This article was originally published on Salon on August 26, 2010.

What should we call the people who are creating valuable new information in the new-media ecosystem?

If you’re a creator of media, and most of us are these days in one way or another, what should I call you?

Why do I ask? I’m finishing up a new book, called  “Mediactive,” to be published this fall. My primary goals are to persuade people to become much more active users, not passive consumers, of media. Part of this is what we’ve traditionally called “media literacy” — among other things, applying critical thinking to what we consume. And because we are all becoming creators in the Digital Age, it also means we need to apply some basic principles so people will trust what we say (assuming we want to be trusted).

One of my dilemmas has been what to call these new trusted media creators. In the era of scarcity, when there were relatively few outlets, many of them were called “journalists.”

This isn’t only my problem, and it’s more than just semantics. Asking the question in the right way has real-world impacts. So-called shield laws, for example, aim to protect whistle-blowers and the journalists whom they tell about government or corporate wrongdoing. Some states specify who counts as a journalist, which leaves out a huge range of people who effectively practice journalism nowadays; it also encourages a pernicious, back-door licensing of journalists. The right approach, if we need shield laws at all, is to protect acts of journalism.

As digital media become ubiquitous and more and more of us communicate and collaborate online, every person is capable of doing something that has journalistic value. Quite reasonably, relatively few of these folks imagine themselves as journalists, and they’d laugh if you called them one.

Suppose you spot a couple of items online that you want me and other people interested in, say, folk music to see. You forward the links, along with short excerpts and a brief comment explaining why these items are worthwhile, to a mail list. If I tell you, “That was an act of journalism: You curated, aggregated, wrote commentary and created meta-data,” your response, appropriately, will be, “Huh? I was just forwarding some links.”

One reason for our terminology deficit, notes Clay Shirky, a friend and author of the brilliant new book “Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age,” is the end of the era when we “assumed that the ability to speak in public was owned by an elite class.” Words like “entertainer” and “journalist” belonged to vocations and professions.

Meanwhile, the words that do apply to large groups — consumer, audience, customer, etc. — have taken on largely passive connotations, for the good reason that these have been largely passive activities. In the mass media world, you take them or leave them, and that’s it.

Another issue: The word “journalist” carries baggage. The journalism business has fallen on hard times for reasons beyond the loss of advertising revenue. Epic failure to do our jobs — Iraq and the financial bubble are Exhibits A and B for the past decade — combined with an obsession for sensational, trivial topics has contributed to plummeting respect the public has for the craft.

I share some disdain for the word. When I was a reporter I called myself a reporter. When I was a columnist I called myself a columnist. Calling myself a journalist, which I did from time to time, tended to make me feel like I was pretending to a higher role than the craft, however vital and honorable it may be, merited.

- – - – - – - -

People often ask who, in the anyone-can-publish world, is a journalist? I tell them it’s the wrong question. The right one: What is journalism?

The mass media creations of the New York Times qualify as journalism. Ditto BBC News. Sometimes they get things wrong, even badly wrong, but they do journalism by any standard.

I hope we can agree that the Blah Blah Blah blog (actually there are a bunch with that name) and the YouTube video of “Nat and Foxy disco dancing” are not journalism. Now, they may be interesting to their undoubtedly small audiences, and we should celebrate their existence to the extent that we celebrate (as I do) any act of hands-on media creation. They just aren’t journalism. (Nat & Foxy do look like they’re having a good time.)

Now consider Talking Points Memo, founded by Joshua Micah Marshall. It’s online only, and it has a politically left-of-center worldview. It’s also unquestionably journalism.

Dig deeper into into new media, and the answer starts to get complicated. 

Brad DeLong, a former Clinton administration Treasury Department official, teaches at U.C.-Berkeley and writes a blog about economics and policy. He does something that surely looks like journalism: commentary informed by knowledge. What about the bloggers who write on Lisa Stone’s BlogHer network? There’s a great deal of journalistic value in what they create.

My old neighborhood in Silicon Valley had a Yahoo mailing list where people talked about the community. Some of what appeared there was journalism by any standard I can apply the word. Most wasn’t.

