Amazon Taunting Antitrust Regulators By Screwing Over Customers Who Want Books From Hachette

from the this-may-not-end-well dept

Amazon, it seems, would like to call regulator attention to potentially anti-competitive practices, while at the same time, screwing over its customers. In a move that seems short-sighted and dangerous on multiple levels, Amazon is apparently trying to punish publishing giant Hachette by pissing off Amazon customers who want any Hachette book. Amazon is apparently unhappy with its current negotiations over a new deal with Hachette, and has decided to passive aggressively take it out on both Hachette and Amazon customers:

Among Amazon's tactics against Hachette, some of which it has been employing for months, are charging more for its books and suggesting that readers might enjoy instead a book from another author. If customers for some reason persist and buy a Hachette book anyway, Amazon is saying it will take weeks to deliver it.

In general, we tend to be quite wary of overaggressive antitrust regulation -- which too often appears to target "big" rather than "abusive in a way that harms consumers." However, this seems like a pretty clear case in which Amazon is using its market power to be abusive in a manner that harms customers, for no reason other than to abuse its market position. I tend to like Amazon, and frequently distrust the big NY publishers, which regularly react poorly to useful innovations like those from Amazon. But in this case, Amazon appears to go way too far, in not just punishing Hachette, but also Amazon's users, delaying delivering for no reason at all or pushing them towards books they don't want, just based on who published each book.

It wouldn't surprise me to find out that Hachette's demands in the contract negotiations were also unreasonable, but even if that's true, Amazon should not respond by punishing both authors and consumers for the contractual dispute. As one analyst notes in the NY Times article above, "This could seem like they're being spiteful and petty.... That's typically not Amazon's playbook." Indeed. It's also the kind of thing that might attract the attention of the FTC, which is often on the lookout for companies behaving badly towards consumers.

Filed Under: anti-trust, books, delays, ftc
Companies: amazon, hachette

Publisher 'DRMs' Physical Legal Textbook About 'Property,' Undermines Property And First Sale Concepts

from the because-that's-what-publishers-do dept

We've talked in the past about just how badly certain industries would love to expand the restrictions created by DRM onto physical goods. And that's because, unlike what copyright system defenders like to claim, DRM allows companies to put restrictions on content that go way beyond what kind of restrictions can be placed on physical goods. For example: the right to resell something. In the copyright space, we've long had the first sale doctrine, which makes it possible for you to resell a physical book you own, without having to first get permission from the copyright holder. Of course, first sale has long been under attack, especially by academic publishers who absolutely hate the idea of a resale market. That's because they are monopoly providers -- professors assign the textbooks, and students need to buy them, leading to ridiculously inflated prices. Of course, what publishers still don't seem to grasp is that a healthy used market actually increases the value of the primary market, since buyers are more comfortable knowing they can at least make back some of the money at the other end.

But, the attack on first sale continues. Somewhat ironically, the next front in this battle is coming from the publisher Aspen, which publishes a very popular (in law schools) casebook on Property. It has started informing professors that with its next version, students will be required to give the book back at the end of the semester, and that the book cannot be resold. In "exchange" for this, it will grant students "lifetime" access to a digital version.

Law professor James Grimmelmann has explained what's going on here: Aspen is trying to do away with first sale rights. Basically, relying on a terrible appeals court ruling in Vernor v. Autodesk (which the Supreme Court refused to hear on appeal), Aspen is seeking to claim that you're merely licensing the textbook, rather than buying it:

The obvious goal is to dry up the used book market by draining the supply of used copies. But as Josh points out, it seems unlikely that every student will return the physical book. Rather, reading between the lines, Aspen may argue that the physical book is “licensed” rather than “sold” under the reasoning of cases like Vernor v. Autodesk. The result would be that first sale (the right of the owner of a book, or a DVD, or any other copy of a copyrighted work to resell it freely) would never attach, since the students wouldn’t be “owners” of their physical copies. If Stan Second-Year sells his copy of the new Dukeminier to Fran First-Year, he’d be a copyright infringer in the eyes of Aspen. So too might be Half.com or Barnes and Noble, if they participated in the transaction. Just to make sure that students know they’re only borrowing Aspen’s books and “agree” to those terms, it appears, students will have to purchase Connected Casebook access through Aspen’s website or a participating campus bookstore.

