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Bush And The Tech Nation
If recent statements by George W. Bush and his advisers give any indication, we're in for a bumpy flight. The new regime may signal a new era by walking away from the antitrust victory the Justice Department won against Microsoft last year. And that's just one of the questions about how the new administration, particularly its distinctly non-tech, old-school, ferociously ideological Attorney General-designate will view technology, morality and cyberspace.
The handful of Presidents recent enough to experience it have held distinctly different attitudes about online technology, especially the Net and the Web -- and those views have had demonstrable impact. There hasn't been a President yet who spent much time online, or whose life and work was shaped by it, even as it becomes more central to the lives of millions of people. Clinton, according to several profiles of him, barely used a computer at all.
"If you think the Clinton/Gore crowd struggled with technology, wait till you get a load of these people," a Washington Post reporter who covers tech issues told me last week. "They think the Net is another planet. There is absolutely nobody high up in this new administration who is familiar with the Net, and when they do hear about it, it's all hackers and perverts. It's going to be weird, I promise you."
It's not hard to believe.
The Reaganauts (and their Bush II successors) tended to see technology as an alien, menacing new reality -- especially in terms of moral danger and challenge to authority. They were particularly phobic about hacking and online porn. Ed Meese's Justice Department conducted an infamous series of raids on suspected hackers while repeatedly characterizing the Net as a haven for perverts and thieves.
Kevin Mitnick and his demonized colleagues scared the wits out of these people, who tried to make an example of him and others by funding federal computer law enforcement projects and by treating them as vicious criminals. Bush Sr. was, by many accounts, a technophobe who saw the Net as a curious playground for academics, hippies and errant teenagers.
The Clinton administration had a spotty record on copyright and certain free speech issues, but was more sophisticated. If nothing else, they grasped the business implications of the Net and Web, and decided to do nothing to impede the new global economy they envisioned and benefited from politically. Al Gore may have overstated his commitment to universal technology -- the administration sure didn't build any true info superhighway, or even try -- but they did get that the Net was an especially free environment that didn't need much regulation, and would grow and prosper on its own.
The Clinton people did plenty of posturing for phobic Boomer parents and right-wing Luddites. If they were sympathetic to the Net's business possibilities, their commitment to digital civil liberties was less consistent.
They paid lip service to a couple of blatantly-unconstitutional Communications Decency Acts, and promoted V-chips, TV and movie ratings systems, and the equally idiotic Clipper Chip, knowing the courts would laugh them down. They pandered a lot, and they probably knew better. It also didn't seem to bother them that corporations were agressively moving to control cyberspace, wantonly invading privacy and altering the free architecture of the Net in the process.
Further, because of the administration's close Hollywood ties, it backed the noxious Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to help rescue the record companies. In the context of the Net, this is a huge black mark against the outgoing administration, as was the FTC's rolling over for the hideously anti-competitive AOL/Time-Warner marger.
Still, the Clintonians came to have a comparatively sophisticated grasp of tech issues -- a number of Clinton cabinet appointees were online quite a bit -- and little real relish for undermining free speech. They really never seemed to fall the idea that games, movies and the Net were destroying the young and spawning violence. And they kept politics out of science.
The vibes from the Bush administrations seem to suggest otherwise. President Bush and his appointees have made clear that they do see technology primarily in moral terms -- as something children need protection from more than exposure to. Bush's HUD secretary has already ordered a safety review of the much safety-reviewed anti-abortion pill, RU-486. It will be interesting to see how they reconcile thise "pro-life" view with their policies towards the bio-tech industry, which is enthusiastically going about the business of altering (and pre-selecting) forms of human life in fertilization proceedures.