A Facebook wall? It’s news to someone, right? Flickr photos? YouTube videos? Adding a location to someone else’s map?

On Christmas Day 2009, as a blizzard pounded Oklahoma, its residents posted local road conditions and information about where stranded travelers could hunker down with local families. If that can’t be called journalism in a traditional sense, it’s certainly more useful to a family in a sedan on the side of the road than any roundup story by a news organization during the storm.

- – - – - – - – - -

We are all creating media. Any one of us can, and many of us will, commit an act of journalism. We may contribute to the journalism ecosystem once, rarely, frequently or constantly. How we deal with these contributions — deciding to try one, what we do with what we’ve created, and how the rest of us use what’s been created — is going to be complex and evolving. But it’s the future.

Back to the earlier issue: Do we need a new name for the modern media creators, specifically the ones who are creating information of value to communities (of geography or interest)? I’d like to find one but I confess I’m not having an easy time of it.

“Creator” has its own baggage. “Participant” and “collaborator” and “contributor” don’t seem exactly right, either.

If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.

This article was originally published on Salon on August 25, 2010.

Not satisfied with our current Draconian rules, the copyright cartel aims for absolute power

In the surely-you’re-joking category, here comes the music industry to say it needs even tougher copyright rules. Sorry, no joke.

As CNET’s Declan McCullagh reports from a conference in Aspen, Colo., Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, complained about “loopholes” in the current copyright system. But what he calls loopholes are among the few parts of the law that remotely temper the absolute control that the RIAA and its allies, mainly in the movie business, want copyright holders to have over everything digital.

Specifically, the entertainment industry is looking to enforce copyright by getting third parties to do some of the dirty work. In particular, the industry wants companies such as search engines and Internet service providers — the latter is typically your phone or cable company — to keep an eagle eye on what you do with your own computer, inspecting what you download and upload in granular ways. This is the rough equivalent of getting your phone company to listen to your calls to make sure you aren’t planning anything illegal.

The way the entertainment companies are trying to make this kind of thing work in other countries is to get ISPs to shut down users’ access after accusations of infringing behavior, with harder punishments also a possibility. A legal battle royal is under way in France and the European Union over this insane policy.

What the cartel wants, essentially, is to make all the decisions about how what it produces may be used in any way. This flies in the face of tradition and law, and would inevitably lead to a regime under which we would all need permission to use digital content for any purpose whatsoever.

As Internet access consolidates into the hands of a few companies, these threats become more serious, not so much because the ISPs want to be spying on you but rather because they may be forced to do so. Let your ISP know you won’t be happy if this happens.

This article was originally published on Salon on August 23, 2010.

As Google gives carriers more sway over the operating system, customers need more options

When Google introduced the Nexus One smartphone early this year, we got a glimpse into what the future could be if device makers a) wrested control of the device from the mobile carriers and b) trusted users to decide what software they could run on the hardware they’d purchased. The heart of this notion was Google’s Android operating system running on a device that wasn’t subject to a mobile carrier’s deliberate limitations on how it could be used.

The experiment wasn’t a rousing success for several reasons, not least Google’s ineptness at running a store where it had to, gasp, deal with actual human customers needing technical support. Still, the Nexus One was the class of the not-Apple world, in my view, which is why I bought one and still use it with almost entirely happy results.

But Google has withdrawn from selling its own devices except to developers. And in the process, as ZDNet’s Jason Hiner persuasively explains, it’s ceded back to the carriers selling Android phones the control that users had expected for themselves with an open-source operating system.

Meanwhile, Google has made ominous common cause with Verizon in the policy arena, saying that it’s OK to toss out network neutrality — the idea that carriers shouldn’t discriminate on the basis of content — on mobile networks. Add it all up, and Google’s retreat is distressing.

The emboldened carriers have started loading all kinds of “crapware” — apps from partner companies that can’t be removed in standard configurations and that can slow down the devices. (For that matter, Google itself has done this with the Nexus One and Android, by putting unremovable apps into the operating system updates.)

