is a sentence omitted from the blog post version, saying “The transit agency says it receives periodic requests to trace information.”)
This information seems to be a nice target for public records requests. Let me know if you’re interested in initiating some of those.
Questioning copyright’s trade-off
This post is cross-posted from the EFF Deeplinks blog.
The idea behind copyright is simple — it is supposed to be a balance in the service of the public interest. There’s a trade-off: for accepting a restriction on certain speech, the public benefits from the production of more new creative works each year. That delicate equation is complicated by many factors, and the right policy should find the balance of copyright scope and duration, limitations and exceptions like fair use, and the appropriate remedies in case of infringement.
But in fact, copyright policies almost universally lack the serious cost-benefit analysis that must precede any evidence-based proposal. And indeed, while the unintended costs are clear to anybody who has observed abuse of, say, the DMCA takedown system, the evidence that these policies create incentives — or even prevent harm — is less forthcoming.
Last week Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute posted a thought-provoking piece that questions the similar calculation at the core of national security rhetoric. In the area of security, he asks, are we actually getting a “trade-off” for all the costs we incur to the country’s budget and our personal liberty? Sanchez convincingly argues that we haven’t been working towards a balance between those two ideas at all. Liberty is consistently discarded in the name of “security,” and the resulting policies don’t actually make us safer. A dialogue that focuses only on striking a balance between these two ideas fails to address more fundamental questions about our policy.
So, too, with copyright. The right copyright policy should serve the constitutional purpose of promoting “the progress of science and the useful arts” while respecting the ideals of the First Amendment. The need for such a balance is well recognized from all corners of the copyright discussion. In a post about the misguided Supreme Court opinion in Golan v. Holder this January, for example, EFF referred to the “traditional copyright balance between public and private interests“; and while EFF doesn’t always see eye-to-eye on copyright issues with content lobby groups like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), its chief executive Cary Sherman has also described “the careful balance struck within” copyright law.
It makes sense, then, that one typical response to bad copyright policy developments — and there are many — is to say that those developments skew this balance the wrong way, favoring the incentives and rewards for rightsholders more than is necessary to maximize creative production. But that approach overlooks the fact that many of the worst copyright proposals, like those that come out of content lobbying groups like the RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) do worse than a skewed balance. Rather, they fail to strike any kind of balance at all, curtailing speech and fundamental online rights without a corresponding increase in the incentive to create new works.
By and large, in the legislature, in the courtroom, in the White House, and in the backroom negotiations for international treaties, balance does not seem to be the real goal. This year’s protests against SOPA and ACTA were certainly historic demonstrations of online activism, but those proposed laws were just the latest in a long line. Even as ACTA met defeat in Europe, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) was being negotiated with industry representatives behind closed doors, with guardians of the public interest on the outside. SOPA was an egregious and over-the-top wishlist of Hollywood demands, but it was hardly new: its Senate counterpart, PIPA, was a re-write of a bill from two years earlier called COICA. And Congress has passed dozens of other one-sided copyright laws over the last thirty years.
If it were simply a matter of striking the wrong balance, SOPA’s cost in terms of threatening human rights, curtailing freedom of speech, and damaging the economy would have to be offset by gains to the content lobby backing the bill. It wouldn’t be the right trade-off, but it would make sense in the context of a balance. In reality, though, the benefits for the content lobby simply weren’t there. In January, Sanchez himself calculated that the size of the foreign “pirate” movie market targeted at Americans — the kind of activity SOPA was written to address — was orders of magnitude below the MPAA claims. And for their part, the RIAA recently revealed in a leaked report from April that despite its public rhetoric, it felt SOPA was “not likely to have been [an] effective tool for music” even if it had passed.
Similarly, when the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act — sometimes called the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” because it kept the world’s most famous rodent out of the public domain — was challenged in the Supreme Court, some of the world’s leading economists lined up in a brief [pdf] to question the premise that the public benefited from retroactive term extension at all. Once again, the costs to the public are clear: we all suffer from a poorer public domain with no clear gains in return. Worse, these examples are the rule and not the exception. Many elements of policy today — from DMCA’s problematic section 1201 to the unconstitutional ICE seizures of websites — and dozens more failed proposals — like the “Hollywood Hacking bill” or the broadcast flag — fit this pattern.
Compared to the trade-off of security and liberty, the question at the heart of copyright policy is an easy one: How do we optimize the incentive to create new works while minimizing the cost to our freedom of speech and ability to innovate? Unfortunately, sane policy developments that work toward this end are all too rare.
Pwn the Drones presentation at HOPE
Last week my colleague (and fellow @drones operator) Trevor and I had the opportunity to present at the HOPE9 conference at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. It was an amazing conference and I was really honored to get to speak there.
Our presentation was titled “Pwn the Drones: A Survey of UAV Hacks and Exploits,” and covered three major points:
- Drones are already in widespread use, and that is set to expand dramatically over the next few years.
- They do not have the best safety record, and have been compromised in attacks on their ground networks, GPS modules, data transmission, and in kinetic attacks on the aircraft itself. Related systems, such as the control satellites, have also been exploited.
- Drones have also been used to deliver payloads in other unusual hacks and exploits, by activists, artists, law enforcement agents, and others.
I’ve already cleaned up the talk once to give a shorter version at dorkbot sf. It’s so important that information about the capabilities of — and weaknesses in — this drone technology gets more widely understood as these get deployed, so I’m happy to do what I can to help that endeavor.
Six months of Iron Blogger SF
I can’t believe six months has already passed, but I realized the other day that I’ve been running Iron Blogger SF for half a year now. A lot has happened: we’ve added a bunch of members and lost a few, too. We’ve had great meetups, gotten to know each other a bit better, and with a convention of the Global Iron Blogger Council this month, ((an email thread between Mako, Michelle and me.)) we’ve even expanded the rules to establish reciprocity for members of different global chapters. Very nice.
I’m really proud of some successes we’ve had. To the extent that more people are writing blog posts more often, that’s huge for me. I know that my volume has gone up significantly since starting, and even when there are lulls of a few weeks here and there, my numbers are up across the board. There’s also been some cross-pollination and introductions that may not have happened otherwise, and I’m happy to have pushed those further.
As our little chapter of Iron Blogger keeps chugging along, I would like to develop some aspects further. I’d really like to see more interaction between Iron Bloggers on their blogs, in things like comment sections and response posts. We’ve experimented with blogging on a common theme in a given week, and it actually works pretty well. And it’s come up before, but I’m really interested in encouraging more diversity within our network in terms of both participants and content. Some of these issues just require that I put in a bit more work each week, and I’m more than happy to do that.
After six months, I remain convinced. I think the Iron Blogger model is a really great one, and it’s good to be running a chapter.