Liberals And Conservatives Switch Positions On NSA Surveillance Depending On If 'Their Guy' Is In Power

from the terrible dept

Orin Kerr has pointed out that people who self-identify themselves as "liberals" or "conservatives" seem to shift their opinion on NSA surveillance depending on whether or not it's "their guy" in the White House. That is, back when George W. Bush was President, "Democrats" disapproved of the NSA's surveillance activities, with only 27% approving it. "Republicans" on the other hand, had a 75% approval of the NSA's activities, which were known to include warrantless wiretapping. Fast forward to today, and we have "liberals" being split down the middle between being concerned and not concerned, but conservatives having 77% either "very concerned" or "somewhat concerned" about the surveillance (48% falling into the "very concerned") category. Kerr notes that the two surveys may not be completely comparable -- the questions were not identical, and one study was based on political party, while the other was based on ideology (which might not match up). But, at the very least, it does suggest a general sense that people are much more comfortable with surveillance when "their guy" is in power, and against it when they dislike the President.

That's troubling on any number of levels, but hopefully it serves as a point to a useful tool in convincing those who trust "their guy" not to abuse the system: just ask them how comfortable they'll be when "the other guy" is in power after the next election?

Filed Under: conservatives, liberals, nsa, surveillance

UK Conservative Party Decides To Memory Hole Its YouTube Presence As Well

from the three-years-of-content-is-not-really-an-'archive' dept

It appears the UK Conservative Party isn't quite finished "archiving" its history into the nearest memory hole. Last week, it was discovered that PM David Cameron's party's webmasters had sent speeches made from 2000-2010 into the ether, aided by an altered robots.txt that kept Google from crawling its pages and prompted a retroactive deletion of the corresponding pages from the Internet Archive.

The Guardian passes on the news that the same behavior is being observed over at the Conservative's YouTube account.

Now it has emerged that every video on the Conservatives' YouTube page that dates from before 2010 has been removed or marked as private. Videos such as Ask David Cameron: Shared ownership, EU referendum, PMQs are now marked as unavailable on YouTube. Others, such as Boris Johnson at the pre-election rally in Swindon, and David Cameron down on the farm, are now unlisted, ensuring that only users with a direct link can see them.

WebcameronUK, the official YouTube channel now hosts only 60 videos. At the moment, 296 videos are still listed at the Conservative's official site. However, videos created previous to the party's arbitrary cutoff date will not load (which, in this case, appears to be April 24, 2009).

A member of the Conservative party offered this excuse.

On Wednesday, Chris Grayling said that there is "a limit to how much you can put and keep on your website year after year", and a Conservative spokesman claimed that the changes to the website were to "allow people to quickly and easily access the most important information we provide – how we are clearing up Labour’s economic mess, taking the difficult decisions and standing up for hardworking people.”

Yes, storage limits can be an issue, but it's hard to believe the party currently in power in the UK can't afford to purchase more. Furthermore, if storage is such an issue, let YouTube handle the storage/bandwidth and just host links at the website. Finally, storing text takes next to no space at all, so this excuse doesn't really pan out for all the (text only) speeches the Conservatives removed last week.

The second statement is nothing but spin, so nothing to see here. And the spokesmen didn't have much to say when confronted with previous non-theoretically-storage-related actions.

When asked about the YouTube deletions and why it was necessary to remove webpages from the Internet Archive, a spokesperson for the Conservatives declined to comment.

What this looks like is a swift rewrite of history ahead of the general election. ComputerWeekly, which broke the news of the first Conservative history cull, suggested the party was attempting to bury Cameron's old campaign promises, which revolved around openness and transparency. The Guardian has another theory.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, pointed out that the material is still available on the UK Web Archive, a project run by the British Library to archive British websites.

Nonetheless, he said: "The suspicion has to be that at the point they are engaged in a huge debate about mass surveillance … they are removing the videos where they criticise Labour for doing the same thing. That's why it's absolutely important that that material remains available."

Sadly, it's not just one political party refurbishing its past. The Labour party has been busy as well.

Labour has also edited its news archive. The party's new website only goes back to September 2010, leaving Ed Miliband's keynote at the party conference that year the oldest speech available. But unlike the Conservatives, Labour didn't require internet archivists to remove stored versions, leaving pages dating back to July 2002 in the database.

Archives for both are still available elsewhere, but the public-facing sites themselves are now willfully incomplete. The digital age may have promised a future of transparency and openness, but both parties have chosen to use these tools to craft flattering narratives and spirit away inconsistencies.

Filed Under: conservatives, david cameron, memory hole, speeches, uk, videos, youtube

New Book Makes The Case For Why Copyright Needs To Be Reformed

from the time-for-a-change dept

I've argued in the past that copyright is a non-partisan issue, in that the concepts behind fixing a broken copyright system shouldn't be specific to either major political party. Unfortunately, historically, that's meant that there's been bi-partisan interest in helping Hollywood expand the system over and over and over and over again (15 expansions in the last 30 years). However, as we saw over the weekend with the wonderful RSC brief that was released and retracted in a day, there is significant interest in some circles to explore the idea of substantial copyright reform, which includes recognizing that the existing system is not functioning up to the standards set forth in the Constitution.

Along those lines, it's interesting timing to see that the Mercatus Center at George Mason University is about to publish a book on why conservatives and libertarians should support copyright reform called Copyright Unbalanced: From Incentive to Excess. The book was put together by Jerry Brito, and he describes some of what's in the book as follows:

• Yours truly [Jerry Brito] making the Hayekian and public choice case for reform
• Reihan Salam and Patrick Ruffini arguing that the GOP should take up the cause of reforming what is now a crony capitalist system
• David Post explaining why SOPA was so dangerous
• Tim Lee on the criminalization of copyright and the a use of asset forfeiture in enforcing copyright
• Christina Mulligan explaining that the DMCA harms competition and free expression
• Eli Dourado calculating that the system we have today likely far exceeds what we need in order to offer authors an incentive to create
• Tom Bell suggesting five reforms for copyright, including returning to the Founders’ vision of what copyright should be

It's good to see more analysis of why the copyright system is in dire need of reform. While I still think this should be a non-partisan issue, rather than a strictly partisan one, it's interesting to see one side of the political spectrum popping up at this time to make the argument. Over the past few years, it's seemed like many of the arguments in favor of copyright reform came from the more liberal/progressive side of the spectrum anyway, so hopefully this "balances" out the calls for reform a bit and makes it clear: the time to fix the copyright system is now, no matter what your political persuasion might be.

Filed Under: conservatives, copyright, libertarians, reform

What Can Bring Together Opposites On The Traditional Political Spectrum? A Fear Of Censorship Due To PROTECT IP

from the speaking-out dept

If you follow the political world these days, you'd think that there was nothing out there that a "bleeding-heart liberal" and a "Tea Party conservative" might agree on. But it appears that the hugely problematic PROTECT IP Act is bringing together such diverse interests. David Segal and Patrick Ruffini -- who probably don't agree on very much at all politically -- teamed up to write an editorial about the problems of PROTECT IP, for OregonLive. The editorial notes the massive unintended consequences likely to come from the bill, and highlights how this is an issue outside of any standard political spectrum. This isn't an issue about political viewpoints. It's an issue about fundamental values and the belief that censorship is wrong.

Filed Under: censorship, conservatives, liberals, protect ip