Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., whose district includes Kirkland, called it “absolutely astounding” that the FTC does not see a need for a new law “when we have hundreds of thousands of violations every day.” Inslee introduced a bill April 29 that would outlaw spyware programs designed to record web browsing habits and collect personal data without notice and consent of the user. (eSchoolNews)

“Me hammer. You must be nail. Bang!”

The FTC is, quite reasonably, suggesting that we wait to see if self-regulation emerges.

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Last week, according to today’s Boston Globe (link breaks soon), Major General George W. Keefe of the National Guard received and forwarded a gag email about the Democratic convention that purported to be a schedule of events: “Opening flag burning ceremony,” a re-enactment of Kerry’s Tossing of the Medals, and “Sen. Kennedy proposes a toast” (six times).

Ok, so maybe it’s not the funniest gag email you’ve ever seen. But Keefe felt forced to apologize for forwarding it after Mayor Mumbles Menino fulminated against it: “It’s unfortunate that an adjutant general of the National Guard has the time on his hands to say things about the greatest senator America has ever had.” So, Menino’s complaint is that people who are worth their salaries don’t have time to forward an email. Oh, and people ought to not to be allowed to disagree with his hyperbolic assessment of his friend, Ted Kennedy.

The state rep from the proud city of Melrose was also furious, saying that Keefe “should be loyal only to the charge of keeping order…This is a serious breach, and he ought to be called on the carpet for it.” Then he manages to tie it to Iraq: “People are dying in Iraq. Don’t make fun of that and then pass it around.” (Fun Tip: Imagine those words coming from David Brent, the manager on the BBC’s The Office.)

The chair of the state Democratic party pretended to be outraged that Keefe lost work time forwarding the email: “It is embarrassing and ridiculous that a state employee would be spending his time sending nasty partisan e-mails, rather than doing his job.” Then he manages to tie this to the fact that the Democratic party in the most Democratic party state in the country can’t manage to get a Democratic governor elected: “The governor reappointed [Keefe] after he sent this foolish e-mail, and he ought to be reprimanded for doing it. This speaks volumes about what kind of administration this is.”

Hmm, so let’s weigh this out. On the one hand, we have the loss of approximately 60 seconds of work time and on the other we have the right to free speech. Clearly, the two sides of the balance are so evenly matched that there’s no way to figure out which to support. So, here’s my solution: Require General Keefe to stay a minute late one night, preferably wearing an orange jump suit. Only then can this great injustice be righted!

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From Chris Nelson’s blog:

The following is what one of the Bush administration’s representatives told journalist Ron Suskind, regarding their philosophy behind the administration’s actions and their relationship with journalists.

I’m quoting from an Air America Radio interview with Suskind:

Suskind: He says, you know, “You, Suskind, you’re in what we call the ‘reality-based community'” — that’s actually the term he used.

I said, “The WHAT?”

He says, “The ‘reality-based community’.”. He said, “you all believe” — now let me see if I can get this right — “You all believe that answers to solutions will emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.”

I said, “Yeah… YEAH, OF COURSE…”

He says, “Well, let me tell you how we really see it. You see, we’re an empire now. And when we act, we kinda create a reality. Events flow from our actions. And because of that, what we do is… essentially… we act, and every time we act we create a whole new set of laws of physics, which you then judiciously study for your solutions, and while you’re doing that we’ll act again, promulgate a whole other set.”

Janine Garofolo: “So you throw a rock in the pond, and the ripples go out…”

Suskind: And this guy said, “and that’s where we’ll stand ultimately; you’ll study us, and we’ll act. We’ll be the actors, and you will study what we do. And if you’re really good — on good behavior — maybe thirty years from now one of us will visit that graduate seminar you’ll be teaching at Dartmouth in your tweed blazer.” That’s the thinking.

Cynical, yet dead-on accurate. It’s not just history that’s written by the victors. Now it’s also journalism, politics, and talk radio.

It’s scary that the Bushies recognize this. It is the nuclear bomb of politics. And it’s what terrorists have always known: 19 guys can create a new normal in a single morning.

[Thanks to Joe Copperas for the pointer.]

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FWIW, here’s a direct link to the talk I gave that C-SPAN broadcast. My piece is 55 minutes in, but the RealPlayer lets you skip ahead.