Now, you can get an iPhone without this stuff. Unfortunately, you also get AT&T’s lackluster network and, much worse, Apple’s control freakery. Apple decides through its app-approval process what you’re allowed to use on the device, where Android phones (in almost all cases) don’t block you from installing what you want in addition to what they’ve already placed on the phones.

I wish Google — or more likely HTC or some other manufacturer willing to risk annoying the carriers — would sell an Android handset that I could use any way I want: an unlocked, un-crapwared device with lots of power and room to expand. Unfortunately there’s no sign of such a phone on the horizon, though I’ll keep watching.

The alternative is less attractive. It’s the rough equivalent of what the iPhone community calls “jailbreaking“ – removing the artificial limitations in the operating system by fixing the software.

In the Android world this is typically called “rooting” the phone (again, not exactly the same thing as jailbreaking an iPhone), or giving the customer what’s also called “Superuser” access to all functions. There are risks in doing this, notably in security, but increasingly I’m inclined to believe they’re worth it.

So as I look for a new Android phone, which I’m doing as the hardware gets better and better, I’m watching several online forums for information, especially the XDA Developers site. Notably, I want to knowbefore I buy that I can root the phone and, in some cases, update to the latest Android operating system with full features.

Unfortunately, this process isn’t always easy or simple, which is just fine, I’m sure, with the mobile network companies. But until we move into a mobile world where at least one carrier and manufacturer allow their customers to actually own what they’ve purchased, we’ll be forced to overcome these barriers.

This article was originally published on Salon on August 19, 2010.

Social networking giant moves swiftly to be the central reality in your digital life

One of the obvious missing pieces in the Facebook data arsenal has been granular location data — knowing where its users are and what they’re doing. The modest but genuine inroads we’ve seen from startups such asFoursquare and Gowalla, among others, proved that at least some members of the latest generation of Internet users are willing to share their location, among many other things, with friends, colleagues and maybe everyone else.

So last evening’s rumor-confirming rollout of Facebook Places, a location check-in service that has a lot in common with what’s come before, wasn’t a big surprise.  Facebook is nothing if not eager to incorporate other companies’ innovations into its own core services.

The launch demonstrated a number of Facebook’s qualities. On the positive side, the Places pitch also included the notion that we need to get out from behind our screens, PC and mobile, and join each other in the physical world. Can’t argue with that, even if Meetup.com has been years ahead in the hugely important recognition that one of technology’s greatest values is in bringing people together to collaborate on offline goals.

The company insisted it had made a serious effort to create meaningful and, if desired, somewhat protective user privacy settings, and it does look possible to stay out of the location service if you wish while still using the service’s other features. Yet the bias — as always with Facebook settings — aims to get you to say Yes to sharing, not No.

The breathtaking über-ness of the initiative shone through in what a company vice president, Christopher Cox, described as a goal: essentially to aggregate history itself — or at least tomorrow’s version of it — around users’ locations, doings and what they’ve told each other about both.

And Facebook will be holding it all in its corporate databases, creating a data set that advertisers will surely find irresistable. (In my case, no thanks — but this is a topic for another day.)

Facebook’s not alone in having vast ambitions, of course. Google, for example, has major social-networking plans of its own and no small amount of location expertise. So presuming Facebook doesn’t succeed in its goal to become the Internet that most people use — Internet users will need to figure out that Facebook isn’t really their friend — a healthy competitive marketplace could still emerge. Will it include the innovators who have helped bring location so prominently into the mix?

When Foursquare and Gowalla shared the stage with Facebook executives, you had to wonder what they were thinking. Certainly they seemed to celebrate their new partnership. Maybe it’ll all work out, but technology history suggests other possibilities.

When Microsoft was the despotic ruler of the personal computing software world in the 1990s, it had a strategy some called “embrace and extend” — to develop software that had the functions someone else had already created and then to extend it in ways that would tend to freeze out others. In time, that phrase morphed, according to Microsoft’s rivals, to “embrace, extend, extinguish.”

Maybe the earlier location services have the kind of deal with Facebook that will give them what they need to grow. If I were one of their investors, I would not be betting on this outcome.

I’d be betting more on an updated riddle (which I first heard in the 1990s in relation to dealings between Apple and IBM):

Q: What do you get when you combine Facebook and Foursquare? A: Facebook.

