Newspapers Reporting On ACTA, Sept 1 - Nov 1, 2011

From January 1 to September 1, there were only seven newspaper stories in LexisNexis. Results from GoogleNews mirror those from LexisNexis.

India insisted it would “not accept any intellectual property talks outside WTO” and The Guardian ran a column from Cory Doctorow that mentioned ACTA as it analyzed how computers can be used to “control and spy on us.”

Compare that with 82 newspaper articles, mostly U.S., published in December 2011 that mentioned the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

It’s not like ACTA wasn’t talked about among insiders. Inside U.S. Trade, for example, ran an article on October 14, 2011 noting that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) challenged the Obama Administration. In a press release, Sen. Wyden said:

“It may be possible for the U.S. to implement ACTA or any other trade agreement, once validly entered, without legislation if the agreement requires no change in U.S. law,” Wyden writes. “But regardless of whether the agreement requires changes in U.S. law…the executive branch lacks constitutional authority to enter a binding international agreement covering issues delegated by the Constitution to Congress’ authority, absent congressional approval.”

And it’s not like ACTA wasn’t talked about by lawyers and geeks.

It simply wasn’t talked about by the media elite, many of which are linked directly or indirectly to Hollywood.

Despite the fact that thousands are protesting in Europe, U.S. newspapers are still ignoring the treaty. But here’s the Financial Times, from Thursday:

Though ACTA has already been signed or initialled by all EU governments, it requires ratification by all 27 national parliaments as well as the European Parliament in Brussels.

That process looks to have been derailed by the anti-ACTA activists, particularly in central and eastern Europe.

Even the RIAA chief, writing in the NY Times last week, went after SOPA/PIPA but mentioned not one word about ACTA or the RIAA’s role in crafting its language. By the way, he implied that if you opposed either piece of legislation that you were either gullible (“anybody could click on a link or tweet in outrage — but how many knew what they were supporting or opposing”) or misinformed (“The hyperbolic mistruths, presented on the home pages of some of the world’s most popular Web sites, amounted to an abuse of trust and a misuse of power.”)

Back during the development of the treaty:

The negotiating text of ACTA and many other documents, including even the lists of participants in the negotiations, are secret. The White House claims the secrecy is required as a matter of national security. But that does not mean the documents are off limits to everyone outside of the government. Hundreds of advisors, many of them corporate lobbyists, are considered “cleared advisors.” They have access to the ACTA documents.

Who is on the U.S. Trade Representative Advisory Committees who saw the pre-public text of ACTA?

• Coalition for Intellectual Property Rights
• Entertainment Software Association
• International Intellectual Property Alliance
• Motion Picture Association of America, Inc.
• Recording Industry Association of America
• Software and Information Industry Association
• Time-Warner
• Verizon Communications Inc

The 2009 FOIA request also revealed that Sony Pictures Entertainment and News Corp were privvy to pre-public documents. More background from Knowledge Ecology International on the ACTA process.

If you don’t think the IP measures relating to digital content are onerous, what about generic drugs?

The French MEP who resigned his position in charge of negotiating the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta) has said it “goes too far” by potentially cutting access to lifesaving generic drugs and restricting internet freedom.

[...]

“The title of this agreement is misleading, because it’s not only about counterfeiting, it’s about the violation of intellectual property rights,” he told the Guardian. “There is a major difference between these two concepts.”

[...]

“The problem with Acta is that, by focusing on the fight against violation of intellectual property rights in general, it treats a generic drug just as a counterfeited drug. This means the patent holder can stop the shipping of the drugs to a developing country, seize the cargo and even order the destruction of the drugs as a preventive measure.”

This trade agreement has been negotiated in the dark with input from insiders who will profit from restricted trade.

Just say no.

Call your Senators and demand that ACTA be treated like the treaty that it is, which requires Senate approval. Bring the discussion of intellectual property protection out of the backroom and into the sunlight.

[1] Source [News, All (English, Full Text)]; query: Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
[2] Image THE BATTLE OF COPYRIGHT 2011 Christopher Dombres

Earlier In TMV

• Guilty Until Proven Innocent Is Bad Law; We Need A Little Sunshine (2012)
• Winner Take All In The Tech Economy (2012)
• Europe To Sign ACTA Thursday, Poland Protests (2012)
• Tech Community Flexes Muscle, Senators Run For The Door (2012)
• On Internet Censorship : ACTA and COICA (2010)
• Obama Administration Secret Proposal On Copyright Puts ISP At Center Of Debate (2009)

Wireless devices today are more sophisticated than ever before. And because of that, the costs associated with upgrading to a new device have increased and is reflected in our new upgrade fee. This fee isn’t unique to AT&T and this is the first time we’re changing it in nearly 10 years.

What, exactly, does AT&T have to do when a customer upgrades her phone? I don’t know, because I’ve never gone through AT&T to get an upgrade. When I “upgraded” from a Blackjack to an Apple iPhone 3GS, I did so at the Apple Store. Ditto when I upgraded to an iPhone4. And I’ll get my iPhone5 at an Apple Store, too.

But AT&T is our provider. Does that mean that I have to pay this $36 even though Apple is doing the work, whatever work is entailed — work that I could have done myself had I had Apple send the phone to my house.

It’s bad enough that we are tied into a two-year agreement for service, an agreement that ostensibly subsidizes the cost of phone but that does not drop in price after the two-year “subsidy” is over. Nor is there a lower contract price for a phone that has been paid for — you know, if you buy a used one or share a used one with a friend.

I suppose current customers are being asked to cough up more dough to pay for AT&T’s disastrous $6.2 billion bill associated with its ill-advised attempt to buy T-Mobile as well as pension accounting (ie, paper loss). Verizon also posted “a $2 billion loss due to a change in its pension accounting.”

AT&T revenue for the fourth quarter, of course, was up 4 percent: from $31.4 billion last year to $32.5 billion this year.

cNet analysis of AT&T’s fourth quarter earnings explains why AT&T wants more money when customers upgrade. For both AT&T and Verizon:

… the iPhone made up more than half of the carriers’ smartphone activations. Without the device, they would have faced a continued slowdown in its postpaid subscriber growth.

There is nothing from mainstream media — print or electronic — about this story as of this writing.

Negotiations over ACTA began in the Bush White House and were ratified by Obama. Last October, the U.S. joined Australia, Canada, Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Morocco, and Singapore in signing the agreement [1]. In 2010, Margot Kaminski (Yale Law School) wrote:

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a plurilateral agreement negotiated outside of the WTO’s processes and protections, is the biggest set of new laws to hit international Intellectual Property…

The biggest three issues may be the scope of criminal copyright infringement, the expansion of the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) internationally, and the creation of a new international institution (an ACTA “Committee”) to deal with enforcement of ACTA.

It is, she wrote, “an IP-maximalist’s dream” … a copyright treaty that is “masquerading as a treaty that addresses dangerous medicines and defective imports.”

Let’s look at a recent example of why guilty-until-proven-innocent law (the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is problematic.

Last week’s SuperBowl featured a long commercial from Chrysler/Detroit with Clint Eastwood playing moderator. YouTube — as well as Hulu and a host of other sites — showcased SuperBowl commercials for people who either didn’t watch the game or who wanted to rewatch or share a favorite commercial. Chrysler had the ad on its YouTube channel.

But on Monday, the day after the SuperBowl, Google pulled the Chryster/Eastwood ad, ostensibly for infringing on (wait for it) NFL copyright!

This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by NFL Properties LLC.

The ad was down at 9 a.m. Here’s Google’s statement, at 5.11 pm:

YouTube expeditiously removes content when it receives a copyright notification from copyright owners, or from third party agencies operating on their behalf. We reinstate content when we receive a retraction from the party who originally submitted the notification. The video has been reinstated.

Who owned the copyright in this case?

Uh, Chrysler. The injured party.

