Sadly, the porn must flow Part 3: Regulatory and Governmental Concerns

I've now addressed concerns with a mandatory pornography filtering system based on conceptual considerations on the nature of pornography and technical ones about how the system might work.  Now I will focus on a critique of the plan based on the governmental and regulatory considerations, as stated in the title.  A main point in my last part could be summed up as, "Don't trust your ISP to keep you safe, you're better off ensuring that on your own."  If we replace ISP with government that same idea will be found here.

America has a unique approach to government in that a fundamental value we hold is liberty, and are sensitive to the power of government to curtail this among individuals or groups.  The conflict between this and the need for law forms a basis to our society.  Whether pornographic filtering should be mandatory is another manifestation for this conflict, and I will be falling on the side of liberty as opposed to security.

The concept of safety curtailing our liberties is one hotly contested in the media with the government's efforts in the last ten years to crack down on and protect against terrorism.  This even has a more direct parallel in the field of communications with recent Snowden leaks on NSA data and metadata collection efforts that, in my own personal opinion and that of at least one court of law, violates American citizens' rights granted by the first (including and perhaps primarily the right of association) and fourth amendments.  With these already in peril, why would we want to introduce a new government mandate and increase their ability to curtail citizens' rights online?

Yes, yes, I know, "No one's rights are being curtailed, anyone can still opt in and get the content they want."  In the short view this may be true, though many of the points in my previous two essays on the subject should demonstrate ways it may also not be.  Though I'd rather not delve too deeply into the 'slippery slope' argument as it necessarily relies on speculation and unverifiable prediction, it would be prudent to mention that any law or regulation would set a precedent that our personal communication methods are something the government has every right to manage.

The proposal would grant new regulatory powers over our methods of communication.  It would be handed off to either ISPs or/and government committees and reduce choice for the individual.  While it's only a default setting that would change right now, the shame often involved in the complex issue of obscenity could easily cause this to be the societal norm, and forcing those who either held liberal views about sexuality or possibly a desire to protect their privacy and security online to be forced into an 'internet ghetto.'  Eventually these people might be lumped in with criminals and subject to greater invasion of their rights because they 'chose to use the internet in a manner recognized to reflect dangerous and deviant behavior.'

Let me explain by way of analogy.  How would you feel if car dealerships were now required to sell cars that would automatically avoid driving you anywhere where obscene or illegal activities were known to occur?  They would naturally have to standardize and define what obscene behavior was, and so a federal committee would now decide what parts of town you were allowed to drive to.  If you wanted to have full control over where you could go in the car you bought you would need to ask the dealer, and maybe they would have a special license plate for your car so that everyone else wouldn't accidentally follow you or wonder why they were having trouble getting to a place that you went to without problems.  Does that sound OK to you, or does it seem like a massive intrusion of government control in your life?

The internet is indeed a radically new method of communication.  Earlier methods often fell naturally into a pattern of self-regulation when it came to pornography.  Movies created a rating system, magazines went under the counter, TV shows had a set of standards to follow until after the watershed.  Phone lines were pretty much just as available to youngsters as much as anyone else but you needed to know what number to call and the commercials didn't go on until after the watershed, so their exposure wasn't really significant and in any event parents would get the bill later.  The internet, on the other hand, is hugely interconnected and once you're online you have access to most resources with nothing more than a name, or if you're not sure of that a search term will probably work just as well.  The industry doesn't lend itself well to self regulationas it is a personal service, the connection is to your home, connected to a vast public network.

It does lend itself easily to personal regulation, though.  In my last post I mentioned a few good and fairly easy solutions to filter pornography.  I explained my feelings that those who were unwilling to gain the technical skills to implement these shouldn't be foisting their responsibility to protect themselves on the country at large as well, but there's another aspect to this naivete I'd like to address: that pornography is a problem that technology or regulation can only slow, not stop.  It plays to the most basic human drives and desires.  This is what makes it so tempting, and destructive.

The way to fight pornography is to teach the right values, habits, and behaviors.  I admit the prevalence of pornography can make this difficult, but teaching our children and selves the truth of what pornography is is the most effective way to fight it.  We shouldn't pretend that we can shut off any exposure to it, and instead prepare ourselves and develop the mental and spiritual discipline to be strong against it when we do.  This may include a personal decision to install some sort of filter on our own networks.  Others might not even see a need for this.

Maturity comes with responsibility, taking on accountability for the way we live and the decisions we make.  I see this petition as immature, trying to abdicate the responsibility for avoiding pornography by passing it along to organizations believed to be more capable of doing so.  We must take this responsibility upon ourselves though, immense as it may seem, because immaturity and liberty cannot coexist.  The more we decide that something is too hard for us and should be handled by the government, the greater the state will become as the citizen becomes smaller and smaller.

Sadly, the porn must flow 2 : Technical Considerations

So I've gone over the conceptual problems with a government mandated ISP based pornography filtering system and given an overview of how these systems might work.  One of the problems with this kind of legislation, however, is that there are numerous technical considerations.  Much like the recent SOPA bill, a pornography filtering requirement could possibly work out to be a government mandate to restructure how the internet works in the service of a specific special interest.

