SemiConscious Dot Org

You have to give Alberto Gonzales credit. Sure, he’s the worst Attorney General in this nation’s history, but at least he’s consistent: whenever there is a case involving the rights of ordinary Americans against unrestrained government and/or corporate power, he will always come down on the side of Evil. Always.

But since he’s a lame duck on his way out the door, the pressure’s off, right? With the fight over Net Neutrality raging in Congress and his Justice Department being pressed for an opinion on the issue, wouldn’t this be the perfect time to come down, just once, on the side of We The People?

Yeah, right:

The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic.

The agency said it was opposed to “network neutrality”, the idea that all data on the net is treated equally.

(snip)

The agency’s stance is contrary to much of the internet community that believes in an open model for the internet.

Net neutrality advocates argue that a two-tier internet would allow broadband providers to become gatekeepers to the web’s content.

Providers that can pay will be able to get a commercial advantage over those that cannot, they say.

In particular, there is a fear that institutions like universities and charities would suffer.

However, all is not lost. As the Save The Internet blog points out, the fact that a soulless, nakedly partisan hack like Gonzo so vociferously opposes Net Neutrality is perhaps the best argument in its favor.

Today, we changed over all the monthly “Staff Recommends” book displays at the library, and as the new Head of Public Services, it was my turn to create one. As usual for me, I had to try and ruffle as many feathers at my new job as possible, taking advantage of the upcoming National Banned Books Week to create a “Read These Books To Annoy People!” display. Unfortunately, we had very few of the really controversial titles in the 100 Most Challenged Books list; no Anarchist’s Cookbook, no New Joy of Gay Sex, no Last Exit, no Sex by Madonna. We didn’t even have the most challenged book of 2006 (a children’s book about two male zoo penguins who raise and hatch an egg, which apparently enrages religious dingbats convinced that reading it will turn their younguns into agents of the Homosexual Agenda.)

Alas, my “controversial” display turned out rather tame. Ooooh, A Wrinkle in Time, how rebellious.

I thought I might quench my unfulfilled urge to offend by printing up and plastering the library with Banned Books Week posters. Unfortunately, the ALA’s offerings were, predictably, both lame and not free. See, this is the kind of thinking that has convinced me not to bother rejoining ALA. The library advocacy organization is going to make cash-strapped libraries pay for promotional materials to get more people into said cash-strapped libraries? What genius thought that one up?

Eventually, I did find some cool, free posters at the American Booksellers Foundation. (They do also sell promotional material, but their free posters are far more effective than anything on the ALA site.)

These days, we tend to think of efforts to ban or censor books as almost comical, the ravings of blinkered bumpkins who think Harry Potter is an Agent of Satan. But in this post-Patriot Act world, censorship has a darker, more insidious dimension. After all, if you know that law enforcement agents might someday pore through your borrowing records without your knowledge, would you check out that copy of Steal This Book or the Anarchist’s Cookbook or that medical textbook on deadly airborne diseases or Mein Kampf for your history paper on World War II? Or would you be too scared, fearing that someone might later think that reading controversial material was tanatmount to agreeing with it?

Our current government, more than any in recent memory, survives by fostering a climate in which the vast majority of citizens are frightened, stupid, and easily manipulated. If self-censorship due to fear of punishment becomes the norm, then they’ve already won. In this climate, reading controversial books is nothing less than an act of civil disobedience.

Last week, the government of Australia released a filtering program with which its citizens could protect their precious children from the scourge of internet porn.

And then a 16 year old kid hacked the filter in half an hour.

Total cost to the Australian taxpayer for this software that was rendered useless in 30 minutes? 84 million dollars.

One might hope there’d be a lesson for the authors of CIPA in all this, but somehow, I doubt they’re listening.

In a year rife with conflicts over freedom of access to information on the interweb tubes, I suppose it was only a matter of time before yet another one erupted. This involves Flickr, the online photo hosting site.

I’ve had a Flickr account for two years, and have, for the most part, had nothing but good things to say about it. Sure, I was annoyed when Yahoo bought Flickr and forced paying customers to sign up for a Yahoo account in order to keep using a service we had already paid for, but like many members, I made my displeasure known and suffered no repercussions for it. It looked like Yahoo might be that rare internet conglomerate that bought out a smaller, more innovative company and didn’t squeeze the life out of it with toxic corporate culture and asinine rules.

Yeah, you probably know what’s coming next:

But, overall, things continued as before; until a few days ago, when Flickr users in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong and Korea noted that they were unable to alter one of their account settings: the ‘safe search’ option, which allows them to specify whether they want searches for images to filter out certain types of content. Under the new dispensation, Flickr users in these territories could only find images that had been flagged as ‘safe’ – which meant, as one disgruntled protester put it, ‘only flowers and landscapes for Germans’.

Shocking, I know.

I suppose it’s just indicative of the dreary, authoritarian, secrecy-obsessed times we live in: less than a week after finding out about Microsoft’s efforts to crush all innovation in the software industry by suing the Open Source movement out of existence, I learn that there is a movement afoot to throttle access to artistic works by excessively extending copyright. Bills to extend copyright are already pending in Great Britain, and on our side of the pond, no less than an authority than the Paper of Record is editorializing in favor of extending American artistic copyrights – forever.

A pox on all their houses. Curses and fulminations upon money-grubbing whores and corporate swine who want to reduce all artistic, cultural, and technological progress to a dollar figure. How far have we sunk when this slavish dedication to “the market” and “free enterprise” leads some shitheads to believe that it’s perfectly acceptable for someone to monopolize access to an idea, in perpetuity?

But maybe, just maybe, the backlash against the privatization of information and information access has begun. A bipartisan bill currently working its way through the Maine state legislature would make my home state the first in the nation to legally enforce net neutrality. As the concept of protecting net neutrality gains widespread notice, more public figures are taking up the banner, most notably Al Gore.

(You know, it’s a damn shame that this Al Gore didn’t run for President in 2000. If he had, he would’ve won by a landslide, and the unmitigated disaster that is the Bush Presidency never would’ve happened…)

Bad news, kids. In an age when your every movement, transaction, purchase, debt, statement, and/or bowel movement is recorded somewhere for future use by Shadowy Persons Unknown, here’s yet another one:

Most digital copiers manufactured in the past five years have disk drives – the same kind of data-storage mechanism found in computers – to reproduce documents. As a result, the seemingly innocuous machines that commonly are used to spit out copies of tax returns for millions of Americans can retain the data being scanned.

If the data on the copier’s disk aren’t protected with encryption or an overwrite mechanism, and if someone with malicious motives gets access to the machine, industry experts say, sensitive information could get into the wrong hands.

Well, that’s just great! When I run for President, the opposing candidate’s political operatives will go over every record of my life with a fine toothed comb, looking for dirt to smear me with…and eventually, they’ll stumble across all those xeroxes I made of my ass on copy machines in every library and organization I’ve ever worked in.

Be prepared for the “AssGate” scandal, starting around, oh, 2016 or so. It’ll make Watergate, Iran-Contra, and DubYa’s nonexistant WMD’s Look Like fratboy pranks in comparison.

Halli-freakin-leujah, DOPA is dead! This atrocious bill, passed in July by the House of Representatives, was an election year sop to suburban soccer moms scared of the Big, Bad Internets. In pursuit of the otherwise laudable goal of blocking online predators, this bill would have forced schools and libraries that receive federal E-Rate funding to block access to any website that allows the creation of a profile. In other words, millions of perfectly legal websites such as MySpace, Amazon, EBay, educational and research websites, discussion boards, social networking sites of all kinds, and practically every single blog in existence. And since further definition of what constitutes a blockable site would have been left wholly at the discretion of the FCC, it could easily have expanded. (For instance, most newspaper sites now require the creation of a profile featuring one’s name, email, and demographic information. Why not block them too?)

Remember, we’re not talking about blocking pornographic sites, which are already illegal for minors to access (and are covered under previous laws anyway.) We’re talking about blocking sites that are otherwise completely legal, and doing so, not based on the site’s content, but on its format. And putting a federal agency, consisting of unelected political appointees, in charge of deciding what should and shouldn’t be blocked. All this, from the “party of limited government.” What a joke.

When I heard about this incomprehensively idiotic bill back in August, I frothed at the mouth, as is my wont whenever news of greater than normal governmental stupidity reaches my ears. However, when friend and fellow librarian Chris pointed out that many of the bill’s sponsors were ejected from Congress in the Glorious Republican Rout of November 7th, I began to hope that the insanity would be averted. And yesterday, Chris sent me a link to an article noting that DOPA will indeed die on the vine, since the lack of Senate action last term means that it will have to be reintroduced this year, and several incoming Democratic committee heads are skeptical about its horribly overbroad nature.

I received several cool presents during the holiday season, but this entirely unexpected, tentative baby step back towards sanity on the part of our elected representatives may be the best one yet. My outlook on the universe has been measurably improved since November 7th. It’s so nice to finally have the adults in charge again.

Now, if we can just do something about Batshit Crazy Old Man John McCain and his War on Blogs…

Last night’s election slaughter (and subsequent purge of Public Enemy #1 Donald Rumsfeld) is unquestionably a fantastically good thing for the United States of America, for any number of reasons. But while you joyfully look forward to the end of the Republican Party’s plundering of the national treasury and rape of the Constitution, and maybe even an end to the Iraq nightmare, don’t forget about another wonderful side effect of last night: the end of the GOP’s War On Libraries.

1. Michael Fitzpatrick, the “lawmaker” who wrote and sponsored DOPA in the house has been dis-elected. DOPA stands for Deleting Online Predators Act and it was designed to restrict, in schools and libraries, any site that required the creation of a profile. In other words, roughly 50% of the entire Internet including MySpace, Amazon, EBay and a slew of educational and library sites.
2. The man who had been chosen to shepherd DOPA through the Senate was none other than Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum. Rick will soon be an ex-Senator. Don’t be a stranger Rick—you’re so good at rallying our base that the DNC should offer you a job.
3. Therefore, DOPA may die in committee and never be referred to the floor for an up or down vote. This is just a fervent wish on my part—there’s no evidence yet and if it gets to the floor Dems will have a really hard time voting against it. Only 10 (10!!!!) Dems voted against it in the House.
4. Joe Barton of Texas, the foremost enemy of e-rate in Congress will no longer be Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. He’s been using this position to launch his attacks on the program as a whole. These attacks have led to much tighter enforcement of erate rules and much more frustration and paperwork for schools and libraries.

I’ve frothed at the mouth about the vile, despicable DOPA before, but thanks to last night’s events, DOPA may be DOA.

Ah yes, it’s a great, great day to be alive.

As previously stated, I don’t pay nearly as much attention to library-related issues and news as I used to. Part of this is due to the fact that I now work in a private, school library instead of a public one, and am thus insulated from either dealing with the public or paying attention to issues that affect how the public is served. The other main reason is my firm belief that I simply can’t summon the energy to fake any interest in pointless, meaningless marketing terms that serve no purpose other than to voice a desperate wish (never to be fulfilled) on the part of librarians to appear hip.

But I digress. Every once in awhile, an issue comes along that manages to pierce even my mighty protective wall of self-interest, and as usual with these things, it was the always helpful Notorious BCK who brought it to my attention. The oh-so-appropriately named DOPA, the more cruel and idiotic inbred cousin to 2003’s CIPA, passed the US House on July 27th by a vote of 410-15. While CIPA forced libraries to install filters as a condition of retaining their E-Rate funding, DOPA goes even further, forcing libraries to block access to chat rooms and social networking sites such as blogs, MySpace, and Flickr. Further, it explicitly places the FCC in charge of screening and evaluating wholly lawful internet content.

Since the furor over the passage of this mindbendingly idiotic bill has been swift, widespread, and severe, I won’t bother rehashing it. (Click the links if you are actually unsure just what kind of Orwellian clusterfuck the House has just voted to foist upon us.) Besides, for my money, the ZenFormation Professional most succinctly summed up the entire debate, and in one sentence, no less:

Now this is some truly scary “let’s get those seniors and soccer moms all paranoid before the midterm elections” shit.

This atrocious bill has not yet become the law of the land; it still needs to pass the Senate before that happens. However, lest any of you out there are clinging to the desperate hope that the Senate might conceivably exercise a modicum of sanity that the House so clearly lacks, please keep in mind that the committee in charge of regulating the internet is run by this guy.

Well, it appears that this putative “Library Blog” is well on its way to becoming a “What Music is Aaron Listening to Today, as if Anyone Cares Blog.” Truth be told, I haven’t been paying much attention to library issues recently, but a post on BCK’s blog brought to my attention new developments regarding our old friend, the USA Patriot Act. (Specifically, the provision of said act most pertinent to libraries, Section 215.)

Section 215 allows law enforcement officials to view a library patron’s book borrowing and internet browsing records by issuing something called a National Security Letter (NSL), a type of warrant that requires no judicial oversight. Moreover, the NSL comes with a built-in gag order, so that library staff who’ve been issued one can’t reveal to anybody that the cops have ever been snooping around the library.

Recently, some librarians have decided to fight back. A group in Connecticut that was issued a NSL for library records filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the built-in gag order, since it ironically prevented those same librarians from having any part in the then-ongoing debate in Congress over whether to reauthorize the Patriot Act. A judge lifted the gag order, but the government fought it in court. By the time the government finally relented and allowed the gag order to be lifted, debate in Congress on the USAPA was already over, a fact the librarians complained about bitterly:

“Free public libraries exist in this country to promote democracy by allowing the public to inform itself on the issues of the day. The idea that the government can secretly investigate what the public is informing itself about is chilling.”

Christian noted with irony that the gag order was lifted only after Congress voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act.

“The fact that I can speak now is a little like being permitted to call the fire department only after a building has burned to the ground,” he said.

In other Patriot Act-related news, the librarians in my current environs of Seattle have passed a resolution calling for the resignation or impeachment of DubYa over the USAPA and a host of other issues. (We all know this happy event has a snowball’s chance in hell of happening while his own party controls all three branches of government, but hey, a boy can dream.) And the number of anti-Patriot Act resolutions passed nationally has recently topped 400, including five statewide resolutions.

Not surprisingly, the Bush administration’s fans in the right-wing chattering classes have pounced on librarians and the ALA over the flap. To the people who equate any criticism of DubYa or his policies as traitors to America, the entire library profession now constitutes a veritable Fifth Column of America-haters.

Back in 2003, when this issue first made national headlines, it was the National Review’s Rich Lowry who lead the smear campaign, excoriating librarians over their opposition to Section 215 (and also throwing in a few other conservative myths, such as the idea that librarians have intentionally turned libraries into de facto homeless shelters and porno stores. He also joked that we should all be killed.) This year, the administration’s main water carrier on this issue is internment camp apologist Michelle Malkin, who refers to ALA opponents of Bush policies as “moonbats” and “Bush-deranged bigots” and suggests that we’ve been “breathing too much photocopier fluid.”

Who would’ve thought that little ol’ librarians could engender so much vitriol from flame-throwing reactionary pundits? In my opinion, it’s a badge of honor. I eagerly await the Ann Coulter column lamenting the fact that Timothy McVeigh didn’t set off his bombs at the ALA convention.