Crusaders like Bush-buddy William Bennett and Vice-President Cheney have long and loudly argued that the Net is rife with pornography and violent imagery, that it is addictive and obsessive, that popular culture promotes immorality and violence. The new Attorney General agrees. Predators and pornographers and rare acts of violence will be seized on and exploited. A key element of the reviving Net culture was is the idea that video games -- along with sexual imagery and a whole range of other things online -- are literally dangerous, even responsible for tragedies like Columbine. Look for the FBI to be given broader authority to track dangerous and illegal activities online and creater a "safer" environment in which businesses can operate.
Universal access to technology is not a Bush administration priority. Gore talked about it, but didn't do much. Only one fifth of kids in families with incomes of less than $20,000 had access to a home computer, compared with 91% of those in families with oncomes of more than $75,000, according to the David and Lucile Packard Foundation (study not yet online). Neither Gore nor Bush mentioned this issue during the presidential campaign, or in any of their debates. Bush's education reforms, both in Texas, and as outlined in Washington this week, centered on literary and standardized testing and accountability. They don't deal with technology, perhaps more educationally significant in the long run.
In the past, the likely new attorney general has been a leader of this brainless brigade, along with Bennett and Cheney (and the ex-Labor Secretary Designate Linda Chavez, who withdrew her nomination last week after a controversy involving an illegal immigrant working in her home). Attorney General Ashcroft was a leader in the Congressional movement to post the Ten Commandments in the country's public schools in response to the Columbine massacre. So was Cheney, and,his wife Lynn, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
If the past culture wars are any indication, the new administration will make access to violent and "unsavory" imagery and information online a centerpiece of their law enforcement initiatives. It's been politically popular for years. They will also hammer entertainment companies, online and off, to generate more "wholesome" entertainment programming, especially for the young.
For them, cyberspace poses a threat to traditional moral values, since it empowers individuals -- especially younger ones -- to access information that once required approval by educators, religious leaders and parents. Now anyone with a modem can find his peers. Now wonder they don't like the idea.
Of course, there's been another twist involving the tech universe and this administration -- Bush got a ton of money from Silicon Valley business leaders, once presumed to be either apolitical or Democratic in orientation. Look for a Bush administration to go after dirty pictures and music-thieves while taking a more generous approach to corporate positions on telecommunications, antitrust and copyright.
Even so, the cabinet as formulated doesn't have a single representative from Silicon valley, or any technological industy. What does that mean for the tech world?
An example of the sort of issue digital civil libertarians will have to fight is the ongoing furor over the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) placing of limitations on the number of general domains. This, say critics like the ACLU and others, threaten free speech for individual Net users and noncommercial organizations. This pro-business decision -- overseen by the U.S. Department of Commerce -- is a perfect example of the kind of issue this administration is likely to resolve on the side of commercial use, not individual users.
The good news: the new administration is unlikely to curb business or technological innovation and expansion. These are not antitrust gunslingers fighting for the right of the little guy to survive. They would never have brought suit against Microsoft, as several Bush administration executives have inferred.
The bad news: Digital civil liberties will be a hot political issue online. The social conservatives returning to power are highly selective about what sort of free speech stays free. Until the Reagan years, classic conservatives equated free speech with patriotism. But in the 80's, conservatism fused with religious and other moralistic ideologies. They absolutely dread the notion of a free and open Net, for all of the obvious reasons -- it's a dogma killer.
Ever since the social conservatives came to power -- and they are especially close to the Republican congress and this new administration -- libraries, schools, kids and coders have had to content with a wide array of challenges to their rights to a free and open Net. This is the crowd that supported legislation recently enacted by Congress requiring all public institutions that receive federal aid -- mostly schools and libraries -- to install blocking and filtering computer software to protect kids from the dangerous Web. Last month, supporters of such legislation controlled Congress. Now they control the White House, cabinet, and federal agencies as well.
What we can expect:
- Bush's campaign statements suggested he wasn't in agreement with the Justice Department's action against Microsoft, or with the court-ordered remedy of dividing the company and enforcing restrictions on its competitive practices. Ashcroft's Justice Department may drop the case or settle under terms more generous than Janet Reno's would agree to. Both Joel Klein, who prosecuted the case for the Justice Department, and David Boies, the attorney who skewered Bill Gates and worked for the Al Gore post-election, will be scarce now.
