Wednesday, May 21, 2003

dissecting arguments for investigating library patron information under the Patriot act ALA Aiding And Abetting Terrorists. Gerry writes "David Horowitz's FrontPageMag, dedicated to rooting out the fifth columns, left-liberals and hate-American conspirators among us, turns its withering gaze to LIBRARIANS..... Please have some fun baiting true believers in the comments forum. " At least they admit ALA librarians are not the quiet, unassuming stereotypes you see on TV and in the movies, but they go on to say while the ALA ostensibly wants to protect the First Amendment rights of all people to read what they want, they themselves seem to have not read the USA PATRIOT Act and its guarantees to protect First Amendment Rights. [LISNews.com] Maybe it's my legal background, but I'm always interested in dissecting a controversy into the exact areas of disagreement. Although I heartily disagree with almost everything written in this article (authored by Paul Walfield), I find that it illuminates very clearly the differences in the two viewpoints. "The idea is simple; terrorists use things like airliners against us. Now, we make it harder for them to do that by federalizing airline checkers, and putting marshals on planes and beefing up airline security in general. The Feds want to do the same for terrorists that use our libraries." Let's develop this argument a little further. The terrorists didn't just use airlines and libraries (allegedly) against the US - they exploited weaknesses inherent in an open, democratic society - freedom of association and movement, freedom of thought, and freedom to read. Let's cut to the chase - 9/11 wouldn't have happened in a police state without those freedoms. Does this mean that these fundamental human rights are to blame for the tragedy and must be curtailed? Of course, even John Ashcroft is not going to admit to that, but we live in an age of doublespeak. So instead of abrogating these freedoms, they attack the tangible institutions and professionals which protect these abstract ideas - in the name of patriotism and preserving the American way of life. The danger is that human rights expressed in the constitution become meaningless because there are no ways of protecting infringements of those rights by the executive branch of government. "The librarians say they will not break the "sacred" trust between a patron and a librarian. The American Library Association seems to view this bond as literally sacred." This has to be the most offensive part of Walfield's article, the way that he scoffs at the idea of librarian's ethics in general, and librarian-patron confidentiality in particular. Without this confidentiality, we librarians could report all patron borrowing, reading and web surfing habits to the government - or sell this information to marketers. Everything you read will be on the record somewhere (but not accessible to you), and people will make inferences about your beliefs and security risks from this - without any input from you or any ways of fixing errors or erroneous assumptions. "She didn't explain that when you take a book out of the library, you are giving up any right to privacy. The employees at Santa Cruz know what their people check out but will not allow our government to know the same ..." Does Walfield really think that because library employees might know what a patron is reading or borrowing, that patrons have given up all their rights to privacy? And that the government might as well know everything too? That's like saying that there's no such thing as medical privacy because doctors and nurses might know your medical information. Well, I'm glad that I can clarify that this is another reason why we emphasize librarian-patron confidentiality in our professional ethics. We know that this information is potentially very sensitive - not unlike medical records - and we take pains to be very careful with it. Library-patron confidentiality is not something which we invented after 9/11 so we could be a thorn in the side of the Bush administration and advance our left-wing agenda. My mother was an academic librarian in the 1970s and this was as central to librarianship then as it is now. "[The Patriot Act] prohibits the government from doing anything that would infringe on an individual's First Amendment right." Yes, that's how the law is written on its face. But in effect, this protection is meaningless. It's up to the FBI to decide if they may be infringing on your first amendment rights. The only restraint on the over-zealous investigator is at a secret summary hearing where you will not be represented. Even if the secret judges do care whether an investigatee's first amendment rights are protected, it is very difficult for them to do so, because they are only told the would-be prosecutor's side of the story. "Unlike our Founding Fathers, the ALA gives First Amendment Rights to "all individuals," presumably including non-citizen terrorists." LISNews.com commentor Daniel Cornwall pointed out that in fact Jefferson believed that the first amendment should apply to all indviduals "against every government on earth" and that he thought that the constitution was flawed for not stating this more clearly. 