All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

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W3C Turns the Clock Back on an Open Web

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A man protests Digital Rights Management in Bo...
A man protests Digital Rights Management in Boston, USA as part of the DefectiveByDesign.org campaign of the Free Software Foundation. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On September 18, Ars Technica reports, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published a new specification recommendation, Encrypted Media Extensions. The recommendation, which natively implements a “Digital Rights Management” scheme in web browsers, marks a giant step backward for user freedom and an “open” World Wide Web.

W3C is the Web’s  “international standards organization.” Simply put, its recommendations are the reason you can load almost any web page in almost any browser and expect to see the same things on your screen. When W3C recommends something, it’s a lead pipe cinch that all the major browser creators will incorporate that recommendation in their products ASAP.

In this case, W3C’s recommendation is the equivalent of a printing standards body deciding that henceforth printing presses should only emboss cuneiform characters in clay tablets. That is, it calls for universal adoption of an obsolete — to the point of silliness — way of doing things.

The purpose of Digital Rights Management is to allow creators to control the use of, and prevent the copying of, “intellectual property” — in the form of copyrighted informational works or proprietary hardware creations — after its original sale.

The 30-odd year history of DRM is one of consumer dissatisfaction and sequential failure. Every DRM scheme is broken sooner or later (usually sooner), after playing hob with purchasers’ ability to actually make use of the products they’ve bought. Lately, in addition to trying to improve DRM, Big Content and Big Manufacturing have begun asking politicians to criminalize cracking of DRM. That’s not going to work either. The only winners in the DRM saga will be the companies which drop the whole idea and come up with revenue models that don’t require them to screw their customers in the name of preventing copying and modification. The false hope of EME puts off that day.

Until the Encrypted Media Extensions scheme is broken in some fundamental way (a way that can’t be fixed with browser updates to the EME code itself), Internet users are going to increasingly find themselves frustrated in copying material they own between their devices, making archival copies, or grabbing snippets under the “fair use” provisions of copyright law.

EME has also already produced a gigantic breach in trust within W3C itself. As Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out (in an open letter announcing EFF’s resignation from the body), “W3C is a body that ostensibly operates on consensus,” yet EME was imposed on behalf of Big Content and over many objections by the body’s director, Tim Berners-Lee,  and adopted by a vote of less than 60%. Berners-Lee and the proponents of DRM may well have permanently wrecked W3C’s reputation as a trustworthy creator and evaluator of standards for the Web.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Harvard Disgraces Itself to Appease CIA Crybullies

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By Bradley Manning Support Network [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
 

The Washington Post reports that Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government has rescinded its offer of a visiting fellowship to whistle-blower Chelsea Manning.

Following tantrums from Central Intelligence Agency director Mike Pompeo (who withdrew from a planned speech) and Michael Morell, a former CIA deputy director (who resigned his own fellowship at the school), Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf issued a statement calling the invitation a “mistake” and denying any intent to “honor [Manning] in any way or to endorse any of her words or deeds.”

Harvard is a private university (to the extent possible in a mixed economy featuring various sorts of government funding for students, researchers, etc.). Its leaders are entitled to discriminate as they wish regarding faculty and curriculum. But the Kennedy School’s action and Elmendorf’s statement are a stain on the nearly 400-year-old university’s honor.

A ping on the ol’ irony meter:

Among those who contend that the assassination of JFK was not the act of a lone gunman, the CIA tends to move to center stage as the likely center of a conspiracy to kill the president. While Kennedy’s intent to thwart the military-industrial complex in general and the CIA in particular may be exaggerated, he nonetheless enjoys a posthumous reputation for attempting to rein the agency in.

Now, more than half a century later, the school that bears his name kowtows to that same CIA over what Julian Assange of WikiLeaks accurately deems a “cry-bully complaint” from Pompeo and Morell. It’s sickening.

Chelsea Manning is an American hero who, after an illegally long pre-trial detention and a show trial lacking even the pretense of due process, was sentenced to 35 years in prison for exposing the crimes committed by numerous actors within the US government. Former president Barack Obama deserves plaudits for his decision to commute her sentence, and condemnation for not going further with a full pardon, lavish financial compensation for the wrongs done her, and an apology and thanks for services rendered on behalf of of a grateful nation.

The Kennedy School’s motto is “ask what you can do,” presumably as excerpted from JFK’s inaugural address: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”

Chelsea Manning asked herself what she could do for her country and for the freedom of man. She then proceeded to act — at great personal cost to herself — on the answers she found to that question. No person on the Kennedy School’s current list of visiting fellows is even close to as qualified as Manning to teach the mission implied by the school’s motto. Douglas W. Elmendorf’s denial of intent to honor Manning or endorse her deeds is a confession that appeasing reprobates like Pompeo and Morell comes before doing the right thing for his students.

Shame on Harvard.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Trump on Debt: Even More Establishment Than The Establishment

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The Washington Post reports that US president Donald Trump and Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) “have agreed to pursue a deal that would permanently remove the requirement that Congress repeatedly raise the debt ceiling.”

That must be a bitter pill to swallow for those who thought they were electing an “anti-establishment” president to “drain the swamp” in Washington, but it should be no surprise. After all, Trump built his business career on going into debt up to his neck, taking a profit when things worked out, and leaving his partners holding the bankruptcy bag when they didn’t.

The political establishment’s way of handling the debt ceiling is for all of the allegedly competing sides to rattle sabers and threaten a fake “government shutdown” if they don’t get their way. Then, before such a “shutdown” (or after a few days of one), the politicians get together to “responsibly” and “reluctantly” authorize  a bigger line of credit for themselves, with you named as guarantor whether you like it or not.

In keeping with his authoritarian dislike of red tape that restricts government from doing anything it might take a notion to do, and in fine establishment style, Trump intends to do away with the theatrics. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders characterizes the Trump/Schumer proposal as “a more permanent solution to the debt ceiling.” By which she means that in the future, no one on Capitol Hill or at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will even bother to put on a burlesque of fiscal responsibility. Any time the credit card is about to max out, the limit will just go up automatically.

But of course it isn’t quite that simple.

The politicians’ debt (they call it the “national” debt in hopes that the rest of us will go along with the fiction that WE borrowed the money and are obligated to pay it back) will soon top $20 trillion. The entire US Gross Domestic Product for 2017, if seized and liquidated for the purpose of paying down that debt, would not quite completely pay it off.

That debt is never going to be repaid in full. In fact, the Trump/Schumer plan is an open statement of intent to never even begin paying it down. The politicians intend to keep on spending more than they take in and borrowing the difference until nobody’s willing to loan money to them anymore.

The US national debt will, sooner or later, be defaulted on. That will damage the American economy badly. But the sooner it’s done, the less the damage will be. If Trump was really an anti-establishment president, he’d veto any attempt to raise the debt ceiling, repudiate the existing debt, and demand a balanced budget from Congress.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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