Grimmelmann goes on to point out that not only will this undermine the important and useful concept of first sale (and the resulting used market in these works), it will "result in the destruction of knowledge" in that it's likely that Aspen will simply destroy these books, rather than set up any sort of resale market itself. As for the claim that "well, at least they have 'lifetime' access to a digital version," Grimmelmann points out that given that such access is dependent on Aspen continuing to provide such access, the lifetime guarantee is not much of a guarantee at all.

Aspen promises “lifetime access” to the electronic versions, but we know from sad experience that gerbils have better life expectancy than DRM platforms.

He has also set up a Change.org petition, trying to get Aspen to reconsider its decision to ban the resale of textbooks, and basically "DRM" their physical books, wiping out first sale. Just the very fact that Aspen is undermining basic concepts of property on its "Property" casebook seems troubling enough -- but it shows how desperate publishers are these days to undermine basic concepts of property to prop up obsolete business models, built entirely on the basis of monopolistic pricing.

Filed Under: books, casebooks, copyright, drm, first sale, law schools, resale rights, text books

What Do You Get When You Mix Napster, Wikileaks, Snowden And Open Access?

from the epic dept

An article in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, which calls itself "the leading peer-reviewed journal for health and healthcare in the Internet age", has the intriguing title: "Is Biblioleaks Inevitable?" Here's what its authors mean by that:

In 2014, the vast majority of published biomedical research is still hidden behind paywalls rather than open access. For more than a decade, similar restrictions over other digitally available content have engendered illegal activity. Music file sharing became rampant in the late 1990s as communities formed around new ways to share. The frequency and scale of cyber-attacks against commercial and government interests has increased dramatically. Massive troves of classified government documents have become public through the actions of a few. Yet we have not seen significant growth in the illegal sharing of peer-reviewed academic articles. Should we truly expect that biomedical publishing is somehow at less risk than other content-generating industries? What of the larger threat -- a "Biblioleaks" event -- a database breach and public leak of the substantial archives of biomedical literature? As the expectation that all research should be available to everyone becomes the norm for a younger generation of researchers and the broader community, the motivations for such a leak are likely to grow. We explore the feasibility and consequences of a Biblioleaks event for researchers, journals, publishers, and the broader communities of doctors and the patients they serve.

The point about how a series of recent historical events -- Napster, Wikileaks, Snowden etc. -- has led to an increasing normalization of certain activities like sharing and leaking, is well made. Although it's rather piquant to see the Biblioleaks idea being explored in an academic journal, the underlying insight -- that people frustrated by the present system of academic publishing might take the law into their own hands -- is hardly original. After all, it's precisely what Aaron Swartz described in his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (pdf), which Techdirt wrote about last year. Here's Swartz's call to "biblioleaking":

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

Of course, that is what he seems to have been doing when he was arrested at MIT, followed by prosecutorial bullying and threats and, eventually, a tragic suicide. The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto begins as follows:

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

As we reported two years ago, Elsevier was the object of a major boycott by academics, organized by the mathematician Tim Gowers. Although that garnered a fair amount of publicity, it doesn't seem to have caused Elsevier to change its behavior much. But Gowers is not finished with the company, either. He has just published a blog post entitled "Elsevier journals -- some facts". That's something of an understatement: the 12,000-word blockbuster details Gowers dogged attempts to answer what ought to be a fairly straightforward question: how much are UK universities paying for access to Elsevier's articles? The final figure, although incomplete, turns out to be quite hefty: £14.4 million ($24 million) a year, and that's for just 19 of the top UK universities.