We can argue whether or not the commercial was “political.” We could share our favorite parody responses. (Note, Chrysler hasn’t tried to stop those fair use examples.)

But that’s not the point.

The point is that Google — like most of the ISPs out there — is going to take down content based on a complaint. Not their job to ascertain if the complaint was, in fact, a valid one. They just want to make sure that they can’t be sued, so they act “expeditiously.”

Guilty until proven innocent puts all the power in the hands of copyright (IP) owners (or those who claim to be). It’s wrong.

And analysts say that the U.S. is trying to export our laws (the ones fashioned by Hollywood) to the rest of the world. Our already quite extensive copyright protection (far more generous than the founders could ever have imagined when they put “limited” copyright protection into the Constitution):

Over the past two decades, the United States has established one of the harshest systems of copyright enforcement in the world. Our domestic copyright law has become broader (it covers more topics), deeper (it lasts for a longer time), and more severe (the punishments for infringement have been getting worse). These standards were established through an alphabet soup of legislation: the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act of 1997, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, and the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO-IP) Act of 2008. And every few years, there’s a call for more.

Many features of existing U.S. copyright law are harsh by international standards. The U.S. penalizes the attempt to access digital material against a rights-holder’s wishes, even when the material itself is not protected by copyright. We guarantee large monetary awards against infringers, with no showing of actual harm. We effectively require websites to cooperate with rights-holders to take down material, without requiring proof that it’s infringing in court. And our criminal copyright law has such a low threshold that it criminalizes the behavior of most people online, instead of targeting infringement on a true commercial scale.

We didn’t stand up to be counted back when the DCMA or PRO-IP or Sony Bono Act were passed and signed into law. We have, at least temporarily, derailed SOPA/PIPA but it is imperative to recognize that neither law was not needed for the U.S. government to join forces with New Zealand to shut down MegaUpload (which the U.S. claims is racketeering and thus subject to extradition) … where innocent account holders data are slated for for the bit-bucket … and which has had little impact on piracy.

Guilty until proven innocent.

The new American way.

Join with the thousands in Europe and just say no. Call your Senators and demand that ACTA be treated like the treaty that it is, which requires Senate approval. Bring the discussion of copyright protection out of the backroom and into the sunlight.

[1] The White House claims that ACTA is an executive agreement that does not require ratification by the Senate. But the U.S. Trade Representative summary of ACTA notes that (emphasis added): “In 2006, Japan and the United States launched the idea of a new plurilateral treaty to help in the fight against counterfeiting and piracy, the so-called Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).”

Chrysler ad

Chrysler ad : anti-Obama

Chrysler ad : anti-Romney

SNL : 1

SNL : 2

SNL : 3

• 46 percent of American children enter kindergarten lacking the basic language skills they need to learn to read
• 61 percent of low-income children have no children’s books in their homes

The verbs convey urgency (currency is an intentional affect, as the factoids are used for fundraising, establishing organizational mandates) and imply that the data are current. But are the data points true, for any definition of “truth”?

Oh. And a reminder. When a “factoid” hits all of your emotional buttons, try to engage your mental brakes before hitting RT, Like, Share or Forward. If it seems too good or too bad to be true, chances are, it’s not.

No Children’s Books?

Check it yourself. Whether using Google (2.8 million) or Bing (10.1 million), the search string <61 percent low-income no children’s books> yields millions of results. Conclusion: it’s a widely cited figure by sites such as BooksForAmerica, BookSpring, JumpStart,  ReachOutAndRead and the Wauconda Area Library as well as news stories.

Here’s one manifestation:

61 percent of low-income families have no books at all in their homes for their children. Families living in poverty must use their financial resources to pay for food and shelter, not books. Reading Literacy in the United States

And another:

In fact, 61 percent of low-income families have no age-appropriate books at all in their homes for their children. Reading Literacy in the United States, Findings from the IEA Reading Literacy Study. 

Reading Literacy in the United States, Findings From The IEA Literacy Study (NCES 96-258), was published in 1996 by the U.S. Department of Education. It is based on data from (wait for it) 20+years ago. The Department of Education report focuses on the U.S. data.

I searched for key words:

• 61 percent : AWOL
• Low-income: AWOL
• Books: AWOL

So what do you think? How could the “fact” that jerked my chain have been pulled from this research report?

Note: in the 2006 study (pdf, 44 MB), U.S. fourth graders dropped from #2 to #18 in reading achievement score. So yeah, we seem to have a problem, but let’s make arguments for change based on solid data, shall we?

Poorly Prepared At Age Five?

In a 2011 press release (pdf) for her iPhone/iPodTouch/iPad mobile gaming application, Footsteps2Brilliance, founder Ilene Rosenthal says:

I created this company after reading a statistic that 46 percent of U.S. children enter kindergarten at risk of failure because they lack essential oral language and literacy skills.

Hmmm. We know from the 1996 report that income and education are contributors to literacy. How many low-income, no-high-school-diploma families have an iPhone, iPodTouch or iPad for their 4 year old? Conversely, how many high-income, college graduate familes have one?

But I digress. Rosenthal provides no source for her factoid (either in the press release or in the webinar that sent me down this rabbit hole).

Here’s what I found:

In a Missouri school district study, 46 percent of 191 kindergarten teachers said that half or more kids in their class had trouble following directions. (MyOptimumHealth – no source)

In a 1995 survey of 3,500 kindergarten teachers from across the country, many reported that large proportions of their students lacked important school readiness skills. For example, 46 percent of the kindergarten teachers reported that at least half the students in their classes had difficulty following directions, 36 percent reported that at least half of their class lacked academic skills they needed, and 34 percent reported that at least half of their class had difficulty working independently. (National Institute for Early Education, pdf, cited Rimm-Kaufman, S. E., Pianta, R. C., & Cox, M. J. (2000). Teachers’ judgments of problems in the transition to kindergarten. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 15 (2), 147–166.)

Here’s a little more from that referenced study (emphasis added):

Teachers [perceived] that 16% of children had difficult entries into kindergarten… Rates of perceived problems were related to school minority composition; district poverty level; and, for certain behaviors, school metropolitan status… Teachers’ ethnicity showed a significant relation to their rates of reported problems.

Hitting a digital brick wall, I changed my search query from <46 percent kindergarten lacking skills> to <enter kindergarten lacking skills>.

Hit number one, and back we go to Jumpstart’s report. Note, Jumpstart exists to solve the “early education crisis” so we know that they are biased towards presenting a problem (emphasis added):

According to a national longitudinal analysis by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), economically disadvantaged children may know only one or two letters of the alphabet when entering kindergarten, while children in the middle class will know all 26. Only half of the children from low-income families can write their own name, while more than 75 percent of children from higher income families can do so. Researchers also estimate that before ever entering kindergarten, cognitive scores for children of low-income families are likely to average 60 percent lower than those in the highest socioeconomic groups, something that remains true through high school. (Jumpstart, pdf, cited Lee, V. E. & Burkam, D. T. (2002). Inequality at the starting gate: Social background differences in achievement as children begin school. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute.)

The factoid that Rosenthal uses does not seem to exist, but Jumpstart makes an argument that an unknown number of “economically disadvantaged” children are entering the educational system “behind” more affluent peers. Let me point you to the U.S. Department of Education report (longer analysis at WiredPen) which reminds us that household economics may be a proxy for household educational level.

And let me remind you, gentle reader, that correlation is not causation.

I did find references to one-in-three children entering kindergarten (as well as “nearly half”) lacking necessary early reading skills, but alas, no sources given. One presentation credits (pdf) the 1-in-3 datapoint to unnamed research from 1985. One 1998 report (pdf) quotes then-Gov. Zell Miller (R-GA).

A report from UCLA (pdf) asserts (emphasis added) that “[u]p to one-third of American children enter kindergarten lacking at least some of the skills needed for a successful learning experience.” Their source, a 1998 book: Snow, C. E., Burns, M. S., & Griffin, P. (Eds.) (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

I’m going to walk out on a limb and suggest that this 1998 book (or maybe the 2007 report) is the initial source for the cannot-be-verified <one-in-three kids enter kindergarten lack reading skills> meme (3.3 million returns on Google).

