No sane person is against protecting children from predators and clearly no one wants to appear to be against protecting children from Internet pornographers—imagine the campaign ads: “Rep. So-and-so voted against protecting children from Internet pornographers.” I am not making light of this issue: Sexual predators and pedophiles are a real threat to the safety of our youth and I fully support efforts to crack down on them. And we have the ability to find and prosecute them, as evidenced by the charges by the Department of Justice against 72 alleged members of an Internet child pornography ring last week. But this legislation feeds off of moral panic of this very real problem to go far beyond reasonable measures to solve it. If it were to become law, the bill would risk exposing millions of Americans to modern, technology-enhanced, McCarthy-style snooping, the results of which border on an Orwellian nightmare.

As the Internet has evolved to become one of the primary venues for self-expression, the place where individuals go to exercise their freedom of speech, technology has evolved with it to threaten that freedom. If the government has a carte blanche to dig through all records of speech, it is effectively stifled. Creating treasure troves of every citizen’s personal information and user activity and giving the government unfettered access to it, as mandated by this legislation, leaves Americans vulnerable to a wide variety of privacy invasions.

There is certainly a debate to be had about the role (and existence of) anonymity on the internet—Randi Zuckerberg, the soon-to-be-former marketing director for Facebook, recently suggested ending Internet anonymity as the only way to end cyberbullying. But there is a difference between an end to online anonymity in comment boards and on email for the purposes of personal accountability, and creating a database of all of your online activities, regardless of whether or not you are suspected of engaging in child Internet pornography. That’s right—this legislation, according to Conor Friedersdorf writing for The Atlantic:

… doesn’t require that someone be under investigation on child pornography charges in order for police to access their Internet history — being suspected of any crime is enough. (It may even be made available in civil matters like divorce trials or child custody battles.) Nor do police need probable cause to search this information.

The Big Brother comparisons may sound like an overreaction, and indeed, I am alarmed—but I am not alone: Friedersdorf suggests “The Encouragement of Blackmail by Law Enforcement Act” as an alternative name for the bill and legislators on both sides of the aisle have come out in vocal opposition to the bill. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) called the bill an “unprecedented power grab by the federal government – it goes way beyond fighting child pornography,” and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) noted the data retained “will be made available to law enforcement officers without a warrant or judicial oversight, and is a convenient way for law enforcement to get powers they couldn’t get in the Patriot Act.”

Consumer and privacy advocates have also mobilized in response: Electronic Privacy Information Center Director Marc Rotenberg testified against the legislation in committee, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation is running a letter-writing campaign urging members of Congress to stop the bill from going forward, as is Demand Progress, the advocacy organization founded by Aaron Swartz.

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) was exactly right when he said, “The bill is mislabeled. This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It’s creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.” Legislators have a responsibility to look past the title and assess the practical implications of legislation they support. In the case of the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, it is clear that those implications go well beyond the stated goal of protecting children; they threaten to undermine the fundamental civil liberties defining our society.

Andrea Peterson is the Assistant Editor for Online Outreach and Analytics at the Center for American Progress.

John Schwartz at the New York Times summarized the case:

“A respected Harvard researcher who also is an Internet folk hero has been arrested in Boston on charges related to computer hacking, which are based on allegations that he downloaded articles that he was entitled to get free.”

While the details according to the indictment sound more dubious–Swartz allegedly covered his face with a bike helmet while breaking into a closet to connect to a hard access point to the MIT network–Schwartz certainly has the gist correct. Guests at MIT are granted access to the network’s JSTOR license so Swartz was using a legitimate pathway to access the information.

Though he is charged with violating the MIT and JSTOR Terms of Service Agreements by using a pseudonym, otherwise evading attempts to limit his access to the network, and using an automated script to download files en mass, he has since settled the matter with both wronged parties. Neither decided to press charges, and JSTOR even went as far as to issue a statement saying they have “no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter.” But that didn’t stop the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts from bringing computer intrusion, fraud, and data theft charges hinging on the Terms of Service violations against Swartz on July 19.

This case raises some interesting questions about the nature of intellectual property in the digital world. While the United States Attorney’s Office accuses Swartz of “stealing,” there is no mention of copyright infringement in the indictments, and theft is a difficult term to define in a situation where the wronged parties in fact did not lose any property. JSTOR and MIT did not suddenly lose all those articles from their server when they were downloaded; all that occurred was the copying of information by an individual who had legitimate access to JSTOR’s hosted files.

This isn’t Swartz’s first run-in with the law; in 2009 he was investigated by the FBI for using an automated script to download public records from a library participating in a trial program allowing free access to the Pacer government court record search system. They claimed his automated downloads of 20 percent of the archive was the equivalent of stealing documents worth $1.5 million dollars, but the investigation was later closed without any charges. (Swartz obtained his FBI file from this period via a Freedom of Information Act request and has since posted it on his blog.)

The continued targeting of Swartz by law enforcement certainly serves to highlight the government’s increasingly dated response to the ongoing conflict between the commercialization of public information and the movement to use technology to democratize information access.

If his goal was to make a statement through civil disobedience, then it would seem that Swartz could have done a better job of being noticed. That he allegedly tried to cover up his information liberation campaign rather than doing it publicly and embracing the consequences weakens the credibility of his activism. But charging Swartz with criminal hacking for his conflict with MIT and JSTOR while far more nefarious cybercrimes are being perpetrated seems an odd choice of priorities, especially when his information liberation campaigns have focused primarily on academic or non-copyright protected public documents.

It is unclear if Swartz intended to release the JSTOR documents into the wild or use them for academic research, but it appears that at worst the end result may have been the distribution of the research he downloaded from JSTOR via peer-to-peer networking. Currently, scholarly research is trapped in an academic-commercial publishing complex run by for-profit publishers. Much of the research held there is supported by public funds, but in the academic publishing world neither the authors nor peer-reviewers are generally compensated, with the profits going to the commercial publishers or databases such as JSTOR who act as gate keepers to the wealth of public domain academic knowledge that many would argue should be available to all.

These circumstances have combined to cause hyperinflation of journal subscription costs, threatening institutional access to the resources the academic community has produced and amounting to an acknowledged academic publishing crisis. Many universities, including Harvard, have turned to open access policies that ensure authors and institutions have the ability to share their research freely in response. If Swartz’ goal were to “liberate” the research he downloaded from JSTOR by allowing its free circulation on the Internet, it is hard to argue the authors, the scientific process, and society as a whole would do anything but gain as the result.

The vast majority of responses from the science and technology community have been sympathetic to Swartz. At least one activist responded to the indictment with action: A man identifying himself as “Greg Maxwell” uploaded a 32 GB cache of 18,592 “stolen” articles to well-known file-sharing site, ThePirateBay.org, citing Swartz’ indictment as the direct reason. The articles were all in the public domain, but currently unavailable to the public except through JSTOR with per article prices ranging between $8 and $19.

Maxwell included a statement summing up his stance:

“The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive copyright is inappropriate for academic works… [a]nd unlike ‘mere’ works of entertainment, liberal access to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued survival may even depend on it.”

This is not an endorsement of Swartz’s alleged actions–he may well be convicted for his law breaking. But at the end of the day, we should take this as an opportunity to evaluate how a perhaps profoundly broken system limits scientific innovation and hinders the public’s access to research it often has already paid for.

Any judge evaluating this case would be well advised to look at last year’s high profile lawsuit against Google, in which the Internet titan was sued for making-public millions of pages of copyright-protected books without permission. But in that case no criminal charges were filed; the suit ended with a settlement in civil court. Let’s hope the judges hearing Swartz’s case take this as a precedent. If Swartz is punished for challenging a legal system in need of reform, and faces it with dignity as a good activist should, he will have given us an opportunity to reflect on what we need to do to bring 20th century intellectual property laws in line with the realities of 21st century information technology.

Andrea Peterson is the Assistant Editor for Online Outreach and Analytics at the Center for American Progress.

Many websites, or ads placed on websites, quietly install cookies, beacons, and other tracking files on Internet users’ computers whenever they are accessed. Cookies generally perform harmless tasks like allowing websites to remember usernames and passwords for future logins. But some cookies can track the websites a user visits, while beacons, which consist of more complex software, can actually track what an Internet user is doing on a website—from the buttons they click to the words they type. Some tracking files may even locate and record sensitive information such as the incomes, locations, and medical conditions of Internet users.

In an examination of the top 50 most visited websites, The Wall Street Journal estimated in July 2010 that approximately two-thirds of tracking files from these sites were dispatched by tracking firms that compile Internet users’ personal information into consumer profiles. These profiles can then be sold to Internet companies to assist them in developing more personalized web services and advertisements.

A number of bills have recently been proposed in Congress to address the privacy concerns raised by the collection of this kind of information. In April 2011, Sens. John Kerry and John McCain put forth the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011, which would require Internet companies to increase the transparency of their privacy policies, acquire consent before acquiring sensitive information, and give users the option to opt out of being tracked.

In May, Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller introduced the Do Not Track Online Act of 2011, which would complement Kerry and McCain’s bill with a mandate for an across-the-board “do not track” option that would allow Internet users to prevent all websites from tracking them instead of having to opt out for each one. A similar bill specifically aimed at children, the Do Not Track Kids Act of 2011, was introduced to the House that same month. It calls for amending the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, or COPPA, to include teenagers, require online companies to obtain parental consent before acquiring personal information from minors, and an “eraser button” to allow users to eliminate personal information online, among other things.

On June 27, the Center for American Progress hosted a panel of leaders and experts in Internet privacy who discussed the problems of Internet tracking and the merits of proposals to fix them. A video of the event can be viewed here.

The keynote speaker at the event, Federal Trade Commissioner Julie Brill, said that the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, is compiling a preliminary report on a new privacy framework proposal, which recommends that companies build privacy protections into new products and use more transparent policies that can be understood by consumers. The commission also supports the creation of a “do not track” mechanism. “Our proposal is a technology driven approach that will allow consumers to make persistent choices that will travel with them through cyberspace, communicating tracking preferences to every website they visit,” said Brill.

Ed Felton, the chief technology officer of the FTC, said that web browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox have already started developing antitracking features, like Tracking Protection Lists and Do Not Track Flags, both of which allow users to block websites from tracking them. “These technologies exist, they’re out there,” said Felton. “Three of the four major browsers now support them and we’re now seeing a dialogue about how to put the choices users are expressing into effect.”

All of the panelists emphasized a need to protect children online, especially Jim Steyer, the founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to improving the media lives of families and children. “Privacy is an incredibly important issue for kids and families,” he said.  “COPPA was written in 1998, which is like the stone ages. I believe there should be new legislation written.”

Although many people agree that kids need protection on the Internet, not everyone agrees on the components of the recent Do Not Track Kids Act. “Most people have applauded the motivation of this bill,” said Chris Wolf, a partner of Hogan Lovells LLC and co-director of the Future of Privacy Forum, who addressed a number of concerns that have been raised in response to the act. “The reactions have been mixed [so] it probably makes sense to carefully look at what this bill would accomplish.”

The act might require websites to verify the ages of Internet users, which seems contrary to the intentions of the bill because it would require the collection of even more personal data. It could also prevent underage Internet users from accessing lawful and benign content for personal or educational purposes. Additionally, the act would have to contend with industry’s First Amendment right to commercial free speech and the fact that the technology to erase personal information from all parts of the web has not been invented yet.

Peter Swire, a professor of law at Ohio State Law School and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, discussed the importance of finding the right balance between consumer choice and industry expense. “I have a slightly more optimistic view,” said Swire, who noted that other privacy issues have been successfully solved in the past through legislation like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA; the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act, or CAN-SPAM; and other initiatives. “We have found ways to manage them through technology, self regulation and legislation,” said Swire.

While the diverse perspectives in the privacy discourse have their merits, Swire urged participants to refocus the discussion on the future. “One of my questions for kids and privacy is, five years from now, what will be obvious that we should have done now and that we’ll all do then?”

Michelle Spektor is an intern with Science Progress, and a rising senior at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.

First of all, science and technology are in the process of converging. Technology has been around since at least the beginning of agriculture, arguably in tools and weapons used by hunter-gatherers, but science in its modern form is a latecomer. One difference between science-based and non-science-based technology is that scientific theories often have surprising implications that even their pioneers don’t anticipate.

A classic example: Albert Einstein had to be persuaded by fellow physicist Leo Szilard that the atomic bomb was a practical possibility, partly in light of the Einstein’s own special theory of relativity, so that Einstein would lend his prestige to a letter alerting President Franklin D. Roosevelt of this potential.

Secondly, science-based technology development is remarkably recent, accelerating only toward the end of the 19^th century, with specific, crafted applications of ideas drawn from the emerging explanatory and demonstrable theories, especially in biology. Of course, it is still possible to engage in technical manipulations of the world without paying attention to any underlying theory, so science and technology will never be identical. But there is every reason to believe that the convergence will go on indefinitely, as science becomes an increasingly critical input to the process of technology innovation.

For a time the idea of starting with a scientific theory as a way to solve a practical problem was so novel that the term “applied science” was coined. But so much technology is now science-based, as in the development of new microprocessors, that applied science—particularly in the public policy arena where policymakers want to speed up commercialization of new technologies—is becoming virtually synonymous with technology.

To appreciate the traditional relationship between technology and invention, take the example of Thomas Edison. He was both a nonscience based technologist and an inventor. The incandescent light bulb was built on a diverse array of gradually improved materials and owed its origins only very indirectly to electrical theory (an early theorist of which was another great American inventor, Benjamin Franklin). Alexander Graham Bell was another to whom the term technologist/inventor applies. Both Edison and Bell were brilliant craftsmen who addressed a problem, but neither was an innovator.

Like science and technology, the relationship between invention and innovation is also evolving, but differently. While science becomes an increasingly critical component of innovation, the process of innovation in turn is becoming increasingly dependent on a wider array of activities than just invention.

Innovation, in the words of the historian Harold Evans, involves more than inventing a new technology, it involves “a universal application of the solution by whatever means…. Invention without innovation is a pastime.” Universal application is a matter of dissemination, sometimes called “diffusion,” or moving an ingenious solution out into the world. In that sense, the telephone as an innovation is owed to someone who is far less than a household name: Theodore Vail, the founder of AT&T. His vision and organizational genius turned Alexander Graham Bell’s technology into national telephone service through the merger of Western Union and the Bell Company.

As the technologies that power our lives become increasingly complex, each new useful innovation stands on the shoulders of an ever growing pyramid of previous inventions. The Pentagon’s invention of the Internet in the 1960s created the opportunities for innovators such as Tim Berners-Lee to develop the World Wide Web. Reminiscent of AT&T’s Theodore Vail, who married two entities to produce his communications system, Berners-Lee joined hypertext to the Internet to produce the Web.

What’s more, the diffusion of inexpensive Internet access into the majority of American homes and businesses, coupled with advanced telecommunications and satellite infrastructure, has made possible yet another innovation, the iPhone application, which can now be instantly disseminated through AT&T’s 3G network to handheld users across the globe.

None of these society-changing technological innovations could have come into being without the work of a diverse array of entrepreneurs and engineers in sectors from computing to telecommunications to infrastructure to marketing—all of whom figured out how to commercialize these inventions by making them useful, profitable, and affordable.

With little notice, these innovations in computing and information technology now shape the science of laboratory biology, as genetic sequences can now be emailed to labs around the world and chromosomes reconstructed from the biochemical data. In this sense, as well, ease and immediacy of scientific communication are giving the scientific community leverage as a new invisible college and also constituting it as a global force, a world polity of instantly shareable knowledge and innovation. The fact that innovations are shaping the way our society and economy function, and even shifting into the development of previously unrelated areas of science and technology are evidence that we have surpassed a factor-driven economy, and exist now in a truly innovation-driven one.

The important public policy lesson is that in the 21^st century technological innovation is not a zero-sum game. Progress in one field of technology or science often yields unpredictable benefits for others. While once an inventor might have relied on her own ingenuity and locked herself in her garage to keep her intellectual property, now the prize will go to those able to collaborate in local, regional, or even global alliances of researchers, technologists, and entrepreneurs. Innovation begins with invention, but success or failure of new technologies in shaping society and improving human lives ultimately hinges on whether there is a profitable business plan to be built around the production, sale, and use of that technology.

As the inherently cooperative and interconnected nature of science, technology, invention, and innovation becomes evermore manifest, public policy needs to reflect the emerging reality that these forces will continue to shape our economy and our society in profound ways we simply cannot predict. We need to ensure that our economy is supportive of the full spectrum of innovation activities beyond invention—from research and development, to demonstration, and on to commercialization. We also need a STEM education system that ensures our students are prepared to participate in these activities, and better work force training and higher educational opportunities to enable our students and workers to quickly shift into the manufacturing and services jobs that comprise the 21^st century innovation economy.

These are difficult policies to create and institute. But if public policy recognizes the inherent value of science as not just the pursuit of obscure truths, but as an irreplaceable input to the technology innovation process that sustains our modern economy then policymakers can begin the effort better positioned and better informed about the possible outcomes.

Jonathan D. Moreno is Editor-In-Chief, and Sean Pool is Managing Editor of Science Progress.

In the early 1980s, Andrew Feenberg did some work for French telephone company, which introduced him to county’s Teletel network. Built to utilize the existing phone lines, the system, launched in 1982, was one of the first large-scale precursors to the modern Internet. In a decision that helped ensure the computers’ widespread adoption and the success of the network, France Telecom gave away some 6 million Minitel terminals to subscribers. Users could place online orders for mail-order products, buy train or airline tickets, and access news and information services. Charges for visiting commercial sites appeared on users’ monthly phone bills, and the telco passed along a portion of the proceeds to the other businesses.

Engineers originally envisioned the network for mostly passive information gathering: subscribers would use sites like they would a catalog or telephone directory. But that changed, Feenberg explains, when hackers broke into a commercial site and used it to send messages to visiting users. Although alarmed at first, the business owners realized the potential for profit from a user-to-user communication system. The result was one of the first commercial instant-messaging platforms.

Feenberg is a professor of the philosophy of technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and he recently joined Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Andrew Light for a podcast discussion about the democratic power of online communities. What happened next in France, Feenberg says, illustrates an important lesson about the evolution of digital communication.

The Minitel computers were developed, Feenberg says, “in order to modernized French society along the lines of a highly rational, efficient, technically sophisticated society.” But rational efficiency was not what a lot of citizens had on their minds. “It turned out that what most people wanted to do with instant messaging was get dates,” Feenberg explains. “It went from cold to hot all of a sudden in the space of a few months. The meaning of the computer was transformed because instead of being an information system it became a communication system.”