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Quite an action-packed day yesterday. I did two keynotes, at two separate events. After the second one, I went back to the first event, a gathering of about 125 people who run libraries and museums, because I’m trying to write some stuff about metadata and taxonomies. I learned, for example, that one well-known art museum has had to create over 300 new Dewey Decimal categories for illustrated manuscripts … and one for astrology.

Afterwards, I went to a cocktail party put on by the hosts of the second event. It was quite the power party. I got to chat for five minutes with Terry McAuliffe, the chair of the Democratic National Committee. I tried to say that the Net can be do things for campaigns other than raise money … for example, bring in a portion of the population that is feeling a tad alienated in part because of the relentless money ‘n’ marketing focus of the campaign. MacAuliffe agreed, and then went on to re-express my point in terms of using the Net to raise money. But, what the heck, it was 5 minutes at a cocktail party where everyone was elbowing for a chance to talk with The Chairman, so I’m grateful for the opportunity to make a ding if not a dent.

I then got to say about two sentences to Tom Daschle. after he spoke to the assembled group, thanking the people there who have done real work for the progressive movement. Sen. Daschle had just made a heartfelt thank-you statement, yet I found myself impressed that I was listening to a person who could express himself in untortured English. Yikes. FWIW, he seemed more sincere in person than on TV, but, then, if the reverse were true, you’d have some type of personality disorder, wouldn’t you? Look, I liked him in person, ok? That’s all I’m trying to say.

I spent a little more time (i.e., a minute or two) with Senator Patty Murray from Washington. We talked about the possibility of using the Internet for more than fund raising. It felt like an actual conversation. She put on no airs and seemed to lack the protective, hey-how-are-ya bubble that surround so many professional politicans.

And then I talked with Senator Stabenow from Michigan. Like Senator Murray, she seemed like an actual person, humbled by sitting in the Senate. I liked her a lot. A real lot. Because we had a little more time, I also urged her not to legislate the Internet without understanding what it is. No Senatorial preachiness to her at all. Just Net preachiness on my part. What an ass I am. But what a treat to get to talk with her.

Here’s the photographic evidence that I’m not a total liar, at least in this particular entry:

Sens. Tom Daschle and Patty Murray

Sen. Patty Murray

Sen. Debbie Stabenow

Me responding to one of Sen. Daschle’s
many sharp-edged japes

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Unbeknownst to me, my presentation at the TechnologyPolitics Summit was broadcast live on C-SPAN this afternoon. You can see it on the Web by going to C-SPAN and clicking on the link to the conference. I don’t know how long they’ll keep the link up, though. (I’m on after Tom Athans from Democracy Radio and Mark Walsh of Air America Radio, about a half hour 55 minutes in.)

I haven’t seen it. All I remember is yelling a lot. Ulp.

[In the comments, Greg has posted this direct link to the video: rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/c04/c04042604_tech.rm. Thanks, Greg.]

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It’s been a week of light blogging because of my 2-day trip to Portugal and then a set of, um, computing setbacks that involved technical support groups on several continents and the reinstalling of anti-virus software. Then, for the past couple of days, I’ve been working on two presentations I’m giving on Monday in DC. Both are new and both are important to me.

In the morning, I’m keynoting a conference of research librarians and am doing a mainly-new presentation about how we managed to “informationalize” the world so that it consists of thin gruel, and how it is (I hope) now being re-thickened and double-good ambiguated again.

While that presentation has new material and a ton of new slides (I tend to eschew text in favor of over-animated graphical slides), I’m more concerned about the lunchtime keynote I’m doing for the FieldWorks Technology Politics Summit. I have half an hour. Here’s an outline of what I think I’m going to say:

1. I want to address two questions in a roundabout way. A. Why is it that when Dean supporters met, we’d frequently talk about what we didn’t like about Dean, even while remaining fully licensed Deaniacs? B. WRT the Dean slogan, we have the power to take our country back from whom exactly? Why did that slogan work?

2. These questions are obscured by the rapid consolidation of inappropriate lessons we’ve taken from the Dean campaign, including that the Net is only good for raising money and all that social networking stuff was for naive girly-men.