What we do know is that parental education is correlated with childhood literacy (emphasis added):

Irrespective of whether we are looking at father’s or mother’s education, students whose parents have not graduated from high school have reading comprehension scores well below the U.S. average. Students whose parents have completed college have reading scores above the national average. (Reading Literacy in the United States, Findings From The IEA Literacy Study (NCES 96-258, p 45)

Verdict: 2-for-2 False

I can hear you thinking (laughing):

OMG! Someone is wrong on the Internet!

That’s not my point. It’s not being wrong on “the Internet” that sets my teeth on edge.

It is the use of sloppy/inaccurate/misleading data to craft persuasive messages.

It’s wrong. It leads to bad policy decisions (and maybe inappropriate foundation grant awardees).

And if done with intent, it’s unethical, too.

:: A longer version of this article (more analysis) appears at WiredPen
:: Follow me on Twitter!

I am assuming this is real and not a staged prank. Assuming it’s real, I am sympathetic with Mr. Jordan.

Unlike some, I am not fazed at the use of a gun. Not only am I one of those who believes the right to keep and bear arms is sacred, but it would have been more disturbing had he used a hammer or run over the laptop with a car. The gun is a distraction at most, although I certainly hope Mr. Jordan has taught his children proper use and respect for that fine firearm of his.

Nevertheless, however justified Mr. Jordan’s anger may be, if he’s wise he will take down this video and apologize–yes, apologize–to his daughter.

I suppose he may get angry at that suggestion, and I’m sure some of you reading this will also be angry. Certainly a lot of people, including some teenagers, are cheering this whole thing. But when tempers cool, here are some things to contemplate:

1) This teaches your child that destruction of valuable property is an appropriate way to express anger.

2) It also teaches your child that if you’re angry, you should retaliate–and retaliate not just in a moment of unthinking anger, but in a cold, calculating, planned manner.

3) The level of public attention this has received now vastly exceeds the level of the offense. Mr. Jordan almost certainly did not intend that, but that has been the result, raising this from teenage misbehavior to International Incident. (I know that was not the intent, but it’s what happened. Whoops.)

4) Teenagers can be selfish and lazy and bratty, but Mr. Jordan may wish to contemplate that there are millions of rebellious teens who do things like get pregnant, use drugs, get involved in crime, run away from home, even wind up in jail or commit suicide. None of those are funny, all of them are real, and they happen to parents of every race, religion, income level, and every part of the country (and world).

Mister Jordan spends much time berating his daughter for how good she has it. In this, he is right. But he may also want to thank God that his problems with his daughter amount to no more than whining about chores, some foul language, and complaining about what awful parents she has. Your girl could be strung out on drugs, pregnant, or in jail Mr. Jordan–maybe all three. Or just dead. And if you think I’m joking, give me a call and I’ll introduce you to some people I know who have had those very things happen to them. You and that girl’s mom need to get some perspective here, because you could have things a lot worse too, and I doubt you’d trade a whole warehouse full of laptops for that little girl.

Now here’s the funny thing: I might have done something very similar to this. I don’t think publicly embarrassing a teenager who’s done something like this is beyond the pale. But as a parent you need to be a little more creative. If my teenager had done something like this, and I was going to post a YouTube video like this, here’s what I would do:

1) Everything you said about how hard you had to work when you were a kid? Good. I’d say that. I left home at 15 and had my first job before that myself. Go ahead and say those things. But you don’t call the kid names or call her lazy. You just make the point of how easy she has it by comparison, and how hurtful it is to have her take that for granted.

2) All that stuff about the “cleaning lady?” I’d say every word of that the same, but I’d also add some extra: she gets to spend the next few weekends at the “cleaning lady’s” house helping her fix up her house. Try doing some cooking and cleaning and even some yard work for that “cleaning lady” and maybe she’ll learn a little more respect for people who are having hard times, and that you don’t treat that with contempt.

3) The laptop? I’d show myself on camera carefully putting it in a box, taking it to the post office, and mailing it to these people, or some other charity. Then I’d tell her if she wants another laptop, she can have it when she buys it for herself.

That would have been funny, it would have embarrassed her without frightening or humiliating her, and it would have illustrated the difference between a temper tantrum and reasonable consequences for bad behavior.

Seriously Mr. Jordan: I would go to your daughter, hug her, explain to her that what she did was wrong but that what you did was not the right way to respond to it. You should not be afraid to tell your child when you’re in the wrong. Then, I would work on a better relationship. Most definitely, I would keep in mind that kids may be selfish and unappreciative, but that’s a pretty normal thing: just about every parent of a teenager puts up with that. But you probably want to be more creative and thoughtful in your responses to it in the future.

(This item cross-posted to Dean’s World.)

For a global business community still experiencing economic pain, Facebook’s humongous $100 billion Initial Public Offering has been an emotional shot in the arm. For French business newspaper Les Echos, columnist Philippe Escande praises the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as being at the heart of what still makes the American business sector the greatest in the world.

For Les Echos, Philippe Escande starts out this way:

It is an improbable story – one that could happen only in the United States. That of a twenty-year-old kid who in 2004 founded his own business just to prove he can, and eight years later finds himself the leader of a business valued at $100 billion. One hundred billion dollars is as much as McDonald’s and two and a half times that of General Motors. All this for a sophomoric prank that today employs no more than 3,000 people.

That is the magic of the U.S. financial sector, which is now being so widely criticized. To all those who think that the stock market serves only to accommodate rapacious speculators who enrich themselves while asleep, getting richer whether the market rises or falls, the Facebook story is a reminder of the two basics of investing: the long-term and risk. The long-term, because the value attributed to Facebook, the profits of which are minimal but the cost of doing business for which is still modest, is an anticipation of future performance. It is the idea that this company, which has quadrupled its revenues in two years, can in a single decade become a giant worth tens of billion of dollars. Which is precisely the gamble Amazon’s stockholders have made over the last ten years, and who are concerned about its weak returns but fascinated by the explosion in sales. For Facebook, as for Amazon and Google, growth potential seems unlimited.

READ ON IN ENGLISH OR FRENCH AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.

Update: The material appears to have been developed with grants from DOJ, not directly by DOJ.

Ten years ago, the Bush Administration pushed a new program, Terrorism Information and Prevention System (Operation TIPS), designed to entice Americans to snitch on their neighbors. From Reason magazine:

TIPS in essence deputizes 1 million Americans in 10 cities as government informants. (That’s just the beginning for its August debut — the program will be expanded next year.) The announcement names “American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others” as potential members of this proud army of snoops and busybodies. A Washington Times story on the program points out that a common denominator for at least a couple of those categories is that their “jobs allow them access to private homes.”

This was before Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, which put the nix on Operation TIPS.

But.

In 2008, the Denver Post reported that there were 181 “Terrorism Liaison Officers” in Colorado.

“The problem is, you’re drafting individuals whose job isn’t law enforcement to spy on ordinary Americans and report their activities to the government,” said John Verdi, director of the open-government project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Now Public Intelligence reports that the Obama FBI has initiated a program called “Communities Against Terrorism.” PI has copies of 25 flyers “produced by the FBI and the Department of Justice [that] are distributed to local businesses in a variety of industries to promote suspicious activity reporting. The flyers are not released publicly, though several have been published in the past by news media and various law enforcement agencies around the country (emphasis added).”

For “Internet Cafes” the suspicious behavior includes just about anything you might do to try to ensure privacy in a public venue. Oddly enough, logging into your ISP account (AOL, Comcast) is considered “suspicious.” So is gaming. VoIP. Encryption.

Excuse me: why wouldn’t you try to protect your privacy when using an Internet Cafe? And why wouldn’t you check your email or “phone home”?

