Computers, Freedom, Privacy - and Policy

For the first time, U.S. technology policy has taken a front-row seat in this election year. If you had the candidates' ear, what would you tell them to do in regards to our digital world?

Computers, Freedom and Privacy (CFP) is a conference whose interests have tracked those of EFF for almost a decade. This year, the 18th annual CFP will focus on what constitutes technology policy — and organizers are asking for your help. Read on to find out how to contribute to the debate, and how to travel and attend for free if you are a tech or public policy journalist.

CFP: Technology Policy '08 is an opportunity to help shape public debate on those issues being made into law, regulations, and infrastructure. The direction of our technology policy impacts the choices we make about our national defense, our civil liberties during wartime, the future of American education, our national healthcare systems, and many other realms of policy discussed more prominently on the election trail. Open participation is invited for proposals on panels, tutorials, speaker suggestions, and birds of a feather sessions through the CFP: Technology Policy '08 submission system. The deadline for speaker and panel suggestions is this Monday, Mar. 24, 2008.

Suggested topics for discussion include:

* Information Privacy
* Anonymity Online
* Government Transparency
* Voting Technology
* Online Campaigning
* Social Networks
* Citizen Journalism
* Cybercrime & Cyberterrorism
* Digital Education
* Copyright and Fair Use
* Patent Reform
* Open Access
* P2P Networks
* Information Policy and Free Trade
* Media Concentration
* Genes & Bioethics
* Electronic Medical Records
* Web Accessibility
* Open Standards
* Network Neutrality
* High-Speed Internet Access Policy
* Freedom of Information
* Technology Policy Administration

At CFP, policies ranging from data mining and wiretapping, to file-sharing and open access, and e-voting to electronic medical records will be addressed by expert panels of technologists, policymakers, business leaders, and advocates.

Our decisions about technology policy are being made at a time when the architectures of our information and communication technologies are still being built. Debate about these issues needs to be better-informed in order for us to make policy choices in the public interest. Join in the discussion by submitting an idea to CFP.

Registration is available online. You can also take part in the discussion and information-sharing about technology policy at the CFP '08 Blog, the CFP '08 Wiki, and CFP groups at LinkedIn and Facebook.

Funding for Journalists

The Yale Law School Law and Media Program (LAMP) announces an opportunity for journalists to receive full funding to attend CFP: Technology Policy ’08. CFP: Technology Policy ’08 will begin with a full day of tutorials and programming specifically geared toward journalists writing about information technology and policy, followed by a networking reception for journalists and other participants in the Law and Media Program. Please see the CFP Journalists page for more details.

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EFF15: And the Awards Go To...

Thanks to your contributions, EFF's 15th Anniversary Blog-a-thon was a stunning success. We heard many tremendous stories about the fight for digital rights, with topics ranging from caller ID to the copyfight, CDA to DMCA, free speech in Singapore to blogging in Bulgaria. You can still find all the posts through Technorati and Pubsub.

No one loses in a blog-a-thon, but we had to choose three lucky bloggers to receive thank-you gifts, including our new EFF blogger t-shirt (available from EFF Shop) and pajamas (available by next week). Our independent panel of judges -- Susan Crawford, Mike Godwin, Xeni Jardin, JD Lasica, and Ernest Miller -- have sent in their picks, and we're happy to announce the winners:

Most Inspirational
IO Error, In Defense of Freedom: "As I said in an Independence Day posting a few weeks ago, the fight for liberty is not only conducted by the armed forces, it is conducted every day by ordinary citizens like you and me. We cannot protect freedom by curtailing it. Enemies of freedom, both foreign and domestic, threaten us every day, and we must be prepared to stand up to anyone who would take away the liberty which has made this country unique among nations."

Most Humorous
Memoirs of a Guardian Vampire, Fair use ... what use is it? (Harry Potter Woke Up Goth): "'Moribund is the core of my consciousness. Half-Heartedly I crawl through the strange forest until insecurities strip me of my fears. Suicide, Suicide, Suicide. Thou art my obsession.'

Thus were the thoughts that greeted Harry Potter as he woke that morning."

Best Overall
The ramblings of Laura Crossett, The Medium is Not the Message: "As I read news reports now, five years later, about bloggers getting in trouble for their writing, I'm reminded of that moment in the basement of Jessup and of the inability, or unwillingness, of the woman at the end of the hall to see electronic communication as equal to oral communication. The attempts to say that bloggers don't have the same rights as journalists stem, in part, from a belief that electronic print is not equal to hard copy print. "

Congrats to the winners and all participants. Thanks to our judges as well as Mary Hodder, Technorati, and Pubsub for their support. And to everyone: we hope you keep blogging the fight for digital rights and supporting EFF for many years to come.