- Some Washington columnists, editorialists and insiders are already referring to the new administration as Bush, Inc., it's so pro-business. The Corporate Republic just got a lot more corporate.
- So, expect good times for conglomerates. Microsoft, AOL/Time-Warner, Disney, Sony all have good friends in this administration (as they did in the last one). Bush got so much money from these and other companies that he rejected matching federal funds for his campaign in order to avoid cumbersome federal regulations and disclosure rules, an electoral first. We may see a proliferation of government-supported legal challenges, patent and copyright suits, decency acts and other provisions designed to make life on the Net safe and profitable for big companies. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies have been pleading for years for more money to go after hackers, crackers and script kiddies on the Net. They'll probably get it.
- Perhaps even more than the previous administration, the Bush team will be sympathetic to publishing, record and movie companies worried about copyright protection. Also to doctors, lawyers and othe well-lobbied professional groups who'd love to curb Websites offering specialized information that used to come, at considerable cost, from them.
- Good times, too, for de-centralized softare programs -- like Linux, Gnutella, freenet and other P2P systems. As government tightens copyright and intellectual property enforcement, which this administration has said it will do, the individualistic point-to-point, peer-to-peer programs already coming of age will become more popular, more necessary, perhaps quite political.
The movement away from top-down, agenda setting media entities has mushroomed online, from instant messaging services to the many thousands of individual Web pages given away for free by search engines and others to sites like this one, Everything2.com, the vines.com, freenet, Plastic.com that turn editorial space and story agendas over to readers and citizens. They are inherently political, consciously or not. The open media movement may accelerate rapidly, and for all sorts of reasons, one being they are much freeer and more open than mainstream media, and nearly impervious to the monitoring of government or other authority.
- The new President himself warned that under certain circumstances, the Net could turn a child's heart "dark." Look for the gaming culture to come under particular fire for promoting violence and other unwholesome behavior.
- Of course, there are certain types of technology the Bush camp will embrace, particularly the kind related to defense industries. Donald Rumsfeld, the new secretary of Defense, and Colin Powell, the new secretary of State, are both pushing for development and deployment of an anti-missile shield around the United States. Claiming the military has been weakened by Defense cuts and needs to be upgraded, they're going to commission the kinds of jazzy weapons systems any 16-year-old Doom player would drool over.
By and large, this is an administration unlikely to focus much on the Net or to pay much attention to the broader, more complex issues affecting Americans and technology in the coming years. If so, this will widen the chasm between younger, technologically-centered citizens and their government, a gap that's already big and getting bigger by the day. Politicians can always surprise us, true, but more often, and especially lately, they seem to play to our worst instincts.
No government that approves the merger of AOL and Time Warner can possibly propose the breakup of Micorosft.
I'm sick and tired of the right ranting about small government and then pulling shit like that. The only way to stop it is to vote for personal freedoms. Sadly only a few dozen people seem to have done that in the last election so we are stuck with the same old song...
--
Pres. Bush loads up Linux Kernel 2.4 on his home PC, says "Where's my Ricky Martin MP3s? Where's my winamp? How come I can't get this so-called 'Stateful Inspection'. Damn strange firewalling syntax if you ask me" - Switches to OpenBSD.
Feds go to hunt down Jon Katz - "Goddamn he's annoying" One secret service agent is heard to say.
IBM bought by Microsoft for there OS/2 technology - Balmer says "Maybe Bill was right after all!" - Bush says "OK!"
Linus has another Kid, declares "Sex is good!" - Big slump in patches to 2.5 kernel, as geeks everywhere discover the wonderful world of sex.
If Bush is really going to carry out his mandates, most of which I don't agree with, then he will drop the case against Microsoft, something I do agree with.