It gets worse. You are suspicious if you use the computer to:

• Download content of extreme/radical nature with violent themes. (By whose definition?)
• Gather information … or obtain photos, maps or diagrams of transportation, sporting venues, or populated locations. (Trying to figure out where free parking might be found near a stadium?)
• Purchase chemicals, acids, hydrogen peroxide, acetone, fertilizer, etc. (Just go ahead and make us give a fingerprint every time we buy something already!)
• Download or transfer files with “how-to” content such as … [a long list]

Spot this behavior? Then those businesses are to

• Gather information about individuals without drawing attention to yourself
• Identify license plates, vehicle description, names used, languages spoken, ethnicity, etc

There are tip sheets for retail stores that may be even worse. They include the suggestion that retail firms “Require valid ID from all new customers.” (I was joking about the fingerprint, in case you didn’t realize that. But I didn’t realize paying cash for something made you a potential terrorist, whether at an electronics store or tattoo parlor – pdf or a surplus store). Ditto requesting a specific room or location in a hotel/motel. (We always request first floor when we are traveling by motorcycle. My dad always requests a handicapped access room.)

The generalizations in these documents overwhelm the common sense points that are occasionally made, such as thinking that “unusual odors or liquids seeping from a guest room” or the discovery of “weapons, ammunition, and explosives” in a guest room or dumpster would be suspicious. Doesn’t mean you are a terrorist, but I’d sure be reporting that to my boss if I worked at a hotel or motel. Without a memo from the FBI.

Irony alert: here’s the footer:

It is important to remember that just because someone’s speech, actions, beliefs, appearance, or way of life is different; it does not mean that he or she is suspicious.

Why are these documents not publicly available on the FBI website? Why is the Obama Administration quietly soliciting Main Street to spy on its customers? And why is the mainstream media stone cold silent?

Twitter Mentions Of Komen, Per Topsy

But this contextual stat is equally startling: over the same 7-day period, there were 507,000 Twitter mentions of the Super Bowl, America’s greatest sports spectacle which is scheduled for Sunday.

Susan G. Komen tweets: 306,000; Super Bowl tweets, 507,000.

Over a three day period, about 10,000 tweets contained the critical phrase #shameonkomen, according to Topsy Labs. During the same period, about 15,000 tweets included the supportive shorthand, #standwithpp.

Wow. That’s a lot of digital water cooler chatter about boobies.

The Sound Of Digital Silence

Throughout the media crisis, which began late on Tuesday, officials from Komen were distant, silent.

The AP wire story broke Tuesday afternoon:

@AP: AP Exclusive: Amid abortion debate, Susan G. Komen cancer charity halting grants to Planned Parenthood: http://apne.ws/AgalYr By @CraryAP

Komen communications folks seem to have closed their doors and turned out the lights long before 5 pm, given the story’s time stamp of 12:31 pm PST/14:31 CST. Not so Planned Parenthood: they had a statement and tweet posted less than 30 minutes later: 12:52 pm PST or 15:52 pm EST. Planned Parenthood posted 12 more tweets on Tuesday, the day the story broke.

But on Tuesday there was no acknowledgement of the controversy on @komenforthecure. Nothing from @NancyGBrinker, either. And nothing on the Komen Facebook page.

On Wednesday, Komen tweeted six times. Two were links to a video statement from Brinker (96+ retweets, combined), three were stats, and one was a reply about the Komen Facebook page. Brinker also tweeted her video statement (29 retweets). Planned Parenthood: 22 tweets (several with 50+ retweets).

Komen put a statement on Facebook just before 8.00 am Texas-time on Wednesday. It currently has 10,477 comments, 3,281 likes.

In contrast, 8,033 people have “liked” the Planned Parenthood “I stood up for women’s health” poster. And 3,278 have shared it.

Nancy Brinker With Andrea Mitchell

Over on Twitter, after it was far too late to stem the digital tide, Komen’s brand management folks began tweeting wildly: 42 tweets on Thursday! But most were statements, not interactions, so this was half-hearted at best. It took until Friday for Komen to finally began to talk to people on Twitter using @replies. By then, we know, it was too late. Komen had officially reversed itself. Sorta.

The Winners and Losers Game

The money winner? Planned Parenthood, by far. The organization temporarily lost about $680,000. In three days, they picked up $3 million in donations.

Planned Parenthood, meet the Haitian Earthquake effect. The Japanese Tsunami effect. The Barack Obama and Ron Paul campaign success.

A sufficiently charged up public will open its collective wallet, at least once.

The winner in the Twitterverse is also clearly Planned Parenthood. According to data from TwitterCounter, @ppact had about 1,400 fewer followers than Komen on January 25. The projection for Saturday? That @PPACT will exceed Komen by about 1,400. However, both organizations gained followers during the dispute. What’s the adage about there being no such thing as bad news?

TwitterCounter - Komen v Planned Parenthood

And then there’s Tumblr. plannedparenthoodsavedme takes a page from the “We are the 99 percent” playbook. And does it well. “Planned Parenthood actually helped me chose NOT to abort my baby.” “Planned Parenthood Found My Breast Cancer.”

And the Tumblr is “not affiliated” with Planned Parenthood.

The loser, all around, is Komen.

Whether or not the decision was actually politically-motivated, it looked like it was.

As Lawrence Lessig writes so eloquently in Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress–and a Plan to Stop It, the reasonable possibility of financial or political motivation is enough to breach trust. It’s Caesar’s wife.

Amy Tan @AmyTanWriter
Interesting fact: Susan Komen Cancer Foundation hired a anti-abortion activist, former right-wing candidate, and… fb.me/1eClzxZW9

Brandon VerVelde @bvervelde
Thank you, Susan G. Komen for rescinding your funding for the abortion factories known as “Planned Parenthood.” #wiright

“Unfortunately, it seems that Komen caved to political pressure from the pro-abortion movement and enforcers in the media.” – Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) in SJMN, 3 February

“To be giving grants to an organization that effectively ends so many lives — (it) just seems to me they made the right decision before and they’re making the wrong decision now.” – Rep. Kevin Brady R-TX) in Chicago Tribune

Peggy Orenstein @peggyorenstein
Breast cancer doesn’t care whether you are pro- or anti-choice, but the Komen Foundation does…. ow.ly/8Nz1L

And then there are these two:

Jade Morey (@JadeMorey) is the Southeast Director at GoVote.com; she has subsequently made her Twitter account private. Karen Handel (@KarenHandel) is a former GOP candidate for governor in Georgia and a SGK vice president; she has subsequently deleted this retweet, which was captured by @LisaMcIntire.

Jade Morey was RTed 10 times, but only nine show

Enough reasonable doubt about political motivation for you?

But what about that severance?

Komen’s 990s for 2008 – 2010 (the fiscal year runs April – March) reveal that the organization has coughed up an estimated $1.9 million in severance fees. Brikner resumed leadership of the organization in November 2009. I’ll have the details in a later post. But unless the mainstream media — TV and big name newspapers — find the salaries and severance shocking, don’t expect this to cripple Komen.

Yes, Twitter and Facebook amplify — but there has to be something to be amplified.

Lessons For Communicators

1. Embrace the fact that the Net never sleeps. PR no longer runs banker’s hours (if it ever did).
2. Use tools to monitor Twitter and Facebook for mentions of your organization. Then be ready to respond. In real time.
3. As in any sales discussion or confrontation, it’s important to acknowledge the other person’s “pain.” In the digital social realm, we do this by “talking” to people in a public space. It needs to feel like conversation but be aware that what we are simultaneously doing is publishing. (Karen Handel forgot that.)
4. Have communication plans ready for contingencies. Planned Parenthood had known for about six weeks that this decision had been made, that this announcement was coming. And they were prepared. Komen, who had known even longer than PP, wasn’t. [Added: I'm reading claims that it was PP that tipped AP to the story. Have not seen evidence, just claim. Will update if I do.]
5. Re-read the Tylenol case. Then Exxon. Which do you want on your resume?