As interesting as the figure itself is the difficulty of obtaining it (do read Gower's amazing post to get a feel for how epic his struggle was.) That secrecy about the high prices universities must pay for journals, coupled with the major obstacles to accessing "the world's entire scientific and cultural heritage" that remain, are why the likelihood of some kind of Biblioleaks happening in the not-too-distant future remains high.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: biblioleaks, books, leaks, research, sharing

Censorious Parent Calls Cops On Teen Giving Away Books In A Local Park

from the protect,-serve-and-enforce-personal-beliefs? dept

Here's where moral panic meets police state... and fortunately, in this case, one of the two involved parties actually showed some common sense.

Here's the short version:

A teenager giving away free books at a book giveaway event at a local park has the cops called on her by a local citizen.

After about an hour of Kissel passing out books to teenagers, Meridian police showed up. They said they had been called out by someone concerned about teenagers picking up a copy of the book without having a parent's permission.

Not sure why that's a police matter rather than, say, a parental matter, but that's the way these things go. If anything, the parent involved probably picked up the "let law enforcement handle everything" attitude from educators, who seem to have relinquished the duties of the principal's office to armed law enforcement officers.

To their credit, the police arrived, checked everything out, and left.

So, why would a parent find giving away a book to be a police matter? Well, that's the longer story.

Junior Mountain View High school student Brady Kissel showed up at Kleiner park in Meridian to pass out the book parents are complaining about. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Some parents believe the book is not appropriate for 10th graders. Others who showed up said they had no problem with their teenager reading it.

The book was taken off the Meridian School Districts reading list and is under review. It is still on the shelves in school libraries.

Some Meridian parents objected to the sexual content in the book. Others say the book is anti-Christian. Some readers say they've seen worse.

Parents have tried to ban Alexie's book because of some very dangerous words that should apparently never be viewed by 10th graders. According to the student passing out the book, the "sexual content" of the book is almost wholly contained within the following sentence.

Kissel says, "There's a paragraph right here where it has some sexual content. But if you look at it it's a paragraph this big in a 230 page book." That page reads 'If God hadn't wanted us to masturbate, then God wouldn't have given us thumbs."

It's a good thing the citizen stepped up, or 10th graders might know what masturbation is. It wasn't just one citizen, however. It was several. Meridian, Idaho's school board voted 2-1 to ban the book, which was apparently all the justification needed to send cops after a teen giving away copies of the forbidden novel. One local idiot offered his opinion as to why the book just needed to go away.

[A]n adult named Lonnie Stiles complained that the Alexie novel contains language “we do not speak in our home.”

Ah. I see. So "not in your home" should mean "not in any home." Stiles is listed as an adult in this article but his behavior (along with a number of Meridian's citizens) sounds dangerously childish. If Stiles doesn't want his kid to read this "offensive" book, he should do all he can to prevent his, and only his, children from doing so. What he shouldn't do is allow his personal squeamishness towards certain words and subject matter to become school policy.

So, once again, it's the kids who are acting more mature than the adults. Somehow, they feel that banning the book would make it less likely to end up in teenagers' hands, an idea that is clearly refuted by the whole of teenage existence since human life began.

Kissel's decision to hand out 350 copies of a banned book was a statement against this small-minded board decision. 350 students signed a petition asking for a reversal, which was ignored. In response, these students were provided with their own copy, showing just how easy it is to route around censorship. As noted earlier, the book has only vanished from the school's library. It's still available at the public library, so all the outrage expended was entirely useless -- like it almost always is.

But this one went a bit further, with a parent apparently believing that the cops are there to enforce stupid school policies outside of school and uphold his or her "not on my bookshelf" morality. Ridiculous.

Filed Under: absolute diary of a part-time indian, books, censorship, police, sherman alexie

Economist Explains How Copyright Just Isn't Working

from the the-same-incumbents-still-winning dept

Alex Tabarrock, one of the contributors to Marginal Revolution (and associate professor of Economics at George Mason University) has often dealt with the subject of intellectual property from an economist's perspective. Recently, he changed things up and posted about his personal experiences with the frustrations inherent to intellectual property laws. Dealing with copyright in practice is much, much more aggravating and ridiculous than dealing with it in theory.

Working with textbook publishers, Tabarrock ran smack into the wall that copyright has constructed around -- of all things -- the public domain. (via Techdirt reader Marco)

For example, the publisher doesn't like to use public domain images. Why not? What could be better than free? The problem is that the bundlers insulate a publisher from lawsuits but when we use a public domain image the publisher is open to lawsuit if a mistake has been made and that makes them fearful.