***

Coverage I liked by other folks:

• Caroline McCarthy, CNET: And now, one check-in to rule them all
• Harry McCracken, Technologizer: One Big Reason Why Facebook Places Beats Foursquare: Clarity of Identity
• Adrian Chen, Gizmodo: The First Thing You Should Do with Places: Don’t Let Other People Tag You
• Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal: Facebook Checks In to the World of Locations

This article was originally published on Salon on August 18, 2010.

District loaned laptops to students, then used spyware to take pictures of them. Prosecutors: No “criminal intent”

Federal prosecutors are showing uncommon sympathy for some Pennsylvania school officials who spied on students via webcams in their school-owned laptop computers: They’ve decided not to prosecute.

The reason? ”For the government to prosecute a criminal case, it must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person charged acted with criminal intent,” the U.S. Attorney’s office said in a statement. “We have not found evidence that would establish beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone involved had criminal intent.”

Let’s leave aside the fact that people are charged all the time for criminal offenses despite having no idea they’re committing crimes. And since when did ignorance of the law confer immunity?

Let’s focus instead on the fundamental creepiness in what happened at the Lower Merion School District in suburban Philadelphia. A lot of the facts and fuller context in this privacy debacle remain murky. Let’s hope that the discovery process in the several civil suits results in a more complete disclosure, but we do know this:

The district loaned laptop computers to students and then, under a program the district said was aimed at recovering lost or stolen machines, used spyware to capture tens of thousands of images of kids. Some of those images, it emerged in civil suits filed against the officials, were taken in students’ homes — and some of those in their bedrooms. Oh, just a terrible mistake, said the district.

Some 38,000 images from six computers alone, not to mention video chats and IMs in at least one case? If this is an oversight, a mere mistake, yike. But if so, the people who were that sloppy shouldn’t be trusted to teach elementary arithmetic or anything else.

There’s apparently no state law against this kind of thing. That’s outrageous by itself. And while the feds have concluded that they can’t pursue criminal charges, no one should even consider letting the school district off the hook in any moral way for its reprehensible behavior.

The case also reminds us that civil lawsuits play a vital role in our society. Yes, some plaintiffs’ lawyers launch meritless lawsuits and cause wide harm. But sometimes, as in this case, they are the last line of defense when powerful institutions beat up on individuals. We forget that at our peril.

This article was originally published on Salon on August 16, 2010.

HP has a lot more questions to answer about CEO Mark Hurd’s mysterious departure

I have no idea whether the Wall Street Journal’s lurid story today about Mark Hurd’s forced departure from Hewlett Packard is believable. It’s impossible to judge because the paper relies so thoroughly on unnamed sources who are said to be, in the latest journo-lingo that purports to explain a grant of anonymity, “familiar with the situation.”

But what we do know is this: HP hasn’t come close to making sense about Hurd’s resignation, which was demanded by the board several weeks ago. There’s clearly a scandal, but what is it, exactly?

When a journalist as smart as the New York Times’ Joe Nocera is reduced to sheer speculation — he believes the board canned Hurd essentially because they and the employees had come to despise the guy — you know that the situation has spun wildly out of bounds.

I don’t buy Nocera’s take for one main reason. The board totally enabled Hurd to become one of the greedier and nastier CEOs of recent times. He is clearly a talented man, but his record at HP wasn’t entirely the triumph that his acolytes in the business press trumpted. His tenure featuredmega-slashing of people, and mega-enriching of himself and his insider cronies.

I’m as lost as everyone else when it comes to understanding precisely what, if anything, transpired between Hurd and Jodie Fisher. She’s the actor who was, apparently, being paid $5,000 a pop to be a hostess at HP events.

I say “apparently” because, like everyone else except the insiders who do know, I’m not sure what happened. HP’s stonewalling on just about everything has been epic, and in particular the company hasn’t come close to clean about the precise nature of their relationship.

One question that has a plain answer is this one: What happened to the HP of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, the men who built a company that held human beings — and their humanity and communities — as essential to the mission as anything the people created?