This re-imagining of the network as an interpersonal communications tool (or specifically, a dial-up dating service) was an example of what Feenberg describes as “democratic rationalization.” The term “rationalization” refers to modern processes used to improve how people manage and control resources through measurement and incremental adjustment. Henry Ford’s automobile assembly line, where humans and machines work together in a carefully calibrated ballet, is an iconic example. Rationalization in this sense is hierarchical, top-down innovation.

“When you make elaborate plans to rationalize something, it usually doesn’t work exactly the way you intended,” Feenberg explains, and management theorists have understood for a long time that initiatives from the bottom could play an important role in the innovation process. He calls large-scale, bottom-up innovation like the user-generated communication on the Minitel network “democratic rationalization.” This process is non-hierarchical and participants may share different values from top-down innovators, but these distributed users brought together by the network are also very good at getting things done. “Without a lot of input from below, you don’t get anywhere. You don’t have innovation and creativity,” he says. “Even though you could make fun of the French for seeking dates…the idea of human communication on computer networks is extremely important for us today.”

Trained as a philosopher, Feenberg eventually found himself working in applied ethics at an experimental medical center focused on treating neurological diseases. His work expanded into investigating questions about the relations between science, technology, and society, and this led to pioneering work in the field of online education. From there, connections in the personal computing industry bloomed. In 1983, the vice president of the Digital Equipment Corporation, the innovative company behind many of the most popular minicomputers of the 1970s and 80s, invited Feenberg to lunch.

“What do you think the future of the personal computer will be?” the executive asked. “I had this sudden revelation,” Feenberg recalls, “Here I was, a student of Herbert Marcuse, this obscure German Marxist radical philosopher, being asked about the future of technology by somebody who was going to make that future.” It dawned on him that he was now involved in something big and important, and he set out from there to develop his own philosophy of technology.

In the early 1990s, he won grants from the National Science Foundation to study nascent online communities, exploring the groups users formed around shared interests, like hobby enthusiasts, or through shared illnesses—without the support or direction of large corporations or government projects. The trends he observed are now entirely familiar to citizens of a networked world, but this was in the early days of the Internet when subscribers dialed in to far less complex services like Prodigy.

This grassroots community building, Feenberg says, was possible because “the networks didn’t really know what they were for. They didn’t have a fully dedicated purpose yet. They were waiting to see what people would make of them, and that gave opportunities for innovation to ordinary people.”

He also says that these democratic features of open networks are important in the current discussions of rules the Federal Communication Commission is considering to protect net neutrality in the mobile phone industry. Feenberg contends that if the wireless business continues on its present development path, with more people accessing the Internet on mobile devices, then large portions of the network will become proprietary, “And the space for innovation and creation that characterized the Internet in its early phases will disappear.”

The FCC decision on net neutrality is important, he says, because the design and configuration of technology constitutes the “framework of our lives.” “If it is not democratized, at least to some degree…then i think it will become a very oppressive environment.”

Andrew Light is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor at Science Progress.

Alec Ross, senior adviser on innovation to Secretary Clinton, explained the mobile-powered donation project in a conversation about New Media and public diplomacy at the Center for American Progress yesterday. Outreach efforts like these are “going to expand and enhance the way the U.S. government and its people can interact with a wider world,” Ross said.

Ross joined Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Faiz Shakir, research director for ThinkProgress.org, and CAP Senior Fellow Peter Swire to discuss Web 2.0 and the federal government.

Standard procedure for State Department initiatives now includes asking what New Media outreach can support the administration’s foreign policy work, Ross said. But he also explained this is new territory for a government that lost ground on innovation over the past eight years. “Innovation is in our DNA,” he said of the new administration.

O’Reilly applauded the creative use of technology in government outreach and went back to his earliest definitions of “Web 2.0″ to describe what he saw as crucial next steps. Pointing to the success of online communities like Craigslist.com, he said the key approaches are “harnessing collective intelligence” and “building systems that get better the more people use them.”

“How do we use technology to bring people together to do things we can’t do alone?” he asked.

Shakir described New Media as a tool for creating a “two-way conversation that government leads,” pointing to the Nowruz video President Obama recorded earlier this year as a public diplomacy effort to engage with the citizens of Iran.

Conversation also circled around the thorny issue of using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook to offer direct communication between citizens and government officials. “If individuals in government can’t act as individuals, social media will never be effective in government,” said O’Reilly, “The authenticity of a conversation is central for social media.” To this, Swire repeated the cautionary warning from his papers on Web 2.0 policy: in the federal government, clearance is very important, as complex issues like foreign relations don’t always lend themselves to rapid-response blog posts or friend messages. On the campaign trail, a careless talking point gets lost in the news cycle and forgotten, he said; but in governing, a slip up, in the worst-case scenario, could send missiles flying from a temperamental dictatorship.

But in areas where it makes sense to collect and absorb public comments or input, the panel did point to policies that make it hard to harness citizen ideas and expertise. Ross described the lack of legal framework for implementing many Web 2.0 tools as part of government operations. There are “analog age laws that are attached to things we’re trying to do in the 21st century,” he said. “A lot of my friends in New Media spend more time talking to lawyers than they spend talking to geeks.” Hence the utility of Swire’s analysis.

During the Obama-Biden transition, Swire was an attorney for the New Media team that operated the transition website, change.gov, and developed the current whitehouse.gov. In a set of new reports from CAP, he introduces the Web 2.0 challenges in the Obama administration, outlines legal and policy considerations for new media concerns, and explains issues with federal technology procurement.

Swire joined Science Progress Managing Editor Andrew Plemmons Pratt in a podcast discussion to talk about how these issues affect federal web managers, business, and citizens. To listen, see the audio player in the sidebar, download the mp3, or subscribe via iTunes.

There are a few key differences between the Obama campaign and Administration, Swire said. One is scale: many more people are eager to send the White House comments, but there are few interns to respond. Second is the issue of clearance. While working in the Clinton administration as chief counselor for privacy, Swire learned that multiple agencies must weigh in before an official statement can appear on the Internet. “Doing a quick and dirty Web 2.0,” he said, “doesn’t cut it in the White House.”

These changes are why some Web 2.0 tools are lacking from administration websites. The fact that the campaign’s New Media team was condensed from 170 members to only about 10 in the White House is another reason. According to Swire, the size of this team “is an unbelievable victory,” as these staff positions came at the expense of others, perhaps in areas like health care or the economy. However, Swire said, attempting to do the same job on a larger scale with much less manpower has the New Media team thinking, “Wow man this is a lot harder than it was.”

The administration met technology challenges the moment they stepped into the White House this January, when some desks did not even have working computers. Security concerns about various web tools are real, but so are federal employees’ needs for tools like and social networking sites that help mobilize people behind issues, Swire said. Many federal agencies have closed down access to Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, but they need to recognize that these are “tools of business for the federal government” and not just “weird things that leftover teenagers are using.” Still, “if there’s a sloppy person who is using a Blackberry and they’re letting hackers into the White House, then that’s a major deal,” he explained.

Looking at Web 2.0 tools can also help address accessibility issues, as the federal government is bound to accessibility rules outlined in the Rehabilitation Act. For example, federal websites cannot place the colors red and green together so colorblind people can understand the content and government videos must provide closed captioning for those who auditorily impaired. Web 2.0 technologies used by the government have to meet those same standards, Swire said.

Swire believes companies that build Web 2.0 software will start thinking ahead on accessibility issues even though it can be a financial burden, as many hope the feds will use their products. “The government here plays an educational function to show what’s possible and what’s the right thing to do,” he said.

Despite the obstacles to Web 2.0 technology, Swire is confident that it will continue to grow in this administration. Weekly video addresses are up, and so are the White House Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter accounts. “A lot is happening but there’s still less happening than there will be when we figure out how to solve some of these problems,” Swire said.

The report, ordered by the President and led by Melissa Hathaway, reinforces the need for a specialized cybersecurity position, President Obama said. He acknowledged that cyberspace is “woven into every aspect of our lives” today. Whether it is in our schools, hospitals, banks, or businesses, it is powering our nation. However, the irony is that “the very technologies that empower us to create and to build also empower those who would disrupt and destroy,” Obama said.

The President cited a personal experience with privacy invasion from his campaign. Although technology strengthened his campaign, hackers threatened his security when they gained access to personal travel plans and policy papers. In addition to privacy protection, cybersecurity is necessary for American competitiveness, economic prosperity, and military dominance, Obama said.

The cyberczar, or Cybersecurity Coordinator, will be responsible for protecting the country from cyber attacks. The coordinator’s office will orchestrate security policies, ensure that agency budgets prioritize security, and orchestrate responses to cyber attacks. The Cybersecurity Coordinator will be a member of the National Security staff and National Economic Council. He or she will also work closely with the Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, and Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, Obama said.

News leaked Friday that Aneesh Chopra, Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, has been appointed the first federal CTO. President Obama made the official announcement Saturday.

While working in Virginia, Chopra lead a highly successful effort to ramp up broadband deployment around the state, which Nancy Scola chronicled in her feature, “Broadband Done Right.” Creative public-private partnerships, as well as funds from the Virginia Tobacco Commission, fueled a variety of projects that wired rural areas from the mountains to the Chesapeake Bay.

In addition to creating opportunities for telework and more tech-based jobs, Chopra also focused on the importance of ubiquitious broadband for providing health care. From Scola’s article:

More critically, Chopra describes demanding medical- records software deployed at health centers serving Virginia’s neediest areas that can’t survive the dial-up link. “People are literally dying because they can’t get the broadband they need to run the software,” He explains. Cutting-edge software applications may demand enormous pipe, but today even successful surfing calls for 200Kbps.

For a thorough roundup of Chopra’s experience and qualifications (including an arguement why a former government official is a better choice here than a Silicon Valley veteran), see Tim O’Reilly’s post at O’Reilly Radar. His verdict: “Aneesh Chopra is a rock star.”

Here’s a screen grab of their mockups:

This is precisiely the kind of work I’ve argued that the nonprofit and advocacy sphere needs to be engaged in right now. For decades, a host of think tanks has analyzed public policies and offered menus of solutions for how government operations should run. But some of the key lessons underscored by web technologies are that the presentation of ideas is inextricably linked to their content, and that effective policymaking must go hand-in-hand with effective communication. One of the great promises of this administration is radical transparency for government operations and information, and so there’s every reason for the experts in the tech and think tank worlds to leverage their design and policy knowledge in support of open government data and successful communications.

To that end, the Labs staff makes another key suggestion: Data.gov needs editors who can write about the information available. The site, they argue, “should feature data, blog about data, and perhaps even link off to interesting things that other people are doing with the data that comes from Data.gov.” Moreover, that sort of feedback loop will encourage more policy that drives further transparency.

But as Mark Lloyd pointed out last week on Science Progress, before the government deploys billions to expand broadband infrastructure, it would be useful to have a working definition of what exactly we mean by the term. His recommendation is to design a process for an evolving definition that ensures consumers can send and receive high speed high-quality transmissions:

Let’s allow the experts to decide quickly what is broadband today, and then bring them back every two years and come up with another definition. Broadband delivery is bound to improve, so we should establish a process to recognize evolving standards to fit new technological realities. The one thing NTIA [National Telecommunications and Information Administration] should not do is what the FCC has been doing since 1996. It should not call broadband whatever is easiest for most telecommunications providers to achieve today.

In addition to incomplete definitions for communications technologies, there is also inadequate geographic information on broadband penetration across the country, a problem raised at a hearing last week. Lloyd examined the serious shortcomings of the data gathered by the NTIA last year, and noted that relying on industry numbers for access in large regions is problematic: “Declaring that access is accomplished when the industry reports that one entity in that zip-code has service does not tell us who has broadband. And 200 kilobits per second in one direction is not advanced telecommunications service.”

Effective, ubiquitous broadband is a crucial driver of economic growth, and without it, U.S. competitiveness suffers on the global stage, as these broadband rankings from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation indicate:

Possible selections for the national CTO, among many others, are Vint Cerf, a “father” of the Internet who is now Google’s chief Internet evangelist; former FCC adviser Julius Genachowski, who helped write Obama’s technology agenda; and a dark horse, Washington, D.C., CTO Vivek Kundra, who is advising Obama’s transition.

Mitch Kapor, founder of the Lotus Development Corporation and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, penned the chapter of recommendations for the CTO in Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President. Read a summary of his suggestions here.

(HT: SEforA)

If only it were that simple. First off, the term “broadband” is so degraded today that it is of little use in a discussion about the future of Internet access for all. Instead, we should be talking about a national advanced communications and information technology policy that encompasses all aspects of public safety and civic participation, and recognizes that structural social and historical barriers to Internet access remain pervasive. The “digital divide” in our nation is vast and deep, threatening our national health and education, national security and economic prosperity.

Fortunately, public policy tools are on hand for the incoming Obama administration and the 111^th Congress to promote the common good through effective, science-based advanced communications and IT policy. They have at their disposal proposals to prioritize these policies in White House deliberations, congressional legislation in place to gather the data necessary to understand how to close the digital divide, and a new set of wired and wireless spectrum policy proposals to create a digital public square that is every bit as open and diverse as our founders and the progressives who followed them envisioned. These policy tools need tweaking, to be sure, but they are available and should come quickly out of the toolbox in the first year of the new administration.

The Role of the White House

Advanced communications and IT is vital to public safety and civic participation, something that President-elect Obama’s transition team clearly understands. But the idea of an IT czar, or federal chief technology officer (as belated as such an office is), does not quite capture the importance of advanced communications and information technology in today’s world. A great deal is known today about the importance of access to advanced IT in relationship to economic development, education, and health care. But equally vital is the relationship between advanced IT access and public safety and civic engagement. I have written on the relationship between advanced IT and public safety in “Ubiquity Requires Redundancy: The Case for Federal Investment in Broadband.” Here, I will examine briefly the relationship regarding advanced IT and civic engagement.

Federal investment in communications services for the purposes of strengthening our democracy is a deeply-rooted American tradition going back to the founders’ substantial investment in the U.S. Postal System. The rationale underlying much of U.S. communications policy is tied to the value of ensuring all Americans access to competing sources of information to support robust democratic discourse. In addition to democratic discussion, supporting the ability of citizens to actively engage with government is also a long standing tradition. Both democratic deliberation and civic engagement must be protected in the digital age.

Increasingly, being able to take part in an open government requires access to the Internet. As government records, administrative proceedings, requests for proposals, tax forms, job announcements, even school closings and emergency warnings go online it is increasingly important for all Americans to have access to advanced telecommunications services.

The Obama campaign and the Obama transition team demonstrated a unique understanding of the importance of advanced IT, enabling them to go around traditional gatekeepers and speak to and hear from the American public. The online activity of this historic campaign and transition is far deeper and far more engaging than the mass media interviews, and it encompasses not only record-breaking fundraising but sophisticated policy discussions.

Unfortunately, not every American has equal access to either government records or on-line policy discussions. Libraries and schools are all too often only occasional access points for the community, and many employers discourage non-work related access to the Internet. This leaves too many Americans with very limited access to advanced IT. Yet access to participate in a local, state, or federal proceeding should not be determined by the unwillingness of the private sector to deploy new fiber or Wi-Max connectivity to particular communities. And access in already-wired communities cannot continue to rest upon a local library’s limited number of computers or whether it can keep its doors open long enough for those working two jobs. This inequality in access to important civic information and engagement should not be tolerated in a democracy.

That’s why the Obama Administration needs to ensure that its IT czar or chief technology officer and all the other relevant federal office holders are given a wide remit to craft advanced communications and IT policy to open online civic participation to every American. The director of this new office, however, must then grasp that closing this digital divide will first require extensive, data-driven investigation.

Defining the Digital Divide

Structural barriers to widespread and speedy Internet connectivity are stubborn. The Obama administration needs to get the data and then get going. The barriers that cause the digital divide will not come down on their own, and they will certainly not come down if we fail to look for them in the rush simply to roll out more broadband. Alas, progressives are not at all immune to the powerful dream of free market competition or ever-advancing technology as solutions to the problems of discrimination or isolation.

Even since Herbert Croly, who in 1909 penned the progressive manifesto “The Promise of American Life,” there is a strong strain in progressive thought that believes somehow the combination of new technologies and free markets will solve the persistent problems of inequality. Without denying the importance of either free markets or technological advance to the general improvement of living conditions around the world, the early 20^th century progressive intellectual (and eventual Supreme Court Justice) Louis Brandeis teaches us to look clear-eyed at the world as it is, and to make policy and law that promotes the public interest.

In the world as it is, there are still very high barriers facing women, people of color, people with disabilities, the poor, and those Americans in the isolated regions of Appalachia, Indian Country, and the hundreds of small black communities in the rural South. These structural barriers, the vestiges of a not-so-long-ago America where women could not vote, Mexican Americans were stacked in barely habitable migrant camps, and Jim Crow laws were strictly enforced, have not been torn down. There remains a danger that as advanced IT becomes increasingly important to our economic prosperity, our educational system, our health care system, our ability to respond to natural disasters and threats at home and abroad, and our ability to engage as citizens, the structural barriers of sexism, racism, poverty, and geographic isolation will reinforce the advantages of a few and make it even more difficult for children living in the other America to ever catch up.

Simply assuming that the market and continued technological advance will address the problems faced by those Americans we do not see until a levee breaks is taking too great a risk. There is still inequality in America because of the continued challenges of gender preferences, racial segregation and rural isolation, and there is still a digital divide.

Despite the marketers’ best gloss, this divide will not be bridged by access to cheap cell phone service. Access to a powerful personal computer linked to a truly high-speed Internet service is far better than even a Blackberry for doing homework or communicating video rapidly with a remote medical center.

But before we tackle the problems of technological inequality in America we must get a solid handle on who has access to advanced IT, where IT is deployed, at what speeds and at what cost. We do not have that data now. The Broadband Data Improvement Act has passed both houses of Congress but is not funded. The new 111^th Congress must do so promptly. There is now, after many years of argument, a consensus about the importance of mapping advanced IT in the U.S. As Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI) has said, we cannot fix what we cannot measure.

But as the new administration gathers this necessary data, it also needs to fund what we know works—the so called universal service program, particularly the program extending telecommunications services to schools and libraries. Despite the on-going attacks on the E-Rate program, which provides discounted telecommunications services to schools and libraries around the country, more American children than ever have at least some access to the Internet because of this program. There are consistently more applications for support than these programs have been able to handle.

There is also very good evidence that the moribund Technology Opportunity Program, which brought together the private and public sectors to develop new advanced IT communications solutions. This program, which still exists but has been inactive in the Bush administration, created important incentives for public-private collaborations and innovations regarding IT applications.