Why? Because it's a waste of taxpayers money at best, and at worst it's a clumsy and dangerous artificial attempt at "making things right." The government tried to sue IBM for something like 20 years, and by the time they got ready to do so, the market had done the work it is supposed to do and IBM was on it's way out. What was the result? Millions of dollars in wasted legal fees.
Microsoft is already less important in many critical ways (data interchange formats, server and web server market share, etc.) and if any of us are ANY good at what we do then that trend will continue.
The estimates on the lifespan of this case are ten years, we've been through three. By the time any rememdies could be in place if they are still necessary then WE should be sued for letting Microsoft sit on a decaying monopoly and doing nothing about it. THAT's anti-competitive.
- Investing "$400 million to create and maintain more than 2,000 community technology centers every year" (georgewbush.com, 9/23)
- a "five year extension of the Internet tax moratorium" (georgewbush.com, 9/23)
- Expanding efforts to bring government services onto the Internet (georgewbush.com, 9/23)
This is what I expect from him, although he is not off to a good start on the third point.Hey democracy lovers, add Quorum as a c
Everything you had to say in your column is the speculation of a journalist in the trenches, one with no more insight into the minds of the Bush team than any other journalist who might be reading this.
Rather than an informed prediction of what is soon to come, your column seems to be an attempt to drum up hysteria about the worst-case scenario. Perhaps you hope that by rousing up the activist spirits of the typical Slashdot reader, we will all be more prepared to throw our cabbages should Bush displease us. That is a reasonable goal, but at least be honest about it if that is what you are trying to do.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I can't possible make myself read 2 hours of katz again, so i read the the first few lines and a thought jumped in my head. Thought I'd share it with you, knowing that by know you're probably somewhat bored (you know why):
RU-486?
No, I'm Pentium.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
One good thing will happen if Ashcroft is the Attorney General: he is known to be an advocate both of encryption and increased support/protection for personal privacy.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Who's morals get to be the standard?
Remember, if the morals aren't mine, then they suck. (repeat 6 billion times)
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
It becomes obvious from that you are unwilling to give Bush a chance. He has been in office 3 days, and you are already perdicting doom and gloom, even your good points are worded in such a way as to cast doupt on how good they are.
Bush has officially been in office for 3 days. It takes longer then that for it to become clear what he is really about. There will be "bad" things that he does, and "good" things. Of course there is always anouther side, and so I might like what you dislike and vis-versa.
I remember quite clearly all the doom the right wing spread about Clinton in office. Well, it didn't happen like that. Mind you to the right wingers things should be better today (by their definition, which isn't just christian fundamentalist) if their guy was in charge.
Clinton was one of the few democrats who supported NAFTA, a complete surprize to the right wing that supported NAFTA - they once thought of Clinton as too left wing to support it, much less be a leader in getting it adopted.
Clinton also raised taxes (in 1993 if I remember right), which was perdicted by the right wingers with much doom and gloom. There are several implications of a tax cut, some affect the ecconomy (which has done well), and some just a philosophy of what goverment should do. Perdicted by the right wingers with much doom and gloom.
Both sides are claiming a balanced budget under the Clinton years, with many giving credit to rebublicans having congress - gridlock making it difficult to spend more money as each side has their own ideas of where to spend it. (Never mind that if you take the socal security ficasco out there isn't a balanced budget)
Clinton signed the Communications Decency act, the DMCA, and several others. Who would have thought a democrat would restrict freedom like that?
At the very least this proves that polititions are not always friendly to their side. Most likely Bush will not be anything close to the worst president in history. He probably won't be impeached. I will gaurentiee that he will never be considered the best or worst president. (I know people who like Nixon despite that scandol, Slient Cal has his fans, FDR, Lincon, and all Washington have critics - those are the obvious canidates for worst/best, and there is no concensious)
So give the guy a chance. Support him when he is right (and he will be). Be an opponant when he is wrong (and he will be). Remember there are two sides of every issue, try to see the other side even if you disagree. Keep the discussion civil.
