Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Forget The First Amendment, BART Messed With The Phone System. Violated CA and Federal Law.

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I suppose I am, at heart, really a telecom lawyer after all. My reaction to the news that the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police shut down cellphone networks in a number of stations had nothing to do with democracy, the First Amendment, Tahrir Square, etc. With all deference to the importance of these concerns, my reaction was WHAT DO YOU MEAN THESE IDIOTS MESSED WITH THE PHONE SYSTEM! From my perspective, and the perspective of traditional telecom law, BART could just as well have turned off the local central office and all this chatter about whether or not BART is a public forum is just a distraction.

Obviously, however, no one at BART thinks of cell phones as the phone system. In BART’s open letter explaining what they did and why it was cool, BART focuses on the First Amendment /public forum issue and completely skips the fact that they shut off a phone system. Mind you, I suppose I can’t blame them – much. A number of folks are asking if there is a right to cell phone service as if there were a novel question rather than something settled by decades of telecom law.

Also missed by most: this goes well beyond BART. If BART gets away with including “we can shut down cell phone service” in its tool box you can guarantee that other local law enforcement agencies will start copying this – and all for the best of reasons. Because what could possibly go wrong when you pull the plug on a critical piece of infrastructure whenever some local police chief or city council person or whoever decides they need to do something about these “flash mobs” or “rioters” or whatever? BART emphasizes the narrowness of the impact. But Montgomery County, MD, where I live, is worried about an outbreak of flash mobs of teenagers that materialize to raid local stores. Suppose they decide to start turning off the phone grid in neighborhoods they believe are “at risk?” Sure, lets just knock out phone service for a neighborhood for a few hours. What could be the harm – and it’s all in a good cause, right?

There is a reason we do not mess with the phone system, and why that doesn’t change when the phone system is wireless.  Legal reasoning below . . . .

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My Thoughts Exactly:
Strange Looping

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I write & publish fiction for hackers and geeks. I’ve written a novel and two novellas and I have another novel in the works. The baseline genre is cyberpunk/biopunk thriller, although I approach the subject matter in a kind of David Foster Wallace/Pynchonian way. So I’m actually kind of a postmodern metafictiony cyberpunky technothriller novelist. All my books concern hacking of both silicon-based and carbon-based systems.

As I discussed in Adventures in Self-Publishing, there’s no reasonable way for me to get my books into bookstores (all the tech bookstores that used to carry me have gone under). Therefor I use other ways to get my books in front of readers. Sometimes I go to places where hackers and geeks and congregate & there set up a table whereupon I put out copies of my books & glowing reviews from geekoid websites & start carnival barking like Billy Mays, selling my books for cash.

I’ve done this for more than ten years. (Here’s an account (from which the two preceding paragraphs were lifted), of my adventure selling books at the giant hacker convention Defcon.)

Next month I’ll be at the StrangeLoop convention in St. Louis, pimping my warez and also taking in as many sessions as I can. This prospect has me psyched. I don’t know if I’ll sell enough books to cover my expenses, but if you were to ask me “who’s the ideal audience for your books?” I would say something like “people who care about literature, are fans of Douglas Hofstadter, and are comfortable with high-geek computer & science stuff”. I expect that everybody at Strangeloop will meet at least a few of those criteria; some may meet them all.
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Neutrino:
A Brief History of Who I Am

Self-portrait by the author

Last week, in my post A Brief History of Who I’m Not, I explained the history of my spectrum of noms de plume from fluorescence to brown. But, of course, the name is not the thing. It’s just a noise.

I’m the thing. That is, I have a persistent delusion of being a specific entity and that’s close enough for our purposes today. Whether I literally am my identity or instead my identity is a byproduct of me is not a student loan I’m willing to take out.
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Tales of the Sausage Factory:
CBO Scores The Senate Spectrum Bill (S.911): No Spectrum Pots of Gold — Really.

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Last week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued its “score” (how much a bill will cost or earn for the U.S. Treasury) for S.911(aka The Rockefeller/Hutchison spectrum bill). CBO estimated that all spectrum auctions proposed in the bill — incentive auctions, new federal spectrum, and generally extending the FCC’s spectrum authority — would net $24.5 billion. After expenses, including reallocating the D Block to public safety, the bill ended up netting only $6 billion for deficit reduction, disappointing supporters who had promised $10 billion in deficit reduction. More importantly than the revenue, however, the CBO explanation of the score highlighted the following for anyone who actually read more than the bottom line:

  1. We have no way to predict what an incentive auction will actually make, and have a lot of doubt this will work;
  1. We don’t believe you can get more good spectrum (the kind that fetches billions of dollars) out of the federal government;
  1. Trying to do spectrum policy right is very expensive.

For various reasons, however, CBO doesn’t come right out and say this in the same bold way I just did above. Instead, they drop little dollops of wisdom in the text, which requires a certain amount of decoding from Washington Weasel speak. Happily, I brought my Weasel Word Decoder (don’t come to Washington without one!).

CBO score decoded below . . . .