Edited for spelling errors and to add a resource link; added link to TMV post about salaries.

Added: Digerati used in the sense of someone who is comfortable with technology. There are many definitions for the word, which at one time (and in some groups) means “digital elite” in the opinion/thought-leader sense.

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If that’s the real reason this sudden reversal came about, (potential loss of sponsors) the sudden reversal by Komen wouldnt be an honest and dependable representation any more than the bungled previous attempt to be opaque about the real reasons PP was defunded to begin with. There is much more scoop to what’s going on inside Komen than they are saying, which only adds to reasoned minds wondering what’s to hide there, and in this decision to defund and then “allow PP to apply” again

…whose ox got gored that such a stentorian announcement about defunding became a whimper to allow PP back into the ‘good graces’ of Komen again. As the oldtimers say, there’s something fishy about this. But, it will all come out soon, I think. There are investigative reporters at work on it as we speak.

The operative words in Komen’s newest statement reversing themselves, are that Komen “will allow” Planned Parenthood “to apply” to them for grants. (while funding the existing grant for now). But Brinker’s statement says nothing whatsoever about commitment to help fund these programs within PP. There is no funding future in this sense. Only “permission” to apply. Big difference. The application by PP could be turned down in a heartbeat. I’d say to keep one’s eye on those words, for they surely can be weasel words, and many will be keeping an eye on Komen to see exactly how they fund PP, or not, past this funding period.

and also keep an eye on what Shaun Mullen brought up in his post below, about Komen defunding to the tune of many millions of dollars also, medical research at several big research centers, regarding cell research. That defunding still, for now, stands as a done deal in Komen’s eyes. A huge blow to the research centers, and smells again of politics in that defunding also, as there is a long history, save Nancy Reagan, of utter resistance to cell research on the part of the GOP now dominated by the far right religious groups.

Brinker has far far more acumen to know how Komen’s words defunding PP would affect much of the populace. There’s far more going on behind the scenes at Komen than is being said, I think, for Brinker was an ambassador and also the equivilent of ‘hostess’ for visiting dignitaries for a sitting president. To say that they are ‘distressed’ that anyone would imagine anything negative about Komen’s motives, seems entirely either disingenuous or being asleep at the wheel big time. Being an ambassador and ‘hostess’ to dignitaries from across the world, means having to know, in order to fit the job description the utmost in tact, diplomacy, decency, propriety, always watching to see who is going to like and and who is going to rail against any potential pronouncement, and a priori… and utter discretion being the greater part of valour.

Thereby Brinker’s wording in her “retraction” is doubly incomprehensible. Brinker is supposed to be the master at handling ‘people matters.’ Yet, she said as though this was just a little trip up: “We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives,” president and founder Nancy Brinker said in a statement today. “We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.”

Rather than her statement being about the suffering and anguish caused to poor women who heard of this defunding, and rather than speaking about PP wondering what they would now do to make it up $$-wise( and they seem to have, but only temporarily) and rather than speaking to people who were caused to suffer over this whole matter, it’s about Komen and Brinker being ‘misunderstood.’ My questions remain, whose ox got gored to bring this reversal around… whose heads rolled and why? And especially, how did this public non-profit, HOW did this truly happen that they put so many through so much and now say ooops.

Here is an excerpt from the WaPo article:

By Sarah Kliff, Friday, February 3, 9:41 AM

The Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure Foundation Friday announced it would revise a controversial new policy that barred the organization from funding Planned Parenthood.

The foundation said that Planned Parenthood would now be eligible to apply for grants. It did not, however, address other reasons Komen has cited for why it might choose not to approve such grants.

“Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation,” a Friday statement said. “ We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.”

“We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities,” the statement continues.

The statement left some ambiguity, however, because it did not mention a second reason Komen has given for ending Planned Parenthood’s funding: That the group did not provide direct mammogram services, but instead referred patients out to other locations.

On Thursday, Komen President Elizabeth Thompson told reporters that the funding decision was unrelated to the Congressional investigation into whether Planned Parenthood was illegally using federal funds to pay for abortions.

Komen founder Nancy Brinker said the organization wants to support groups that directly provide breast health services, such as mammograms. She noted that Planned Parenthood was providing only mammogram referrals.

Planned Parenthood celebrated the news as a victory.

“We are enormously grateful that the Komen Foundation has clarified its grantmaking criteria, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Komen partners, leaders and volunteers,” said Planne d Parenthood president Cecile Richards in a statement. “What these past few days have demonstrated is the deep resolve all Americans share in the fight against cancer, and we honor those who are at the helm of this battle.”

Warren Buffett’s complaint about his secretary paying more in taxes than he does is having a global ripple effect. According to columnist Helena Garrido of Portugal’s Jornal De Negotios, the debate on tax fairness in the United States should be food for thought in Portugal, where the economy is in a tailspin and thanks to widespread tax evasion and tax avoidance, tax revenue has plummeted.

For the Jornal De Negotios, Helena Garrido writes in part:

The question that small enterprises raise about the recent tax control initiative is always the same: what about the others? Why have tax administrators limited the tax planning that larger enterprises have to deal with? In an environment of austerity, it is a problem that concerns most Western societies: the lack of equity.

In the United States, where the debate about tax fairness is red hot, tax inequality is in the public square. Even before this major crisis hit in 2007, it was reported that Warren Buffett pays lower taxes than his secretary, whom Barack Obama has transformed into a symbol of fiscal inequality. Last week, the most serious Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, was obliged to disclose his tax returns, which showed that his effective tax rate was 13.9 percent in 2010 – on an income of $42 million.

What would we discover if we found out how much in taxes larger fortunes in Portugal pay?

Of course the battle against tax evasion must be a cause of the whole of society. Each of us must be aware that for every person who fails to pay their taxes, there is someone else who has to pay double. But for that, one would need to know that the tax authorities treat everyone the same and have effective weapons at their disposal.

READ ON IN ENGLISH OR PORTUGUESE AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.

Duke, a progressive university with a strong med school may have ‘a problem, Houston.” They’ve invited Brinker along with four other notable people to do 2012 commencement. Problem may rise up with parts of vocal student body and profs, as they now realize Brinker just cut off Planned Parenthood from Komen funding for breast cancer screenings and breast cancer education for poor and needful women.

Brinker says she and her board convened some new ‘rules.’ That PP got cut off because of new stringent funding rules that preclude any org that is being investigated from receiving funds from Komen… even though, as I read it, Brinker says they fund in over 50 countries worldwide.

. My question would be then, so how do you know if clinics in other countries are being investigated or not? and would you trust third world and dictatorial or faux democratic or corp run governments to ‘investigate’ in all truth and justice? Really?

Here in the US, a republican congressperson began an ‘investigation’ into Planned Parenthood that sounds more like harrassment… “to see if PP is living up to the federal rules for abortion.”

I’m a woman who is a pro life person for myself and my daughters. Meaning I will do all I can, and have, to bring life to fruition, even though the circumstances have been far far from ideal. And for me, that was right. But/and, in no way will I try to pressure all others about what they ought do, especially in cases of rape and incest, abject poverty and being with abusers. If I’m asked, I will say/ offer my thoughts on what I see as precious life in utero, but knowing that most women find that so, even if they think/ feel they cannot continue the life of this embryo. That is why they suffer often with their choices.

The idea that some denigrators of women throw about… that women who come to the heavy decision to terminate the pregnancy are monsters…. reminds me of the spewers of propaganda against the Chinese in WWII [for a US secret at that time: horrible counter-moves against targeted segments of the Chinese in order to provoke rage and ramp up their support to fight Japan], creating posters showing deep yellow skin, slanted eyes and yellow buck teeth, with Chinese soldiers gutting babies on bayonets (this image was used for any Asian who was considered ‘enemy.’ And it is similar bloated propaganda re women. And, this attack on women insisting despite facts (such as I’ve heard in my consulting room for more than 40 years now, often many many years after a woman’s had an abortion and is still in sincere regret and sorrow) that women so choosing to end a pregnancy dont give a good g-d dang, makes no sense for most women I know… So, if I’m asked, I can gently say my piece which is mainly about not panicking, and seeking many means of support if one can, even from strangers if need be … but otherwise, I keep my own counsel.