After all, the victim is dead, he's not comming back, the trial is just a clumsy and dangerous artificial attempt at "making things right." Oh wait! That's right, we enforce the law to stop them from doing it again. Sheesh, hang your flamebait head in shame.
How we know is more important than what we know.
To me, one of the metrics of political ideology in a America (and perhaps the most important one) is the Left/Right one. Of the many issues that seperate the two, one large, overriding issue is how power and morality are controlled.
Overall, the Left moves in the direction of a lot of personal Liberty in the areas of Morality, but a lot of centralized power/money in the government. The Right, of course, moves in the direction of a lot of centralized control of the nation's Morality in the government, and a lot of personal freedom/liberty/power, thus reducing that of the government. Please don't argue this with me unless you are sure you know what you're talking about, I've researched extensively without listnening to anyone's propoganda.
My personal political ideology of choice is Libertarian. The gist of that view is that this country is founded upon the rights of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" so long as you don't infringe on the same rights of another person. I feel that the Constitution was designed to protect these ideals. I feel that in respect to our current state, the Libertarian view would want us to reduce laws against drugs, gun ownership, crypto use, and many others - as wells get rid of the IRS and try to find some sane way for the reduced government to get the money it needs.
However, the Libertarian Party hs never produced a candidate I would call anything but ridiculuous, and the Republican party is far closer to my ideals than the Democrats, so I vote for them (in general... I will always vote against a complete loser, regardless of party).
I feel that it is vitally important that if we want our Hacker ways to get out to the world, we have to stop the concentration of power and money in the government. We also need to stop the execessive restrictions on our freedoms.
The reason that those in the Right direction of politics has made many bad decisions for the techies of world is because the individual people in power are ignorant of our thoughts. I fully believe that their ideology is the one we can benefit from the most... but they are still stuck in an old world. They'll come around and see what we have in common with them in time. If you leave the Left in power, they _will_ take your freedom to program, they will take your freedom to encrypt, and they will turn us into the world's newest socialist/fascist country if given enough rope to hang us with.
I believe too much of our community has been blinded by a Left that has been in power and infiltrating media organizations. CNN is their lapdog. Even if you are of Left ideology and don't much care, be realistic and realize that fact.
Please don't respond just to flame me, or to start some political science debate. This is my opinion, and I think I'm in the minority enough here that I can make a good one-sided rant without providing the other side's view - it has been expressed enough.
11*43+456^2
Normally I like Katz articles. However, in this case he seems to have the same failing that many other posters here have - that because you understand technology, you have its best interests at heart.
He kind of struggles around this issue, noting that under Clinton we got the DMCA - "but at least they understood techology!" He cries. So what? Gore FULLY supported the Clipper chip (which Katz shrugs off as being obviosuly unconstitutional, so it didn't even matter that it was supported), do you think our personal privacy would have been in better shape under a Gore administration who knew technically how to take away our rights, of under a Bush administration who may not quite understand how best to keep them?
Bush has always been a strong advocate for personal privacy, and I expect that to continue. Perhaps corperations might have an easier time overall (though I'm not yet sure that's true) but at least there might be tougher laws about companies storing data about us.
Of course, I really wish Brown would have won but given the options, we have the next best thing to ensure some degree of electronic rights and privacy.
Also - one last dig. Look at this quote from the article:
They don't deal with technology, perhaps more educationally significant [than literacy] in the long run.
Now I'm a huge fan of technology in schools and education. But even I will admit that it's probably better that kids understand what all those squiggly lines are on the screen before they learn how to flash-update a bios.
Sure, we might see more huffing about "morality" on the internet - but what has that really done before? Also remember that we have a very balanced congress and house now, so any truly wacky proposials are unlikley to go anywhere.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley