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Frist Filibuster

May 3, 2005 by

Last night about 9:30 I was walking across campus, and I came across the Frist filibuster, an event that had until then existed only in the media for me, even though it has been going on for nearly a week, no more than 500 yards from my office.

The filibuster is a clever bit of political theater dreamed up by Princeton students. The idea is to mimic an old-time legislative filibuster in which people speak without interruption for heroic lengths of time (unlike the wimpy virtual filibusters one sees in the modern Senate), and to do it on the Princeton campus in front of the Frist Campus Center, which was donated by the Frist family, including Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who is now deciding whether to ban or curtail filibusters in the U.S. Senate. The goal is to galvanize opposition to a change in the filibuster rules. In keeping with my usual nonpartisan policy, I’ll leave aside the merits of the Senate filibuster issue here, and focus on the campus filibuster.

A website has live webcam images of the filibuster.

Last night at 9:30, two people were keeping a lonely vigil in front of the Frist Center. One, a thirtyish man, was standing at a makeshift podium and reading softly from a book, into a microphone. The other, a younger man, was in a small tent structure nearby, sitting and watching behind a table that bore a modest supply of food and drink. After a few minutes a young woman, apparently a student, arrived and took over as speaker. She started reading aloud from a photocopied article, which might have been assigned reading for a course.

I caught up with the first speaker as he was leaving. He was a not a university person, just an interested citizen from a nearby community who had come by over the weekend and had signed up then for last night’s half-hour speaking gig. He said he had started by reading Brown v. Board of Education, which he said illustrated the importance of political balance on the Supreme Court. After that he read from Stephen Jay Gould’s Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History, because “Gould is my favorite biologist.” (The off-topic reading may seem odd, but I’m told it was common in old-time filibusters, where the goal was to fill time after all of the debating points had been made.)

Princeton has allowed the filibusterers to do their thing. This is clearly the right policy, notwithstanding the statements of a few commentators, some of whom should know better, that Princeton should send in the campus cops and break up the filibuster. Trying to ban a peaceful, nondisruptive, student-organized protest would be a terrible idea, and would quite possibly be illegal under Federal and/or New Jersey law.

Even crazier, in my view, is the claim that these events demonstrate inappropriate liberal bias at Princeton. Two things have happened: (1) a small subset of the student body has spoken against a change in the Senate filibuster rules, and (2) Princeton as an institution has decided to let them speak. Neither event demonstrates that Princeton as a whole has any political bias.

You may believe for other reasons that Princeton tilts to the left. That’s a topic for another day. But I don’t see how the filibuster, and Princeton’s response to it, shows any overall bias on campus. You may ask where the counter-protest is; and it’s true that there hasn’t been one. It’s part of the genius of the filibuster as political theater that there is no obvious counter-protest tactic. Holding a counter-filibuster would just draw more attention to filibustering.

Would Senator Frist want Princeton to stop the filibuster now? I doubt it. Even leaving aside the free-speech issue, the Senator is surely smart enough to see that a university clampdown is the perfect ending for the students’ political theater: the powerful authorities break the filibuster, suppressing the speech of a political minority, apparently to please a wealthy donor. That’s not an image the Senator would want associated with the anti-filibuster position.

And so the Frist filibuster goes on, and on, and on. They say they have speakers lined up at least through Thursday.

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Mobile Network Providers Flirt with (Self-)Regulation

May 2, 2005 by

Mobile phone networks in the U.S. are developing a rating and filtering system to apply to content on their networks, according to a Reuters story by Antony Bruno.

The Federal Communications Commission oversees the distribution of wireless spectrum to U.S. operators, and wireless carriers do not want the [FCC’s] indecency campaign against radio, TV and cable broadcasters to come their way.

“The adult side of things has really kick-started it,” says Mark Desautels, [cellular industry association] VP of wireless Internet development. “As indecency becomes an increasing point of interest on the part of policymakers, we really need to be proactive about it.”

Avoiding government regulation by self-regulating is an old trick. In this case, though, it’s hard to see how the self-regulation will pacify the FCC. Here’s an example, from the article:

Wireless carriers and record companies view a rating and filtering system as an opportunity to offer a greater spectrum of content, including master ringtones or voicetones with explicit lyrics. Currently, wireless carriers offer only the most non-offensive content possible because they do not have a mechanism for limiting edgier content to adults.

Do they really think that the FCC will ignore complaints about explicit ringtones being heard in public, just because those tones happen to come from the phones of grownups? The FCC wants to stop kids from seeing or hearing adult content, period. Often they seem to be trying to keep adults away from adult content. Today’s FCC will never accept explicit ringtones, or visible-to-others adult images, being distributed in public.

Even more interesting is the mobile providers’ assertion that they control what happens on their networks. This may have been true historically, but we’re shifting now to a world where phones are really Internet-connected computers that are programmable by anyone. That means a phone can, in practice, access any data that its owner wants to get.

It’s true, of course, that mobile providers can wall their users off from the Internet, and can wall the phones that use their networks off from nonapproved programs. But doing so will make phones much less useful, by shutting out most of the world programmers and most of the world’s sources of information. Competition will force mobile providers to open their phone platforms to third-party programs and content.

The mobile providers would much prefer to keep their platforms closed. There is more money to be made by operating a closed platform than an open one, as long you can’t lose business to competitors who open their platforms. If you’re a mobile provider, you must feel the urge right now to make a deal with your competitors, in which you all agree to keep your platforms closed. But that would be an agreement not to compete, which is illegal.