What happened was this: It was destroyed by market and political conditions that encouraged boards and CEOs to exemplify the worst of American capitalism.

HP’s board has dug itself a deep hole, and it keeps digging. I take some comfort in knowing that Marc Andreessen is becoming a more visible board member, because I have trouble believing he’s comfortable with what’s going on at HP. I have absolutely no inside knowledge, but I find myself hoping he’s leading a board uprising. Someone needs to do it. Quickly.

This article was originally published on Salon on August 10, 2010.

Without evidence, the “kidnapping” tale is an example of what media consumers should automatically disbelieve

UPDATED

So Rand Paul felt obliged to deny an accusation that he kidnapped a Baylor University swim teammate and forced her to smoke dope.

I believe him. I believed him before he said he didn’t do it. (Update: And it turns out that no such thing happened, even according to the still-anonymous source for this story. See update below.)

Why? Because the accusation is about something that allegedly happened some 27 years ago, and his accuser is staying anonymous. Sadly, GQ magazine — which published an otherwise interesting (and better-sourced) account of Paul’s, uh, socially active college years — went with this tale.

Even more sadly, the state of American media is such that the accusation has made its way into the mainstream. Bloggers and traditional journalists alike have quoted the GQ piece and given it credence it absolutely hasn’t earned. Anonymous sources deserve no credibility unless they provide evidence.

I hope Paul loses in November, because I find his politics odious in many ways. But I hope this story doesn’t sway anyone.

UPDATE: So, according to the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, the accuser, who still won’t give her name, says the GQ piece was wrong in some vital ways. Namely, it wasn’t a forced abduction; she was essentially role-playing; no one forced her to take drugs; and the people involved were friends. In other words, however weird (and there’s definitely some odd behavior here) the situation may have been, it wascollege party-style weirdness, and nothing resembling the alleged criminality we’ve been hearing about.

Several comments have raised the appropriate question of whether what happened in college almost three decades ago is relevant to someone’s fitness for office today. A kidnapping, if it happened, would be relevant, no doubt. It didn’t happen.

And the other hijinks the GQ story discusses, as well as the anonymous woman’s latest account (the truth of which I still don’t take for granted)? Not relevant in the slightest, at least in any sense of disqualifying someone for public office, given how long ago this was and how we all change as we get older. If anything — given that practically everyone I liked in college was “lewd, crude and grossly sacreligious” (characteristics attributed to the group he apparently joined at Baylor) — they tend to make Paul sound more interesting.

Finally, some of the comments on this item reflect a disturbing reality. Many folks want to believe the worst about Paul, and don’t care if there’s any real evidence. I hope they’ll consider how they’d feel if someone made this kind of accusation against them or someone they like.

This article was originally published on Salon on August 9, 2010.

Ominous references to the “public Internet” inescapably suggest something else entirely

So Google and Verizon had not, in fact, cooked up a special business dealfor their mutual benefit. But what they have cooked up, as announced today, may be no great deal for you and me: the idea of a parallel network that could, in the long run, become the default network — at the very least for entertainment and truly advanced services.

At first glance, no one could argue with what the companies’ CEOs, Eric Schmidt and Ivan Seidenberg, announced on Monday: A “joint effort by two companies to offer a suggestion” to public policy makers, as Seidenberg put it. (Both CEOs denounced last week’s media hyperventilating, based on stories in the New York Times and Bloomberg News, as bogus journalism, though they didn’t use that precise phrase. “There is no business relationship,” Schmidt said on a conference call.)

Their suggestion? Essentially, it was to insist that the Internet should remain open and freely available, with enforcement teeth to ensure what most people would call network neutrality, the idea that carriers can’t discriminate against one content provider in favor of another.

But the proposal went further. It would promote the expansion of new services, not part of the  Internet as we know it now, that would go beyond anything we have today. These new services, if Congress and regulators enacted the companies’ proposal, could not be designed to be end runs around net neutrality; they would have to be genuinely new.

But here’s the rub: You should not trust Verizon or other carriers, or Google for that matter, to follow through in ways that are truly in the interest of the kind of open networks the nation needs. Throughout the conference call, we kept hearing references to the “public Internet” — an expression that leads inescapably to something else.