12 The Papers of Thomas Jefferson 438, 440 (J. Boyd ed. 1958). Also, while I don't like the idea that terrorists have human rights and may use these rights to cause destruction, it is dangerous to say that terrorists can never have any legal rights. What if you are mistakenly found to be a terrorist, and thereby lose all your legal rights? Including the right to appeal the mistaken terrorist designation? Mistakes happen all the time in any legal system, which is why there need to be procedures - natural justice at the trial level, procedures for appeals and accountability against abuses. After discussing the ALA's resistance to the Patriot Act, Walfield gives a brief chronicle of the ALA's "left-wing agenda." Included in the ALA's list of sins is campaigning for more openess in government records. Towards the end, there is a mention of the ALA being upset at the destruction and looting of the National Library and Archives of Iraq. Of course this was interpreted that the ALA did not care about the safety of American troops. Forget the fact that the Ministry of Oil had been protected, or that the US Government had been warned of the dangers to Iraqi cultural institutions and chose to ignore them - and their international legal obligations as an occupying force. I can't ignore Walfield's mention that the ALA's left-wing activism happens despite the organization's tax-exempt 501(c) 3 status. This struck me as a veiled threat which is so typical of these times. Yes, you still have freedom of speech, but if you express unpatriot/lefty views, we will try to punish you until you shut up! 1:56:16 AM

	Monday, May 19, 2003

my first impressions of iBlog: Mac-only blogging software with a news aggregator Ever since I first heard about iBlog a few months ago, I've been wanting to take a look at it and write down my impressions. iBlog is Mac-only blogging software. It's built for OS X and sports the increasingly ubiquitous brushed metal interface. Because things have been kind of busy for me lately, I wasn't able to take a very detailed look at iBlog. I was half-afraid that the more I looked at it, the more likely I'd decide to dump my Salon/Radio blog for iBlog. I was very impressed. iBlog also has a built-in news aggregator. What struck me the most is how easy to understand the iBlog software is. I took a quick look at the various files that it created in my Mac's library and I could actually understand how it worked. I'm sure that this simplicity would make it that much easier to customize a blog. As much as I like the Radio Userland software, it's taken me a long time to understand how it works, and I've been blogging with it since last August. But on the other hand, iBlog is like Movable Type in that you need your own server to publish your blog on. But this could be a .Mac account, which is becoming an almost essential subscription for Mac users. Maybe it's because I'm a librarian, but I really liked the category feature in iBlog. It made assigning and organizing categories to be very easy. iBlog also generates an RSS feed - which is essential for blogging software, I think. I do have two negative things to say about iBlog. The first thing is that although I like its news aggregator, it provides no simple one-click method of posting items from the news aggregator to the blog. Radio Userland does this - and I thought that was the whole point of having blogging software integrated with a news reader. It is very likely that this omission will be fixed in future releases of iBlog, so this is not a huge problem. My other concern is more of a social rather than a technological issue, but it's real and is the major reason why I don't switch to iBlog tonight. It's that iBlog is so relatively new and has not yet established a community of users. I've talked about blogging communities before (see Digression2). Although I think one's blogging software is a very loose and less significant community, it does count for something. Maybe it's also because most of the time I feel quite at home in the Salon blog community. Anyway, I'll finish by recommending iBlog to anyone starting a new blog on a Mac (OS 10.2). Because it's on a Mac and the software is very Mac-like, you won't waste as much time figuring out the technology and can spend more time being creative. 10:02:47 PM

	Sunday, April 27, 2003

truth and lies in public discourse: Fox, Nike and Kamiya This week I’ve musing about truth and lies in public discourse. They are quite different issues but it is ironic that as Salon’s Gary Kamiya is being castigated for his extremely honest and courageous essay about the fall of Baghdad, we see companies such as Fox News and Nike go to court to preserve their right to mislead the public. 1. Distorting the News The courts have officially ruled that it is okay for television news to lie and distort the truth. Accepting a defense rejected by three other Florida state judges, a Florida appeals court has reversed the $425,000 jury verdict in favor of journalist Jane Akre. Here's the full scoop: Jane Akre and Steve Wilson had produced an expose for WTVT/Fox News of Tampa about how Florida supermarkets were reneging on a promise not to sell hormone-laden milk from rBGH-injected cows. In their investigations, they also found many troubling things about the artificial hormone and its maker, Monsanto Company. Fox News had already advertised the expose, but the day before it was to air, the station received a threatening letter from Monsanto's lawyers. Fox ordered Akre to retract her story and do a slanted piece in favor of Monsanto, but Akre refused, on the grounds that it would be dishonest journalism. As a result, she was fired. Akre sued, but a Florida appeals court has now ruled that it is technically not against any law, rule or regulation to deliberately lie or distort the news on a television broadcast. [Reader Weekly, Duluth Minnesota] First, for the lawyer types, the case is New World Communications of Tampa v. Akre, 2003 WL 327505, 28 Fla. L. Weekly D460. The issue before the court was not whether broadcasters are allowed to mislead the public. Rather, it involved interpreting 448.102, Fla. Stat. (Supp. 1998), Florida’s private-sector whistler-blower law. In my view, the Court made its decision in the following two quotations: Even if we agreed with Akre that the FCC's news distortion policy was a "rule" as defined by section 120.52(15), her argument overlooks the fact that the whistle-blower's statute specifically limits the definition of "rule" to an "adopted" rule. § 448.101(4). "This limitation to 'adopted' material only appears deliberate, and well serves the public by hinging civil liability upon matters of which due notice, actual or imputed, has been conveyed." Forrester v. John B. Phipps, Inc., 643 So.2d 1109 (Fla. 1st DCA 1994). We find the legislature's use of the word "adopted" in the statute to be a limitation on the scope of conduct that will subject an employer to liability under the statute. … First, federal law recognizes a dichotomy between rulemaking and adjudication; it does not equate the two. See Bowen v. Georgetown Univ. Hosp., 488 U.S. 204, 109 S.Ct. 468, 102 L.Ed.2d 493 (1988) (Scalia, J., concurring). Second, while federal agencies may have discretion to formulate policy through the adjudicative process, the same is not true under Florida law. The Florida Legislature has limited state agencies' discretion to formulate policy through the adjudicative process by requiring agencies to formally adopt each agency statement that fits the definition of a "rule" under section 120.52. See § 120.54. As noted above, the legislature's use of the word "adopted" in the whistle-blower's statute was deliberate and was intended to limit the scope of conduct that will subject an employer to liability. This limitation is consistent with the legislature's requirement that agency statements that fit the definition of a "rule" be formally adopted. You might say that the Appellants (the Fox affiliate) won on a technicality. It doesn’t matter if they violated the FCC news distortion policy, because that policy had never been adopted according to the exact requirements of the Florida statute. Because of this, the District Court of Appeal did not need to decide whether the Appellants had in fact violated the FCC news distortion policy. The Court did discuss the news distortion issue somewhat. It recognized In re CBS Program "Hunger in America", 20 F.C.C.2d 143, 150-51 (1969) as the leading authority on the issue. It also cited a journal article: Chad Raphael, The FCC's Broadcast News Distortion Rules: Regulation by Drooping Eyelid, 6 Comm. L. & Policy 485 (2001). Much of the Hunger in America opinion concerns whether a broadcaster is liable if one of its rogue employees distorts the news – unknown and unbidden by management. The FCC wrote: [U]nless our investigation reveals involvement of the licensee or its management there will be no hazard to the station's licensed status. Such improper actions by employees without the knowledge of th licensee may raise questions as to whether the licensee is adequately supervising its employees, but normally will not raise an issue as to the licensee's character qualifications. If the facts in New World Communications of Tampa v. Akre are correct, it seems pretty clear that the Fox affiliate engaged in the “top down” management-mandated distortion which the FCC was concerned about here: Rigging or slanting the news is a most heinous act against the public interest -- indeed, there is no act more harmful to the public's ability to handle its affairs Violations of this news distortion policy are only relevant when the FCC is deciding whether to renew a broadcaster’s license. There are no other legal consequences for distorting the news and misleading the public. And can anyone imagine that the current FCC, headed by Michael Powell would give a Fox affiliate even a slap on the wrist for distorting the news? The law is an ass – as indicated by the result of the New World Communications of Tampa v. Akre – but politics is worse. 