Larry Downes, Senior Adjunct Fellow

The White House’s “Consumer Data Privacy in a Networked World” report outlines a revised framework for consumer privacy, proposes a "Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights," and calls on Congress to pass new legislation to regulate online businesses. The following statement can be attributed to Berin Szoka, President of TechFreedom, and Larry Downes, TechFreedom Senior Adjunct Fellow:

This Report begins and ends as constitutional sleight-of-hand. President Obama starts by reminding us of the Fourth Amendment's essential protection against "unlawful intrusion into our homes and our personal papers"—by government. But the Report recommends no reform whatsoever for outdated laws that have facilitated a dangerous expansion of electronic surveillance. That is the true threat to our privacy. The report dismisses it in a footnote.

Instead, the Report calls for extensive new regulation of Internet businesses to address little more than the growing pains of a vibrant emerging economy. "For businesses to succeed online,” President Obama asserts, “consumers must feel secure."  Yet online businesses that rely on data to deliver innovative and generally free services are the one bright spot in a sour economy. Experience has shown consumers ultimately bear the costs of regulations imposed on emerging technologies, no matter how well-intentioned.

The report is a missed opportunity. The Administration should have called for increased protections against government's privacy intrusions. Focusing on the real Bill of Rights would have respected not only the Fourth Amendment, but also the First Amendment. The Supreme Court made clear last year that the private sector's use of data is protected speech—an issue also not addressed by this Report.

Szoka and Downes are available for comment at media@techfreedom.org. 

Today, the FCC began the long-overdue process of reforming the Lifeline and Link-Up America programs, which subsidize basic phone service for low-income Americans. The following statement can be attributed to Larry Downes, Senior Adjunct Fellow at TechFreedom:

The FCC has taken positive steps today toward reform of the bloated and outdated Lifeline and Link-Up programs. As conceived by Congress, these programs subsidize basic telephone service for low income Americans. But even as basic communications costs continue to decline, the fund has grown over 1,000% in the last fifteen years. It’s no surprise, then, that the Lifeline and Link-Up programs are universally acknowledged to be plagued with waste, fraud and abuse. Reform is long overdue.

The FCC today also announced a pilot program to use projected savings from today’s reforms to offer broadband Internet access to low-income families. While we share the goal of making broadband Internet available to all Americans, we're troubled by the Commission’s continued determination to regulate without authority from Congress.

The majority’s reliance on Section 706 of the Communications Act, which the FCC also used to ground its now-challenged 2010 Open Internet order, is deeply problematic. Section 706 encourages the agency to remove regulatory oversight of broadband markets. It is not a blank check for the FCC to pursue any agenda it thinks best, no matter how well-intentioned.

We agree with FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell that Section 706 doesn’t authorize the FCC to extend its own authority—and that it is imprudent to spend money on a pilot before it’s clear how much will actually be saved from today’s important reforms.

Downes is available for comment at media@techfreedom.org.

It was a dangerous year for innovation. Governments around the world became increasingly aware that digital technology could disrupt the political and economic status quo.

Lawmakers and lobbyists were calling for new laws to curb innovations that challenged traditional law enforcement and old ways of doing business. But the laws would have stifled innovation far beyond their intended goals. Technology industry leaders sounded the alarm, but their voices went largely unheard in the corridors of power.

But one proposal gave birth to an organized resistance. Top government officials tried to force industry to re-engineer key technologies to dramatically expand government intervention and oversight, allowing federal law enforcement agents to manipulate core innovations central to fast-growing but still immature new products and services.

A small group of entrepreneurs, activists, writers and lawyers banded together to rally the technology community in opposition. A surprising coalition of Republican and Democratic lawmakers emerged to support the freedom fighters, many considered otherwise too liberal or too conservative to have common cause. Together, they fought back the proposal and, perhaps, saved a generation of future technological innovation.

The year was 1993, and the fight was over technology called the Clipper Chip, which the National Security Agency tried to force cell phone manufacturers to include in all consumer phones. Clipper was a government-designed chipset with built-in encryption developed by the NSA. One of its features, however, was a "key escrow" that gave the government a permanent backdoor to decrypt any conversation.

It was a terrible, terrible idea.

And the organization that formed to fight the Clipper Chip was the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In the end, its creation was the only affect the Clipper Chip actually had.