If Schmidt was telling the truth when he said Google’s overwhelming focus will remain on the public Internet, such as his promise that YouTube will remain there, that’s great. I have no reason to disbelieve him, and Google’s track record to date is strong on this issue. But plans change, managements change, and corporate goals change.

The other big news in today’s announcement was Google’s clear retreat on network neutrality when it comes to wireless networks. As Susan Crawford, professor at Cardozo Law School and an expert on all things Internet, explains: ”That’s a huge hole, given the growing popularity of wireless services and the recent suggestion by the Commission that we may not have a competitive wireless marketplace.”

For Verizon’s part, the acceptance of what sounds like fairly serious neutrality rules on current wire-line networks was welcome. But I see the rest as a Trojan Horse for a modern age. Verizon and other carriers have every incentive, based on their legacies, to push network upgrade investments into the parallel Internet, not the public one.

With one exception, the carriers have all but abandoned their push to bring the kind of wired-line bandwidth that other nations — Japan, South Korea, France and Sweden come immediately to mind — have done. Verizon has all but stopped building out its fast fiber-optic network to homes, leaving Comcast as the provider that is most ardently boosting connection speeds via its cable lines. (Even Comcast’s fast speeds are nothing special next to what carriers in those other nations have provided.)

So when Seidenberg said, “We have to be flexible,” my immediate thought was, uh-oh.

I’ve been worried for years that the game was on to turn the carrier-controlled Internet into just another version of television. Maybe the carriers won’t get away with that.

The right way forward is to have sufficient bandwidth that we can do pretty much anything we choose using public networks — a true broadband infrastructure where packet-switched services (moving data around, at super-fast speeds, in little packages that are reassembled at the user’s device) are the basis for all communications.

Instead, the game is on to create a parallel Internet. It’ll still be packet-switched. But they won’t call it the Internet anymore. That’s an end game we should not encourage.

This article was originally published on Salon on August 5, 2010.

Reports of backroom deals by big players that would inhibit Web freedom are unconfirmed, but should make us uneasy

UPDATED

The Internet is abuzz with worries that the Bloomberg news service and the New York Times may have gotten it right in reports that Google and Verizon are cooking up a deal that, in the worst case, would be a blow to our digital future.

The story, denied by both companies (Google tweet, Verizon blog post) in language that gives them plenty of wiggle room, essentially says that the corporate giants are on the verge of an agreement that would, as the Times says:

allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content’s creators are willing to pay for the privilege.

The charges could be paid by companies, like YouTube, owned by Google, for example, to Verizon, one of the nation’s leading Internet service providers, to ensure that its content received priority as it made its way to consumers. The agreement could eventually lead to higher charges for Internet users.

As countless commentators have already agreed, such a deal would mock something that Google has in the past adamantly maintained: the need for content-neutral treatment of what flows on the Net. It’s usually called “network neutrality,” and it means that Internet service providers — typically your cable and phone company for home broadband connections — should not get to decide what bits of data get delivered in what order and at what speed, if at all, based on who’s providing those bits of information.

That is, Verizon should not have the right to decide that it will delay what you see from, say, Salon or my personal blog if Fox News pays Verizon to put its content in the queue first. Why not? Because Internet access is an oligopoly business, creating unprecedented (at least in modern times) choke points for information.

The Federal Communications Commission, which has been making noises about doing more to make net neutrality a requirement, has been holding semi-secret meetings with many of the top players in the online world. If you and I have been represented at that table, it’s news to me, but this is how so much gets decided in our world. (UPDATE: The FCC has reportedly suspended the close-door meetings; good.)

Now we hear that Google — once the foremost proponent of net neutrality and a participant at those meetings — may be cooking up a deal with Verizon, which has also been at the FCC table. The scary thing is how plausible this is; Google is a huge company now with interests that may well be diverging from its previous commitments on the matter.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking yesterday at a conference, told reporters that the company isn’t backing away in the least from the coreprincipalprinciple (thanks, pragma). Speaking about network neutrality, he said, according to CNET:

“I want to make sure that everybody understands what we mean about it. What we mean is that if you have one data type, like video, you don’t discriminate against one person’s video in favor of another. It’s OK to discriminate across different types … There is general agreement with Verizon and Google on this issue. The issues of wireless versus wireline get very messy … and that’s really an FCC issue not a Google issue.”