2. Nike's Right to Mislead The Christian Science Monitor has a good summary of the facts and issues involved (thanks to Howard Bashman for that cite ): The case, to be heard Wednesday, centers on Nike's ability to participate in public debate over its foreign business operations - which critics call dangerous and immoral - without being held liable for any false or misleading statements. The question is whether Nike is engaging in commercial speech, which is subject to civil charges if found to be false, or political speech, which enjoys greater protection under the First Amendment. The US Supreme Court is reviewing Kasky v. Nike, Inc., 93 Cal. Rptr. 2d 854 (2002), which reversed Kasky v. Nike, Inc., 27 Cal. 4th 939 (2002). I will be pleasantly shocked if the Supreme Court does not rule in favour of Nike. It has been very interesting to skim through the amici briefs, most of which have been filed for Nike. I do not want Nike to win this case. Maybe it’s because I’m not American, but I do not think that free speech trumps every other right – especially the idea that companies should have the same freedom of speech as people! Freedom of speech becomes meaningless when money=speech. This means that although the poor have de jure freedom of speech, they have no de facto freedom of speech. Sorry to slip into legalese, but a legal right on paper is meaningless if there is no social or economic ability to exercise that right. So freedom of speech means the freedom to lie? Even in this country, it is not OK to use dishonesty to defame another person’s character. Corporations already have way too many rights – especially when considering their wealth and clout in media and politics. It is time to start scaling back, not expanding the legal personhood of corporations. I think that all corporate speech is advertising of some kind – whether to consumers or investors. In the company where I used to work, public relations was actually inside the marketing department. When the news about Nike’s sweatshop practices first came out, I decided to avoid Nike products. But if I heard convincing information from them that they had cleaned up their act, I’d be inclined to consider them again. In fact, I’d be more likely to trust information that did not obviously appear to be advertising. The point is that these statements do have an effect in the marketplace, therefore they should be regulated according to the rules of the marketplace. 3. Honesty will be distorted and used against you The treatment of Gary Kamiya’s article is different from the two court cases which I’ve mentioned, but it is also concerns distortion and the place of honesty or dishonesty in public discourse. O'Reilly-a-rama Here at Salon, we're used to having our arguments ripped out of context and turned into fodder for the right-wing media machine, but the feeding frenzy of distortion and lies surrounding the selective quotation from Gary Kamiya's "Liberation Day" op-ed over the past few days set a new standard for disingenuousness. You can read more about it in this Salon editorial. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] Kamiya’s main argument was that the fall of Saddam Hussein was something which everybody could feel glad about – whether they were for or against the war in Iraq. Because Saddam Hussein was a very nasty man – and whether or not the war was justified, or that it will open a Pandora’s Box of ethnic and religious hatreds in the Middle East – it is good to see him gone. In reaching this position, Gary Kamiya addressed his opposition to the war in the first place. He very honestly wrote: I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings. Of course, Bill O’Reilly and other right-wing commentators immediately jumped on these sentences, ignoring the point of Kamiya’s article – that as the war progressed, his position had evolved from that secret wish for things to go wrong. The moral of this incident is that as corporations extend their rights to lie and be misleading in public discourse, individuals will be punished for being too honest. The equivalent honesty would be if Bill O’Reilly admitted to that for a moment he really wanted to tear Jeremy Glick into “f**king pieces” for daring dispute the Right’s ownership of the 9/11 tragedy. 4:38:42 PM

	Wednesday, April 16, 2003