There is legitimate concern that the universal service program, which provides discounted telecommunications services not just to schools and libraries but to rural communities across the country, needs to focus more on access to advanced IT and focus less on supporting plain old telephone service. The current universal service priorities are no longer sufficient in 21st century America. Once the Obama administration has the data it needs to identify the digital divide, it needs to act quickly to provide all Americans access to the online public square.

Spectrum Policy for a New Century

First of all, analog wireless technology—the free “AM/FM/TV channels” we grew up with—has been obsolete for over a dozen years and must be replaced. Smart radio technologies, combining Internet-like protocols and signal scanning, now make a much more efficient use of the public spectrum possible. We need policies and regulation that catch up to the new technology.

We need to move all current analog broadcasters to digital service as soon as possible. There are much more efficient ways to use the spectrum, but they cannot be put in operation as long as old analog broadcasters, including radio and low power television, are taking up more space than the information they carry really needs.

We also must move forward on the transition to digital television, even while we prepare for the fact that too many Americans will not be ready for this transition. Plans must be put in place immediately to first determine where and exactly what the problems are going to be when the switch-over takes place on February 17, 2009—such as unexpected interference with the digital signal, a digital broadcast range that does not match the old analog range, consumer confusion—and to respond to those problems with real people, ready and able to help both on the other end of a telephone call and just a few miles away, who can come to assist where needed.

This will require a massive help-your-neighbor campaign to make certain this ongoing transition to digital occurs across America. One way or the other we must move quickly to get all of the old analog broadcasters to switch to digital services and free up that spectrum.

Then we need to craft new spectrum polices. As economist Greg Rose and I have written in the past—in “The Failure of FCC Spectrum Auctions”—the auctioning of spectrum does not work to encourage new entrants. The Obama administration must find ways to ensure that women, minorities, and small businesses have an opportunity to participate effectively in the advanced IT structure of the future. Current spectrum policies limit opportunities to new players and will continue to do so as long as we continue to play by old rules that tend to benefit powerful old telecom incumbents.

Allowing innovators access to the spectrum in exchange for clear public interest benefits, such as serving marginalized communities or creating platforms for public safety workers, in place of auctions is a way to open up opportunities for those who cannot compete at auction against large established companies or well-funded investors. Creating free unlicensed access to spectrum that can be dedicated to fixed protocols, such as Wi-Fi, but with multiple applications might also increase innovation and access.

Establishing incentives to immediately put public spectrum to use, to create opportunities for women, minorities, rural communities, and small businesses, and to limit spectrum squatting by auction winners might also work to bring U.S. spectrum policy into the digital age. A new spectrum policy for a new century will create greater access to advanced communications and information technology for all Americans.

Many of the old battles, of course, remain to be fought even as the Obama administration moves forward with far-sighted spectrum policies for the 21^st century. Public access media in communities such as Chicago and Burlington are still fighting under a set of policies that puts them at the mercy of their competitors. Public service media in the United States also remains under-funded and subject to political interference, and there is too much concern about sex and vulgarity and not enough concern over hate and violence. Finally, the public trustee model regarding broadcasting is broken, and the anti-trust rules are a farce.

But a new administration gives us many reasons to hope that as officials craft fundamental telecommunications and information technology policy, these other fights can also conclude and encompass the best progressive principles. The first order of business, though, must be complete online access to the public square for all Americans.

Mark Lloyd is an affiliate professor of public policy at Georgetown University and a member of the advisory board of Science Progress.

Basic Books

Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President

One of the first questions from the audience at this morning’s Google D.C. Talk concerned a topic of interest to the techies everywhere: who should President-elect Obama appoint as the Chief Technology Office for the government? The panelists didn’t make any concrete recommendations, aside from mentioning names that have been bandied about in the media and blogosphere, but while the transition team continues working on appointments, the other pressing question is what should be the policy priorities of the executive branch CTO?

No one has ever held the job before, but the forthcoming Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President, now in production and due in bookstores in January, devotes a chapter to recommendations.

Mitchell Kapor, founder of the Lotus Development Corporation and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is the author of the chapter and argues that technology is a tool for all aspects of effective governance:

Rather than being thought of as alien territory or an implementation detail, the next president can use information and communications technology, or ICT, to proactively drive both the vision and the strategy for a progressive agenda that emphasizes democratic renewal, opportunity creation, and a broader vision of security.

He outlines three roles for the CTO: advise the president on open government programs, work with the Office of Science and Technology Policy on policy areas where ICT is important, and help expand communications technology capabilities across the country.

Some of his recommendations:

Move fast. Kapor writes that the president-elect should appoint a CTO immediately, and make it someone who “deeply understands information and communications technology policy issues, has concrete experience implementing and managing actual technology systems, and is a skilled and collegial advocate for technology issues.”

Expand Transparency. “The CTO should be a champion of principles of open government.”

Listen to Public Concerns. The CTO should play a visible inside and outside government role, advocating for “the president’s information and communications technology priorities with Congress, the media, the private sector, and civil society,” and unify technology efforts across executive branch agencies.

The Center for American Progress Action Fund, sister organization to CAP, last week released Change for America in conjunction with the New Democracy Project. The book draws on the expertise of 67 leading policymakers who describe how the presidential transition should operate and what policies it should prioritize across a wide swath of executive branch departments and agencies—many of which play critical roles in the determination of the county’s science policy.

What do readers think should be the priorities for the first White House CTO?

The servers are obviously having a tough time handling the traffic load (I’ve gotten a few errors throughout the day), but President-elect Obama’s transition project has already hit the ground running with a box of tools to organize the next administration at change.gov.

In his article on the many uses for social software in the transition (“The Oval Office Facebook Group“), Mark Drapeau wrote that the team “can expect…about 40,000 applications in the first few weeks and eventually…70,000 interested persons,” hence the job application form.

But today is also the day that Obama and his national security staff began their daily intelligence briefings, and as Drapeau pointed out, the intelligence community already wields some powerful IT tools for collaborating and sharing information. Making the most of that technology to get the new government up to speed will be a critical component of this massive project.

Opening these airwaves could lead to the possibility of building a nationwide wireless network and spur innovation in Internet technologies. If the FCC votes in favor of the proposal—as it is expected to do unanimously—huge portions of wireless spectrum will be available all over the country, including 40 percent of the spectrum in the Dallas-Ft. Worth and 74 percent in Juneau, Alaska.

This could be the easiest way to bring high-speed broadband access to all Americans. The available spectrum can penetrate walls, relay large amounts of data, and travel longer distances than signals on other frequencies, which would allow it to reach almost everyone in the United States. And a wireless system operating on these spectrum bands would definitely be less costly, time intensive, and disruptive than laying wire across the entire country.

But major TV broadcasters, including ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC, strongly oppose such a project, along with some sports groups such as Major League Baseball and NASCAR, who argue that an increase in signals could disrupt their own broadcasts and communication.

Even former FCC Chief Economist Thomas Hazlett and Nobel Prize winner Vernon Smith—despite opposing the proposal—pointed out in the Wall Street Journal last month that, “today’s digital transmissions can be tightly packed. It is now easily possible to deliver 50 digital signals using just eight TV channels of bandwidth.” The FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology confirmed this conclusion on October 15th, saying that its laboratory and field tests show that opening up the airwaves will not disrupt signals. The FCC’s report further recommended that requiring portable devices to have sensing technologies and a geo-location database would ensure protection for broadcasters.

Opening the airwaves is supported by groups ranging from Google—who launched a “Free the Airwaves” campaign in response—to the New America Foundation, the Wireless Innovation Alliance, and Free Press. This support is for good reason. Access to the powerful, new broadcast spectrum will expand possibilities for wireless innovators of all stripes and potentially give more Americans better access to the Internet and new technologies that we can’t even imagine yet.

UPDATE: As projected, the FCC voted 5-0 to open the white spaces.

University of Richmond, SP

Top: the University of Richmond historical voting map for 1980. Bottom: the Science Progress “human toll of climate change” mapping project.

Open access publishing is great, but what if you can’t capture your research in words? Over at the Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog, Jeffery Young reports that in order to expand the reach and accessibility of their historical elections mapping project, digital historians at the University of Richmond moved their data from an in-house system to two platforms familiar to many web surfers: Google Maps and Google Earth.

The election maps for today’s results aren’t likely to change until after dinner time, but until then, you can explore what happened in previous elections going back to 1980. The original U of R site has data stretching back to 1840.

The project demonstrates the immense power of using free mapping utilities for presenting academic research. Science Progress took the same route in building its map project tracking research on the human toll of climate change.

But Young’s point isn’t just about communicating and collecting research–it’s about thinking of open formats like Google’s mapping system (which stores data in a special flavor of the eXtensible Markup Laguage, or XML, called KML) as new frameworks that can shape the research product itself. He asks whether open platforms like Google should be the tools of choice or whether home-grown systems are the better way to go.

The time, effort, and expertise necessary to build custom a mapping system are just some of the reasons to think about open systems that boast an every-increasing number of customizable features. But another consideration is accessibility. In-house systems, or ones built on expensive, professional geographic information system platforms, may not allow for easy information sharing, third-party mashups, or even visibility to non-academic readers.

So would it make sense to consider stipulating that some map-based research end up in an open, accessible format? The current National Institutes of Health policy on open-access publishing mandates that research funded with NIH dollars published in peer-reviewed journals must also be submitted to the PubMed database within 12 months. An agency like the National Science Foundation could experiment with providing incentives or tools to research grantees doing mappable work to provide their research in open formats. What do you think?

The process itself is extremely complex and will happen very quickly. There will be about 800 people on the transition team, which will spend roughly $9 million. Given that this team will have about 11 weeks to form a new government as the country skids through an economic crisis, it will not be an easy job. The handover of power will involve an unprecedented amount of information and will require fast, effective communication. Briefing books, face-to-face meetings, and phone calls will be insufficient. The transition team must make the most of modern information and communications technology to shape, coordinate, and run the process of moving the next president into office. Here are some suggestions on how that can work.

Previous administrations—and ultimately the American people—have suffered from poor communication and coordination during transition periods.

One of the first priorities of the president-elect must be issues that could affect national security and other vital interests. Ordinarily, this information gets passed around in the form of briefing books and PowerPoint slides. But now, information and communications technology allows experts to conduct briefings remotely using videoteleconferencing, present information via secure webpages and internal wikis, and conduct real-time discussions and make document modifications using collaborative software and chat tools.

Previous administrations—and ultimately the American people—have suffered from poor communication and coordination during transition periods. For example, the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident occurred in Somalia at the time of the Bush 41-to-Clinton transition, and the “Bay of Pigs” occurred during the Eisenhower-Kennedy transition. Ultimately, these crises, and numerous others, boil down to lack of communication, coordination, and collaboration.

But the U.S. Intelligence Community has already cleared a lot of the technical hurdles in this area. Their recent advances with INTELINK and its cousin A-Space are essentially mashups of the functionality civilians are familiar with through Facebook, LinkedIn, GoogleDocs, and Google Reader—all rolled into an addictive work environment. These social networks allow status updates, subscriptions to real-time news feeds, activity streams, content management, a community tag cloud, drag and drop, discussion threads, a “scrapbook,” and widgets. This system is better than anything I know about in the private sector and the whole government should now make good use of it.

Using INTELINK to coordinate the intelligence and national security teams of the incoming administration is but one important example of how social networking software and Web 2.0 tools can facilitate the presidential transition, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

What is the transition team?

Broadly defined, the presidential transition includes the entire campaign season, the election cycle, and a number of months after inauguration when the Senate confirms appointees and leaders are stepping into decision-making roles. The team that coordinates this process exists in two critical and intertwined worlds.

The first is in the Executive Office of the President, where transition staff are concerned about staffing the White House, vetting potential cabinet members, developing advisory councils, recruiting lower-level personnel, coordinating with the outgoing administration, communicating with key outside advisors and leaders in government and the private sector, and drafting an initial presidential agenda.

The second world is executive branch departments and agencies, where team members have three main responsibilities: analyzing the overall organization and function of parts of the executive branch, reassessing key senior personnel positions and responsibilities, and looking at pressing and long-term issues in subject-matter areas.

Department-specific teams are especially important during a change in which the incoming president is from a different political party from that of the outgoing administration. In the event that Sen. Barack Obama wins, those transition teams within departments and agencies are likely to be larger than what was normal in the past.

Technology in the transition

During the Clinton-Bush transition to the 43^rd presidency, the United States was just past the Y2K confusion and at the peak of the dot-com bubble; Time-Warner purchased AOL; Microsoft released Windows 2000 and was in the middle of an antitrust case; Netscape launched its open-source Navigator 6.0 browser; Wikipedia did not yet exist; and the first short film to be widely distributed on the Internet, “405: The Movie,” had just appeared.

But now the presidential campaigns are longer, more expensive, and more stressful, and the government is larger. Since that last transition, there is a new department in the executive branch for Homeland Security, as well as significant new coordinating offices like that of the Director of National Intelligence. As such, transition organization will be more difficult than ever.

In this process, personal connections are imperative, and new social software lends itself to precisely these situations. A new administration in transition, just off a grueling campaign, cannot reasonably be expected to comb through mountains of data which are not necessarily well-organized, in agreement, or even fully available due to classification issues. Social technologies, inherently designed to bring people and ideas together, can improve the transition process.

The transparent transition

Eight years after the last hand over of the presidency, collaboration tools have emerged and evolved, and the complexity of projects like managing an 800-person government transition, organizing what might be the largest White House ever, and analyzing a myriad of government agencies, employees, contractors, and policies, could be easier and more effective by drawing some lessons from Wikipedia and even the familiar Facebook.

Immediately post-election but pre-transition, there is a huge need to understand the institutional memory of the White House and of the cabinet agencies. Eight years ago, briefing books—big thick binders of information— were still in vogue. But now, social tools like websites, wikis, and collaborative software can help by making information more widely available, searchable, and discoverable, and it can also promote and aid discussions between relevant transition personnel with areas of overlap.

The White House must also coordinate a recruitment effort to seek out individuals with required expertise to staff the incoming administration. This involves not only the creation of a website for this purpose, but management of the resume information—which they can expect will be about 40,000 applications in the first few weeks and eventually total 70,000 interested persons, according to an article written by Clay Johnson III, the current deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and previously the executive director of the Bush 43 transition team. Social software will also facilitate the associated research for vetting job candidates. Information management tools, collaborative software, advanced Internet search algorithms, and knowledge of online social networks would greatly facilitate a good deal of this important task. In addition, current career government employees could staff some of these thousands of open positions. The transition team is in a unique position to reach out to and recruit those people—even if just temporarily—using social tools. This approach would leverage existing bureaucratic knowledge without risking administrative gaps in the critical first months of the presidency.

Next, the incoming administration will be immediately and constantly overwhelmed with “advice” (some wanted, some unwanted) from think tanks, previous administrations, “experts,” interest groups, lobbyists, governors, legislators, and donors. And this information will come from a variety of sources using diverse media—print, email, video, and audio. Points of contact for these people and groups need to be organized and coordinated; information must be organized and shared; and staffers must meet and sometimes partner with groups, all in the effort to craft the short and long-term agenda of the critical first 100 days (and beyond) of the new administration. New social websites and software allow coordination of formal debates so as to allow actionable conclusions from what might at first seem like the chaos of many opinions. And the new administration might consider using social networks to reach out to stakeholders as well.

Within departments, small teams from the incoming administration will be interacting with existing personnel in order to prepare for the cabinet and sub-cabinet heads, tee up important upcoming issues, and reorganize resources and personnel. Social tools would enable teams interacting with different departments to share information and advice while they perhaps struggle to obtain information or solve problems. Social software can also help coordinate informal social networks and organize advisory groups of outside-subject-matter experts to advise the transition team members, keep track of discussions, and include people who cannot attend in person.

Risks during the transition

Once the president takes office, there is a very real chance of a crisis that will test the new administration. Both World Trade Center incidents occurred in the first year of a new presidency. If this happened in 2009, would formal and informal networks and communication be in place? Social media can reduce these risks by getting the right information to the right people before they need it. Prior to September 11, 2001, groups within the intelligence-gathering community did not share information. Tools like INTELINK, discussed above, have solved many of those information-sharing problems in principle, but the transition team must plug the right people into the system right away—and they have to use it.

Within the Executive Office of the President, every administration’s staff is organized differently according to the president’s desires. But this organization has consequences for communication and effectiveness. For example, staff with insufficient titles cannot go to certain parts of the White House, including the Mess. Where else might important, informal, evolving staff interactions (say, between speechwriters and policy advisors) come from? Social media can help create more of these interactions. One potentially useful idea from corporate America is that every morning each person must enter one sentence into a collaborative system, answering the question, “What are you working on?” These data—available to anyone on the system—are simple, searchable, discoverable, and archivable.

In addition, now in office, the president must focus not only on the voters he needed to get elected, but on the public sentiment of the entire nation. Governing is very different from campaigning. Social software can help with this too. Websites like Twitter offer real-time information on public discussions people are having on the Internet. Quantifying public sentiment using these and other tools, both open and proprietary, will be very important for reaching out, listening, and engaging the citizens post-election, and henceforth for influencing new policies and programs.

Last but certainly not least, the people of America should be engaged in knowing about what is happening during the presidential transition process, and what increased risks (if any) there are during that period. Historical incidents, like the World Trade Center bombings, tell us that there are increased risks. In an increasingly fragmented media and information society, that level of engagement requires more than a press release on the White House website and stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post. It means full multimedia engagement in a myriad of locations and times using a blizzard of tools including blogging, speeches, informal gatherings, mobile technologies, podcasts, online video, and widgets. In addition, the outreach should use social tools that allow not just message “push” but rather bidirectional conversation—increasing citizen participation and interest in government.

Dr. Mark Drapeau (mark.d.drapeau@ugov.gov) is an Associate Research Fellow directing the Social Software for Security (S3) project at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy of the National Defense University in Washington DC. These views are his own and not the official policy or position of any part of the U.S. Government.

In part because of failed Bush administration tech policy, the United State has not seen significant increases broadband speeds in recent years. As a nation, our current median data download speed is 2.3 megabits per second—Japan boasts 63 mbps (2739 percent higher than the United States), Korea 49 mbps (1739 percent higher), and France 17 mbps (739 percent higher). Advertisements for internet connection providers would make us believe otherwise, showing us that we can now download MP3s at rates faster than ever before.

iStockphoto

A new report from the Communication Workers of America provides more data on a problem we already knew about: the past seven years have been bad for broadband policy.