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Neutrino:
My Ghost Town

My Ghost Town, illustration by Cheeseburger Brown

Towns die, when their time comes. The town I grew up in died right under my feet — it died while I watched. It isn’t even on the map anymore.

Once there were hundreds of towns like it: far flung on the frontier, each nestled in the shadow of an atmospheric processing tower whose rumbling works had been patiently revising the climate for centuries. In its heyday atmospheric processing employed thousands. It was the cornerstone industry of country life on this planet, the great smoking hubs at the crossroads of rude paths that linked wildernesses more hostile than anyone young today can easily imagine.

In those days we were fighting both the rocks and sand and frigid cold of the old world along with a million kinds of aggressive and voracious life from the new. Colonization isn’t for the faint of heart. In my grandfather’s time as many travelers stumbled into town just to die as to find a drink or a bed.

But eventually the sky turned blue, and one by one the processing towers were decommissioned. Including ours.
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Inventing the Future:
These “Clouds” Have a Dark Lining

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Do you like dealing with your cable company or your bank? How would you like to resolve an account issue with them if they had cut off access to all your documents, email, contacts, pictures, links, and all else digital in your life?

It is important to recognize that the term “Cloud” is a pernicious misnomer. This isn’t Napster or Bit Torrent or a DHT. As both legally and technically implemented today, your vital data is not stored in the ether, owned and accessible only to you. It is simply stored on a huge corporation’s servers, accessible and controllable by them for any purpose and disclosure whatsoever, and with no protections for continued access by you. Ah, but Google are “good guys”, right? Well, any Google employee will tell you that the cult is not one of actions and good works of the form “do no evil”, but rather a self-ruling predestined “don’t BE evil.”

Anyway, we don’t have to imagine or guess what will happen. It has already has. Read the tale of Thomas Monopoly. There are bound to be many more concerning aspects of the still-experimental g+, such as this one. Indeed, my G+ invitation came through the artist and storyteller known as Cheeseburger Brown. He has now had to shut down his g+ account for fear of running afoul of Google’s anti-pseudonymity policy. Even as Google decides to make his commercial and artistic identity a social unperson, the man who illustrated the modern anticorporatist 1984 cannot risk loosing his gmail or blogger access. When I tried to comment on the corpse of his g+ identity, I am told only that “There was a problem updating your comment.” The point is not the degree to which these or comparable Facebook incidents are defensible or temporary, but rather that the Monopoly affair is not an isolated incident.

As a child I used to wonder how whole populations in history could collectively engage in self-ruination. Through the work of experimental economists such as Vernon Smith, we now know that people do indeed create market bubbles and bubbles of perception around ideas that they know to not be true, but which they’d like to get away with being temporarily true. Whether wanton violence during war or rapacious speculation in a housing bubble, people will abandon the rules they have always lived by as long as they believe that many others are now doing so as well. (I do not think we yet understand which people will abandon which beliefs under which circumstances.)

With this in mind, I have no doubt that people in this second part of the Information Age will happily give up their most important information to corporations that offer no protection for it whatsoever.

I do not think that the US government is currently inclined to help, nor the US voter inclined to demand protection for individuals. Read the tale of The United States v. Aaron Swartz. Among the principles we have collectively abandoned recently, is the dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Hundreds of years ago, we designed our system of government with each limited-power group counterbalancing each other, and simultaneously modeled our economic philosophy the same way. But now we have radically allowed no limitation on the power, control, “speech”, access or operations of the largest corporations. We ignore the evidence of the effects of that we see today on our environment, economy, and government process. What we will soon have, then, is internationals answerable to no one, with access to everything.

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
PK Action Alert To Save the Future of Unlicensed Spectrum

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Despite the obvious reliance on unlicensed spectrum by Americans every day in the form of everything from wifi to baby monitors to RFID, the current mania for spectrum auction revenues combined with lobbying from companies opposed to the TV white space has put the future of unlicensed spectrum at risk. This is particularly true under the discussion draft circulated by House Republicans last week. That draft would require that before the FCC could allocate any new spectrum for unlicensed use, it would first have to have an auction that would allow companies to buy the spectrum for exclusive use. Only if everyone collectively outbid AT&T or Verizon for unlicensed would the spectrum go to unlicensed use. As Stacy Higginbotham at GigaOm notes, this would have devastating impact on the future of unlicensed and the innovation that comes out of the unlicensed bands.

As if that were not enough, the proposed bill literally allows companies to buy their way out of FCC consumer protection regulation.

We are trying to stop this before it’s too late.  Public Knowledge has created an Action Alert asking anyone who cares about protecting unlicensed, or opposed to letting companies literally buy their own rules, then help us this Friday (tomorrow) by telling your member of Congress not to sell off our digital future or let companies buy their way out of public interest obligations. Sign up for the PK mobile Action Alert and you will get a text message tomorrow letting you directly contact your member of Congress so you can tell them why this bill is a really, really bad idea.

I reprint the PK Action Alert below.

Stay tuned . . . .

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