That's only one way excessive copyright protection negatively affects the public domain. As has been noted here several times, the expanding length of copyright protection has carved a massive hole in the public domain, resulting in fewer older works being made available for public consumption. Our current system grants automatic copyright protection, along with a lifetime + 70 years of keeping it locked up, even if the creator has no desire to exploit the system well into his or her children's later years. This automatic protection makes the public domain a minefield for almost everyone.

The general lesson is that strong IP shrinks the public domain not just because it keeps things out of the public domain but also because it makes the public domain appear to be uncertain and dangerous. It's as if clean, mountain spring water were freely available but people bought from the bottlers instead out of fear of contamination.

As Tabarrock points out, this expanded, automatic protection actually does very little for the individual creator. Instead, it rewards "bundlers" like Corbis and Getty, entities that can use their own products without fear of legal reprisal. The more they bundle, the harder it is for others to make their creations available to other creators. Anything outside the mega-bundlers is viewed by other giants in the industry as inherently suspect by those paid small fortunes to protect their clients' IP and fend off challenges from others.

Worse, even if you secure the rights, you may not have secured the rights.

Here is another example. To illustrate the point that, contrary to what is often argued, a rich person might get more from another dollar than a poor person we have in Modern Principles a movie still of Scrooge McDuck swimming in money. We think the image speaks for itself but apparently that is a problem. The rights to the photo are–we are told–not the same as the rights to the characters shown within the photo. Thus, even though we have bought and paid for the right to print the photo, to ensure that the use of the characters within the photo falls under fair use we must discuss, comment on and critique the content of the photo in the text.

It's no coincidence that the example given features a Disney character. Many of the excesses in copyright law can be traced directly back to the entertainment giant. As long as it exists, copyright term expansion will always be on the table. Again, this favors the corporations, not the creators, as those creations are made under contract or considered "work for hire." They retain none of the rights, making any extension of copyright protection solely a win for Disney et al.

This climate has given rise to another powerful group, one equally benefited by each extension and convolution of copyright law: IP lawyers. Someone has to navigate the mess made by those in the copyright industry, and billable hours mount pretty quickly when someone can purchase the rights to a photo but not the content of the photo.

The public domain is dead to most in the industry. It's there to be occasionally exploited (Disney loves doing this) but the thought of anything of theirs falling into the public domain is inconceivable. It's a relic of the past as far as they're concerned, a noble idea that has no relevance in this era of lifetime-plus terms and automatic protection. But this same protection, granted in the name of creators, harms creators. At best, it makes navigating the rights process unnecessarily frustrating. At worst, it makes the public domain unusable and turns independent artists into unsafe, unknown quantities.

Filed Under: academic publishing, alex tabarrock, books, copyright, culture, public domain, publishers, risk

DailyDirt: Publishing Digitally (For Free!)

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Publishing content digitally is a topic that comes up around here fairly regularly. If you're a longtime Techdirt reader, you'll know that we generally think digital publishing drives down the price of content to free (but that doesn't mean your work is worthless!) and giving away content is often a very effective promotional tactic for selling other things that can't be freely copied. Here are just a few interesting examples of free content you can peruse at your leisure.

• Novelist Teju Cole surprised some folks by releasing a new short story of his on Twitter, using retweets only. The story, titled 'Hafiz', is now available (for free), and it poses some interesting questions over who owns the work. [url]
• If you have a Kindle, here's a link to a list of public domain books, sorted by author last name. This list is compiled from an ebook index of Project Gutenberg books, and there's also an EPUB version available (for non-Kindle users). [url]
• All sorts of people post answers to questions on Quora, so wouldn't it be nice to read a compilation of some of the best responses in one huge book? Quora released a free pdf of over a hundred answers from 2010-2012, covering 18 different question categories and including answers from anonymous users as well as Jimmy Wales. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: books, ebooks, free, kindle, media, public domain, publishing, quora, sir, teju cole, tweets
Companies: quora

DailyDirt: Categorizing Everything

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

People just keep creating stuff -- books, movies, music, you name it... so it's (more than) a full-time job to keep up with all the cool new stuff. How do we classify music into hip-hop, heavy metal or Krautrock? What can we learn from mapping all these seemingly separate media genres? People and machines are working together to cobble together categorization systems that try to keep up with the flood of new content. Here are just a few examples.