Mark Lloyd, Vice President of the Leadership Council on Civil Rights, explained the irony of the situation earlier this year on Science Progress, noting that our global competitors are outpacing the United States by implementing policies similar to our own from the 1990s. The Clinton administration encouraged public/private telecommunications partnerships, connected schools and libraries to the World Wide Web, and allowed competitive service providers onto the networks of the local telephone monopolies in an effort to speed up the deployment of broadband around most of the nation. Over the past seven years, the Bush administration has implemented policy increasing the number of subscriber lines, but not necessarily the locations of them.

Under Bush administration policy, the possibility of closing of the digital divide remains an impossibility. A substantial rise in subscriber lines is not a good indicator of deployment because multiple subscriber lines are used in large businesses. As Lloyd goes on to explain, Bush’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration does not even have useful indicators because it collects information with minimal geographical details. “Declaring that access is accomplished when the industry reports that one entity in that zip-code has service does not tell us who has broadband,” writes Lloyd.

Without a national broadband policy, he also notes that America grows less competitive in a global economy, and, as he argued in his “Ubiquity Requires Redundancy” report, vulnerable to and ill-prepared for real threats to our national security—another irony, as improved security was the one of the initial rationales behind U.S. government investment in the development of the Internet.

This change hasn’t happened, but that raises questions of what else the West can do to promote human rights in this totalitarian country, and whether the West should facilitate freer electronic communication in such contexts.

In September, 2007, when the monks in Myanmar protested in the streets, the government cracked down, stripping, beating, and arresting them. Protesters filmed the violence with cell phones and emailed the images across the world—until the junta shut down Internet servers, all of which it owns and tightly controls. When cyclone Nargis devastated large parts of the country in May 2008, the junta impeded delivery of relief aid to victims and detained activists for distributing aid to needy villages.

The West can also help by considering ways to facilitate electronic freedom.

The U.S. government voiced protest and sent to the region four ships laden with relief, along with aircraft for delivering it. The junta has allowed a small amount of the aid that is needed to enter into some regions, but refused to grant permission for the ships to land, or for necessary supplies to reach the hardest-hit areas. Though activists urged the United States to deliver the supplies anyway, airdropping them if necessary, on June 5 the United States capitulated and withdrew the ships.

Yet in an increasingly global community, we will increasingly face moral dilemmas of whether and when to intervene in humanitarian ways. The Internet is creating global communities. But global communities mean global responsibilities. As reformers in a country communicate with the outside world, sending vivid images directly in “real time,” and seek to establish close bonds with us, how should we respond? When, if ever, do we have any responsibilities to them, and if so, what are they?

Many observers around the world have predicted that the Internet would readily lead to democratization and peace. Yet despite the Web’s spread, free speech is still limited or threatened in most countries in the world. Fierce battles for freedom rage from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

A critic can argue that we must respect first and foremost the sovereignty of a regime over the emails of its citizens. But what if the legitimacy of that government is questionable? As walls between nations shrink, we need to consider how best to help reformers in a repressive country. We must consider what rights they have, and what rights we have to intervene. As the world becomes more global, in many ways we are entering a new Internet-driven era of “post-nationalism.”

The full implications of this development are not wholly clear, but in the case of Myanmar, we can do several things.

The West can first supply and deliver more humanitarian aid, and second can apply further political pressure. India, China, and Thailand all still support the junta, and Chevron is involved in building an oil pipeline, supplying the regime with about $1 billion last year alone. Congress is considering ending tax breaks for Chevron as a result, but could apply more pressure.

But importantly, the West can also help by considering ways to facilitate electronic freedom. For example, in October, Burmese protesters asked U.S. and U.K. embassies and the United Nations to make free wireless Internet access available. It didn’t happen. But in countries where regimes control Internet use, questions arise of whether the West should ever make Wi-Fi freely available, and if so, when. Just as the Voice of America reached millions in totalitarian countries, should we not develop the Web of America?

The junta also uses California-made censorship software to limit the availability of websites to the Burmese. The West could consider scrutinizing the sale of such censorship tools to repressive regimes, perhaps as it monitors sales of armaments.

Relatedly, the United States needs to protect and promote human rights more vigilantly and consistently. More reformers will need to feel that they will be supported. Their dreams will only be dampened by the United States disrespecting human rights and overlooking human rights violations in Iraq and elsewhere.

Three years ago, I wondered what the monks beside me were writing. I didn’t know, but sensed hope. The media seemed the message.

Unfortunately, it is not enough. Over the past few months, the tragedies in Myanmar have saddened me all the more. These men were reaching out to new worlds that I wish don’t now let them down.

I could not see their words—only their fingers flying rapidly over the keys. But I will never forget their intense and hopeful gazes. The screens before them revealed both distorted reflections of the small dark room around us, and the great World Wide Web beyond.

Robert Klitzman is an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and the Director of the Ethics and Policy Core of the HIV Center at Columbia University.

The bill proposes a combination of tax incentives, grants, loans, and supports for current federal development programs to spur the growth of widely available and affordable Internet in rural America.

Policy that helps spread the benefits of high-speed communications infrastructure to all citizens is a good thing. In his report, “Ubiquity Requires Redundancy,” Science Progress advisory board member Mark Lloyd explained how Internet connectivity in rural areas is a critical component of homeland security and natural disaster response. Broadband can also improve rural healthcare, education, and economies, argues Nancy Scola, who examines successful programs in Virginia in her article Science Progress, “Broadband Done Right.”

Minor is, improbably, the official blogger for Rose Hill, Va., a tiny mountain town tucked deep in Virginia’s tobacco and coal-mining country, who came to live there because of the state’s unique broadband policies. “You know the magazine Fast Company? They did this issue on people who work from all these bizarre locations—like a monastery on an island somewhere,” she explains with a hearty laugh. “What all those places had was a broadband hookup. And that was my inspiration.”

Minor moved to her Appalachian oasis after catching word that high-speed Internet was on its way. As recently as two years ago, as Minor tells it, getting online to run her grant-writing business required actually meeting the Internet halfway. “I used to drive over the hills for 45 minutes to Duffield because that was the farthest point west the Internet went.”

Virginians are clustering, but not always by packing themselves into easily wired urban areas.

But while the federal government limps along with its fortune-cookie message of a broadband policy—“The market will provide”—in Virginia the global communications network is being pulled and cajoled into every corner of the state where Virginians want and need to get connected. This approach not only gives the state a much needed economic shot in the arm. It also demonstrates a realist approach to bringing broadband to Americans where they make their homes, giving them the tools to live the lives they want to lead.

This is Virginia’s broadband-development model—or more precisely, a collection of models that marry together state, local and federal funds with private industry participation, creating new jobs in parts of the state that have been losing them for decades. What’s more, the Old Dominion model is proving itself up to the task of delivering demanding online applications, much need medical care and training, and small business opportunities to Joan Minor and millions of others in the commonwealth. The approach underpinning the successful rollout of high-speed connectivity represents technology policy innovation at its best.

Demand-led Innovation

Virginia is in a state of demographic flux, with the commonwealth’s growing population of 7.5 million rushing headfirst towards metropolitanism. But that’s not to say the state is becoming citified. Virginians are clustering, but not always by packing themselves into easily wired urban areas. And, as with Rose Hill, the state still retains its deeply rural pockets.

All of which makes bringing broadband ubiquity to Virginia challenging, but the desire is certainly there. Aneesh Chopra, Virginia’s Secretary of Technology, recalls hearing about when the town of Rose Hill called a meeting several years ago to hash over the need for indoor plumbing. Only a handful of town folk turned up, he says. But a recent meeting about laying high-speed fiber-optic cable lines pulled in more than a hundred— in a town where the 2000 census found 714 full-timers. “That’s just how viscerally people feel about broadband,” he says.

“How do we get broadband to a community where the private market isn’t going to go anytime soon?”

The nuts and bolts of how broadband came to Rose Hill is a story of leveraging local funds—cash from the state Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission charged with developing Virginia’s tobacco country—to draw in federal grant monies from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s rural Internet program. The Rose Hill model is being replicated down the road a piece in Ewing (population 436), and the even smaller coal-mining community of St. Charles (population 159).

As Karen Jackson, the state official heading up Virginia’s broadband efforts, puts it, “If you’re up a holler and around two mountains, you’re still going to be hard to reach.” Which is why the state puts such an effort into wiring all of its rural communities, she adds. (See sidebar for a detailed look at the policies and programs behind the wiring of Virginia.)

And that’s how broadband came to Rose Hill, but it’s certainly not the only model on view in Virginia. Leave Rose Hill, head north on Route 81, and eight hours later you’ll arrive near the shores of the Chesapeake Bay in King George County. The county is home to the Navy’s celebrated Dahlgren base and is equidistant to Richmond and Washington DC, making it attractive settling grounds for many Virginians. And King George’s population is indeed exploding, having grown by a third since the start of the decade.

Yet the county remains low-density, and hard to network. “You can live on 20 or 30 acres of land out here, but there’s no broadband,” says Brian David, King George’s administrator. “People who work at the base or for military contractors like Lockheed [Martin] drive home and only have dial-up. Newcomers are coming in from Northern Virginia, Charles County, and Prince George’s County in Maryland, and are frustrated. It’s a quality of life issue. The question is,” says David, “how do we get broadband to a community where the private market isn’t going to go anytime soon?”

Just last month, King George County settled on an answer: lower the capital investment by making use of the municipality’s water towers and water tanks, and use its stellar credit rating to borrow and then re-lend the proceeds to a start-up broadband provider with expertise in modern wireless technologies. King George is betting that with a little public sector creativity it can indeed meet its broadband needs. Nearby Spotsylvania is now copying the King George plan.

Or consider how the mountain towns of Danville and Martinsville, lying smack in the middle of the state’s southern border with North Carolina, drew new jobs to their cities via new broadband lines. One of the commonwealth’s earliest adopters of new ways of working, the state’s Department of Taxation, recently took a chance on a pilot telework program, opening up customer service jobs anywhere broadband now reaches—including more than 50 slots allotted to Danville and Martinsville.

“They were absolutely astounded at what they got,” recalls Jackson. “These are not high-paying jobs, but the sort of people who applied are the sort of people who in the Richmond area are already employed. But here the people can stay home. They don’t have to drive into Richmond to get to work. The department got to pick from the cream of the crop and the attrition rate has been next to nothing.”

Broadband for Health and Education

The delivery of broadband to Virginia over the past decade is akin in many ways to the New Deal mobilization to bring electricity to the American countryside. Rural electrification of the ‘30s bridged the divide between rural and urban America, shaping the destiny of many an American, including a Georgian boy named Jimmy Carter. The former president has called the arrival of electricity “the event that transformed our family’s lives most profoundly.” For one thing, artificial light opened up the possibility of reading in those dark hours before morning chores of after the evening meal, a tremendous boon for eager learners such as Carter.

But lighting up the American countryside shares with broadband the “up a holler” problem—low-density is the enemy of networking. In the dreams of a central planner, the most efficient way forward for a state like Virginia might be to turn into one big Dulles Corridor, that high-tech cluster where short hops from one house to the next school to the next industrial park make it no real challenge to string the Internet from one place to the next. Some Virginians, however, want to live outside of suburban tech clusters but remain employed in the wired world; others have never lived in urban or suburban communities and would rather have the wired world come to them.

But the change wrought by broadband isn’t just about neat apps and educational outreach.

So the trick is to network them in a way that spreads broadband’s benefits even as the Internet itself evolves into an ever-more-bandwidth-hungry medium. Says Jackson, “there was a time that as long as you had dial-up and weren’t getting dropped, people were pretty happy. That’s changed.” More critically, Chopra describes demanding medical- records software deployed at health centers serving Virginia’s neediest areas that can’t survive the dial-up link. “People are literally dying because they can’t get the broadband they need to run the software,” He explains. Cutting-edge software applications may demand enormous pipe, but today even successful surfing calls for 200Kbps.

Asked how the people of Rose Hill are using their new broadband hookups, blogger Joan Minor points to people seeking medical information. “We have a high disability rate,” She notes. Indeed, it’s more than twice the national average. “And we don’t have access to large medical facilities,” she adds. “So we have people getting information that they then use to know when to go to our local doctor and when to leave the area.”

In fact, on the health front, Rose Hill has to contend with a double whammy. Its residents confront high rates of sickness and disease. And the area is home to too few medical professionals to treat them. “We have a hard time getting health professionals to live and work here,” admits Minor.

High-speed broadband attacks the problem from three angles. The first is by reducing the need to have medical experts living and working in the communities they serve; via a high-speed video hookup, a pediatric cardiologist at Richmond’s Virginia Commonwealth University can monitor the progress of a struggling newborn and deliver instant guidance to local physicians.

The second is distance-learning programs, in which medical residents are trained to do more basic procedures—an approach international aid groups like Doctors without Borders are using to meet many far-flung health needs. And the third way broadband can reduce illness in a community like Rose Hill is simple but powerful: opening up career alternatives to the dangerous and draining jobs such as coal mining, logging, and tobacco farming that contribute to Appalachia’s poor health.

“Virginia Tech has one of the highest-speed computing platforms in the world, explains Virginia Tech’s Dr. Jeffrey Reed, an engineer who heads up the school’s Wireless @ Virginia Tech research program. “But anytime you have high-speed computing, you limit its capability if you don’t have high-speed broadband.” But the change wrought by broadband isn’t just about neat apps and educational outreach.

Chopra, for one, is well aware that wringing out the full value of the Internet is going to take cultural shifts. Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare initiative, for example, is at the bleeding edge of Internet education, with the institution placing course materials free online, making them accessible to anyone with a broadband hookup from Roanoke to Rawalpindi. Along those lines, Virginia is working with Old Dominion University in coastal Norfolk to host introductory nursing classes online, says Chopra. “We don’t know as a society how HR departments will value that you’ve taken 30 hours of MIT coursework.”

Chopra, who sees himself as Virginia’s high-tech storyteller and cheerleader, is hopeful companies will take chances on workers whose credentials are less than traditional. And inspired by the thinking that wiz-bang gadgets and apps can only serve to prove the value of high-throughput connectivity, a team of researchers headed by Virginia Tech’s Dr. Reed and Old Dominion University’s Dr. Nancy Cooley are working to detail a new set of broadband-enabled innovations for a report due on Governor Tim Kaine’s desk this summer.

Keeping Virginia Rural

Asked how the people of Rose Hill are using their new broadband hookups, blogger Joan Minor has quick answers. “eBay is a big one,” she says. “People across all economic lines here are using eBay. Franchisees are ecstatic to be able to communicate with headquarters, who had been telling them they were going to pull their franchise if they didn’t get broadband.

A recent post on Joan Minor’s Rose Hill Blog also highlights Black Bear Blast, a gathering of scientists and locals in Cumberland Gap National Park. Another details Kite Day, a local tradition tracing its roots “way back yonder when,” says Minor. She’s delighted to promote these rural get-togethers, the better to help preserve the small town’s unique way of life. “You look at this town’s demographics, and they’re depressing,” she says. “The people of this town are poor, and they’re sick, and they’re old. Our best and brightest have been leaving and not coming back until they retire. But there’s still a whole lot of pride in these communities. One of the points of the blog is to celebrate that, so the younger generations will want to stay. Now they can figure out how to use the Internet to find a way to stay.”

From Rose Hill to Danville to King George County, the freedom of choice that broadband delivers for Virginians to better their job prospects, their businesses, and their health defines a broadband policy that works. It’s a practical approach aptly summed by Karen Jackson: “We try to find what the barriers are,” she says, “and then we knock them down.”

Nancy Scola is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY.

“Portable, high-speed connectivity provides new options to help create business expansion in rural communities,” Rural Development Under Secretary Thomas C. Dorr noted. “Communities that lack broadband are often bypassed for new economic development investments. “Broadband is as important today as providing rural telephone service was 75 years ago, and we’re proud of our role in fostering public-private partnerships to bring broadband services to rural America.”

In his Science Progress report, “Ubiquity Requires Redundancy,” Mark Lloyd emphasizes the importance of broadband access–especially in rural America–to homeland security and natural disaster response. He makes the case for Federal investment in broadband access to ensure the U.S. has robust, reliable, and redundant networks with which to respond to emergencies and promote public safety. This partnership could be one project along that path to nation-wide connectivity.

At the most basic level, net neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet; all content on the Internet is equally accessible, and once a person pays for access to the Internet, they alone get to choose how they use it. This means that providers should not be allowed to block access to certain sites or applications, or charge different customers different amounts for services.

Net neutrality proponents argue that without regulation that prevents Internet providers from regulating their services, telecom companies could control Internet traffic to serve their vested interests. Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist.org, explains this position, saying, “Imagine if you tried to order a pizza and the phone company said AT&T’s preferred pizza vendor is Domino’s. Press one to connect to Domino’s now. If you would still like to order from your neighborhood pizzeria, please hold for three minutes while Domino’s guaranteed orders are placed.”

Net neutrality was brought to public attention recently when it was reported that Comcast, a large Internet service provider, was blocking file-sharing traffic to ensure quality of service to its consumers. Although Comcast suffered widespread condemnation and is currently under investigation by the Federal Communication Commission, sides began to form among the various stakeholders, each formulating its own perspective on the ramifications of regulating net neutrality.

To understand the net neutrality debate, it is helpful to be familiar with some of the stakeholders who have a variety of interests in any regulatory deliberations on net neutrality. Internet users and their advocates generally favor net neutrality, while telecom companies see it as a threat to their use of their own property. Pressure is mounting for Congress to decide how it will or will not regulate the industry.

The Government

The key government players in the net neutrality debate are the Federal Communications Commission, which is charged with regulating all non-governmental use of the radio spectrum, including the Internet; and the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice, which enforce antitrust law.

The FTC urged policymakers in June 2007 to “proceed with caution in evaluating proposals to enact regulation in the area of broadband Internet access” because of possible unintended consequences to consumers. But then in February, 2008, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said that he is “ready, willing and able” to prevent broadband internet service providers from interfering with access to any specific content. The FTC and DOJ could conceivably prosecute telecom companies under any net neutrality laws, if enacted.

Internet Users, Websites, and Big Media Companies

Big media and entertainment companies, which controlled information, knowledge, and culture for much of the twentieth century, are not happy that the Internet enables a wider variety of people to participate in cultural production. Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, an influential spokesperson for Internet users and creativity, argues that net neutrality policies are important for empowering users. Net neutrality policies could prevent telecom companies from restricting access to blogs, wikis, and independent podcasts, for example. CAP fellow Mark Lloyd has also suggested that net neutrality policies would benefit public education, health, and safety because it ensures that everyone has equal access to the Internet’s contents.

