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How Will Law Continue to Affect Technology?
WPL510 asks: "I'm writing an article on how law impacts technology and vice versa, and would like to get the opinions of those who use technology every day. So- which laws have most affected your use of technology? Which have tried and failed? Does anyone else foresee any other possible, as yet unknown, problems posed by new technology (just as Diamond's Rio showed the holes in the AHRA)?"
Sadly the U.K is not alone in this. Our own illustrious Congress here in the U.S. is attempting to enact a similar bill s.2516 "The Fugitive Apprehension Act" would provide the same kinds of government policies here. In this case the goal is to ensure that the govenrment can locate fugitives by searching through their friends' and relatives' posessions.
The interesting aspect of our bill is the principle of delayed notification. For (perhaps loogical provided you don;t trust people) The government is entitled to search your records at a bank or at your ISP and "Delay Notifying You" until such time as they deem it appropriate. Presumably this time and the time when it's too late for you to get back at them will coincide. This delayed notification clause also allows them to arrest anyone (a bank clerk or ISP worker say) who is kind enough to tell you that your e-mails are being or have been read. Like the U.K. Bill this one requires explicit ISP cooperation.
By far the most pointed element of this bill is the fact that all of this can take place without a warrant. The requirement that a Judge grant permission to invade someone's privacy is missing from this bill. This is interesting since warrants have classib=cally bin the untimate dfence of people's liberty and rights against overzealous justice officials. In place of the warrant is something called "Administrative approval." I'm not sure who's approval that connotates (U.S. Justive department probably) but certanly not an unbiased party."
Currently Congress is due to go on the capaign trail soon so this bill may or may not be heald off. At the moment it is sitting in a House subcomittee. You can find the deatails on www.congress.gov Incidentally the bill was sposored by Strom Thurmond. AC
I believe that one of the most dramatic ways in which laws have been affecting technology as of late has to do with database implementation. Deadbeat Dad laws have finally enabled the collection of a single unique identifier, the SSN, for all US citizens. To be able to do much of anything with regards to state or government agencies (such as getting a driver's license, fishing license, etc) you'll have to supply your SSN. What this ultimately means is that a myriad of previously disjoint databases spanning many different government agencies are going to be searchable with a single key, and the ramifications of that in terms of everyday technology, even where it affects non-geeks, is staggering.
I live in QLD Australia. In June '99 the Federal Government made an amendment to the Broadcasting Services Act. This amendment introduced a "complaint based" internet censorship system. It came came into effect one the 1st of January 2000.
I haven't noticed the slightest bit of difference. There was a lot of puffing and blowing in Parliament about Protecting the Children and applying the same standards we have for movies and TV to the internet. There was talk of filtering all packets that came into Australia after the (startlingly obvious) point was made that most content viewed in Australia is hosted overseas.
Informed opinion (i.e., that of people who actually used computers/the internet) was that the proposed scheme was ludicrous and unworkable (ISPs are legally require to "make available" client side filtering software, although no-one seems to know if use of them is supposed to be mandatory), and time has shown that opinion to be correct. The scheme isn't the slightest hinderance to accessing "undesirable" content, it has cost millions of taxpayer dollars, and it has made Australia look like an IT backwater (which it isn't). Check out this link for an overview of the law.
At the time I said to people "this is the thin edge of a nasty wedge", and I'm still concerned that I may be right. While the law in its current form is more stupid than problematic, I'm deeply uncomfortable that it sits there packing some nasty penalties for non-complying ISPs. When there's a precedent for blocking one form of "undesirable content" it means that the infrastructure is right there when the government wants to block another form of "undesirable content".
Hope this helps for your article!
grib.
maybe
Please limit your answers to, at most, two double spaced pages.
Thank you.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
www.stand.org.uk has details on how silly/scary (depending on whether you're watching or on the receiving end) the RIP bill is.
Of particular interest is the letter to Jack Straw complete with encrypted confession to an unnamed crime. As it explains, under the RIP bill Jack Straw could be imprisoned unless he can prove that he does not have the decryption key. Proving you do not have something is a little tricky, of course.
And even you can prove that, you're still liable for imprisonment unless you give the police information enabling them to get the key.
A full guide to the implications of the bill is here.