On the surface this seems like an overreaction, porn filters already exist so how difficult would it be for these to be implemented broadly by ISPs rather than requiring users to implement them personally.  It's not, though, as scalability isn't simple.  There's a reason why programs have run locally on personal machines for years but only now can be served out from a remote location to hundreds of thousands of users.  There's a reason enterprise servers are different from personal computers.

Still, though, it's certainly doable.  It would take a lot of work, though, and skilled programmers, network engineers, and system administrators don't work for free.  That means forcing this to happen at the ISP level will be expensive.  A government mandate means everyone's prices will go up.  Think about if a similar resolution were to be passed for gasoline, electricity, or food.  People would rightfully be incensed that either they're being forced to pay more for a service they don't want or are already using from a provider they trust and have established a good relationship.

Also, people don't often think about what their ISP is doing with their internet traffic.  Usually that's because it's assumed that they shouldn't be doing anything with it apart from passing it on to the intended recipient.  That's not the case, though.  Your ISP is watching you, much like Google, Facebook, or other online advertising companies are and like these they plan to sell information about your habits to interested parties for some extra cash.  They're also watching you as a favor to their friends in the entertainment industries to make sure that you don't "copy or share a movie, television show, or song improperly."  The more I find out about the ISP industry, the less I trust them.

Knowing this we're likely to see two things happen should any sort of legislation pass from this petition: First, pornography filtering will be put in place, but thanks to a grant from the pornography industry to ISPs will make this laughably easy to circumvent.  There could possibly be a sort of 'protection money' situation where ISPs block the pornography sites that don't pay up to be on their list of sites that aren't too 'extreme or hardcore.'  Second, the system will be implemented with little thought to protecting those that want to avoid pornography, but as a great excuse to further other goals for the ISP.

I mentioned encrypted traffic in my last post and how this can create a problem for porn filtering systems.  My feelings about ISPs give me every reason to believe that they would be happy to use porn filtering mandates to try to subvert users' efforts that are trying to remain anonymous and gain a modicum of privacy while online (such as when using a VPN service like ProXPN to hide traffic from the ISP, or connecting to a Tor node to remain anonymous).  This way they could continue collecting information about you and your habits to sell to advertisers or make sure you fall in line with the entertainment industry's demands.  They'd also have the power to brand anyone trying to get around these restrictions on the service they're paying for with a 'scarlet P' by saying that they had opted in to the internet with pornographic access plan.

Going back to the phrase from the petition, "Parents and individuals have to go to great lengths to install Internet filters that often don't weed out all porn," I'm not really certain what these 'great lengths' are.  Installing a free program like K9 web protection on your computer, or an app on your cell phone like this web filter?  Admittedly my preferred solution, OpenDNS, is a little technical but even then you don't even need to sign up and they'll still provide straight forward instructions like these on their website.  Why do we feel it necessary to have the government partner with our ISPs to do this for us?  If staying safe from pornography is important to us shouldn't we be willing to put an iota of effort into doing it in a way we understand and are in control of?

This leads me back to one of my original points: naivete.  I recently watched a documentary on prohibition and one thing that was pointed out was that once the prohibition amendment had passed the prohibitionists had thought they'd won the war on alcohol.  Anyone with a smattering of US history knows that wasn't the case, and a tacit law saying porn is to be avoided won't make it any less desired or sought after.  We'll be handing over a good degree of power over our lives, remember the internet is only becoming more and more important to who we are, in exchange for avoiding something like an hour a week, at most, to install, configure, and maintain a filtering solution that fits our personal needs.

I'm writing a novel this month for National Novel Writing Month in the tradition of cyberpunk.  One characteristic of the cyberpunk genre is that it features technology not as an enabling  force that brings about Utopian lives for mankind, but instead becomes a force for control and oppression.  There's hints of this in my novel, but one of the themes is also supposed to be that this happens because people give up their rights, their strength, and their power to others because they think it's too hard to develop the technical skills necessary to understand the systems they use.  Society has fallen back into being controlled by a few select elite, but this time we chose it because math, programming, physics, engineering, and computing are hard and we'd rather enjoy ourselves while someone else did those complicated things.  This petition is a sad reminder that the bleak future I'm writing should be fiction, but might not be someday.

The Fourth Amendment in the Information Age

In my last post I mused on the nature of data and how the information about us defines who we are.  I was spurned to write this and finished off the post presenting disappoint with Verizon, my cell carrier, and their failure to protect users' privacy and respect their charge in holding data about us.  Lately Verizon has been in the news for handing over call records to the NSA, so the wound has had salt thrown in it rather than had time to heal, so to speak.  In my investigations into jumping ship from a company so cavalier about it's responsibility to protect who I am in the form my data I've had some interesting experiences.