Telecom Companies

Companies that own the physical pipes of the Internet argue that they have the right to control the use of those pipes in such a way that is most profitable to them. David Farber, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, has also argued that giving telecom companies the freedom to experiment, without the restrictions of net neutrality policies, could encourage unanticipated innovations on their part, which might benefit other stakeholders. The telecom companies also complain that government regulation may hinder return on investments, deterring them from expanding the broadband infrastructure.

Congress will have to address these competing views as the net neutrality debate begins to intensify in the coming months. The new net neutrality bill, which is backed by Internet giants such as Google and Amazon, is garnering more attention in the public sphere than previous legislation attempts, and could signal a new battle between net neutrality advocates and detractors.

Who should be the next President’s science adviser? Scientists could help decide the fate of the position and the 50 or so science-and technology-related vacancies opening up when the new administration takes power in January. Speaking at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, policy experts told scientists to organize and weigh in with a list of recommendations for the positions. They should also lobby for the restoration of a science advisor who reports directly to the President, a position removed during the Bush administration, reported Science.

Google has teamed up with the Cleveland Clinic to store patient’s medical records online. The pilot program has raised alarms among privacy watchdogs who are concerned the search engine giant will exploit the information for marketing purposes. The program, which has yet to specify a start date, will begin with 1,500 to 10,000 volunteer patients.

Consumers advocacy groups, like Save the Internet, hailed the bill as “a blow to the gatekeepers,” lauding it for protecting consumers from discrimination by Internet providers and bringing the net neutrality debate outside the influence of corporate lobbyists and into an arena where the public–and not the cable and phone companies–decide the future of the Internet. The proponents say the bill would maintain the open marketplace of the Internet where all information is treated equal. Some bloggers complained that the bill, which has the support of Google and Amazon, is a “watered-down” version of Markey’s previously stronger “net neutrality” bill which failed to pass through Congress in 2006. They bemoaned the lack of an enforcement provision or penalty for violating net neutrality as another example of legislators too afraid to confront telecom companies.

On the other side, telecom companies expressed concerns that this bill would introduce regulation that would not only stifle competition and innovation, but would threaten much-needed investment in expanding the network infrastructure. With less financial incentives to expand the infrastructure, they argue, consumers and tax-payers would essentially have to fund the expansion as public works. While Representative Markey assured telecom companies that the bill “contains no requirements for regulations on the Internet whatsoever,” it did little to allay the fears of Scott Cleland, President of NetCompetition.org, who called the bill “a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ because it seeks regulation of the Internet under the guise of ‘Internet freedom.’” The organization, whose members include telecom giants such as Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, Qwest, and Time Warner Cable, goes on to say that the “net neutrality” debate is not even a political concern, but a “fringe issue and a factional business dispute.” Another telecom-funded interest group, Hands off the Internet, shared the same sentiments, claiming that current federal law already provides for an open Internet and the new bill would be “an expensive and unnecessary burden” on the FCC.

The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste took issue with the bill over the proposed summits. They questioned what would be gained from the expensive studies, which would cover issues already addressed by the FCC during earlier deliberations.

Image credit: flickr.com/aaronw79

No longer is an encyclopedia a static collection of facts and figures…it is an organic entity.

Although Wikipedia was certainly in the public discourse for quite some time—Wired featured Wikipedia in March of 2005—it was the Seigenthaler controversy which brought the encyclopedia “anyone can edit” to the forefront of public consciousness. In May of 2005, as a hoax, an individual edited John Seigenthaler’s Wikipedia entry so that it read that for a short time Seigenthaler, who was the Assistant Attorney General under the Kennedy administration, had been implicated in the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy, a patently false claim. In September of that year, a friend of Seigenthaler discovered the error and reported it to Seigenthaler, which led to a public debate between him and Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. This incident seemed to prove what many had feared: that this new encyclopedia was a cesspool of misinformation, not to be trusted. In the words of a Britannica editor, Wikipedia is like the public restroom; one never knows who used it last.

Not surprisingly, much of the ensuing debate around Wikipedia centered on its level of accuracy, and several studies were initiated to compare Wikipedia to other sources such as Britannica. In many of these studies, Wikipedia fared equally as well as its competitors, with the added advantage of being able to correct its own errors and relish the fact that others could not do the same. Unfortunately, this debate obfuscated a more important aspect of this event.

Seigenthaler and his colleagues are, I assume, a relatively educated group of individuals. Seigenthaler is a lawyer and a journalist, obviously a man who is gifted with words, and comfortable writing. However, rather than edit the Wikipedia entry himself, he emailed others about it. The entry was not changed until, after some time, another colleague of Seigenthaler decided to edit the biography. Why did it take so long after the error was discovered for someone to change it? I am not trying to play blame the victim here; I am merely pointing out that what seems like the easiest and most obvious initial response was not so with respect to the 78-year-old Seigenthaler.

And this is why digital literacy is so crucial for educational institutions: we do a fundamental disservice to our students if we continue to propagate old methods of knowledge creation and archivization without also teaching them how these structures are changing, and, more importantly, how they will relate to knowledge creation and dissemination in a fundamentally different way. No longer is an encyclopedia a static collection of facts and figures (although some of its features might be relatively so); it is an organic entity. To educational and policy institutions which, for a substantial portion of history, have maintained control over static codex centered archives—think not only academic libraries, but national ones as well—the shift to an organic structure which they no longer control or solely influence represents a crisis indeed. But to train students in old literacy seems to me to be fundamentally the wrong approach. As Howard Rheingold suggests in Smart Mobs, in the future individuals will be divided between “those who know how to use new media to band together [and] those who don’t.”

Not only does Wikipedia contain the “hard science,” but it also records and contributes to the politicization and dissemination of scientific research and communication.

Because Wikipedia users tend to be more tech-savvy than the rest of the population, and because tech-savvy individuals are more likely to have science and engineering backgrounds, entries on these topics are some of the strongest in the encyclopedia. This website has grown into an immensely useful resource for background information on a wide range of scientific subjects, and can serve as a quick reference for any number of scientific facts. What is perhaps more important and useful, though, is the extent to which Wikipedia also preserves the debate and discourse around a particular subject. Two of the most important features that I point out to students when I teach them about Wikipedia are the history pages and the discussion pages. Unlike traditional archives, Wikipedia preserves not only its past representations, but also the discourse which produced the current entry. A strong example of this is the entry on global warming, which does a good job of dividing the controversy of global warming from the science on global warming. While the main page serves as a good primer to the science of global warming, students miss out if they do not also consult the discussion and history pages to understand how this article was produced. In prior models of knowledge, storing and recording important discursive histories was a less than transparent process; indeed, those functions were entirely unavailable. (Who decided that Pykrete was not important enough to make it into Britannica?) Now these features are relatively open to the public.

What this means for training people working in science and technology is that they will need to posses a new type of collaborative literacy, an ability to understand and negotiate an archival structure which is always in flux, and to which they can contribute. As we clearly see in the global warming article, not only does Wikipedia contain the “hard science,” but it also records and contributes to the politicization and dissemination of scientific research and communication. And, in order to be participants in these debates, students will need to understand the structures and rhetorics within which they take place.

And here the policy implications extend beyond Wikipedia, for it is not only about teaching people about Wikipedia but, more importantly, about this collaborative literacy in general, wherein the notion of the individual authority or expert no longer holds. To be sure, this runs counter to the ideology of most institutions where individual degrees are the measure of authority but, like it or not, the networked digital archive changes our basis of knowledge and training people for the future is about training them for this shift. What is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way.

When I hear debates about the digital divide, access is often the largest issue, as if merely having access to computers solves the problem. “Bring computers into the schools and fund technology” are the regular solutions. However, the technology here is merely secondary: what is more important is teaching people how this technology changes the social sphere so that students too can be empowered to engage the polis rather than being passive users of Word Processing programs. Knowledge of how to indent paragraphs on a computer or make bullet points for a Power Point presentation is meaningless without the more important literacy of how to use these new media collaboratively to create a different kind of knowledge. Literacy in modern society means not only being able to read a variety of informational formats; it means being able to participate in their creation, with Wikipedia serving as the marquee example.

David Parry is an assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas.

SciDev.Net reports that the first step is creation of a web-based database. The program will launch May 12. The database, which will house information on members and their research, aims to link researchers working in similar fields and prevent unnecessary overlap, and allow individuals and organizations to request specific resources.

Evelyn Strauss, executive director of the new organization, explained the mission of the new group to SciDev.Net:

The “Without Borders” idea perfectly captures what we — and others in different fields — are trying to do: break down the geographical (and other) borders that can hinder progress, and engender the sense of belonging to a global community.

The initiative will begin with a focus on African countries. Already, there are 70 organizations and 400 individuals around the globe willing to participate.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency of the Department of Commerce, announced last week that the U.S. is a networked nation. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The press release trumpets “the nation’s broadband success story.” The report itself is full of anecdotes that demonstrate why broadband is important in the fields of education, health care, and disaster response. But the most striking claim is that “since President Bush took office, the total number of broadband lines in the United States has grown by over 1,100 percent from almost 6.8 million lines to 82.5 million in December 2006.”

The U.S. government can’t even pinpoint where advanced telecommunications services are deployed in the United States.

Unfortunately, the report is simply another public relations trick meant to obscure the hard fact that the U.S. government can’t even pinpoint where advanced telecommunications services are deployed in the United States. First of all, because multiple subscriber lines are used in large businesses, the rise in the number of subscriber lines is not a good indicator of deployment. Worse yet, the very details about the data highlighted in the report illustrate exactly why the data itself is unreliable.

The report states, for example, that “it appears clear, at least at the level of analytical granularity that the present data will support, that a vast majority of Americans (well over 90 percent) have access to broadband communications through one or more modality.”

The NTIA, however, is relying largely on discredited zip-code data from the Federal Communications Commission.

The report also pulls from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Internet Use Supplement to the October 2007 Current Population Survey, which does not provide information about broadband speeds. So, it turns out that “the level of analytical granularity” is not very granular at all.

Declaring that access is accomplished when the industry reports that one entity in that zip-code has service does not tell us who has broadband.

The report admits that “more work remains to be done both by the government and by the private sector to improve broadband data.” That statement, at least, is factually correct. It has taken far too long to get the Bush administration, and the private industry that apparently directs it, to admit what many of us have been writing about for ten years.

The data collection problems have not changed: A five-digit zip-code is too large a geographic area to indicate where broadband is deployed. Declaring that access is accomplished when the industry reports that one entity in that zip-code has service does not tell us who has broadband. And 200 kilobits per second in one direction is not advanced telecommunications service.

Recommendations on repairing these deficiencies are as old as the data collection problems. House Telecommunications Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Edward Markey’s Broadband Census Bill passed the House last year, and the Senate Commerce Committee passed Chairman Daniel Inouye’s Broadband Data Improvement Act, but we have no bill before the President to sign. Congress should act on this immediately. As Senator Inouye said last spring, “we cannot manage what we do not measure.”

Senior Bush Administration officials, however, keep peddling the happy talk. According to Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, the Bush administration’s regulatory and tax policies, “made a significant impact on the availability and affordability of broadband in the United States.” Again, this is more spin than substance.

The Administration claims that it has “cleared away regulatory obstacles that could thwart the investment that fuels development—and deployment—of new technologies.” The President deserves credit for signing legislation to extend the Federal moratorium on State and local taxation of Internet access, and for legislation allowing companies to accelerate depreciation for capital expenditures, including those associated with broadband deployment. But these tax policies were set during the Clinton years.

The Bush administration’s word games—calling telecommunications companies information service companies so they would not have to support universal service—alongside its general antagonism toward the E-Rate program, which supports deployment to schools and libraries, did not fuel the development or deployment of new Internet technology.

Moreover, the elimination of NTIA’s Technology Opportunity Program, and termination of support for community technology centers, were steps in the wrong direction.

Instead of hype, we need national leadership that will be brave enough to ask the hard questions about U.S. broadband capabilities, and then be willing to tell the American people the facts. For the fact is this: The United States needs a comprehensive broadband that is ubiquitous and redundant to boost our national security, national preparedness, and national economy.

Mark Lloyd is a Advisory Board member of Science Progress for telecommunications and the Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. Read his report Ubiquity Requires Redundancy: The Case for Federal Investment in Broadband.

Lloyd went on to explain the ineffective approach from decision makers on broadband access:

The increasing noise from Washington about the lack of a U.S. broadband policy obscures the fact that a policy choice was made by the Bush administration to rely entirely on “market forces” to determine how and where advanced telecommunications services would be deployed. That policy has failed.

As Free Press and Ars Technica pointed out, the the U.S. has fallen far behind other developed nations in broadband availability. Lloyd explained, “There is no credible dispute that the United States has fallen behind Canada and France and Japan and a dozen other industrial countries in broadband deployment.”

The policy of relying on “market forces” that the Bush administration claimed for seven years would propel broadband access is irresponsible and insufficient. Without a robust broadband network connecting urban and rural America, the country is not only less competitive in the global economy, we will be ill-prepared to respond to national security threats and natural disasters.

Image: High-speed providers in U.S. zip codes, from the NTIA report, “Networked Nation: Broadband in America.”

Mark Lloyd issued a similar call for government investment in a robust and redundant broadband infrastructure for the United States in his recent report, Ubiquity Requires Redundancy.

The Spectrum

Broadcasters will return the 700MHz spectrum to the government in the transition to digital television scheduled for February 17, 2009. The FCC will retain control of two major blocks within this band for public safety use. Several remaining blocks will be available for bidding in Auction 73, which began yesterday, Jan. 24.

Why are these frequencies so important? The 700 MHz band has ideal physical properties for broadband and cellular services, as signals operating in this frequency can penetrate barriers like building walls and travel longer distances with little distortion than signals operating over other frequencies, making it easier to reach more people.

Below is a graphic detailing the license blocks up for auction, along with the TV channels to which they currently correspond:

For more information on geographic areas covered by each block, see the FCC’s information page for Auction 73.

The Auction

To facilitate the sale, the FCC is holding a standard English Auction in which each round of bidding raises the price until auction participants drop out, leaving only one high bidder for each license. The process will take place primarily online. Congress granted the FCC authority to auction spectrum licenses in 1993. Briefly, during the Reagan administration, licenses were up for grabs in lotteries. For nearly 50 years prior to that era, companies looking for a piece of the spectrum pie competed against one another, arguing their cases in hearings before the commission. According to the General Accounting Office and the FCC, spectrum auctions are successful because they are more efficient than hearings or lotteries, and because they raise revenue for the government. In this case, estimated proceeds from the auction will be at least $15 billion.

Revenues are one thing, but what of the public value of the technologies companies will build that capitalize on the available spectrum? A Wall Street Journal column from 2006 quoted Thomas Hazlett, a former FCC economist: “Congress is spending too much time looking at auction revenues and not enough time looking at the gains to the economy from having more productive use of spectrum.” According to a 2006 report from the Center for American Progress, past auctions have been susceptible to bidder collusion and large-scale mis-pricing by the FCC.

Two hundred and sixty-six companies applied to participate in the bidding for the 1,099 available licenses. Along with their application, the companies were required to include a substantial upfront payment.

Last week, the FCC held a mock auction for bidding companies to familiarize themselves with the auction process. Once the auction begins, companies are forbidden to discuss their bids, make them public knowledge, or even know the identity of other bidders. Furthermore, participants must cease business discussions with one another until the process is over, including talks about mergers or partnerships. These rules aim to prevent both collusion between companies trying to keep prices down and retaliatory bids from one company signaling to another that rivals are encroaching on “prized” licenses.

The entire auction cycle will likely take two months, at which point the high bidders can make public their winning bids in order to negotiate with partners and losing bidders.

Opening The Network

The FCC decided to split the available 60 MHz of bandwidth into five blocks that have been paired with an upper and lower portion of the band to allow separate up-link and down-link capabilities (see the above graphic). The C block in particular has generated headlines over the past few months, as acquiring all twelve licenses would result in complete national coverage (see map below). The minimum bid for the C block is $4.6 billion. The D block will also provide national coverage but its single license will come with the requirement that the winning bidder enter into a public-private partnership to develop a network for emergency first responders.

Adapted from FCC map and band plans for Auction 73.

Google made headlines in 2007 by working with other Internet companies and consumer groups to pressure the FCC to attach conditions to the C block licenses mandating that auction winners open their network, permitting consumers to use any compatible device or software. Verizon announced plans in November that it would open its network to outside devices this year.

Open access to these wireless networks could revolutionize the way telecommunication companies do business. With an open platform, consumers, resellers, and business would have an unprecedented amount of access to the licensee’s network. Consumers would be able to use any software applications, services, content, or devices they choose. Third parties would be able to buy wireless services at wholesale and connect to the 700 MHz network from any point. Open access will likely lead to greater competition, innovation, and lower prices—all of which are stifled by the current proprietary network approach.

We ought to have universal, affordable access to broadband technology by the year 2007. And then we ought to make sure as soon as possible thereafter consumers have plenty of choices.

—President George W. Bush, March 2004 [1]

The United States will not meet President Bush’s goal of universal broadband by the end of 2007—not by a long shot. The number of subscribers to Internet services is growing faster than the adoption of “dial-up,” yet for the most part these subscribers are not connected to the broadband technology Congress described in 1996 as a two-way communications service capable of high-speed delivery of data, voice, and video.

Download this report in .pdf format.

Listen to a press call on broadband and national security with Mark Lloyd and P.J. Crowley (download .mp3):

This failure to connect over half the country to advanced telecommunications service is not a technological failure. It is a 21st century public policy failure. In the 1990s, policies established by the Clinton administration to encourage public/private telecommunications partnerships, to connect schools and libraries to the World Wide Web, and to allow competitive service providers onto the networks of the local telephone monopolies all sped up the deployment of broadband around most of the nation. These policies were either deliberately abandoned or hampered by the Bush administration.

The increasing noise from Washington about the lack of a U.S. broadband policy obscures the fact that a policy choice was made by the Bush administration to rely entirely on “market forces” to determine how and where advanced telecommunications services would be deployed. That policy has failed.

The goal of federal investment in broadband should be first and foremost to ensure our ability to respond to threats to our homeland security and to natural disasters.

The result of administration neglect, industry intransigence, and the incompetence of a Federal Communications Commission apparently “captured” by the industry it is supposed to regulate has left the American people and most policymakers with no clear idea where broadband services are deployed in the United States. There is no credible dispute that the United States has fallen behind Canada and France and Japan and a dozen other industrial countries in broadband deployment.[2]

Americans are not more adverse to new technology compared to our neighbors to the north or our friends overseas. The difference is that these countries have moved ahead of the United States after having adopted one version or another of U.S. telecommunications policies established in the mid-1990s.[3] In addition to leaving America less competitive in a global economy, this failure has left the nation vulnerable and ill-prepared for real threats to our national security—the rationale behind the initial U.S. government investment in the development of the Internet.