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EFF15: Why Defend Digital Freedom?

In answer to that question, I composed the ditty below, inspired by my recent trip to Defcon. Ahem:

Lawyers, Geeks, and Money
(With apologies to Warren Zevon).

Well, I hacked into the Cisco
The way I always do
How was I to know
They'd call in CCIPS, too

I was talking at Black Hat
I took a little risk
Send lawyers, geeks, and money.
Jen, get me out of this

I'm the innocent bystander
Somehow I got stuck
Between the feds and Cisco
And I'm down on my luck
And I'm down on my luck
And I'm down on my luck

Now I'm pwned by the injunction
I'm a desperate geek
Send lawyers, geeks, and money.
A hacker up the creek

Send lawyers, geeks, and money.

Any relationship between this post and real life is merely coincidental. After all, who would really try to suppress open and honest discussion about a security flaw through legal action?

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EFF15: How I Became a Geek Crusader

I hope you're not reading this blog entry using somebody's open wireless network. It could get you arrested for trespassing. Earlier this month, a Florida man was arrested for sitting outside somebody's house in his car and using their open wifi network. What the hell? The network was open, people. But as Engadget reports, another guy was arrested for the same thing in the UK, and was found guilty last week of "dishonestly obtaining an electronic communications service." Law enforcement in both instances claimed that the problem with accessing an open wifi network is that it allows people to commit crimes anonymously. And yet we have only a very few examples of such crimes, compared to the millions of examples of happy people using open networks without doing anything illegal.

All this BS about arresting people for sucking free bits out of the air with their antennae makes me think back to a time, many years ago, when I first realized the social injustices suffered by geeks didn't originate entirely from groups of jocks and generic popular kids in the halls at my high school.

(Read on after the jump.)

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EFF15: The Best Laid Plans . . .

I didn't plan to become a copyfighter.

As a fresh-faced grad student, I was planning to spend my life as an academic, writing about the social construction of property through the lens of feminist legal theory. But the plan started going a little haywire when I started looking at ownership of the body, which led me to Moore v. Regents of the University of California (a 1990 case about property rights in human tissues) and Vanna White v. Samsung Electronics America (a 1993 publicity rights case that turned on the burning question of whether it is possible to distinguish Vanna White from a robot). Which led me to the award-winner for best case title, Carson v. Here's Johnny Portable Toilets, Inc. (I think you can guess what this one's about). And so on. Before long, I was hooked on the questions these cases raised. How, for example, did we all become committed to the notion that ideas, names, likenesses, expressions, symbols, etc., could be owned?

I looked at the history, especially the comments of some of the folks that invented modern IP, and discovered that it wasn't easy to convince people that ideas or expression should be owned at all. I discovered that part of what convinced them was (1) a promise that IP rights would be limited by doctrines such as fair use and first sale; and (2) a promise that eventually the works would enter the public domain. I discovered that significant new technologies have almost always provoked struggles over the proper balance between public and private domains of information.

Thus armed with a little knowledge, I came back to the present and looked around again. In my own university, professors, administrators, and publishers were fighting over the best way to own academic works -- but precious few were asking about the best way to share them. In Congress, legislators were passing draconian legislation like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Copyright Term Extension Act. With the blessing of the courts, the US Patent Office was approving silly patents like a method for "expanding web documents by merging with linked documents" (thank you, IBM). In short, there were plenty of folks lined up to define and defend a private domain of new technologies. But who was standing up to defend the public domain?

If you're reading this, you probably know the answer: the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Along with just a few other organizations, EFF was fighting the good fight in the courts and in the Congress. And sometimes, against extraordinary odds, EFF was winning.

Fast forward a few years, and I am proud to say I am now the newest member of the EFF legal team. Happy birthday EFF! And thanks for letting me join you in time to blow out the candles and make a wish.

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EFF15: No Place I'd Rather Be

Contrary to what you might imagine, watching Elvis and Xena the Warrior Princess casually saunter by doesn't necessarily mean that you've lost your mind. For me, it meant that I was finally home.

Rumor has it that working for EFF is a spectacularly cool gig. The secret's out: It really is. EFF works the way it does because it doesn't merely tolerate but actively embraces, cultivates -- even demands -- a sense of wonder at the technological world and a burning desire to fight the good fight, sprinkled with a leavening dose of quirkiness to help you roll with the punches.

