Chaos Magnet

It's easy to think that

It's easy to think that "government" is the enemy of freedom, but here in the US, government isn't just a nameless, faceless entity. It's hard to remember it sometimes, but it's made up of real live people who do, on occasion, listen to the people they are supposed to represent. Especially when enough of us talk loudly enough. Witness today's news that the House of Representatives has voted to stop the FCC from raising the cap on the number of television and radio stations a single company can own. The provision still has to get through the Senate, but the President's going to have a tough time making this one go away.

(It's worth noting, however, that the House did not succeed in reversing the FCC's plans to allow a single company to own a newspaper, television station, and radio station in the same market, nor their plans to allow a single company to own two television stations in some markets.)

Still, it's good news, and reminds me that it's worth speaking up. Which brings me to three very important matters. The ACLU has forms that enable you to send a free fax to support bills that will provide oversight for the secret FISA court, defund (yes, deFUND) TIA, and protect people's right to read what they want.

The "Freedom to Read Protection Act"(H.R. 1157) by exempting libraries and bookstores from laws that allow the FBI to conduct searches of personal records without warrants. (These laws, part of the USA PATRIOT Act, also make it a criminal act for a librarian to tell you that your records have been searched.)

TIA is a data mining system that was originally called Total Information Awareness. It specified that the goverment would collect all sorts of records on every single person in the US, including not just your public records and your credit report, but also the type of information places like Wal*Mart collect: what you buy and when you buy it. These records would be searched for "patterns" that suggested you are a terrorist. In a brilliant piece of political marketing, the program has now been renamed "Terrorism Information Awareness." This program is so reviled by the technical community that would have to implement it that engineers have started to publish articles explaining how to keep your data useful to you while making it useless to TIA.

Finally, the FISA Court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the government to basically wiretap anybody without any public record of it, as long as the court approves. In the decades the court's been in existance, its only turned down ONE request, and in the wake of September 11, it's use has soared. According to the ACLU, "A bipartisan group of Senators, including Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), have introduced legislation called the FISA Oversight Bill (S. 436) that would ensure our elected officials are able to provide appropriate oversight over the secret FISA court. This bill would not hinder law enforcement but instead would simply require the public accounting of basic information such as the number of Americans subjected to surveillance under FISA and the number of times that FISA information has been used for law enforcement purposes."

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