The American invention of the Internet, of course, was preceded by hefty scientific investments beginning with the Eisenhower administration for military purposes. In fact, the Internet developed despite “market forces” dominated by the not-so-invisible hand of the Bell telephone monopoly. While the development of the Internet has certainly benefited from global market forces, the “free market” blinders that prevent present-day U.S. policymakers from seeing beyond the interests of corporations must be removed. While Reagan-era Republicans seem to don their blinders with greater pride, this is not a partisan issue. It was, after all, Vice President Al Gore who insisted that the “information superhighway” would not be built the way the U.S. highway system was built, but would instead be financed by private enterprise.[4]

If the United States is to catch up with other developed and developing nations, however, we must look beyond even the abandoned policies of the Clinton era and begin to move with greater urgency and resolve to address pressing disaster response and defense needs. After all, the attacks of 9/11 and body blow of Hurricane Katrina highlight for all but the most doctrinaire advocates of free markets that there is an exceedingly strong case for direct government investment in the deployment of advanced telecommunications services to build a safe, strong, and resilient America.

The goal of federal investment in broadband should be first and foremost to ensure our ability to respond to threats to our homeland security and to natural disasters. Directly connected to this goal is the availability of advanced telecommunications services in our health care and educational systems—the modernization of which is key to our nation’s ability to respond to threats to our national security and public safety immediately and over the coming decades. Without ubiquitous broadband our first responders could be crippled by the lack of effective communications in the event of a terrorist attack or natural disaster. Similarly, our educational institutions need to be able to communicate quickly and effectively in case of a pandemic, as well as conduct research and development on all of the technologies needed to maintain our nation’s national defense and public safety.

In meeting these goals, federal investment should make certain that the U.S. communications infrastructure is continually upgraded, robust, redundant, and able to withstand multiple threats and uses. The public should not be left to rely on any one technology, but rather on multiple technologies—each able to operate with the other, and each able to serve important needs if the other technologies are destroyed or compromised. Market forces will not guarantee this result.

Infrastructure for a Strong and Safe America

Together, the united forces of our communication and transportation systems are dynamic elements in the very name we bear—United States. Without them, we would be a mere alliance of many separate parts.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, Special Message to the Congress Regarding a National Highway Program, February 22, 1955.

In small rural towns, in the crowded barrios and ghettos of urban U.S. cities, in those places where financial institutions are not yet convinced they can get an adequate return on investment, Americans do not have access to the communications networks they will need to keep them safe in the future.[5] It is no coincidence that these same places hold our nation’s toxic waste dumps, our chemical plants, and our seaports and airports, yet we do not have the ability to communicate most effectively where we are most vulnerable.

The Department of Defense has long been provided almost all the communication resources it needed to protect American interests overseas. What has been too often forgotten is the importance of equipping all Americans with the ability to participate effectively in the national defense effort at home. Americans take pride in assisting when their communities are under attack or threatened by a natural disaster. A concerted effort must be made to equip all Americans so they are able to communicate effectively when confronted by catastrophe.

President Eisenhower understood the value of a robust transportation system at home to sustain national unity and to promote defense needs. In announcing the new interstate highway system, Eisenhower called the effort “the National Defense Highway System.” In addition to some direct experience with a problem-laden military convoy from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco he took in 1919, Eisenhower was also impressed with the German autobahn. “The old convoy,” Eisenhower said, “had started me thinking about good, two-lane highways, but Germany had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land.”

Despite the squabbles of some local government and business leaders who fought against a federal highway system, Eisenhower was convinced that America could do better. As Richard Weingoff reports in his excellent history of the interstate system, when Vice President Richard M. Nixon delivered an address before a 1954 conference of state governors at Lake George, NY, reading from Eisenhower’s detailed notes, he declared that the U.S. “highway network is inadequate locally, and obsolete as a national system.”

Nixon then recounted Eisenhower’s convoy and then cited five “penalties” of the nation’s obsolete highway network: the annual death and injury toll, the waste of billions of dollars in detours and traffic jams, the clogging of the nation’s courts with highway-related suits, the inefficiency in the transportation of goods, and “the appalling inadequacies to meet the demands of catastrophe or defense, should an atomic war come.”[6]

If America is to be ready “to meet the demands of catastrophe or defense,” all Americans need access to advanced telecommunications services in the 21st century, just as they needed access to an advanced highway system in the 20th century. But as the 9/11 Commission noted in its report, the United States is not ready for a national emergency. And as every comprehensive analysis of the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina revealed, we are not prepared to handle a major natural disaster. Both of these experiences highlight the importance and the multiple failures of U.S. communications services as warning systems or as systems to allow for the coordination of first responders.[7]

Command and Control vs. National Leadership

A standard complaint of conservative defenders of the current telecommunications regulatory system regarding communications policy focuses on the supposed “command and control regulatory policies” of the federal government.[8] They argue that the heavy hand of regulation stymies the roll out of advanced telecommunications networks across the nation when in fact the tendency of the federal government historically is to exercise this “command and control” on behalf of the communications industry itself.

The result of this regulatory protection of different bits of the telecommunications industry leaves the United States with balkanized communications capabilities. If the prevention or response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11—when New York City police, fire, and rescue workers could not communicate with each other amid the chaos and carnage of that awful day—or the prevention or response to the failed levees overwhelmed by hurricane Katrina demonstrated anything, they demonstrated the need for better command and control.[9]

The determination of how our country’s critical communications infrastructure is upgraded and deployed is entirely determined by private industry.

Indeed, in the debate over communications policy, the term “command and control” is little more than a right-wing slogan. Outside of military operations this phrase has never accurately described either the policymaking process or the execution of policy in the United States. Even the federal highway system so important to Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower for military purposes, was the product of a contentious federal-state partnership.

Still, there is no question about the importance of federal vision and leadership and funding.[10] The importance of strong federal engagement in the development of the national highway system is beyond dispute. The same can be said of the importance of federal leadership in the U.S. space program, which led to the U.S. satellite industry, as well as federal leadership in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which spurred the research behind the Internet.

Perhaps the most direct corollary to the national highway system in the U.S. telecommunications arena is the National Communications System. The NCS began after the Cuban missile crisis. Communications problems between and among the United States, the Soviet Union, and other nations helped to create the crisis. President Kennedy ordered an investigation of national security communications, and the National Security Council recommended forming a single unified communications system to connect and extend the communications network serving federal agencies, with a focus on interconnectivity and survivability.

The NCS oversees wireline (Government Emergency Telecommunications Service) and cellular service (Wireless Priority Service).[11] The NCS is now part of the Department of Homeland Security’s Preparedness Directorate, and despite the increased attention to the communication needs of first responders on September 11, 2001, NCS failures and inadequacies were made obvious after Katrina.[12] In New Orleans, police officers were forced to use a single frequency on their patrol radios, which “posed some problems with people talking over each other,” explained Deputy Policy Chief Warren Riley at the time. “We probably have 20 agencies on one channel right now.” And with little power to recharge batteries, some of those radios were soon useless.

In southern Mississippi, the National Guard couldn’t even count on radios. “We’ve got runners running from commander to commander,” said Maj. Gen. Harold Cross of the Mississippi National Guard. “In other words, we’re going to the sound of gunfire, as we used to say during the Revolutionary War.”[13] As Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) said: “This is a further demonstration of our inadequate response to the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations and other warnings about the failures in our first responders’ communications systems.”[14]

How can these obvious communications failures still leave the United States groping for an adequate response? One of the biggest challenges we face is the tendency to see national defense and emergency needs regarding communications as separate and unrelated to the communications needs of the American public. The NCS has established an elaborate set of protocols that make government communications a priority over what is called the public switched network. Federal, state, and local governments pay substantial fees to use this communications network. But the determination over how that network is upgraded and deployed is entirely determined by private industry.

Katrina and 9/11 remind us that access to advanced telecommunications service is a public need. Above, President Bush surveys New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by helicopter. SOURCE: AP.

We cannot have a robust, survivable, interoperable communications system that protects the public if the public is treated merely as a mass of consumers and not as an integral part of national defense and emergency response. The U.S. public remains vulnerable because our communications infrastructure is too often viewed only as a private business. Katrina and 9/11 remind us that access to advanced telecommunications service is a public need. We need national leadership to remind us of this, and insist on policies that address public needs.

Advanced Telecommunications Capability in the 21st Century

In the 1996 Telecommunications Act, Congress indicated that advanced information and communication technology, or ICT for short, should provide the ability to send and receive data, voice, and video. Today, advanced ICT means the ability to send and receive high-definition video in real time, something that requires massive telecommunications power if the goal is for everyone to be able to do so. Further complicating this goal is that in emergency situations communications systems become easily overloaded as people rush to their phones to check on loved ones.

In the case of an emergency or national disaster we need a capacity far greater than the market would support for even heavy shopping days. A starting point would be symmetrical speeds (both download and upload capability) of 10 gigabytes per second. Today, speeds of that magnitude are available only at the most important point-to-point interchanges of the Internet backbone or between dedicated military, financial, educational or scientific institutions. Both fiber and robust wireless services have the potential to deliver these speeds in both directions.

In fact, redundancy is so essential to public safety and national security that where private industry refuses to create these alternatives government must do so.

But the construction of one or even two robust communications pipelines into police stations or military posts would still leave the United States vulnerable. The sole reliance on only one or two sources of communications creates an inviting target and, at the very least, creates the potential for deadly communications bottlenecks. Telecommunications businesses won’t help us solve this problem. At their best, they work to create greater efficiency by eliminating redundancy. At their worst, they work to eliminate any and all competition so that even efficiency doesn’t matter.

When reliability is essential, redundancy is highly valued. When lives are at stake, establishing alternative systems that can do as good a job as any designated primary system is routine. And while our policymakers speak of competition—sometimes even embracing competitive communications infrastructures that might lead to alternative “consumer” choice—policymakers rarely seem to understand that alternatives are essential to national defense and emergency preparedness.

In fact, redundancy is so essential to public safety and national security that where private industry refuses to create these alternatives government must do so. Safety engineers consider redundancy a critical ingredient of creating a system with a high probability of safety. In the commercial aircraft industry, for example, pilots and passengers are assured of safety in part because redundant equipment, including engines and sensors, are required by government regulation.

Or consider the redundancy standards that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will require to keep our astronauts safe if there ever is a manned flight to Mars. NASA has developed a graph that shows the relationship between the survivability of an astronaut crew and the amount of redundant equipment in the space vehicle (see table, below). Surely our communications systems require equally robust redundancy given the very real threats to our nation posed by terrorism and natural disasters.

NASA graph demonstrating the relationship between the survivability of an astronaut crew and the amount of redundant equipment in the space vehicle.

In addition to redundancy, it is vital that the different systems and the equipment operating over these communications systems be interoperable. One unfortunate result of relying on private competition is the tendency of competitors to develop systems which do not permit interoperability. A key failing of emergency response after 9/11 and Katrina was the lack of interoperable communications equipment.[15]

Many of the problems of interoperability are the result of turf wars and not equipment limitations. Federal policies to override local turf wars are essential. The Department of Homeland Security has made it a priority to solve the range of problems related to interoperability.[16] But again, interoperability must not be limited to operation over one infrastructure, but must cross all relevant communications platforms. Phones and computers must operate over wireline and wireless infrastructure, including competing wireline and wireless networks. Interoperability is a vital component of emergency service and a modern communications network. Closed “private” broadband networks stifle not only innovation and service competition, they also limit the ability of all Americans to participate effectively in response to natural disaster and terrorist attack. If the United States is to compete effectively in a global economy and defend itself against global terrorist threats, then it must take advantage of the unique opportunities only possible with an open network.

Federal law should require that all broadband networks are open to the attachment of any equipment the user chooses—so long as it does not harm the technical operation of the broadband network. In addition, federal law should require broadband networks to be open to other information service providers and accessible to other networks, except for restrictions related to vital law enforcement or for network management.

Investing in Multiple Technologies

Our nation’s wireline infrastructure is inadequate to meet 21st century needs. The old telephone network is simply incapable of delivering the bandwidth to meet the emergency needs of today and the future. While efforts have been made to upgrade the relatively more modern cable infrastructure, there are too many rural communities where the cable system has not upgraded to provide digital service. Even in our major metropolitan areas, gross deficiencies are self-evident.

The strain on the existing telecommunications infrastructure was obvious as call after call was blocked during 9/11. But this strain is obvious to anyone who regularly uses either the Internet or regular cell phone service in a major metropolitan area in the United States. The concerns that the Internet as presently constructed simply will not bear the amount of use projected over the next five years are longstanding. While more sophisticated filtering and better emergency protocols may address this problem in the short-term, the strain on the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure will only increase as the call for greater bandwidth for video over the Internet increases.

If meeting the communications needs of first responders or panicked parents were simply a matter of “market forces,” then one would be tempted to applaud the telephone and cable companies for squeezing as much profit as possible out of old technologies. But the challenge of communicating in an emergency should not be held hostage to even legitimate profit-seeking demands of private investors.

In brief, the nation should be investing in the deployment of fiber, powerline, wireless, and satellite communications technologies. The combination of these technologies would ensure robust and ready communications services in case of a national emergency. What’s more, these technologies are readily available for roll out, as we will detail below.

Optical fiber

The most promising single technology that could deliver advanced telecommunications connectivity to homes and offices everywhere is optical fiber, a thin glass or plastic line designed to distribute light. Optical fiber is distinct from the electricity that distributes communications through copper telephone wires or coaxial cable. The light in optical fiber permits transmission of digital data over longer distances and at higher rates than other forms of communications.

The emphasis on market priorities, forward thinking or not, does not serve the goal of protecting Americans with the best communications service available in case of an emergency.

Fiber optic products have been used for several decades in a variety of defense technologies designed for air, sea, ground, and space applications. During the high technology boom of the 1990s many privately held companies and public corporations built out vast fiber optic networks even as telecommunications companies beginning in the early 1990s began to upgrade their networks to incorporate fiber technology. Yet only one large U.S company, Verizon, has extended optical fiber to the home.

The immediate reaction from Wall Street to Verizon’s plans was pessimistic. Verizon’s stock value in 2006 dropped and investors pressured the company to scale back deployment or abandon the investment in fiber to the home altogether. The reason: investors saw little reason to back Verizon’s expensive proposition, which the company estimated would cost $23 billion.[17]

Never mind that over time Verizon’s emphasis on delivering video entertainment alongside other telecommunications services so the company could compete with cable is now increasingly viewed as smart forward-thinking investment strategy. Unfortunately, Verizon’s service areas are largely densely populated urban areas, and Verizon’s rural customers are not likely to get fiber anytime soon. Other telecommunications companies, including AT&T and smaller, regional players, have no plans to provide their customers with fiber optic service to the home.[18] Again, the emphasis on market priorities, forward thinking or not, does not serve the goal of protecting Americans with the best communications service available in case of an emergency.

There are municipalities, however, that have deployed optical fiber networks with the expressed intent of improving the communications capability of emergency workers. One example is Arlington County, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. Arlington firefighters were the first to respond on September 11, 2001, when the Pentagon was attacked by terrorists. Beginning with its 10 fire stations in January 2002, by June 2002 all 40 county sites were connected to a fiber network. In 2005, Arlington extended the network to the nearby city of Alexandria, to facilitate interagency collaboration.[19]

These are the kind of public investments that federal, state, and local governments all need to make in tandem with the private sector to ensure that households and offices are all connected to the most readily available form of high speed telecommunications. Ubiquitous broadband via fiber optics is the best first step that could be made by such a public/private partnership.

Powerline communication

Broadband over power lines, known as BPL by industry insiders, is a promising technology that would make use of the extensive electrical power grid infrastructure to communicate digital signals. BPL, however, still has some kinks to be worked out. Both the electric grid and the home create what engineers call a “noisy” environment. Every time a device turns on or off, a pop or click is introduced into the line.

With only a few technology hurdles to clear, and with FCC regulatory clearance already evident, BPL through a public/private partnership could become available swiftly.

Indeed, BPL has developed faster in Europe than in the United States due to differences in power system design philosophies. Large power grids transmit power at high voltages to reduce transmission losses, and transformers that are near the customer reduce the voltage. Because BPL signals cannot pass through transformers, repeaters must be attached to each transformer. In the United States, a small transformer typically services a single house or a small number of houses. In Europe, it is more common for a larger transformer to service up to 100 houses. Delivering BPL over the power grid of a typical U.S. city will require many more repeaters as compared to a typical European city.

Despite these challenges, BPL in the United States is on the rise, with about 6,000 BPL subscribers nationwide as of 2006.[20] According to the United Power Line Council, commercial deployments are up slightly, from six in 2005 to nine in 2007. Trial rates, however, have fallen from 35 in 2005 to 25 in 2007.[21]

An indication of a possible increase in BLP penetration, however, came in 2007 when DirecTV announced that it was getting in on the BPL market. In a deal with Current Group, DirecTV plans to provide BPL service in the Dallas-Fort Worth and Cincinnati areas with a potential for much broader rollout. Not to be out done, Oncor, a subsidiary of Dallas power company Energy Future Holdings Corporation—formerly TXU Corporation—has started to deliver BPL service and it recently passed 108,000 customer deployments, less than five percent of its goal.[22]

The rise in BPL deployment can also be traced to steps the FCC took in 2006 to support the technology by reaffirming an earlier decision that BPL providers have the right to provide data access using power transmission lines so long as they do not interfere with existing radio service. Still, opponents of BPL, including the aviation industry and the amateur radio community, have continued to voice the strongest concerns over the issue of possible interference with radio communication,[23] though there is some dispute among experts over the degree to which electricity over BPL actually “leaks” and thus interferes with an electromagnetic wireless signal.

In a further boost, the FCC classified BPL-enabled Internet access as an information service, rather than a telecommunications service, in November, 2006. According to the FCC, “The order places BPL-enabled Internet access service on an equal regulatory footing with other broadband services, such as cable modem service and DSL Internet access service.”[24] According to Joe Marsilii, president and CEO of BPL equipment maker and integrator MainNet Powerline Inc., 70 percent to 80 percent of the nation’s electrical grid will be equipped with BPL in five to eight years.[25]

This kind of rollout of BPL services, however, will not occur without a coherent policy advanced by those federal agencies responsible for keeping America competitive and secure. BPL could easily become the second ubiquitous source of broadband to all houses and offices with a plug. With only a few technology hurdles to clear, and with FCC regulatory clearance already evident, BPL through a public/private partnership could become available swiftly.