It would be so much more convenient if some regulation came along that had the side-effect of keeping platforms closed. Perhaps a regulation that disallowed content that hadn’t been officially categorized by a mobile network provider. A regulation, coincidentally, just like the one the industry is starting to develop.

All of this is in vain, I think. The value to customers of open phone platforms is too large to ignore, and some platforms are open already. It’s hard to see how such a useful product feature can be stopped by voluntary means. And once platforms are open, people will get the content they want, like it or not.

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New ClipBlog Site

April 27, 2005 by

My clipblog has moved to DashLog, a new clipblogging site. My clipblog gives quick pointers to interesting sites or pages, with only minimal commentary. It’s designed as a complement to this blog.

New addresses for my clipblog:
HTML: http://www.dashlog.com/logs/tinker
RSS: http://www.dashlog.com/dash/feed.php?log=tinker

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U.S. Considering Wireless Passport Protection

April 26, 2005 by

The U.S. government is “taking a very serious look” at improving privacy protection for the new wireless-readable passports, according to an official quoted in a great article by Kim Zetter at Wired News. Many people, including me, have worried about the privacy implications of having passports that are readable at a distance.

The previously proposed system would transmit all of the information stored on the inside cover of the passport – name, date and place of birth, (digitzed) photo, etc. – to any device that is close enough to beam a signal to the passport and receive the passport’s return signal.

The improved system, which is called “Basic Access Control” in the specification, would use a cryptographic protocol between the passport and a reader device. The protocol would require the reader device to prove that it knew the contents of the machine-readable text on the inside cover of the passport (the bottom two lines of textish stuff on a U.S. passport), before the passport would release any information. The released information would also be encrypted so that an eavesdropper could not capture it.

I have not done a detailed security analysis of the crypto protocols, so I can’t vouch for their security. Juels, Molnar, and Wagner point out some protocol flaws (in the Basic Access Control protocol) that are probably not a big deal in practice. I’ll assume here that the protocols are secure enough.

The point of these protocols is to release the digital information only to an entity that can prove it already has had access to information on the inside of the passport. Since the information stored digitally is already visible (in analog form, at least) to somebody who has that access, the privacy risk is vastly reduced, and it becomes impossible for a stranger to read your passport without your knowledge.

You might ask what is the point of storing the information digitally when it can be read digitally only by somebody who has access to the same information in analog form. There are two answers. First, the digital form can be harder to forge, because the digital information can be digitally signed by the issuing government. Assuming the digital signature scheme is secure, this makes it impossible to modify the information in a passport or to replace the photo, steps which apparently aren’t too difficult with paper-only passports. (It’s still possible to copy a passport despite the digital signature, but that seems like a lesser problem than passport modification.) Second, the digital form is more susceptible to electronic record-keeping and lookup in databases, which serves various governmental purposes, either legitimate or (for some governments) nefarious.

The cryptographic protocols now being considered were part of the digital-passport standard already, as an optional feature that each country could choose to adopt or not. The U.S. had previously chosen not to adopt it, but is now thinking about reversing that decision. It’s good to see the government taking the passport privacy issue seriously.

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Recommended Reading

April 22, 2005 by

Following the lead of other bloggers, I’ll be writing occasionally to recommend books or articles that I found interesting. Today, I’m recommending two books that could hardly be more different in topic and tone.

The 9/11 Commission Report

This book was a real surprise. I started reading from a sense of obligation, but I was quickly hooked. It isn’t light reading, and parts are simply horrifying; but it explains the events of 9/11, their causes, and the aftermath with admirable depth and clarity. Most surprising of all is the quality of the writing, which rivals the best journalism or historical writing. The tick-tock in Chapter 1 is riveting and will surely be the definitive account of what happened that day.

The Commission had broad access to documents and people, a sizeable staff, and bipartisan national support, all of which allowed them to see clearly the history of the 9/11 plot, the U.S. government’s efforts to deal with al Qaida over the years, and the response to the attacks. Much of this is eye-opening. The sheer chaos and lack of information flow that confronted first responders is sobering. We also see the national security community’s wavering focus on the al Qaida threat and the gathering of significant intelligence about it, coupled with a cultural inability to strike boldly against it before 9/11.

Overall, the report was much better than I expected – much better, really, than a government commission report has any right to be.

Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey into the Heart of Fan Mania, by Warren St. John

Bummed out by the 9/11 report? This book is the antidote. It’s a group portrait of the most rabid University of Alabama football fans, written by a New York journalist who grew up in Alabama and knows firsthand the lure of Bama football. It’s a nicely polished little book packed with laugh-out-loud moments.

A typical vignette introduces a couple who skipped their own daughter’s wedding to go to a Bama football game. (The game got over in time for them to attend the reception.) They seem like fairly normal people, and when asked to explain why they did this thing, they’re at a loss. The author reports asking many Alabamans what they thought of the couple’s story. Three-quarters shook their heads and wondered why in the world loving parents could skip their daughter’s wedding. The other quarter shook their heads and wondered why in the world a loving daughter would schedule her wedding on the day of the Tennessee game.

The beauty of the book is that the author doesn’t caricature the fans. He tells their stories sympathetically, and one comes to see their obsession as not so different from the obsessions or hobbies that many of us have. Indeed, the author himself is gently pulled into their community, buying himself an RV and driving it to the games just like the most devoted fans. He weaves together the stories of the fans, his own story of being drawn into their world, and references to academic studies of fans and their behavior, into a revealing and very entertaining mix. I’m a big fan of this book.

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