As the previous poster mentioned, press coverage of the bill has been extremely limited, which is surprising given the far reaching effects on the right to privacy it has.
The fact that the law functions as an immune system for society means that it is susceptible to the work of people who are the societal equivalent of the AIDS virus; people who corrupt the structure of the legal system to their own destructive ends.
Because the law is uniquely devoted to the control of evil in society - it is the one societal system which evil feels, and has always felt, a pressing need to control and shape.
Does anyone seriously believe that holding red hot pokers to someone's tongue was the idea of good people? Ancient legal systems were - from our perspective - obviously the work of evil. Modern ones still are, they are just packaged so as to make that evil influence blend in invisibly.
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The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works.
In theory yes, in pratice big business pushes
for most of the laws.
We who believe in open source have won a few
but we have the same problem the indians had
when the amercas were discovered.
The indians believe that land belongs to no-one.
This is why they "sold" land for little or no
money.
The settlers took full advange of this. Now indians live on reserves and "americans" own the land.
Most people on slashdot thank that standards
should be open. However open standards do not
allow big business to leverage markets so
big business will fight this by lobbying for
new laws and patenting every thing in site.
As much as I am voting for companies that promote
open source software and standards (redhat, valinux etc )it seems that companies who make money keeping standards and software development
closed (ala microsoft) will have several advantanages.
Unless our goverment leans real hard to the left
big business will have an advantage.
The real challange for open source is not just
write better software and open standards but
to also learn how to market it and leverage it
better than closed source companies.
Lets face it. Most people that are using open
source are not paying for the software and are
paying little to no money for support.
Everything else being equal closed source comanies
have a lot more money to market there products and
lobby goverment with.
Sadly unless something changes in our laws or
someone finds a way to make open source more
profitable than closed source we have a hard road ahead of us.
AdFuel
Government's primary function is protection of property rights, not the active exercise of those rights. Therefore it is property rights, not activities, that should be taxed. The government should be held accountable for property losses, as is any insurer; particularly losses due to government malfeasance as protector. But the government should _not_ be held accountable for losses to property rights for which it is not paid a tax. Exemptions for taxation naturally extend to the property rights traditionally protected by the head of the household, such as home and tools of the trade (which are also protected from creditor confiscation under traditional notions of bankruptcy).
Such tax exemptions should include patents held by the inventor as they are quite naturally an extension of the concept of "tools of the trade".
The main symptom of activity taxation is the distance created between technology and capital. The legalistic literacy needed to avoid activity taxation is enormous and it is acquired at the expense of technological literacy. The best example of this is the enormous industry of tax accountants and lawyers who sit at the right hand of any corporate CEO. "flat tax" proposals never really go anywhere due to the fact that they are taxing all activity "evenly". Such proposals are the reductio ad absurdum of activity taxation. It is simply impossible to tax all activity. Voluminous exemptions are needed or else the economy would be so impeded that even the government recognizes it would suffer enormously. This creates yet another industry of lobbyists who attempt to off-load their clients of these burdens.
I put out a white paper on a net asset tax in 1992 after having participated in passing a couple of laws to reform technology policy at the federal level, including tax policy. But over the years I've become much more realistic and therefore radical in my thinking. I now believe those that proclaim themselves to be "libertarians" need to take their own rhetoric more seriously by pursuing something like my proposal for Warrior's Insurance. But that's only if they want to be honest with themselves, which is doubtful. Even Ayn Rand couldn't face the fact that at some point the word games have to stop.
Seastead this.
