ARTS & FARCES internet

US District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker last Thursday ruled that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA) and AT&T can proceed. The lawsuit alleges the government agency and telecommunications giant’s warrantless wiretapping surveillance activity is illegal. The government argued that the case must be dismissed because state secrets could be revealed in open court. AT&T argued that it’s relationship with the US government granted it immunity from prosecution. Both arguments were flatly rejected.

Judge Walker rejected the government’s argument in a landmark ruling that puts distinct limitations on the president’s “state secrets privilege” that’s invoked whenever anything the executive branch wants to keep under cover gets secretized under claims of “national security.” Part of Judge Walker’s rejection was based on the fact that the government and AT&T had publicly disclosed the wholesale surveillance activities. “Dismissing this case at the outset,” wrote Judge Walker in his decision, “would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.”

In a unique move, Judge Walker also noted his preference to appoint an outside expert with the appropriate security clearances to review and evaluate the national security ramifications of evidence in the case.

In a separate case in Detroit federal court, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing the NSA over the Bush administration’s surveillance program.

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Princeton professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs, Ed Felten, has published a ten-page whitepaper on network neutrality that greatly clarifies the complexities involved in the issue. Felten’s paper does a good job of finding the third-way between the misleading scare tactics of some activist organizations and the telecommunications companies’ astroturf campaigns.

Felten posits that the mechanics of network discrimination are the core of the issue, something that relatively few people understand.

Because the internet is an end-to-end network, with all of the intelligence and heavy lifting happening at the edges, Felten writes that the network neutrality debate is a “fight between the edges and the middle over control of the network.”

The internet has enjoyed its unparalleled success precisely because all intelligence has been pushed to the edges of the network. The telecommunications companies want to reverse this, aggregating the intelligence in the center of the network, where everything—including innovation—is easier to control. Putting the internet genie back in the bottle, as it were.

Network discrimination can occur, according to Felten, when a router prioritizes packets and discards low-priority packets first. Felten calls this minimal discrimination because packets are only discarded when it’s absolutely necessary.

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Edward Tufte’s new book, Beautiful Evidence has been released. Tufte’s books—every one of them—are hand-crafted and beautiful to behold. From the book’s introduction:

“Science and art have in common intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information. Beautiful Evidence is about how seeing turns into showing, how empirical observations turn into explanations and evidence presentations. The book identifies excellent and effective methods for presenting information, suggests new designs, and provides tools for assessing the credibility of evidence presentations.”

Judging from the sample pages on Tufte’s website, Beautiful Evidence appears to be of as fine quality and as compelling as the three previous books in his graphical display of information series.

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Depending on who you believe, Amanda Congdon was either fired from RocketBoom or decided to move on to Hollywood to become a star. Because Congdon was Rocketboom, the former is probably closer to the actual truth. Either way, her future is bright—she already got a pretty peachy job offer from Jason Calcanis—and Rocketboom is probably toast, destined for the second tier of video blogs if it survives at all. Congdon, for now, continues to video blog at Amanda UnBoomed.

So why is this gossip worthy of our attention? Because it hasn’t yet made it into the corporate media’s publication cycle, if it ever does, and with about 250,000 daily viewers, Congdon’s audience share rivals corporate cable shows. Because AOL, through Calcanis’s Netscape offer, has offered a video blogger ownership rights and full-scale studio and editorial support. And mostly because this is happening real-time in the blogosphere—outside of the corporate mediasphere—right before our eyes. This should be all the proof corporate managers need to let their editors move as fast as they possibly can to a continuous publication cycle.

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China has a new draft law—one that is surely the envy of President Bush and his administration—that fines media outlets for reporting on “sudden incidents.” The proposed legislation would levy fines up to US$12,500 on media organizations or journalists who report on “outbreaks of disease, natural disasters, social disturbances or other so-called sudden incidents that officials determine to be false or harmful to China’s social order.” So reports Joseph Kahn in this morning’s New York Times.

This is a change for China’s relations with foreign media outlets. Until now, non-Chinese media operated under different, more lax rules although they were always monitored closely by security and operate under travel restrictions. Foreign media operations were, however, generally exempt from attempts at state censorship.

Chinese officials maintained that the new rules were intended to make government officials better manage the “sudden incidents” and to “prevent malicious behavior by journalists who willfully misled the public.” On the other hand, Kahn writes, “critics say the law could be used by government officials to forbid coverage of strikes, riots, epidemics or accidents that they prefer to keep secret.”

In America. on Independence Day, it’s important for us to remember all that means, the administration and the conservative attacks on the Times and other US media outlets notwithstanding. Good journalism isn’t always convenient; but it is necessary.

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