• Netflix hired a bunch of people to try to categorize every movie, and it has 76,897 separate sub-genres for films like "romantic comedies" and "Violent Action Thrillers Starring Bruce Willis". You'd probably never guess which actor crosses into the most movie sub-genres (it's not Kevin Bacon).... It's Raymond Burr. [url]
• A brief history of music genre origins tells us that categories of music are often named after popular bands or lyrics. For example, bluegrass music is named after "the Blue Grass Boys"... and guess what lyrics inspired "Doo-wop" music? [url]
• Melvil Dewey came up with the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system in 1873. The DDC system is now published by OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. which owns all the copyright rights and manages the licensing of this method of organizing general knowledge. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: archives, books, categorization, ddc, dewey decimal, films, genres, libraries, movies, music, oclc, recommendation systems, sky is rising
Companies: netflix

Norway To Digitize All Norwegian Books, Allowing Domestic IP Addresses To Read All Of Them, Irrespective Of Copyright Status

from the futuristic-thinking dept

Here's a pretty amazing story from Norway:

The National Library of Norway is planning to digitize all the books by the mid 2020s. Yes. All. The. Books. In Norwegian, at least. Hundreds of thousands of them. Every book in the library's holdings.

Now, in any normal country -- where "normal" means one in which copyright has reached the heights of monopolistic insanity -- if those books were still under copyright, the digitized versions (assuming publishers even allowed them to be made in the first place) would probably only be available in a specially constructed room deep in the basement of the National Library on a (small) screen, and with guards stationed either side of it to ensure that no unauthorized copies were made. Here, by contrast, is what's happening with the National Library of Norway's digital collection:

If you happen to be in Norway, as measured by your IP address, you will be able to access all 20th-century works, even those still under copyright. Non-copyrighted works from all time periods will be available for download.

As Alexis C. Madrigal points out in his entertaining article for The Atlantic, there's a rather interesting consequence of the different approaches to book digitization taken by Norway and the US, say:

Imagine digital archaeologists coming across the remains of early 21st century civilization in an old data center on the warming tundra. They look around, find some scraps of Buzzfeed and The Atlantic, maybe some Encyclopaedia Britannicas, and then, gleaming in the data: a complete set of Norwegian literature.

Suddenly, the Norwegians become to 27th-century humans what the Greeks were to the Renaissance. Everyone names the children of the space colonies Per and Henrik, Amalie and Sigrid. The capital of our new home planet will be christened Oslo.

This is what excessive copyright does to countries that impose it. It not only prevents today's artists from building on the work of their recent forebears -- something that occurred routinely until intellectual monopolies were introduced in recent centuries -- but it even jeopardizes the preservation and transmission of entire cultures because of publishers' refusal to allow copyright to move with the times by permitting large-scale digitization and distribution of the kind envisaged in Norway.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: archives, books, digitization, knowledge, libraries, norway, open access, sharing

There Is No 'True' Price For Anything

from the markets-adjust dept

There's an odd little NY Times article that reader Jake Rome pointed out to us, which seems like a totally random attack on Amazon based on the fact that some publishers don't like the fact that Amazon prices things based on this silly concept known as "what the data suggests will be the most appropriate price," rather than what these publishers insist is the only way to price things: "what publishers say a book's 'true price'" is and "how amazingly special and valuable books are." One of those ways of pricing is based on reality and economics, the other is based on fantasy and ignorance. Guess which one is which.

One consequence of this shift is that soon no one will know what a book’s “real” price is.

No one ever knew what a book's "real price" was, because there's no such thing as a "real price." There's whatever price a willing buyer and a willing seller agree on, and that's the "real price" for that book.