I despise seeing anti-abortion groups standing on street corners screaming and screeching and bellowing like rutting animals at women who are entering a clinic, projecting onto her, most often falsely, that she’s on her way to go have her 20th abortion as idle entertainment. That projection onto strangers is egregious and in most cases, the bearing of false witness…which is completely antithetical to the premises of the religion the screamers say they follow.

But, I digress. Back to Duke’s invite to Brinker. We’ll have to wait to see what happens next. Brinker is a careerist woman, who has climbed the ladder of influence. Her organization has exploited to the max her sister’s dying request. I dont say that negatively, but with several books by Brinker, tours, speaking engagements, fund raising, putting in to be nominated for awards of all kinds, it appears that every avenue to raise money –and be recognized– has been hit and hard.

I see that the Komen org is 30 years old and claims it has given 2 billion dollars away in 30 years. For some reason, I’d thought it was far, far more than that per year. I’m still going to look at annual report, and also see about FOIA on line item budget for Komen for the Cure. I’d like to know how much the execs get paid, what perks the board gets, where they trim the budget, and most of all, where they dont.

As for Duke, we’ll see who’ll cut off whom, if/when.

Here’s more about Brinker’s life: Brinker in 1982 founded Susan G. Komen for the Cure after promising her dying sister, Susan G. Komen, that she would do everything in her power to end breast cancer. Komen for the Cure says they have invested almost $2 billion to research, community health, advocacy and global programs that serve hundreds of thousands of women in more than 50 countries.

Brinker, herself a breast cancer survivor, was U.S. Ambassador to Hungary (ambassadorships can come from having an ‘in’ via a president, and sometimes by having made a huge monetary contribution in support of that president or just be one of the in-crowd) from 2001 to 2003 and U.S. Chief of Protocol (which is like hospitality charge nurse, offering social times for foreign mission folks, and visiting leaders, and ensuring their time spent in the US is “positive and productive.) from 2007 to the end of the George W. Bush administration.

In 2009, President Barack Obama named Brinker a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for her work to end breast cancer.

She serves as the World Health Organization’s Goodwill Ambassador for Cancer Control and has written four books, including the New York Times best-seller “Promise Me,” about Komen’s growth from a promise made to her sister to the global organization of today.

See also: Shaun Mullen writes about the Komen debacle above the fold today, and Taylor Marsh’s article calling out the liberals for being asleep is farther down the TMV stack.

Yesterday, in a YouTube/Google Plus town hall, President Obama finally admitted to what the world has known for years: that the United States has been using drone aircraft to kill militants in among other places, America’s supposed ally, Pakistan. This editorial from Pakistan’s The Nation welcomes this admission of the obvious, but wonders how the president could claim that most of those killed in the strikes were militants, and calls for shooting down the drones whenever they are found in Pakistan air space.

The Nation editorial starts out this way:

President Barack Obama has at last acknowledged what has long been undisputed fact to even the most casual observer: CIA-operated drones have been carrying out missions in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. His claim that they targeted “al-Qaeda and its affiliates” and not civilians, however, raised more than a few eyebrows. After all, if all of the 2,661 people killed in the 303 drone attacks since 2001 were militants and their affiliates, the phenomenon of terrorism would have fizzled out long ago. The fact is that only a small number of those killed were confirmed as militants, while the rest were civilians posing no danger to the “U.S. and its citizens,” which is the cause of the drone strikes according to the American leader. Mr. Obama made his remarks in a discussion with Web users on Google Plus and You Tube. Before that, U.S. officials had refused to talk about the drones in public.

READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.

Updated 4 February, in the wee hours of the morning:
An alert reader, who looked at Schedule J more thoroughly than I did, noticed that former Komen CEO Hala Moddelmog, the woman who stepped down in November 2009, received $279,734 the following fiscal year as part of her severance package. Others receiving severance: Annetta Hewko ($134,483), Kimberly Earle ($271,781) and Marianne Alciati ($208,231). Holy cow. That’s $894,000 – almost a million dollars – in severance.

• Alciati was Vice President, Research and Scientific Affairs from 2008-2010. She is currently a health research consultant.
• Earle was Chief Operating Officer at Komen and became Chief Executive Officer of Mothers Against Drunk Driving in June 2010. Last month, she was named the inaugural President of the Edith Sanford Breast Cancer Foundation.
• Hewko was Komen’s Vice President, Global Strategies and Programs. She is currently a management consultant.
• Moddelmog was CEO of Komen from 2006-2009; she is currently President, Arby’s Restaurant Group, Inc., a position she assumed in May 2010.

Updated 3 February in wee hours of the morning:
The key message of this post still stands — check before you tweet.

However, Susan G. Koman CEO Nancy Brinker is very generously compensated. A reader pointed me to the SGK IRS filing for fiscal 2010 (April 2010-March 2011, pdf), which reveals that CEO Nancy Brinker had a salary of $417,171. As CEO from Nov 2009 – March 2010, CharityNavigator.org and the IRS filing shows no reported compensation.

According to CharityNavigator, the median nonprofit CEO salary in the south (SGK is headquartered in Dallas) was $269,057 in 2010. For health NFPs, it was $144,080.

And Komen? They have yet to return my phone call or respond to my email or tweet.

Oh. Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards? $319,245, in New York City (Fiscal 2010, 990, pdf)

Contrary to a very popular tweet, the current CEO of the Susan G. Komen Foundation does not appear to make almost $500,000 a year.

According to Charity Navigator, Hala G. Moddelmog, the former president and CEO who left the organization in 2009, made $456,437 for the fiscal year that ended March 2010.

That was two years ago. The current CEO is Nancy Brinker, who is reported as “not compensated” in that earlier report. I’ve not found any published report that her non-compensated status has changed. What I did find was a 2011 assertion that Brinker takes no salary, an assertion from someone who has no love for Komen. There has been no annual report published on the Komen web site since 2010.

Update: I’ve tweeted Komen and sent email asking for confirmation that CEO Brinker remains non-compensated, per the most recent charity watchdog report.

The tweet, by Slate Senior Editor Jessica Grose (@JessGrose), references an October 2010 Slate article. The article asserts a figure for an unnamed CEO, a figure for which the author (a cancer survivor writing a review of a book criticizing breast cancer research) provides no source:

The CEO of the Komen Foundation, who earns $459,406 a year (more than 5,000 race entry fees), could try living on the wages of your average oncologist—$250,000 a year—and top up the fund with that extra $200,000 or so.

Run away from unsubstantiated claims like this, even if they make your heart go all a-flutter.

I have heartburn about much of what goes on under the Komen name, not the least being their trademark claim for the cure. And I think our focus on breast cancer blinds us to preventable disease: the number one killer of women in America is heart disease.

But don’t drum up opposition using a lie.

What about the other data point, that Komen provides only $680,000 in donations to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening?

According to the most recent consolidated annual report (2010, pdf), Komen “paid for” 625,000 breast screenings “last year.” Annual screenings cost? $46,861,000. It’s on page 14. Who did those screenings? Komen doesn’t say. AP reports:

Planned Parenthood said the Komen grants totaled roughly $680,000 last year and $580,000 the year before, going to at least 19 of its affiliates for breast-cancer screening and other breast-health services.

[...]

According to Planned Parenthood, its centers performed more than 4 million breast exams over the past five years, including nearly 170,000 as a result of Komen grants.