I sent an email to Sprint asking if their company does anything to protect users' data and privacy.  Their response was,

Sprint as a company is not commenting on this report. We do not have 

any information to share, and that Sprint will not be commenting on the 

subject. 

which I found alarmingly curt and evasive.  Don't get me wrong, I wasn't expecting anything terribly profound or telling, I was expecting a sorta non-committal PR department generated canned response along the lines of, "Sprint is committed to protecting customers' data and ensuring their privacy, however we still must comply with any lawful U.S. Government agency request."  There's no real way to peer behind the curtain and discern why they responded with the air of, "Oh geez I don't want to talk about this please don't make me say anything why are you doing this to me?"  My speculation on the subject, which I feel such a curious response deserves, would be that either Sprint is just as uncaring when it comes to customers' data and privacy and can provide no unembarrassing response to a customer asking these type of questions, or that they are actually fearful of what might happen should they take a stand.

Both could of course be true, in fact the latter may be the cause and the former the effect.  I find the latter more interesting, though.  It's easy to dismiss concern with how a company protects (or more often fails to protect) our information as unfounded worry about "government conspiracies" (in fact, that's exactly who a T-Mobile salesperson ended up characterizing my concern when asking about it at a store location).  While the fact that most citizens probably won't be much affected is true and the majority of people (including myself with all my seditious comments coming out on this blog) aren't interesting, influential, or dangerous enough for the government to take the effort to spy on, the issue is far from unimportant for everyone save a few security advocates, legal scholars, and tech enthusiasts.

As I pointed out in my last post we're seeing the importance of the physical diminish.  The things that are important to us are increasingly in the form of data accessed in a number of different ways?  As these changes in the way we communicate, work, and create emerge so the laws which will govern these new methods of living.  And they are being changed.

"The Fourth Amendment (Amendment IV) to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, along with requiring any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause."  This worked well for many years when communication took place between two people in the form of physical letters that they could keep on their property and evidence showed up as physical items that, again, could be held on someone's property. These laws are essentially being re-written as more and more of what's important to us has a digital presence.

The fourth amendment seems to grow out of the presumption of innocence.  We aren't to be observed, investigated, or seized until some degree of proof of guilt can be obtained.  This is what's being eroded by modern electronic surveillance.  It echos the complaints by so many in gaming when considering many invasive digital rights management (DRM) systems, "I'm being treated like a criminal when I haven't done anything wrong.  They're just assuming I'm going to steal things."

Privacy and the internet is always, and may always be, a thorny issue.  There's many conflicting theories, ranging from the internet being a surveillance state, to the assumption of privacy which is continually being shown to be unsupported, to complex privacy policies written by lawyers and mostly ignored by users, to understanding that privacy is only there when one takes the steps to encrypt their data and secure their connections.  The internet is increasingly how we live our lives-in both private and public contexts-and after fighting for our rights and freedoms in the physical world we need to take up the fight once more for cyberspace, whether that means holding elected officials accountable, suffering the inconvenience of using security software, or considering privacy and data security when selecting service providers.

Taxes and Taxation

I recently did my taxes and have also been reading The Federalist Papers and have been thinking a lot about taxation lately.  One thing that always strikes me at tax time is the labyrinthine extensiveness of the tax code.  I'm terrified of filing next year, trying to figure out how I'll file after getting married, having an HSA, and who knows what else is still to come.  The complexity of the tax code is always what has struck me as the most immoral thing about it.
In The Federalist Papers Alexander Hamilton said, "The genius of the people will ill brook the inquisitive and peremptory spirit of excise laws." (emphasis added)  We are living a world of privacy concerns.  We watch our internet service providers eavesdrop on their customers at the behest of the entertainment industry or for advertising profit, the web services we use constantly collect that details of how we're using them, we keep devices in our pockets which may upload our exact location throughout our day, and we're told to be careful about grocery store discount cards as they can easily lead our eating habits getting sold to an insurance company to raise our rates.  In this world of shrinking privacy our government should be working to protect what we have left, but instead we see it complacent and then at tax time bold faced enough to ask and expect us to answer a slew of questions about our investments, medical bills, work location, housing, and 'anything else you might have missed.'

An uncle of mine that prepares taxes has said that he would be unable to do so without the aid of computers.  The fact that we have created such a situation is ludicrous. I have more than one uncle who makes pretty decent money preparing people's taxes, so let me make one thing very clear: I don't think there's inherent corruption in the tax preparation industry.  There's competition, people concern themselves with following the law, and try to be honest.  That said, I don't think it should exist.  The fact that the layman cannot pay those who govern him without going through an entity that's insinuated itself through great deal of study and hard work is unnerving.  I don't want a people that separated from their government, especially regarding something affects them so directly.  This can only be done through an exceedingly simple tax code, far from what we have now where only one who devotes his life to understanding the tax code or is wealthy enough to hire someone who does will get the benefits of it.

This country was founded on many things, but one of them was "no taxation without representation."  We believed so strongly that we deserved a say in how and why governments take money from us that we fought for that right.  Has the American spirit dwindled to a point where we accept taxes as an inevitability, overseen by some arcane power that we can only glimpse through the eyes of a few initiated elite among us?