(Read on for more after the jump.)

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EFF15: How an Old Fart Traditional Lawyer Became an Online Activist

I've had a rather strong interest in protecting free speech for about 40 years. In the mid-sixties, when I was barely a teenager, I was suspended from school for engaging in activities similar to those described in the most famous case concerning the free speech rights of minors, Tinker v. Des Moines School District. My parents were supportive, they hired a lawyer for me, and my school backed down. When I went to law school and took my first job as a law clerk in 1977, I turned down a higher paying job so that I could work for Paul Selvin, one of the leaders of the fight against the McCarthy-era Hollywood blacklists, and considered by many to be one of the Deans of the First Amendment bar in California.

It's no surprise, then, that free speech work became a part of my practice from the beginning. However, perhaps because I'm considerably older than most EFF staffers (we joke that I'm their adult supervision, but little do they know that I'm an Honorary Teenager), I came to the Internet much later than many, not until about 1995. Quickly, though, I happened upon two issues that piqued my professional curiosity.

The first was censorware, less pejoratively known as filtering or blocking software. The second was the notion that code is speech.

(More after the jump.)

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EFF15: The Moment I "Clicked-Through" to the Copyfight

In 1997, I entered my first year of law school at UC Berkeley. At the time, I had a pretty open mind as to what I wanted to do with my life as a lawyer. I had done some work on gender issues in the past and thought I might continue in that vein, working on social justice in the courtroom or policy arenas. But then I met Pam Samuelson.

Pam teaches at Berkeley, but I met her outside the classroom as part of the team organizing a conference on software licensing law. When I showed up to the meeting, I was skeptical that I would be interested; after all, who cares what the fine print says in those tedious multi-page "I agree" windows? To me, it was all just boring corporate contract law BS. Yet within an hour all of that changed.

Pam showed us that hidden beneath these banal, technical, obscure provisions was a raging battle over principles of fairness, free speech, consumer protection, and free culture in the information age.

She showed us that there were key public interest questions at stake: Could a company censor product reviews of its software? Could I be forced to consent to a search and seizure of my data files? Would a single company be able to lock out all competition in a market by undermining fair use and reverse engineering of its products? These were just a few of the policy questions at the heart of the symposium we were organizing. From there, I was hooked.

(Read more after the the jump.)

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EFF15: Keep Blogging for Freedom; Seven More Days to Enter Contest

Blog-a-thon posts are surging -- if you haven't been following the inspiring tales through Technorati and Pubsub, you're missing out! To keep the momentum going and to give you another chance to enter your own story in EFF's contest, we've extended the Blog-a-thon submission deadline to August 2nd.

Here are some recent highlights:

HangLeft: "It became obvious that Intel's master database of CPU serial numbers would be an extreme invasion of privacy intended to empower their marketing department, the public's right to privacy be damned. I was furious at the idea."

Liza: "We don't usually lose privacy protections in great dramatic moments. Instead, they get slowly smaller and less effective. When privacy protections are gone, instead of feeling exposed and at risk, we more often simply accept that 'this is how life is.'"

Nightsoil: "I realized that a failed scientist and musician just might make a good IP attorney. It is my hope that with my education I can somehow effect change that will help preserve what is beautiful and true by ensuring more artists and scientists can communicate new expression and ideas in a way that is beneficial to us all."

Joe Hall: "What incensed me more than the fact that Diebold misused intellectual property law was what I learned in the process about the machinery that is increasingly casting and counting our votes."

Yovko, translating from Bulgarian: "Perhaps it seems it is too far away from here, probably it is still not too scary, but we should never forget what happened with the software patents."

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EFF15: The View From a Windowless Office

My digital liberties "click moment" is less a moment than a place -- a windowless basement office, to be precise. The office was home to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, a research center at Harvard Law School, when I was a student. I had found the recently established Berkman Center through their advertisement for a webmaster and sysadmin. I thought that running a webserver under my desk qualified me for the post, and, in a sign of the times, they did too.

The Berkman Center was founded on a commitment to openness: open code, open law, open access, open education, open governance. Berkman founders and faculty -- Charlie Nesson, Jonathan Zittrain, Lawrence Lessig, and Terry Fisher -- understood that the magic of the Internet was not what it was now, but what its users could build upon it. They infused the Center's research with that build-it spirit, and quickly made me more than just a webmaster/sysadmin, but a full participant in the construction. If the tools we needed didn't exist, we'd create them, test them in real-time, and deploy -- whether it was classroom discussion software (now h2o), online teaching, or open-source law.

(more after the jump)

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