Wireless Broadband

As anyone who has attempted to carry on cell phone conversations in New York or rural America will attest, reliance on the most prevalent wireless technology in America would be misplaced.[26] Cell phones are no less ubiquitous in big American cities than they are in London or Taipei or Toronto, but somehow cell phones seem much more reliable in other countries.

Coverage problems in the United States result from the lack of cell phone infrastructure—towers and repeaters—necessary to sustain a large number of users in the variety of locations. The infrastructure problems are directly tied to two factors. First, the costs to build that infrastructure at present outweigh the commercial benefit, which is the profit the telecommunications companies and their shareholders think they can realize. Second, because cell phone service is seen only as a commercial need, there is little public will to assist in supporting the cost of this infrastructure development by allowing, mandating, or helping to finance the build-out of towers and repeaters.

The focus, however, should not be on any one technology, but rather on the full funding of a public safety network that utilizes wired and wireless infrastructure.

Coverage problems also result from the limited propagation characteristics of the spectrum set aside for cellular service. In other words, if the characteristics of the spectrum were more robust, fewer towers and repeaters would be necessary. While analog cell phone service is being phased out in the United States (as of February 18, 2008, cellular phone companies will not be required to support analog service), most cell phone use in the United States is based on dated technology.[27] Advanced digital Internet protocols make possible voice, data, and video communications over mobile networks. Third-Generation or 3G broadband has been deployed effectively in the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and other countries, but the United States lags behind.[28]

Policymakers are placing a great deal of hope that the planned FCC auction of the spectrum to be abandoned by analog television broadcasters will allow the United States to catch up in wireless broadband. The FCC will allocate 24 MHz of that spectrum to auction a license for a public safety network, and will allow the licensee to lease 12 MHz of that spectrum to commercial users—when it is not being used for public safety.

The goal of this policy is to allow a licensee to generate revenue to support the development of a national wireless broadband network. A variety of participants in the proceeding to determine the rules for the auction of this spectrum proposed coupling the commercial lease to a requirement of open access. The focus of these proposals is to encourage innovation, a worthy goal and while complementary, spurring innovation should be a secondary goal to public safety.

The danger is that an incumbent may win the license and bend to the very strong business reasons to recoup as much investment as possible from their existing network and outdated technologies and delay the investment in new advanced communications services, despite clear public safety needs. That cannot be allowed to happen.

The creation of a next generation wireless broadband network is an important public policy goal. The public safety benefits of reaching this goal justify significant federal funding to subsidize the development of such a network. One proposal is that the funding of a 3G public safety network could come by redirecting the billions of dollars designated to the federal government’s wireless network project—estimated between $5 billion to $10 billion—and which will only serve a limited number of federal agencies.[29]

The focus, however, should not be on any one technology, but rather on the full funding of a public safety network that utilizes wired and wireless infrastructure. The establishment of a public safety network can serve as a strong starting point for the development of a next generation network for commercial purposes. A public safety network, however, should not be held hostage to commercial interests.

Federal allocation of spectrum must be revised to allow for the deployment of advanced wireless technologies. Licenses for all current analog radio and television broadcasting must be revoked by 2008, after which at least 25 percent of this spectrum should be set aside for public safety purposes, and half of the “vacant” spectrum should be reserved for temporary experimental applications with a priority placed on those applications that serve public safety, health care, or educational institutions.

Wi-Fi and Wi-Max

Wi-Fi is a digital wireless communications technology. The brand is owned by the Wi-Fi Alliance, a consortium of companies that have agreed to a set of interoperable products based on a standard (802.11) set by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Though the Wi-Fi Alliance apparently originally intended the name to mean “Wireless Fidelity,” later statements from the consortium suggest the name is not an acronym or abbreviation.

Wi-Max is an acronym for “Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access.” This was adopted by the Wi-Max Forum in 2001. Wi-Max adheres to the so called IEEE 802.16 standard and allows for higher speed networking across much wider geographic distance than is currently possible with Wi-Fi. Both Wi-Fi and Wi-Max in the United States face the technical challenges of limited spectrum allocation, particularly when compared with Europe.

Preoccupation with these industry concerns largely obscures the needs of public safety and emergency response.

As of mid-2007 there were over 400 counties and municipalities with wireless networks. These networks are used for applications ranging from reading meters to managing traffic and providing Internet access. Most municipalities contract with private companies to build and operate the network, and understandably the private industry is primarily concerned about profit. Therefore, in addition to the technical challenges in the United States, there are substantial difficulties with the business model.

Because of both the technical and business challenges, large-scale municipal wireless projects are flopping in big cities all across the United States. The problems arising in Houston, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and San Francisco are for the most part very similar: the infrastructure (nodes and towers) was not in place, and when private companies were contracted to build the infrastructure, raising public money was difficult. Plans to migrate to public from private service were complicated by the fact that the slower and less reliable Wi-Fi connections are not able to compete effectively against incumbent wired (cable or DSL) Internet providers. As one reporter put it:

This summer was hard on urban Wi-Fi. Exhibit A: the extreme corporate shake-up at Earthlink, one of the biggest names in municipal wireless. In the same few days, the Atlanta-based Internet provider abandoned its much-heralded proposal to build San Francisco’s wireless network, faced a $5 million fine from Houston for missing a contractual deadline in rolling out that city’s network, and announced it would shed some 900 jobs—half of its staff—including the company’s head of municipal Wi-Fi. In St. Louis, a $12 million plan stalled out this summer when AT&T and the city couldn’t untangle an electricity snarl… That plan is on hold indefinitely. With these signs of the industry buckling, Chicago officials backed off their plans to install a city network after failing to reach an agreement with either of the competing wireless providers.[30]

The success stories of municipal Wi-Fi come from small towns. In St. Cloud, Florida, a truly citywide municipal Wi-Fi network exists at no cost to residents. Mountain View, California has a citywide wireless network owned by Google with free service to residents. Both these networks operate over relatively small geographic areas: Mountain View is 14 square miles; St. Cloud is 12 square miles. Of the 400-plus American cities and counties attempting municipal Wi-Fi, most cannot offer it for free. There are currently only 92 cities or towns with active municipal Wi-Fi networks.[31]

The telecommunications industry nonetheless argues that the involvement of municipalities creates unfair competition for private organizations because of their ability to use public assets. The industry also argues that municipal governments do not have the necessary expertise to operate or maintain the technology and anyway should not be “picking winners” in a competition among technological alternatives.[32]

Preoccupation with these industry concerns largely obscures the needs of public safety and emergency response. While neither Wi-Fi nor Wi-Max will address all the communication needs of local communities, the establishment of these systems can help fill in the deployment gaps and assist in providing the important redundancy demands of emergency communication. Fixed microwave wireless communication systems can also help fill in critical gaps.[33] The real problem is the tendency to look for easy answers rather than implement comprehensive solutions that should include Wi-Fi and Wi-Max. Federal leadership is needed to push forward a rationale for public investment that puts a priority on safety and emergency response.

Satellite Broadband

Satellites in geostationary orbit can relay Internet speeds of about 0.5 megabits per second to the user. But satellite broadband typically allows for only 80 kilobits per second from the user. In many rural areas this is a substantial increase over what is typically available. Although Direct TV and a few others have invested in making satellite broadband service a commercial competitor, it suffers from serious competitive disadvantages. Bad weather and sunspot activity can cause unreliable signals and drop-outs. Applications such as virtual private networks and voice over internet protocol, or Internet telephony, are discouraged or unsupported. And most satellite Internet providers abide by a Fair Access Policy, limiting a user’s activity, usually to around 200 megabits per day.

Perhaps the greatest commercial disadvantage, however, may be the delay that results from the 44,000 miles a signal would need to travel from the user to the satellite company. This delay results in a connection latency of 500 to 700 ms, as compared with a latency of 150-200 ms typical for terrestrial Internet service providers.

Still, new technology has decreased the weight and size of satellite antennae and receivers, which combined with computer tracking devices makes it easier to send and locate satellite signals. And perhaps the biggest advantage of satellite broadband, particularly for emergency use, is that it can be established very quickly on a mobile unit that can avoid an attack or be rushed to the scene of a natural disaster. Fixed towers and telecommunications conduits necessary for wired or terrestrial wireless services are much more vulnerable to attack or natural disasters.[34]

All these communications technologies—satellite broadband, Wi-Fi and Wi-Max, wireless broadband, power-line communications, and optical fiber networks—are available for local, state, and national government to warn and protect citizens. It is not a matter of choosing one or the other, but intelligently investing in all these technologies and engaging in research to develop more. Government protection of the U.S. telecommunications industry should take the form of ensuring that industry is protected in case of an attack or natural disaster, it should not take the form of protecting industry profit at the expense of national security. America needs a robust communications system for emergencies the nation will surely face in the future.

Where Advanced ICT Infrastructure Should Be Deployed

All government offices, health care centers, primary and secondary schools, military, police and fire, and emergency responders need access to advanced information and communications technology to prepare for and respond effectively to natural disasters and terrorist attacks. Federal and state governments may bicker over their relative access to advanced ICT, but there is little disagreement over the need for access. Similarly, while there are disputes on the edges there is a general consensus that police, fire, and emergency responders need this access.

But there are other institutions in this country that require ubiquitous broadband access in order to help our citizens in times of crisis. The remainder of this paper will focus on the importance of providing broadband access to the two most critical sectors of our society—educational and health care institutions.

Health Care Centers

Health care centers face extraordinary burdens during and after emergencies. The victims of natural disasters or other catastrophes require medical attention, as do the emergency responders who risk their lives. The ability to diagnose and monitor patients, to access patient records, and to communicate with pharmacists is increasingly dependent upon reliable communications systems within and beyond the hospital.

The absence of robust and redundant communications systems in our community health care facilities puts at risk not only patients but those who risk their lives to keep the rest of us from having to enter the hospital. In addition, advanced telecommunications systems have proven to be effective in providing access to medical expertise even over great distances.

“Broadband Internet access to hospitals is becoming a critical tool in the delivery of medical services.”

A cardiac patient in a small military hospital in Guam, for example, was able to undergo a life-saving heart operation supervised by an expert doctor located 3,500 miles away at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu. The surgery was relatively routine for Dr. Benjamin Berg, who was able to dictate the procedure to a less experienced colleague, monitoring every move and heartbeat with a high-resolution video camera and instant sensor gathering data from the catheter as it was slid carefully into the right chamber of the patient’s heart.

“The real-time information requires a continuous broadband connection,” Berg said. “The delay in the transmission of data about pressure inside the heart would be unacceptable.”[35] Imagine doctors being able to help patients remotely as the health care centers in New York and the Gulf Coast were inundated.[36]

The example cited above of the surgeon in Honolulu supervising an operation in Guam is but one of the remote care practices engaged in by the Veterans Administration system. The VA also works with the Alaska Federal Healthcare Access Network, which links nearly 250 sites including military installations, Alaska Native health facilities, regional hospitals, small village clinics, and state of Alaska public health nursing stations to provide various healthcare services using high-speed broadband services including satellite broadband.

A VA study of a remote monitoring program demonstrated a 40 percent cut in emergency room visits and a 63 percent reduction in hospital admissions. A separate Penn State University study estimated that remote home health monitoring for diabetes patients cut costs for hospital care by 69 percent. According to Jon Linkous of the American Telemedicine Association, “Broadband Internet access to hospitals is becoming a critical tool in the delivery of medical services.”[37]

In addition to providing the communications infrastructure to local health care facilities, it is vital to increase support for both the National Institutes of Health and the Center for Disease Control. NIH has long demonstrated its importance in emergency and disaster readiness. One notable program is the University of California, San Diego and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology’s $4 million WIISARD (Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters) project, which is funded by NIH’s National Library of Medicine.

The WIISARD project allowed the San Diego Metropolitan Medical Strike Team to bring together scientists and engineers from the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology with local and state police, SWAT, fire, HazMat, and other first responders. In a simulation in 2005, the team was able to test the prototype of a video system that allows medical personnel to view a 3D virtual environment generated by a live video stream.

In another new technology demonstration by the WIISARD project, first responders were provided wireless personal digital assistants, or PDAs, outfitted with software to help them keep track of victims’ locations and triage status, capturing important medical data at the point of triage and transmitted that immediately back to hospitals and a command center using a Wi-Fi network. According to Jacobs School of Engineering computer science and engineering professor Bill Griswold, San Diego’s Metropolitan Medical Strike Team “has realized that law enforcement is an integral part of medical disaster response, and to better coordinate that, they anticipate that technologies like this can be useful in communicating from law enforcement to medical responders without distracting law enforcement from their duties.”

Griswold adds that “we’ve also had some interest from SWAT officials because these technologies would allow SWAT teams to communicate information silently back to their commanders. Currently they have to use hand signals or radios, both of which put them at risk from exposing their positions.” Continued NIH funding to support this work is critical in keeping the nation safe and prepared for emergencies. [38]

Similarly, but on a national scale, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention is an essential health care institution in emergencies, particularly in an age of biological weapons and biohazards that spread as a result of natural disasters. Whether it is containing the threat of anthrax or limiting the spread of waterborne human disease, it is essential for the CDC to have effective communications capability in the first hours of an emergency.[39]

Educational Institutions

In 1957 America rested assured of its status as a singular world power, convinced of her superiority on every front after the victory of World War II, after the development and detonation of an atom bomb, and after the resurgence of the economy that followed the Great Depression and allowed the United States to contribute to the rebuilding of Europe. America could finally rest, and rest easy. And then, in October of that year, America’s rest was rudely interrupted by Sputnik.

The Soviet Union’s launch of an orbiting satellite haunted the American dreamscape with the sudden threat of communist missiles raining down from the skies, which sent school children under their desks to duck and cover. The Director of Development for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at the time, German rocket scientist Werner von Braun, testified before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and Labor:

Modern defense programs…are the most complex and costly, I suppose, in the history of man. Their development involves all the physical sciences, the most advanced technology, abstruse mathematics and new levels of industrial engineering and production. This…require[s] a new kind of soldier, who may one day be memorialized as the man with the slide rule…It is vital to the national interest that we increase the output of scientific and technical personnel.[40]

Sputnik’s wake-up call led directly to the establishment of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which is credited for inventing the Internet. It also led directly to the passage of the 1958 National Defense Education Act. The NDEA allocated approximately $1 billion in funds to supporting research and education in the sciences through 1962.[41] The connection between education and defense could not be clearer.

Of course, educational institutions must have robust communications systems to warn and protect teachers and students. But to focus solely on American schools because they might be targets holding our children, our most valuable assets, would be to miss the lessons of the past. Our schools, whether at the elementary or at the graduate school level, must have the most advanced information technologies available if we are to develop the minds we will need to protect ourselves and find solutions to the various complex challenges in an increasingly complex world.

U.S. students and teachers must have ready access to the most advanced information technologies available. To deny this access because a government investment may challenge the interests of private corporations misses the larger point that not doing so will rob those corporations of the very minds they need to stay competitive. To deny access to this technology may rob the nation of the resources it needs to save itself.

The value of advanced broadband infrastructure is apparent in fields such as astronomy and genomics, but e-learning has barely scratched the surface of its potential.

The importance of making advanced communications technology available to schools and students has been the subject of hundreds of reports over the past 50 years. Information technology leaders in higher education were actively engaged in planning and deploying the networks that led to the formation of what many think of as the original Internet, the NSFnet of the late 1980s, along with successful effort to generate congressional support for scientific and academic networks, leading to the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, and the National LambdaRail effort to build an all-optical, facilities-based network for leading edge science and research.

The value of advanced broadband infrastructure is apparent in fields such as astronomy and genomics, but e-learning has barely scratched the surface of its potential.[42] Students, particularly those who are not living at school, continue to have difficulty accessing broadband service. Undeterred, conservatives in the telecommunications industry continue to attack the Universal Service Fund program established by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and have sought to undermine its effectiveness since its inception.

Yet the effectiveness of this program is undeniable. In 1998, at the beginning of the implementation of the USF program, only 14 percent of public school instructional classrooms were connected to the Internet; as of 2003, classroom Internet access was at 93 percent.

Nearly all public library outlets today are now able to offer some Internet access. Yet in each funding year since 1998, requests for E-Rate discounts vastly exceed the $2.25 billion made available. Despite the clear need and success of Universal Service, the Bush appointees at the FCC have threatened support for the fund by excluding cable companies providing advanced telecommunication services from the requirement of a universal service contribution.

What’s more, in 2004 the FCC suspended the E-Rate program for three months. The ostensible reason: The FCC determined that the Antideficiency Act, which bars federal agencies from obligating funds without adequate cash on hand to cover those obligations, applied to the E-Rate.

The Universal Service Fund subsidizes the schools and libraries, the poor (Lifeline and Link-Up), rural telecommunications services, or telemedicine applications. When the Bush administration limits contributions and stalls funding it is heading in exactly the wrong direction. All Americans should have access to advanced telecommunications services whether they are poor, living in high-cost rural or urban areas, or living on fixed incomes.

Citizens remain our first line of defense and response in a natural disaster. If Americans are not connected, deployment will make little difference. USF support for advanced telecommunications services are clearly needed if all Americans are to be connected. A renewed commitment and a national broadband policy that puts universal access at the top of the list are past due.

Conclusion

The United States needs to move forward in a coherent fashion to deploy advanced telecommunications infrastructure, but not because we want to be number one. We have vulnerabilities at home that need to be addressed with some urgency. The possibilities resulting from the synthesis of powerful networks, computers, and databases has been the subject of a variety of blue ribbon panels, most notably the U.S. National Science Foundation report on cyberinfrastructure in 2003.[43] Five years later another panel is in order, with recommendations ready for a new administration and a new Congress.

The first work of such a panel should be to get accurate information on the deployment and capability of the various communications networks now operating in the United States. This paper has discussed a range of basic principles to meet the ends of national security and response to natural disasters. Those principles include

• Robust networks capable of symmetrical speeds of 10 Gbps
• Redundancy
• Interoperability
• Network neutrality

We have a wide-range of technologies available to communicate effectively. We should not choose between satellite broadband, Wi-Fi and Wi-Max, wireless broadband, power-line communications, and optical fiber networks—all of these technologies should be invested in along with new developing technologies to protect our defense and emergency needs at home. In addition, because our citizens are our first line of defense or response, the nation needs to make a commitment to universal service regarding advanced telecommunications services for all Americans.