3. So, let’s accept (for the nonce) the view that politics is naught but a specialized form of marketing in which the only successful market share is 50% + 1. So, what’s happening with marketing? Marketing is war waged against customers, but we’re in revolt. Marketers no longer have control over corporate information. Networked markets are smarter than the companies they’re talking about. [Yes, this is overtly Cluetrain-y.]

4. At the heart of the revolt is the human voice. We get to sound like ourselves in the new public world known as the Internet, rather than having to listen to the monotonous, inhuman, too-perfect voice of marketing.

5. Taking blogging as an example. It looks individualistic, but it’s really about conversation and links. To see how unusual it is, look at the Dean blog: We’ve never before had someone who speaks for the campaign but in his/her own voice. This isn’t good marketing. It’s anti-marketing: It succeeds insofar as it stays off message.

6. To see the importance of comments (i.e., the blog wasn’t simply a new type of broadcasting), you have to understand the Net’s architecture. It is not a broadcast or publishing architecture. It’s end-to-end. It succeeded by removing the controlling center, and by keeping the center as empty as possible so that innovation would happpen at the edges. The Net is the opposite of marketing. It is profoundly democratic. And it explicitly provided the model for the Net portion of the Dean campaign. (Meanwhile, Washington and Hollywood seem hell-bent on destroying the Net by misunderstanding it.) [I’m sneaking in World of Ends stuff because there will be people in the room — including Tom Daschle — who I want to yell this at.]

7. No wonder we’re so eager to go wrong about the role of the Net in the Dean campaign. Campaigns are about top-down control of message. Kerry said ten words off mike and there was a firestorm. But blogs are always off mike. (We forgive ourselves preemptively.)

8. Back to the two questions. We talked about why we disliked Dean because it affirmed that this campaign wasn’t about top-down marketing. It was about us. We were encouraged to go off message — that is, to appropriate the message in our own way — because the campaign is about us, not only about Howard Dean. That is, we are taking the country back not just from the lobbyists, corporations and Republicans. We’re taking it back from the campaign marketers. We’re taking it back from our own alienation. And that’s a good thing.

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Great news! Congressman Tom Reynolds of the National Republican Congressional Committee has personally invited me, via a tape recording played over the phone, to become an honorary chairman.

Of course I said yes, proudly and humbly…

More at Loose Democracy…

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This comes from the blog of Iran’s vice president:

The convulsions in Iraq are of benefits for America

I believe that America, close to the presidential elections, needs Iraq situation to be convulsed more than ever. It is because the best reason for America’s stability is these convulsions. Bush needs to announce the public in America that there is an unfinished project in Iraq that no one else other than him can make it to the last point and if doesn’t finish, the Middle East will be in war and fire and America will be injured and damaged more than any other country.

If my analysis be the right one, Moghtadi Sadr attitudes and actions in Convulsion making in Iraq and unifying Shiite and Sunnis together against America, is just exactly what America needs in such a situation.

The out of tradition attitude by America which is being shown against the convulsions in Iraq, like the blockade of Falluja or killing the innocent Iraqi citizens who are extremely tired of killings and wars, or closing some newspapers in Iraq by America, which are all opposite of the principles that America used to talk about. These are all in concern with how much do the Americans need a convincing reason for their stability in these days close to their elections and also how much would these manners be effective for Bush’s stabilization.

I hope that those who are influential in political areas of Iraq, including Shiite and Sunni parties, pay attention to this reality and do not prepare grounds for the longer stability of occupational regime and let Iraqis to be able to decide on their destiny as soon as possible.

First, need I point out how remarkable it is that a vice president is blogging so frankly and so personally?

I can certainly see why the upheaval in Iraq from outside the US looks like it should be helpful to the incumbent president. And we do hear the Republicans talking about not changing horses in midstream (or, as someone put it recently, not changing horses in mid-Apocalypse:). But surely the Republicans would be happier if Iraq were stable, democratic and quiet, for they get the bulk of the blame for the war not going well.

Another attack on the US homeland, however, would (IMO) greatly favor the Republicans because they are more capable of the sort of intemperate response that we would emotionally want. It’d be the sort of classic id vs. superego battle that the superego always loses.

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. And, in my book, hope is something you work for.

By the way, don’t miss VP Abtahi’s description of the social role of coffee.

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Tony Blair on why we’re in Iraq…and Terry Jones’ grading of his essay.

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