At that ratio, Komen should be sending all of its screening dollars to PPH. (Yes, I know that the Komen data are, to be kind, vague. But still: the Komen annual report suggests the screenings cost $75 each, but PPH is getting them for $4?)

What’s really bad about this decision is that local breast cancer screenings are funded by local Komen affiliate money. National money goes to research. This is another reason the juxtaposition of data points is a false argument; the CEO is not involved in those local decisions, other than to bless the organizations eligible for grants.

What’s good is that it’s less than 2 percent of the money raised for screenings. PPH isn’t very high on local Komen affiliate priorities. That might explain why Komen made this decision.

Key take-away: if a tweet tweaks your heartstrings or elevates your blood pressure, ignore the knee-jerk click to retweet! I almost did it myself when I saw this one, it was so outrageous. But my rational mind said, “that just does not sound right.”

I’m glad I waited.

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RT @kegill: Komen CEO Compensation Tweet Rings False http://is.gd/PFBYIj @JessGrose | CEO Brinker salary $0; screening funds from locals not nat’l
https://twitter.com/#!/kegill/status/164668374931095552

In this case, Amazon wants to protect its bundled product, the Kindle. The Kindle is to Amazon as Office or MSIE are to Microsoft, extensions of an infrastructure franchise. Over at Google, it’s two pronged: Google+ and Android. At Apple, it’s the iTunes ecosystem.

Two of those businesses – Google and Amazon – engineered their dominance in part through the use of APIs, providing free access to their data in order to propagate their services (and brands). Now that they are super-major players, they are rethinking (restricting access to) those same APIs. The result is pissing off developers (Google’s changes in free services) and causing partners to bail (Goodreads and Amazon). In both cases, the alternatives are not straightforward or 100% substitutable. The result is friction of the economic kind and a diminished marketplace for consumers.

This is not what tech-opia envisioned.

But it is the nature of digital goods, which are more like public goods than retail goods made of atoms. Digital goods also have network effects which lead to a winner-take-all market structure.

Public goods, like software and information, have high fixed costs and really low marginal costs. This means the cost of creation is wrapped up in the first product sold. Everything else? Marginal costs of replication and distribution, which are (relatively) low. In the case of digital goods, approaching zero low.

Public goods are non-rival. You and I can both “own” the good at the same time, without duking it out to see who gets to drink a single bottle of, for example. This means we can both buy a Kindle book without any impact on a warehouse and only marginal impact on Amazon’s server farm.

And they are non-excludable. The owner has a hard time making everyone pay because copies are perfect and easily created; DRM is the attempt to make digital goods act more like non-digital ones. This is the principle underlying SOPA and PIPA and ACTA (and all the laws that came before).

The firms that supply public goods — such as water, sewer, electricity, telephone infrastructure (wires), cable (wires) — have historically been regulated because, contrary to common mantra, society is better off when there is only one set of expensive infrastructure : not 10 cable companies digging up the streets in NYC but none interested in Ellesnburg WA (because the population density is insufficient). Hence the term, regulated monopoly.

Compete, instead, on providing services over that infrastructure. We got used to this system when alternatives to AT&T’s long distance service were finally available. And the cost of long distance calls plummeted.

Alternatively, citizens decide to supply some services themselves — like fire departments, armies, roads and lighthouses — through their governments. Sometimes ROI isn’t the right measure.

Am I arguing that the government should run Amazon or Google? No. But I am pointing out — arguing — that the nature of digital goods is different. The economics are different. Laissez faire works best when markets are perfect; these markets clearly are not.[1]

The question is what form of regulation/oversight should citizens demand, not whether there should be any. Prohibiting/regulating bundling as a way to extend reach might be a good step. It sure would have been a smart move in the finance sector, now wouldn’t it? [2]

[1] See Adam Smith, not American political rhetoric. Smith abhorred monopolies.

[2] See repeal of Glass-Steagall and other legislation/regulation that allowed banks to bundle services under one shell, erh roof.

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Obama, 2012 SOTU, White House Photo

Flash forward almost five years. On Monday at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, Google+ (which is also less than a year old), is the stage for a presidential response to last week’s State of the Union address. As in 2007, the questions are generated by us. And as in 2007, which questions get answered is not being left in the hands of the crowd.

From 2007:

In case you’ve been somewhere other than online lately, the “news” is that today, Democratic party challengers will answer questions generated by “you” (Time’s person of the year) — rather than seasoned political reporters and pundits — although question selection has been trusted not to the wisdom of crowds but to CNN.

From 2012, per the White House:

On Monday, January 30, the President will join a special Google+ Hangout from the West Wing. He’ll be answering several of the most popular questions that have been submitted through YouTube, and some of the people who submitted questions will even be invited to join the President in the Hangout and take part in the live conversation.

The “interview” will also be streamed live on the White House YouTube channel. This makes sense: the White House YouTube channel has 192,190 subscribers and 13.9 million channel views; the White House Google+ page has 56,334 followers.

What I was looking for in 2007 was a break from how politicians play to the camera: “Which candidates would answer questions like they were talking with a real person, instead of regurgitating a pre-set soundbite spin?”

I’ll be watching for something similar on Monday: can President Obama talk to the camera as though he is talking to a real person? In other words, can he talk to us, connect with us, or will he forever be locked into his teleprompter?

But I’ll also be watching to see which questions are selected as well as who is allowed to join the hangout and what that means; in other words, will hangout participants simply be a virtual audience or will they be allowed to, you know, participate? (Not holding my breath.)

YouTube Platform

The question process is 100% reliant on the Google platform. You have to have a YouTube account (ie, a Google account) in order to post a question or vote on a question. According to the channel, 227,966 people have submitted 133,255 questions and cast 1,630,870 votes.

What questions have gotten the most votes? There isn’t a straightforward answer, as the “sort by popularity” link … doesn’t (Safari and Chrome, Mac). Here are the top vote-getters, based on looking at the first 10 pages of “most popular” results. Note: each of these eight have less than 0.05% of the votes cast; people can vote for more than one question, however.

1. 6,279 votes: Why are you personally supporting the extradition UK Citizen Richard O’Dwyer for solely linking to copyright infringing works using an Extradition Treaty designed to combat terrorism and to bring terrorists to Judgement in the USA?
   jeepersmedia, Connecticut USA
2. 6,256 votes : Mr. President, what’s being done to battle SOPA, PIPA, and the apparently recently exposed ACTA? Some of us are beginning to feel as if we’ll be arrested or fined for every little thing involving any sort of media.
   nidira, Cleveland, OH
3. 5,060 votes : Mr. Obama: Back in ’04 you said the ‘War on Drugs’ has been ‘a utter failure’ and that we need to rethink & decriminalize marijuana. You did a 180 degree turn on this. What are your plans for this ‘war’ in the future since all it does is bleed money?
   sectiontwelve, Boston, MA
4. 4,580 votes : Why did you sign the National Defense Authorization Act (a law which opened the door for trial-free, indefinite detention of anyone, including US citizens, so long as the government calls them terrorists) when you said you were going to veto it?
   obsidianwizroh
5. 4,501 votes: As a retired LAPD deputy police chief with 20 years experience, I saw the failure of our country’s drug policies. Polls say more Americans now support legalizing marijuana than support prohibition. What do you say to this growing voter constituency?
   copssaylegalizedrugs, Los Angeles, CA
6. 4,178 votes : After CEO Chris Dodd openly admitted on FOX News to the corruption of the MPAA attempting to buy laws like SOPA, PIPA, and others; how can middle class Americans know that our votes will be heard over these profiteers?
   sparkstr
7. 4,139 votes: With over 850,000 Americans arrested in 2010, on marijuana charges alone, and tens of billions of tax dollars being spent locking up marijuana users, isn’t it time to regulate and tax cannabis?
   vicki221
8. 3,021 votes : With over 850,000 Americans arrested in 2010, on marijuana charges alone, and tens of billions of tax dollars being spent locking up marijuana users, isn’t it time to regulate and tax marijuana? Alcohol/Tobacco are 5,000x more dangerous. Wake up!
   christmadden

You and I know he’s not going to address the drug war, even though this is probably the most asked-category of question (3,428 questions for marijuana, 2,431 questions for drug). I can’t imagine him addressing number one or four, although he might respond to the SOPA/PIPA question set (2,469 questions for SOPA).