Price will be determined by demand and perhaps by whim.

Supply and demand have always been the key setters of price, so why is that so surprising or troubling here? And I'm not sure where the "whim" comes in, because that's actually much more how book pricing was done before. Amazon appears to be doing the exact opposite of that: it prices things based on data, rather than on a whim.

“And I don’t like the inconsistency of the pricing, either — the raising, the lowering — because it sends a confusing message that good books are worth less, and because it encourages buying based on something other than the quality of the book. It’s just an unhealthy business if people are buying a thing mostly because of its price, not its quality. That’s how you sell widgets, not books.”

Someone doesn't seem to understand the difference between price and value -- nor do they understand price elasticity. But, perhaps that's because they don't understand basic economics, as evidenced by their dismissive concept that books are not "widgets." Price and value are not the same thing. Just because a price is low, it does not mean the value is low. In fact, very cheap things can be incredibly valuable. And, the fact that more people buy stuff when it's cheaper, well, until you change basic human nature, that's never going to change. Pretending otherwise is like pretending you can stop the tide from coming in.

“Discounting, and especially inconsistent or shifting discounting, really messes with a publisher’s ability to price a book fairly and accurately to its cost,” he added. “You have to consider the fact that whatever price you put on the cover, Amazon is going to reduce it by as much as half — unless they don’t — or they may, but only for a while. But in short they’re going to make your book look like a thing with a cost lower than the one you placed on it.

"Fairly" is what the market will bear, and it appears that Amazon knows a lot more about that than this publisher. "Accurately"? What does that even mean? The book is always priced "accurately" because whatever price is put on it is "accurate." The publisher sets the basic cost, and what the retailer sells it at is a separate issue.

“So do you raise the price, knowing they’re going to lower it, so that the price will then appear closer to what you need it to be? But if you do that then you’re screwing the more honest retailers who can’t discount. And we’ve gotten a long way from recognition of the fact that publishers have costs in making books, and that should have something to do with the price.”

This whole discussion seems to suggest this publisher, Dennis Loy Johnson, of Melville House, doesn't seem to recognize the fundamentals of the situation here. He's the publisher: he prices the books at what's the best price for his publishing house to maximize its revenue overall, and what retailers then price the book at is not a huge concern, because he's already set his own price. If Amazon wants to sell the books as a loss leader, so be it. What difference does that make unless you have some faulty notion in your head that books are so stupendously valuable that they "must" be priced higher than most people want to pay?

Filed Under: amazon, books, economics, true price

Amid NSA Scandal, Orwell Books Rocket Up The Sellers Lists

from the i-thought-nobody-cared? dept

As the NSA spying scandal lumbers along, or as some reports suggest, begins, reports of American apathy have already rolled in. Of course, those supposed indifferent shrugs tend to amount more to how the questions are being asked than actual viewpoints. Couple that with how social humans are as a species, is in my opinion quite dangerous. It'd be all too easy for people to hear reports that nobody really seems to care about any of this intrusive data gathering business and decide that they should feel similarly.

Fortunately, there's at least some evidence that such an effect isn't occurring. Otherwise, we're going to have to come up with a whole new logical reason as to why George Orwell's books, particularly 1984, are skyrocketing up the hot sellers lists. As Gawker notes:

According to Amazon's Movers & Shakers countdown, three different editions of George Orwell's alt-history book Nineteen Eighty-Four have shot up hundreds of spots on the chart since news of the NSA's clandestine spying program PRISM broke late last week. One edition in particular — the Centennial Edition — has exploded in popularity, increasing its sales rank by 7,000% in days.

Now, before you cheer this on, it's worth noting that other books on the "Movers and Shakers" list aren't so politically-minded, unless books on being a gentleman (pshhh!), books on calorie counting (pshhh!), or books by Glenn Beck (PSHHH!) actually have some value there that I'm not aware of. Still, it's encouraging to see signs that people are paying attention. That, after all, is how change actually occurs. I might suggest some lovely texts by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine as well, but Orwell is certainly a start.

Filed Under: 1984, books, george orwell, nsa, nsa surveillance, privacy