So is this about wireless or wired connections, or both? How does this square with the Times report saying that Google would pay Verizon to speed YouTube videos to users’ computers? The murkiness of the entire thing is disturbing, which is one reason it feels too early to declare the imminent death of the Internet as we know it, as some commentators have done.

While I’m not ready to hyperventilate about this alleged deal, I’m more than ready to say that the policy and corporate trajectories are going in the wrong direction. I don’t trust Google to do what’s best for me. I trust Google to do what’s best for its shareholders, and if throwing net neutrality under the bus is best for Google the company will do that in a heartbeat — if allowed.

Take it for granted that the telecom companies will keep pushing for the right to control the content in the data pipes. They don’t want you to remember that they built their networks in large part with the help of government-granted monopolies and other special help; that would make it harder to claim this absolute control.

The backroom dealing is a big part of the problem here. If the FCC wants to come up with the right policy, it should make transparency part of the method.

Schmidt is board chairman of the New America Foundation, a smart-thinking organization that has done a lot to elevate policy conversations in recent years. I hope he’ll read and heed what the foundation said today in a statement:

During the 19th century a handful of wealthy industrialists dominated steel, oil refining and railroads; striking agreements to receive favorable terms for the carriage of their goods, while subjecting farmers and competitors to unreasonable and excessive charges.

Now, over a century later, history is in danger of repeating itself. After weeks of closed-door meetings sanctioned by the Federal Communication Commission, two of the largest corporations in the communications industry have reportedly negotiated an agreement on network neutrality. Though details of the agreement are not available, its terms are immaterial. It should not be the policy of the FCC to allow the largest companies to write the regulations that will determine the future of the Internet.

UPDATE: Scott Rosenberg wonders if the entire leak is just a head-fake, or possibly reflects dissent inside Google. Meanwhile, Google has put out a more strenuous denial, telling the Guardian, among others: “The New York Times is quite simply wrong. We have not had any conversations with Verizon about paying for carriage of Google traffic. We remain as committed as we always have been to an open internet.”

This article was originally published on Salon on August 4, 2010.

When officials claim limited goals and strong privacy guarantees with security technology, don’t believe them

When government officials launch new security technologies, they always promise that the devices and methods will A) not unnecessarily invade people’s privacy;  B) have strong policies in place to prevent abuse; and C) not go beyond their initial mandate. Then they break the promises.

The latest case in point involves the full-body scanners that are being installed in airports and some other federal installations: As CNETreports:

For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they’re viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that “scanned images cannot be stored or recorded.”

Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.

It’s an example of “mission creep” — the pervasive tendency to expand original goals or tactics beyond supposedly narrow original goals. It’s how laws supposedly aimed solely at crime lords end up being used against average folks. The only surprise in this case is that anyone would be surprised.

The misrepresentations about the body scanners have been a key feature of the machines’ rollout. First we were told that no images could be stored because they’d be automatically deleted. Whoops, not true. In fact, these machines are specifically designed to store the images.

Now the Department of Homeland Security has done what everyone paying attention knew was coming: It’s mandating the rollout of the body scanners nationwide. Soon, everyone who flies will be invited to bare all for the sake of security.

But you don’t have to actually go through the scanner, right? Isn’t there an option to be checked in some other way? There sure is, but be prepared for a serious hassle if you do.

Be prepared for some other upcoming realities. Even though lots of celebrities make sex tapes, there are at least a few movie stars and other public figures who have retained some old-fashioned modesty. Think any of these folks, however they regard their own privacy, won’t be targets? Think again.

And watch as the full body scan becomes less and less optional if you want to actually catch your flight. Either it’ll be mandatory, or the alternative will be hugely time-consuming and/or physically invasive. So if you find yourself shocked one day that yet another vestige of your liberty and dignity has been taken away, you won’t have been paying attention.