Other question categories of interest: 1,825 questions for NDAA; 1,735 questions for terrorism; 1,637 questions for education; 1,406 questions for Citizen’s United; 1,171 questions for Social Security; 946 questions for health insurance; and 401 questions for Medicare.

Will you be watching?

Supporting Media

Click here to view the embedded video.

Seed Newsvine

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Academy of Sciences published a study purporting to show how psilocybin, the active ingredient in what are known as “magic mushrooms” is helpful in the treatment of depression, PTSD and anxiety. Another study, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, found similar results.

Meantime, researchers around the world have been experimenting with Ecstasy, whose active ingredient, MDMA, has been linked to improvements among people suffering from depression.

The Academy of Sciences study looks at where and how psychedelics work in the human brain. Turns out, “turning off parts of the brain may be the real secret to expanding your mind.” And a Johns Hopkins study finds mushrooms induce mystical/spiritual experiences descriptively identical to spontaneous ones people have reported for centuries.

Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner

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US regulators are reportedly looking into whether Google manipulates its search results to favour its own products and have expanded the investigation to include Google+.

That’s a far cry from the company mission/vision/mantra in 2004, which is when (Chief Executive) Larry Page told Playboy (emphasis added, tip):

Most portals show their own content above content elsewhere on the web. We feel that’s a conflict of interest, analogous to taking money for search results. Their search engine doesn’t necessarily provide the best results; it provides the portal’s results. Google conscientiously tries to stay away from that. We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible. It’s a very different model.

I think it’s a conflict of interest, too. That’s the argument I’ve made against Google’s preferential treatment in its search results of content published on Google+ or created by people with Google+ profiles. Then along came Search Plus Your World, which provides a new “Personal Results” view that appears at the top of your screen.

Search Plus Your World

Danny Sullivan writes:

Search Plus Your World may cause some privacy worries, as private content may appear as if it is exposed publicly (it is not). It might also cause concern by making private content more visible to friends and family than those sharing may have initially intended.

However, this social world is limited to Google+.

In addition, Google has added a question at the end of its search listing: “Want to ask your friends about [whatever you put in the search box]?” The query goes to Google+.

Hence the results manipulation in The Guardian report.

If you’d like to see your non-Google social circle, such as friends from Facebook or Twitter, you’ll need to use this third party app, Don’t Be Evil. (It’s a bookmarklet hidden underneath the “Try A More Relevant Google” link — a clear sign that this site was created by engineers, not anyone with UX expertise.)

But wait. There’s more. And it’s worse.

Google is consolidating its privacy policies — 60 policies into one. That, in and of itself, doesn’t sound horrible. In fact, it sounds customer-friendly.

Here’s the not-so-customer-friendly part:

In addition to consolidating its privacy policies, Google plans on consolidating the data it has about your interactions with its products and the web. As Jessica Guynn, the LA Times, writes:

Google Inc. said it is changing its official policy so it can track users across all Google services including email, Web search and YouTube in a move that could invite heavier scrutiny of its privacy practices.

The new policy, which takes effect March 1, affects hundreds of millions of users who log into Google on their desktops or on their mobile devices. The only way to turn off the data sharing is to quit Google.

You read that right: there is no “opt out” except to ditch Gmail, Google docs, Google-the-search vehicle, Google maps, YouTube, your Android table or phone, and any other product you might use.

Google’s Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering, writes:

Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services.

Google presents this as a way to be nice to its customers. But The Economist warns (emphasis added):

But there are other, unspoken reasons that Google is keen to make this change. By creating comprehensive profiles of users by combining crumbs of data they leave across its services, the firm is betting it can target more online ads at them more accurately. It also wants to position itself as a comprehensive online portal in order to compete more effectively with Facebook, which is soaking up an ever-increasing amount of web surfers’ time.

There’s “portal” again. When it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck …

And from Forbes:

After this Google blog post announcing the company’s new privacy policy went up today, Facebook management was probably breathing a nice big sigh of relief. No longer can they be accused of driving the biggest privacy steamroller, because with today’s announcement an even bigger steamroller is revving up to flatten user privacy.

Gizmodo is blunt (and has had fun with Page and Brin in an illustration):

What this means for you is that data from the things you search for, the emails you send, the places you look up on Google Maps, the videos you watch in YouTube, the discussions you have on Google+ will all be collected in one place. It seems like it will particularly affect Android users, whose real-time location (if they are Latitude users), Google Wallet data and much more will be up for grabs. And if you have signed up for Google+, odds are the company even knows your real name, as it still places hurdles in front of using a pseudonym (although it no longer explicitly requires users to go by their real names).

[...]

So why are we calling this evil? Because Google changed the rules that it defined itself. Google built its reputation, and its multi-billion dollar business, on the promise of its “don’t be evil” philosophy. That’s been largely interpreted as meaning that Google will always put its users first, an interpretation that Google has cultivated and encouraged.

Is such self-serving (“evil”) behavior an inevitable result of organization growth?

What will you do? Say I told you so (because you use some other service)? Shrug and feel powerless? Find alternate services? Call your congressman?

What?

P.S. This is as good a time as any to remind folks about EPIC2015:
Click here to view the embedded video.

Critics say that the name is misleading because the bill would create a database of every “every digital act by every American.” The Obama Administration Department of Justice has lobbied for these expanded record-gathering and -keeping powers.

According to the CRS bill summary for HR 1981 (wow, that was awfully close to 1984), which Rep Lamar Smith (R-TX) introduced in May 2011, the bill:

Requires a provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service to retain for at least 18 months the temporarily assigned network addresses the service assigns to each account unless that address is transmitted by radio communication. Bars any cause of action against a provider for retaining records as required. Makes a good faith reliance on the requirement to retain records a complete defense to a civil action. Expresses the sense of Congress that such records should be stored securely to protect customer privacy and prevent breaches of the records.

That sounds tame compared to the details that came out in news reports last summer:

[U]nder language approved 19 to 10 by a House committee, the firm that sells you Internet access would be required to track all of your Internet activity and save it for 18 months, along with your name, the address where you live, your bank account numbers, your credit card numbers, and IP addresses you’ve been assigned.

Tracking the private daily behavior of everyone in order to help catch a small number of child criminals is itself the noxious practice of police states. Said an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “The data retention mandate in this bill would treat every Internet user like a criminal and threaten the online privacy and free speech rights of every American.” Even more troubling is what the government would need to do in order to access this trove of private information: ask for it. (emphasis in original)

The vote on what information must be collected and retained was 7-16 against “an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored.”

The bill has 39 co-sponsors. According to a Congressional Budget Office analysis (pdf), the costs imposed on providers of electronic communications services would exceed the threshold set by the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act (UMRA).

Note 1: these are primarily Republicans calling for a new law that would increase the cost of doing business.

Note 2: the fact that the cost of the bill exceeds the UMRA threshold is basically meaningless.

Someone asked how we live with uncertainty – we do it every day and have done so since 1948.

Keeping in mind what Iran has done without nuclear weapons, can you imagine what Iran will do with them?

We want Bashar Assad to go. We would like all of our neighbors to be peace-loving democracies.

We face many challenges but are far from helpless.

We have signed onto the Iran sanctions for the last 2 years.
Combined with a credible military threat, sanctions may dissuade Iran.

We are meeting our challenges every day and embody the resilience of the Jewish people. We are even exporting wine to France!

You can be certain of our resilience!

Q&A Session:

There are tactical disagreements with the Obama administration but our security cooperation is excellent!

The greatest threat to peace is Iran’s nuclear program.