As President Eisenhower said in 1955, “Our nation is sustained by free communication of thought and by easy transportation of people and goods.” Our dependence on communications systems makes them more critical now than ever before. And as the nation pulled together and committed to the development of highways, satellites, and schools to win the Cold War, we must pull together now.

Mark Lloyd is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Notes

[1] “Promoting Innovation and Competitiveness, President Bush’s Technology Agenda,” available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/technology/economic_policy200404/chap4.html

[2] Mark Lloyd, “Raise the Bar on Broadband” (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2007),” available at http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/07/broadband.html; and “Assessing Broadband in America: OECD and ITIF Broadband Rankings,” April 24, 2007, available at http://www.itif.org/index.php?id=57

[3] Leila Abboud, “How France Became A Leader in Offering Faster Broadband,” Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2006, available at http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB114351413029509718-W1Q0hKioxsOdZ1Bs_6RCB7hQiBg_20070328.html; “Successful Broadband Program Completed Ahead of Schedule,” Bell Canada Enterprises, June 29, 2006, available at http://www.bce.ca/en/news/releases/aliant/2006/06/29/73706.html.

[4] CNN transcript of Vice President Al Gore’s remarks, Dec. 14, 1992, at the Little Rock Economic Summit, in a conversation with AT&T CEO Robert Allen; also cited in Charles Lewis, et al, The Buying of the President (New York: Avon Books, 1996), pp. 61-65.

[5] Testimony of Craig E. Moffett, Vice President and Senior Analyst- Sanford C. Bernstein and Co., LLC, Before the Subcommittee on Communications, United States Senate, March 14, 2006, available at http://commerce.senate.gov/pdf/moffett-031406.pdf (Craig Moffet of Bernstein Research writes “In 60% of the country, there are simply no new networks on the horizon, and the existing infrastructure from the telcos—DSL running at speeds of just 1.5Mbs or so—simply won’t be adequate to be considered “broadband” in five years or so.”)

[6] Richard F. Weingroff, “Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956: Creating the Interstate System,” U.S.Department of Transportation-Federal Highway Administration, Summer 1996, Vol. 60: No. 1, available at http://www.tfhrc.gov/pubrds/summer96/p96su10.htm.

[7] The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, “9-11 Commission Report,” July 22, 2004, “The inability to communicate was a critical element at the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and Somerset County, Pennsylvania, crash sites, where multiple agencies and multiple jurisdictions responded. The occurrence of this problem at three very different sites is strong evidence that compatible and adequate communications among public safety organizations at the local, state, and federal levels remains an important problem,” available at http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch12.htm. See also “Recommendations of the Independent Panel Reviewing the Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Communications Networks,” June 8, 2007, available at http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-07-107A1.doc; “U.S. not ‘well-prepared’ for terrorism,” CNN, December 5, 2005 at http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/12/04/911.commission/index.html9/11; Panel to issue report critical of federal security response: 9/11 Commission report card at http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2005/images/12/05/2005-12-05_report.pdf; Declan McCullagh, “Homeland Security flunks cybersecurity prep test,” CNET News.com, May 26, 2005, (http://news.com.com/Homeland+Security+flunks+cybersecurity+prep+test/2100-7348_3-5722227.html) (Agency’s lackluster efforts to guard against Internet attacks may leave the U.S. “unprepared” for emergencies, federal auditors say.); Eric Lipton, “Efforts by Coast Guard For Security Fall Short,” The New York Times, NYT, December 30, 2006, available at http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F40710FF3D540C738FDDAB0994DE404482 (“The communications, boat tracking and surveillance equipment rarely lives up to its promised capacity; for the largest systems, work is far behind schedule and over budget. Unlike the relatively unified command over the nation’s skies, control of the waterways and coasts is divided among at least 15 federal agencies, which sometimes act more like rivals than partners.”).

[8] Statement of Adam D. Thierer before Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, April 8, 2004 at http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-at040428.html.

[9] The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Ibid., at http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch12.htm (“The attacks on 9/11 demonstrated that even the most robust emergency response capabilities can be overwhelmed if an attack is large enough. Team-work, collaboration, and cooperation at an incident site are critical to a successful response. Key decision-makers who are represented at the incident command level help to ensure an effective response, the efficient use of resources, and responder safety. Regular joint training at all levels is, moreover, essential to ensuring close coordination during an actual incident. Recommendation: Emergency response agencies nationwide should adopt the Incident Command System (ICS).When multiple agencies or multiple jurisdictions are involved, they should adopt a unified command.”).

[10] National Cooperative Highway Research Program, “The Interstate and National Highway System–A Brief History and Lessons Learned,” June 13, 2006 at http://www.interstate50th.org/docs/techmemo1.pdf.

[11] National Communications System, “Background and History of the NCS,” at http://www.ncs.gov/about.html.

[12] David C. Walsh, “Inter-Agency Communications Systems Remain Uncoordinated,” National Defense, January 2006, at http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/issues/2006/jan/inter-agency.htm.

[13] Bruce Meyerson, “Katrina Rescuers Improvise Communications,” Associated Press, September 2, 2005 at http://www.iridium.com/about/press/pdf/1-16197134_Eprint.pdf.

[14] John Eggerton, “Katrina Spotlights Spectrum Issue,” Broadcasting & Cable, September 2, 2005, available at http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6253687?display=Breaking+News&referral=SUPP.

[15] See Timothy Roemer comments “Lessons of Katrina: Critical Infrastructure, Preparedness and Homeland Security” Center for American Progress conference at http://www.americanprogress.org/kf/katrina%20infra%20conference%20transcripts.pdf.

[16] U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “DHS Releases Nationwide Interoperable Communications Assessment,” January 3, 2007, available at http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/pr_1167843848098.shtm.

[17] Jessica Seid, “Too early to hang up on Verizon?,” CNN/Money Stock Spotlight, October 21, 2005 at http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/21/markets/spotlight/spotlight_vz/index.htm.
”The entire telecom industry has taken a hit this year but Baby Bell Verizon Communications has really taken it on the chin. Shares of the New York-based telecommunications giant have tumbled 28 percent this year, making Verizon (Research) the second worst performing stock in the Dow industrials. But investors are also worried about high capital spending as Verizon gets set to launch its own video service to better compete against cable.”

[18] Michael Morisy, “Can AT&T’s VDSL compete in a fiber world?,” Telecom.com, Oct. 9, 2007 at http://searchtelecom.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid103_gci1275983,00.html.

[19] Cisco Systems Incorporated, “County Government Capitalizes on Network to Improve Public Safety and Quality of Life,” at http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/docs/gov/CS_ArlingtonCounty.pdf.

[20] Annie Lindstrom, “Is BPL Gaining Momentum- Again?” XChangeMag.com, December 27, 2006, at http://www.xchangemag.com/articles/501/6ch201042153728.html.

[21] UPLC Deployment Map, UPLC.org, Accessed September 27, 2007.

[22] BPL Today, “Oncor (TXU) BPL deployment passes 108,000 customers,” BPLToday.com, September 25, 2007, at http://www.bpltoday.com/members/1236.cfm.

[23] Wayne Rash, “FCC Supports Broadband Over Powerlines,” EWeek.com, August 3, 2006, available at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1998647,00.asp.

[24] FCC, “FCC Classifies Broadband Over Power Line-Enabled Internet Access as ‘Information Service.” news release, November 3, 2006, available at http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-268331A1.doc.

[25] Annie Lindstrom, “Is BPL Gaining Momentum- Again?” XChangeMag.com, December 27, 2006, available at http://www.xchangemag.com/articles/501/6ch201042153728.html.

[26] Li Yuan, “Why You Still Can’t Hear Me Now,” The Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2005 available at http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/2005/06/13/sections/business/business/article_556623.php; Sarmad Ali, “The 10 Biggest Problems With Wireless and How to Fix Them,” The Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2006, available at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116120231104396746.html.

[27] FCC Consumer Advisory, Analog-to-Digital Transition for Wireless Telephone Service at http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/analogcellphone.html.

[28] Ben Charny, “U.S. carriers pick up the 3G pace,” ZDNet News, Mar 22, 2004, available at http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5176504.html.

[29] The CTIA-sponsored roundtable report, “Toward A Next Generation Network for Public Safety Communications,” available at http://www.silicon-flatirons.org/conferences/Hatfield_Weiser_PublicSafetyCommunications.pdf.

[30] Chris Gaylord, “Municipal Wi-Fi Thrives- On a Small Scale,” Christian Science Monitor, September 13, 2007, available at http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0913/p13s01-stct.html.

[31] Muniwireless, available at www.muniwireless.com

[32] Francois Bar and Namkee Park, “Municipal Wi-Fi Networks: The Goals, Practices, and Policy Implications of the U.S. Case,” Communications & Strategies, 61 (1) (2006): 107-125.

[33] “Milpitas, California, Deploys Metro-Scale Wi-Fi Public Safety Network from Tropos Networks,” Business Wire, June 8, 2004, available at http://www.govtech.com/whatsnext/assets/Brochure-Fixed%20Wireless%20for%20Public%20Safety.pdf.

[34] “SIA First Responder’s Guide to Satellite Communications,” Satellite Industry Association, available at http://www.sia.org/guide.pdf.

[35] John Borland and Jim Hu, “A life-saving technology,” CNET News.com, July 26, 2004, available at http://news.com.com/Broadband+A+life-saving+technology/2009-1034_3-5261361.html.

[36] Leonard A. Cole, “Asleep in the E.R,” The New York Times, June 10, 2007, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/opinion/nyregionopinions/10NJcole.html?ex=1188619200&en=433c43e50935adc5&ei=5070; Robert Davis, “Hospitals learn from Katrina,” USA Today, January 23, 2006, available at http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-23-katrina-hospitals_x.htm.

[37] “Advancing Healthcare Through Broadband: Opening Up a World of Possibilities,” Internet Innovation, Wednesday, October 24, 2007, available at http://www.internetinnovation.org/tabid/56/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/86/Default.aspx.

[38] “UCSD Researchers Test Wireless Technologies in Simulated Medical Disaster Response Drill,” May 16, 2005, available at http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=384 and http://www.bbwexchange.com/publications/newswires/page546-2252944.asp.

[39] Communicating in the First Hours, available at http://www.bt.cdc.gov/firsthours/overview.asp

[40] “Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor on H.R. 10381, H.R. 10278 (and Similar Bills) Relating to Educational Programs.” (Part 3) United States Government Printing Office: 1958, 1309.

[41] Roger Geiger, “Sputnik and the Academic Revolution” Conference paper from “Federal Support for University Research: Forty Years After the National Defense Education Act & the Establishment of NASA.” available at http://ishi.lib.berkeley.edu/cshe/ndea/geiger.html.

[42] “Broadband America—An Unrealized Vision,” EDUCAUSE, July 2004, available at http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/word/NET0409.doc.

[43] NSF Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel, “Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the NSF Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure,” the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, NSF, January 2003, available at http://www.cise.nsf.gov/sci/reports/toc.cfm.

The European Commission has filed two new inquires into complaints that Microsoft is unfairly preventing competition by withholding interoperability information from developers and by bundling Internet Explorer with its operating system. The European Committee for Interoperable Systems filed the complaints with the backing of IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Nokia. Opera, whose eponymous web browser competes with Microsoft’s Explorer, filed its complaint separately.

Japan has announced a new five-year plan to boost cutting edge physics research and reiterated its commitment to the International Linear Collider. The decrease in U.S. and UK funding for the collider may mean the ILC will end up being built in Japan. This rubs salt in the wounds of some in the U.S. scientific community who are already reeling from large budget cuts in particle-physics and fusion research in the new omnibus spending bill. Science Progress recently covered R&D funding in the 2008 budget.

Terminally ill patients do not have a constitutional right to developmental drugs that have not yet been approved by the FDA. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal on a DC Circuit court ruling in favor of the FDA’s restrictions on unproven drugs. The Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs and the Washington Legal Foundation sued the FDA in 2003, claiming that its policies moderating access to experimental drugs are unconstitutional.

The FCC’s wireless spectrum auction, scheduled for January 24, may be running into the ground before it even takes off. One of the wireless licenses available, the Block D license, would allow the highest bidder to build a network with national coverage. Because the license stipulates a public/private partnership granting the government access to the network for emergency responders, the Commission is offering the license with a discounted reserve bid. But Block D may have difficulty finding a buyer. The most likely bidder, Frontline Wireless, dropped out of the auction, and if the license for Block D does not sell, FCC officials may have to re-auction the license without the public safety conditions. It is hard to know what companies may bid for this license because the FCC has forbidden participants from discussing the auction and the deadline for joining the bidding has already passed.

New York City officials recently deployed a small battery of detectors that will monitor the air in high-traffic areas for indicators of a biological attack. But is direct detection of airborne pathogens the best strategy, when resources could go towards testing programs at traditional facilities like hospitals, which allow public health officials to monitor health and agricultural disease patterns that may indicate bioterrorism?

China has introduced new legislation that will allow scientists to own the rights to intellectual property that emerges from their publicly-funded work. The move is an attempt to jumpstart scientific innovation. Scientists can also report failed or incomplete results without risking their ability to receive future funding. Supporting more high-risk innovation is a good a policy move for the U.S. as well, as a recent Center for American Progress report on the opportunities for economic growth through science and technology argues.

The United Kingdom will likely clear the way next week for new nuclear power plant construction. The plans for new British plants, which could be online as early as 2017, are one wedge in the country’s initiative to combat climate change (via Grist). Readying for the next generation of U.S. commercial reactors, the Department of Energy recently announced that university researchers will have access to its Idaho test reactor.

Pending approval from the DOE, Mattoon, Illinois will be the site of FutureGen, the first commercial-scale carbon capture and sequestration project.

Just before the end of 2007, President Bush signed the “OPEN Government Act of 2007,” which reforms the Freedom of Information Act to provide bloggers better access to public information (via PBS Engage).

Image credit: flickr.com/pingnews

California is one state moving to combat the steady uptick in digital identity theft, which compromised data enables. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently approved legislation creating the California Office of Information Security and Privacy Protection. The office will coordinate prevention activities between law enforcement, businesses, advocacy groups, and consumers. Groups like Cal-PIRG want to give consumers more control over how they allow companies to handle their personal information.

The more control consumers have over how businesses handle their personal data, the better. And as Peter Swire has argued here on Science Progress, consumers need sensible, accessible, and intuitive privacy choices—much what they expect from the goods and services they buy.

To try to learn about these emerging technologies, the Federal Trade Commission recently held a Town Hall event. The event produced little consensus. Privacy advocates criticized the new types of online profiling. Industry mostly explained why profiling is good because people will see only the ads for things they are interested in.

At the Town Hall, along with my written testimony, I proposed a common-sense test for what should happen—individuals should have a realistic way to choose not to be profiled when they go online.

Repeated polling shows that millions of Americans don’t want to have detailed and permanent profiling of their surfing habits.

Current practices on the Web often don’t meet this simple test. For instance, the Network Advertising Initiative operates a web site that lets you stop DoubleClick and similar cookies from following you across the Net. Although the NAI opt-out tool has worked for me, I spoke with an FTC attorney at the Town Hall who had spent nearly an hour online the night before. She had tried without success to get the NAI opt-out to work for her. If it’s too hard for smart attorneys trying to opt out as part of their job, then it’s not a good enough system.

I learned the common-sense test when I worked on privacy in the White House under President Clinton. It was a huge help when we could say that individuals had a choice. One example was the financial privacy law in 1999. Under the law, individuals gained the choice not to have their personal information sent to outside marketers.

Another example was in 2000, when there was a cookie problem on the White House website. We created a policy that tracking cookies would be set only with the choice of the surfer.

On a political level, these measures worked—the administration could explain that individuals had a realistic choice about how their data would be handled. These measures also basically worked at the policy level. The reason: People who cared a lot about their privacy now had a way to say no to certain practices. (We later pushed for stronger financial privacy protections, but at least the 1999 law contained some important privacy measures.)

People in the advertising industry, understandably, don’t want to face burdensome regulations on their new business models. They believe targeted ads, based on detailed profiling of surfing habits, will be more profitable for companies. They say that consumers will benefit by seeing more relevant ads. They argue that profiling is benign because it only determines which ads get served to the desktop.

There are two major problems with that position, however. First, in our post-Patriot Act world, records can quite easily end up in government hands. The government can now use National Security Letters, so called Section 215 orders, and other tools to see the surfing records, often without any notice to the individual concerned.

Second, repeated polling shows that millions of Americans don’t want to have detailed and permanent profiling of their surfing habits. Some people are spooked by the risk that the government might be looking over their shoulders. Others simply want to surf without leaving detailed records in the hands of multiple company databases.

In short, there are good reasons for leaders in technology and E-commerce to find realistic ways for consumers to have a choice. I personally think, for instance, that search engines should have an option not to link my current search with previous searches. Ask.com has announced plans for this option, but the practices of other search engines vary widely.

Industry leaders should listen to the privacy concerns and come up with workable ways for consumers to get what they prefer when it comes to online profiling. Some consumers will love personalization and want online companies to know everything about them. Some consumers won’t care one way or the other. But some consumers don’t like the idea of their search requests and surfing habits being stored out of their control.

In the long run, the press and the political system are likely to push back whenever detailed profiling becomes a mandatory part of surfing the Web. It is common sense to build user-friendly systems from the start.

Peter Swire is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and the C. William O’Neil Professor at the Moritz College of Law of the Ohio State University. From 1999 to early 2001, he served as Chief Counselor for Privacy in the U.S. Office of Management & Budget.

ICANN has proven to be a controversial but ultimately important organization since its formation in 1998. Developing nations and the EU have expressed concern that ICANN gave the U.S. too much control over the Internet and that it was unfair that all domain names had to be constructed with English characters. But at this week’s meeting, ICANN will be laying out the policies and technical specifications for international domain names.

These international domain names will be possible with the introduction of the new networking technology IP version 6. IPv6 is a major upgrade from the current 32-bit IPv4 protocol, which can encode only 2.4 billion domain names. The new 128-bit protocol will expand the possibilities to 4 quintillion (or 4 trillion, trillion, trillion) domains names. Some predict that this will eventually result in every consumer product having an IP address, even if only for inventory purposes.

ICANN will also take up the issue of the WhoIs database which provides the public with the name and address of the owner(s) of any given domain name. Proponents of the system call it a tool for law enforcement and the protection of intellectual property, while detractors call it an infringement of privacy.

For more coverage:

In an interview with Britain’s IT magazine, The Register, Cerf reflects on the recent developments he has overseen with ICANN and speculates on the future of the Internet.

CBC News, Digital Trends, and Australian IT all cover Cerf’s departure from ICANN.