A lot of people are constantly complaining about the law being behind the times and how it cant hope to keep up with technology. Some try to use these complaints as some sort of excuse to not regulate technology in the least. This atitudes show a lack of understanding of how the law works. The law cannot spend its time trying to predict each twist and turn that our culture will take and what actions will be necessary because of these twists. The law places a high value on precedents. So in a sense it constantly looks at the past. Because of this attempting to change the law is hard and will always be hard. This is necessary because a premium is placed on constancy. The law needs to be as constant as posible. What was wrong yesterday cannot out of the blue be right today or vice versa. Changes in the law will for the most part be slower than changes in society since the law is a contractual agreement between all the members of the societal group and it must wait until the societal group is ready to codify its new belief. Sure the law makes discrimination illegal but discrimination still exists. This doesn't mean that the change in the law was not a reactionto changes in society. It was necessary to go through the equal rights movement to get some changes in the law. The law follows society and tries to solidify what most people in that society believe is the correct way of dealing with specific problems. Sure the law will and can be perverted by entities that are powerful in that society (a la M$ employing the son of the chief supreme court justice) but even that shows what the belief structure of the society is. We live in a society where money is one of if not the most powerful entity and those who have can try to mould the society as the will. Sometimes the society will not tolerate those attempts because what they are shooting for is either too alien or contradictory to other values that form the culture of the society. So the law is a part of society and its culture and like any other part of society it can affect the culture and thus directly or inderectly affect itself. As a part of society it also mirrors the greater structure of society within itself.
I think encryption, spread spectrum wireless and other technologies are responses to governments policing (or repressing depending on your opinion)
It's sad, but in the ever present "WAR ON DRUGS" a lot of civil liberties have been thrown to the way side. In the 1930's a "no knock warrant" would have been laughed out of court. Police dressing up in Ninja suits would have cause a public outrage, but not today. The police say they need more information, and thus more weapons. The pursuit of this information and weaposn fuels some technology.
THen there is the other side of the coin. Drug dealers (if they are smart) employ technology to try and stay one step ahead of the police. Anti-bugging technology super fast scanners and so forth are fueled by concerns that people are being "listened in on". Thousands on boats that have low radar profiles and good top speeds. They even use the "Internet" to communicate which technoliges are successful with each other.
In these examples the Law is fueling a duel between police and drug dealers. So far with BILLIONS wasted, and numerous lives lost the battle still rages on. We could legalize drugs and get off this silly damn merry go round but that would stop the people that are making a profit and doing the R&D into NEW technologies, curtail the DEA's budget and put thousands of hard working drug dealers out of work. (Excuse the run on sentence :)
Just one example of laws fueling technology
The law provides a profit motive for some technologies. Some of the highest profit motive is for technologies that allow people to "skirt" the law.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
For example, I'll focus on pornography because it's everywhere and has been a hot issue. Porn has always been around. When the camera was invented, people whined about porn there. When the VCR was invented, people whined about people having or buying porn tapes. (Ironically, porn is one of the reasons that VCRs got so much market penetration so fast...pardon the pun.) When the camcorder was invented, there was complaining that people were using it to tape their sex romps.
For some reason when it gets to computers, people freak out more than usual. When BBSes became popular, people were being jailed (e.g. Amateur Action BBS). When the Internet became popular, the news media, public, and political scum went nuts, passed laws like the Communications Decency Act, made hit-and-run attacks on the Internet such as the "computer pedophile" episode of NBC's "Crusaders" back around 1995.
But look at the change in culture between, say, the mid-80s and the year 2000 in America. Sex is nowhere near as taboo as it was. "Alternative sexualities" (sexual orientiations as well as things like bondage) are tolerated and practiced far more mainstream. It's discussed more openly. It's more prevalent in movies and on TV. This is a pretty massive change. (As a side note, you can tell how tolerated sex has become by observing how readily people like Dr. Laura freak out.
Of course, banning pornography was hard already. Banning it in the future will be nearly impossible with file sharing networks like Freenet. For better or worse, I expect that technology will have some of these effects over the next few years:
Restricting things like child pornography will rapidly become very difficult, if not impossible. (The legality and ethics of this is a completely separate issue, which is more complicated than most people think, involving things like different ages of consent in different countries.)
Intellectual property, in the form of software, music, and video, will rapidly become obsolete. New market models will have to be developed.
Strong cryptography will become more commonplace.
Many "undernets" will spring up across the Internet which use strong cryptography, tunnelling, and have their own email, news, and other systems. I know for a fact that this has already happened, and they have restricted access and fairly complex entrance systems. An infinitely more mainstream but very watered-down version of this is Gnutella.
In these cases, the law could try, but they can't readily enforce, just like they can't readily enforce laws against having sex in positions other than the missionary position. They can't regulate what they can't see. In the latter case, it's your house, curtains, or whatever. In the case of the Internet and technology, it's cryptography, systems like Freenet, and plain old practicality.