Bush's amnesty demands continue

There isn't much new to Bush's latest demands that the House pass the FISA bill he wants. He continues to threaten to veto the bill if it doesn't include telecom amnesty, even though he considers it vital to American security. He continues to declare that the telecom companies won't cooperate with legitimate investigations if they don't have amnesty, thus effectively encouraging such behavior. He claims that the litigation "would require the disclosure of state secrets that could lead to the public release of highly classified information," which is a bare-faced lie about how such legal proceedings work.

The one new thing, or at least one which I haven't noticed before, is his claim that "this litigation would be unfair, because any companies that assisted us after 9/11 were assured by our government that their cooperation was legal and necessary." If the administration gave this advice in good faith, then what is he worried about? The courts will dismiss the suits if they have no legal basis. If, on the other hand, the advice was duplicitous and intended to lure the telecoms into breaking the law, it doesn't take them off the hook; they should have checked with their own lawyers.

Legislator seeks to ban anonymous online speech

A bill introduced by Rep. Tim Couch in the Kentucky legislature would ban anonymous online speech. The penalty would be imposed on Web site operators, not on individuals making posts, so it isn't clear whether it would have any effect beyond making all discussion boards move out of Kentucky. This would be similar to requirements imposed by the Chinese government, and for all Couch's "protect the children" talk, it serves the same purpose -- to intimidate those who would speak freely. Correction: China withdrew its requirement last year, so Kentucky would actually be more repressive than China in this respect.

Contact info on Couch is available here. Although he wants to force everyone else to expose their email addresses to spammers, he uses a web form rather than publishing his address.

Link to the bill. Rep. Jimmy Higdon is listed as a co-sponsor.

Update: Couch has admitted the bill he proposed is unconstitutional.

"Market failure" in privacy?

Ed Felten discusses the low cash value which people seem to place on privacy, and concludes that this demonstrates a "market failure." The cause of the failure is that businesses are allegedly unable to guarantee long-term data privacy in a convincing and understandable way. However sincere the management of a company may be, it can't guarantee the behavior of future buyers.

The words "market failure" should be regarded with concern. They're usually followed by "and the government has to do something about it." Is there really a market failure in privacy, or do people simply put a low premium on privacy in their economic choices? To try to answer this, we can look at people's behavior where their privacy is entirely under their own control. There's a lot of evidence, anecdotally and from my personal experience, that they don't value their privacy enough to significantly change their behavior. I'm talking about actions such as limiting the duration of cookies, disabling JavaScript, and declining to provide their e-mail addresses. I do it, and maybe you do, but how much attention to most people pay to these things? My experience suggests not much.

This may not be totally unreasonable. The result of losing privacy to businesses is mostly annoyance. You get more junk mail and telemarketing calls, but nothing really disastrous is likely to happen.

The situations which are of greatest concern are loss of information to criminals and to the government, but neither of these are affected by a business's privacy policy. A business which is sloppy and lets crooks steal large amounts of customer data is going to suffer in