4 motivations for blogging, with 2 digressions I’ve been ruminating about this topic for several weeks and now I feel inspired to write about it. So why do people blog? For some people, it fits in very well with their day job. This is partly the reason why I blog. As I’ve explained in some of the essays I’ve written about blogging, maintaining a blog is a good way of keeping up with the latest news and technology concerning my profession - being a law librarian. For some people, this goes further. Blogging is becoming a parallel way of publication, which is so important in the academic world. Of course, self-publication will never be as prestigious as peer-reviewed or paid publication. But does this distinction really matter when blogs are offering the most innovative and accessible (read cheap) content and form? I’m sorry, but if I only have x hours per week for professional reading, that time is better spent reading blogs than journals or trade magazines. <Digression1> Of course, I’m a Very Naughty Librarian for saying this. We always push getting the best of both print and online worlds. So why have I turned heretic in this way? I know that blogging is far from perfect. It can be a breeding ground for rumours, half-truths and bad scholarship (I’m guilty of this at times, so I’m allowed to say this). It can be very circular or self-referential. On other hand, established publications aren’t perfect either. They can be expensive, full of ads, and print only publications don’t have hyperlinks (and rarely do their online versions) – footnotes aren’t quite the same. I think that reading online materials with hyperlinks is a more active and engaging process than reading articles in print. Most importantly, more often than not, I am simply not interested in the content which has been selected by publishers. Reading blogs, I am in charge of what I’m reading. I choose which blogs I put in my aggegator, which posts to skim over and which ones to read in detail. This is one of the benefits of information overload. I know that there will always be more things to read than I have time for. I can use this situation to my advantage by letting myself focus in what I’m really interested in. I’m not saying that publishers don’t add any value. They do by paying professionals to write and sometimes selecting interesting articles which I wouldn’t have read otherwise - Salon being a case in point for me, for which I’m very willing to pay. But other bloggers can do this too - and they point me to interesting articles in other publications which I would never read otherwise. All that said, I still do read print journals and trade magazines - because I'm also a bookworm and feel that I should. </Digression1> Some blogs greatly compliment the blogger’s paid career. I know of instances of people being offered real jobs because of the quality of their web logs. Another reason to blog is that it’s good for the ego. I don’t mean this in a derogatory way. For people who think that “ego” or “egotistical” are invariably bad things, think self-esteem instead. I think that most honest & self-aware people who aren't saints would be hard-pressed to deny that the ego boosts can help. It’s nice to read your blog being praised. It’s interesting to see the number of hits & referrers to your blog increase. Of course, I must mention the BlogShares (truly, life is too short to be fixated by such things). Of course, depending on their sensitivity, a blogger’s ego can be hurt by criticism, being delinked or receiving reduced readership. Some people have a thicker skin and are not bothered by this. Other people reduce the likelihood of negative reactions by not going out on a limb or expressing opinions which would be inflammatory to members of their particular blogging community. <Digression2> It’s very hard to define what a blogging community is. I don’t mean anything monolithic such as - “Trent Lott’s racist remarks caused such furor in the Blogging Community that the mainstream media could no longer overlook them.” There are many different blogging communities. They include the formal attempts to establish a blogging community - e.g. Salon blogs, the blawg web ring, various LiveJournal communities etc. But these formal constructions only help facilitate a blog community, they are not essential for a community. I would tentatively say that a blog community consists of those formal or informal relationships between bloggers who frequently read each other’s postings and occasionally point to or comment on them. I would guess that relationships are based on shared viewpoints and personalities. The blogiverse is like the night sky. Stars all over the place, in every direction. Some are bright while others are very faint, some have different colours, and they arranged in constellations. Now, imagine a series of Venn diagrams overlaying these stars. And so the image changes to light rain falling onto a pond. The water's surface is covered with interlinked and concentric circles. Some circles are larger than others, some circles intersect with others, some circles are wholly contained by others. So each blog falls into a number of different communities, some of which may be large, other which might be small or narrow. For example, if it is very important for me to be included in the mainstream law blog community or the library blog community, it is not wise to rant my particular blend of left-wing politics. Because I may alienate myself from the members of these broad communities who have opposing or neutral point of view, and I move to the fringes of the community. On the other hand, my rants may bring me closer to the centre of the smaller communities of lefty lawyer/librarian bloggers. </Digression2> So if you aspire towards the centre of a large mainstream blog community, you can’t be too controversial, particularly about issues which are outside the main focus of that community. Before I finish about blogging and the ego, I must point out this discussion by Jonathon Delacour. Another reason to blog is simply for self-expression. Blogging for self-expression is similar but different from blogging for the ego boost. It’s not hard to imagine situations where self-expression will get you into trouble and cause you to be criticized, delinked or removed from aggregators. The people who blog purely for self-expression are not interested in their readership or number of links, so long as they are saying what they want to say, in the way that they want to say it. Of course, ego can be important to even the most idealistic / artistic bloggers, because what is the purpose of self-expression if nobody is going to read it? But now I’m approaching into questions which have challenged philosophers and artists for centuries, and I don’t want to add another digression. Finally, there are some people who blog for money. I suspect that this will become a trend, as blogging becomes more mainstream. Depending on the financial relationship, this could seriously undermine the ability for self-expression. On the other hand, being paid may confer extra legitimacy and visibility, which could help the ego. Finally, blogging for money could conceivably become a job – which returns to the first motivation I that mentioned. I’m writing all this to understand my own motivations for blogging. I think that I’m motivated in part by my career, my ego and my need for self-expression – but not for money :) I wouldn’t be opposed in principle to blogging for money, so long as it didn’t interfere with my other needs, particularly self-expression. I’m not going to rank how important these three different motivations are for me, because it changes on any given day. I can say that the self-expression motivation is getting more important, but I doubt that the other two motivations are going to disappear. 11:46:20 PM

	Thursday, March 27, 2003

my unlikely adventures in AOL I’m the last person whom I’d ever think of as an AOL user. I’ve never really had a strong opinion about it, but AOL has never really appealed to me. It must be all I’ve heard about it being the dumbed-down internet on training wheels, that is expensive yet full of spam. I’ve been bombarded with their CDs, and have always ignored them, thinking that I’d never try AOL and that it’s such a waste of resources to be distributing all those CDs. Well, maybe there’s some truth to that axiom of marketing about repetition, because I did end up trying AOL. The circumstances were pretty exceptional. I was catsitting for some friends. I wanted to connect to the web with my iBook. I was using Qwest/MSN dsl, which gave me a certain amount of free dial-up access for this type of situation. The trouble was that their dial-up only worked if I used Mac OS 9.2 (apparently this will change when MSN for OS X comes out shortly). Basically I use OS X for everything now, and did not want to be working in the old operating system. That’s when I decided to retrieve one of those AOL CDs from the garbage bin – literally! I knew that they had a relatively new version for OS X and thought that I’d try it. Besides, I was a little curious to find out what their gated internet world was like. Maybe there was something good about it and it was only snobbery that made me shun it. At any rate, this experiment wouldn’t cost me anything if I cancelled the subscription in time. The installation went very smoothly and easily. No complaints there. AOL for Mac OS X has a very visually attractive interface. The animated browser icon looks very cool and liquid-like. I’m a member of a number of different web “communities.” By communities, I mean spaces where you can discuss particular topics and hook-up with people with similar interests/views/experiences. LiveJournal is the first web community which I became involved with. There’s a bewildering number of communities, from librarians to shy people (guess what – nobody says all that much in it!) to all sorts of fan communities. Recently I also joined the Well, one of the oldest internet communities, which predates the web. I did this mainly to support to support Salon, which I do not want to see fold. The Well is a gated community which is centred on on-going discussions of various topics – from libraries again to TV shows such as Buffy to discussions on etiquette, not to mention the ubiquitous discussions on Iraq and other common events. Even blogs are a kind of community – generally way more open and diffuse and less organized than the others I’ve mentioned. But often certain bloggers pay attention to other bloggers, forming a certain loose-knit community. Then are more deliberate attempts to establish blog communities, such as the blawg web ring or the Salon blogs community, both of which I belong to. I mention all this because I think that the main thing that AOL offers are some gated virtual communities. Because AOL has such a large user base, there is a very wide-range of topics and common interests. For example, there isn’t just one Buffy/Angel message board, there are active ongoing discussions about each of the regular characters in the two shows! One thing that makes AOL stand-out is that they make it very easy to become involved in real-time online chats. For example, there are three different chat rooms about the Buffyverse. Of course, it is possible to do all this outside of AOL, but here I admit that it is much easier in AOL. This is one part of the internet which in my mind, needs a bit of simplification. This assumes that one likes chat rooms, and I’m not sure if I do… In fairness, chat rooms are just a different medium which I’m not used to. Blogs and web discussion boards are hardly paragons of thoughtful, considered conversation, but they are when compared with chat rooms. Chat rooms more closely emulate a real discussion. They’re much faster and spontaneous. There can be a number of different threads of conversation operating simultaneously. Maybe if I were better at multi-tasking, I’d get more out of chat rooms. Of course, AOL is meant to be more than just chat rooms, message boards and online communities. There’s all the “content” available – thanks to its troubled merger with Time Warner. I have to say that none of it really impressed me. Maybe one reason might be that Mac users can’t use the AOL Radio feature. But none of AOL’s other content struck me as any better than anything I could find very easily on the free web. But I guess that AOL’s content is simply there – it’s not even a matter of finding it. AOL’s biggest short-coming is its rampant spam. With my previous email accounts (with the exception of hotmail), I was only spammed after I started making my email address available to the outside world – by buying things or filling out forms etc. With AOL, I started getting spammed almost immediately. Worse than that, when I was in chat rooms, I would get spam instant messages, which are even more annoying. I realize that because AOL is the biggest ISP, it’s also the biggest target for spam. I know that it has developed spam control features which I could probably use more effectively. Still, it’s off-putting to be receiving nasty sexual spam within an hour of initially signing onto AOL. Because I had such low expectations of AOL, I ended being slightly impressed. Is it worth the extra money? If you just need internet access, definitely not. If you want the whole AOL experience, especially the chat rooms and other community features, possibly. Other online communities can also cost money, and if they don’t cost money, they may be more difficult to use or require more work. 12:16:29 AM

	Wednesday, February 12, 2003

are libraries essential services or not? big assumptions in a footnote Yesterday I awoke to hear the news that Minnesota's State Auditor, Pat Awada, is proposing to cut state aid to local government. Apparently, the level of state aid must be too high, because too many cities are using it to fund "non-essential services" like parks and libraries. I was intrigued to view the complete version of Awada's report, to read how they devised this essential/non-essential categorization. This turned out to be difficult to find - in half of a footnote on the first page of the executive summary: The OSA grouped three current city services: general government, public safety and streets and highways together to form essential current services. All other current services are called non-essential current services for the purposes of this study. (emphasis not added) That was it. I'm not suggesting that the essential services listed aren't really essential. It is interesting to see the leaps in logic here. First, that all government services are either essential or non-essential. Second, that it is not reasonable to fund non-essential services. In my view, to say that governments are only about roads and police is the same as saying that the only things people need in life are food and water (& grudgingly, shelter, because it gets kind of nippy in Minnesota winters). Of course, people do need food, water and shelter, or they will quickly perish. But that is only the beginning of people's needs - what about the human needs for companionship, purpose etc? Once the most basic needs have been satisfied, do the secondary & tertiary needs come to the fore. In the same way, roads and police are the basic services of government, and after them come the secondary services (like parks & libraries etc) which give meaning to society. I would have mentioned education earlier, except that this report by Awada only concerns funding to cities, not school boards (they'll have their turn, I'm sure). By the way, there is no state library system in Minnesota. The local government public libraries are the only ones that we have. By lumping them into non-essential local government services, is Awada saying that there is no place for public libraries anywhere in Minnesota? The assumptions in this footnote raise some important questions. I was curious to see if it was standard practice for governments to consider libraries as "non-essential services" in this supposed information age. I was not able to find very much. Probably because these are decided by what is not said rather than by what is said - for example, Pat Awada's report makes no mention of libraries, but this doesn't reduce its potential negative effects on libraries. I found two interesting things: a newsletter from a Wisconsin library system encouraging people to let their leaders know in very concrete terms what reductions in library funding will mean. The other one is a pdf version of this paper: Proctor, Usherwood and Sobczyk, What happens when a public library service closes down?, Library Management 18, no. 1 (1997): 59 12:42:24 AM

	Friday, December 13, 2002

Dow Jones may have lost the Gutnick battle in Canberra, but they and their allies will win the war in Washington D.C. I have just posted a "story" (in the Radio Userland parlance) about the Dow Jones v. Gutnick case recently decided by the High Court of Australia to almost universal condemnation in the blogosphere. In it I've abridged Kirby J's concurring opinion. It's a lengthy post, but the decision itself is much longer. I wanted to show that this particular judge is quite aware that it's an unfortunate decision with potentially very negative and far-reaching consequences. One of his concluding points is that the problems in the law of internet defamation need to be fixed by the legislative branch of governments and by international agreement, not by an Australian court. If the Court had decided in favour of Dow Jones, what would there be to stop "libel-havens" from developing - countries with no local defamation laws where the multinational media companies could locate all of their web servers? I'm sorry, maybe I'm just too disillusioned by corporate culture, but if there's convenience to be had or a dollar to be saved in doing something like this, it would inevitably happen. After all, we already have tax havens. The gist of the High Court's decision is that the Australian law on the topic was quite settled. Dow Jones was asking the Court to make radical changes in the Australian common law. Usually widescale law reform of this nature is a matter for Parliament, not the Courts - unless extraordinary circumstances exist (as occured in the Mabo and Wik cases). Maybe I shouldn't be deliberately confusing the issues, but I'm a lot happier with the High Court stepping in to help out Eddie Mabo or the Wik People on matters of human rights than I would be about extending the same courtesy to make life easier for Dow Jones and the other huge media companies. Just for the record, I think it would have been better if the High Court of Australia had gone out on limb and decided something constructive rather than passing the buck - which is essentially what they did. Had they done this and decided something which govenments didn't like, corrective legislation would have appeared quickly, to the benefit of everyone. By doing essentially nothing in changing the applicable law, the proponents of change will need to convince govenments why they should make changes. This will prolong things. On the other hand, I am quite confident of the ability of large multinational media companies, through the clout of their campaign contributions, to lobby the U.S. Government to help them out. It would be very easy for the U.S. Government to sign a bilateral treaty with Australia on this issue. John Howard, the current conservative Australian Prime Minister is always willing to do whatever he can to demonstrate his undying-obedience to his good friend, George W. Bush. If Australia signs a treaty in this area, John Howard will get the constitutional power to legislate this Gutnick case out of existence, and he will. Of course, a multilateral treaty would be the better way to solve this problem. Whether the rest of the world will be as compliant as the Australian government is another matter. "Let's see - they're not interested in limiting greenhouse gas emissions, they're actively undermining the International Criminal Court but they want the rest of the world to help them preserve the profit margins of some of their campaign contributors in the media industry ..." I think that this is only a small setback for Dow Jones. They will prevail in the end. 12:36:48 AM