Alec Saunders SquawkBox

This morning we talked about some of the stories that are emerging about the use of technology in politics.  Barack Obama’s use of SMS to announce Joe Biden as his running mate, Microsoft’s deployment of a voter registration application on XBOX, and the novel ways that cellular phones are being used on the convention floor.

The other topic?  Tomorrow is Skype’s 5th anniversary.  How has Skype changed your world?  the communications industry?

On the conference call today: Dan York, James Body, Jim Courtney, Bill Volk, Jonathan Jensen, Sheryl Breuker, Jeanette Fisher, Dave Brown

 

 Squawk Box August 28 [37:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Michael Geist was our SquawkBox guest this morning.  Michael is the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. He has degrees from Toronto, Cambridge and Columbia.  In addition he's a columnist on technology law issues who regularly appears in the Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, and BBC. And he serves on the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s Expert Advisory Board and maintains privacyinfo.ca, a leading privacy law resource.

Recently Michael has been focused on copyright reform here in Canada.  The Conservative government has proposed legislation that is remarkably similar to the widely discredited Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the United States, and Michael has been asking ordinary citizens to voice their opinion on what Fair Copyright Reform looks like.  In fact, his Facebook group Fair Copyright for Canada has grown to nearly 40,000 members since it was started in December.

Enjoy the interview.  If afterward, you want to get involved, join the Facebook Group, and take a look at Michael's list of 30 things you can do, beginning with writing to your MP.   

 

 Squawk Box Feb 1 - Michael Geist [33:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It must be summer.  These are slow news days, while everyone heads out to the beaches and cottages.  For instance, this morning:

• The Register reports half of all European calls will be mobile in 2008. They're raising the alarm for fixed-line carriers. Not exactly surprising, that.
• Microsoft will release Works 9.0 as ad-funded software. Finally. How long has the been speculated about? 
• The US House of Representatives has passed a unanimous motion demanding that Canada stop the slaughter of baby seals.  I guess now that they've debated Bush into a corner on Iraq, they've run out of other work.  Take a vacation, guys.

We had a spirited discussion around the breakfast table yesterday morning.  Topic: politics. Always good for some heated debate. And if you followed my Facebook profile yesterday,  you saw the evidence of the progression of that discussion.  At the beginning of the day I listed my political viewpoint as libertarian.  Part way through the day it flipped to moderate.  And it's now back to libertarian.

It began with Janice questioning my choice to label myself as having libertarian views.  She's not the only one either.  A few times recently friends have asked what libertarian on my profile means. The problem is that declared libertarians are frequently perceived to be a little nutty. In fact, that was the source of today's discussion.  Janice pointed out the platform of the Libertarian Party of Canada, which mostly stands for abolishing everything supported by government, including items like abolishing universal education. Of course I don't believe in those things.  And the Wikipedia entry on libertarianism is also full of similar radical views. 

Most political parties today are really about two things — economics and personal freedoms. They tend to define themselves on axes that range from controlled economies to free markets (left to right wing), and individual liberty (or libertarian) to authoritarianism. Traditional conservatives are authoritarian free marketers, for example, which explains the trend in recent years to a loss of civil liberties accompanied by less regulated markets. 

There's a fabulous survey tool at http://www.politicalcompass.org/ that you can take to see where you stand. I scored slightly left on the right vs left scale (-1), and feel deeply about personal liberty (-6.5) on the authoritarians vs libertarian scale. Makes sense, although I was surprised to see myself on the left side of the scale.  While I prefer open markets, I do not believe in the benevolence of corporations.  They exist to serve their shareholders, not society. And while I accept authority as a necessary requirement for society to function, I have a deep belief in civil liberties, individual rights and freedom of thought.  If there's one thing that makes me irrational it's the Orwellian idea that we should do or think something for no other reason than "it's the right thing to do".

So that's me — a small L libertarian. An economically moderate guy with a knee-jerk reaction to the arbitrary application of authority. 

Political Compass also shows where the parties in many countries would chart at various different elections.  Here, for instance, is Canada in 2005.  The chart also helps to explain why I had such difficulty in making a voting choice in the last election.  The Liberals and Conservatives were not that different, and both were much more authoritarian than I find comfortable.  The NDP, too far to the left. The Libertarian Party of Canada would be deeply libertarian and far right. The Greens, while not shown on this chart, were shown on the UK chart… as deeply libertarian and slightly left, and that's where I placed my vote.

Yesterday MySpace deleted the profiles of 29,000 sex offenders from the site.  It was a good PR move for the company, and more motivated by wanting to be seen to be "taking action" by politicians and the public than anything else.  After all, it would be a simple enough task to gain access to the registered sex offender database, compare emails to registered emails on MySpace, and then delete the accounts.  No doubt any real predators who want to target MySpace users will simply create another account.

It generated a fair amount of debate.  Stephanie Booth pointed out that prudish sex offender laws in many states lump acts between consenting adults into the same category as those preying on children.  You can read her full post, but let's just say that it's hard to imagine that most adults haven't, at one time or another, committed one of these acts.  That's why what MySpace and grandstanding Connecticut AG Richard Blumenthal have done is nothing more than a placebo perpetuated on an unsophisticated public that really just wants to protect kids.  Their actions are a fraud.

Brandon Watson, the CEO of IMSafer, wrote an impassioned and lengthy post also. His point? Predators go where they prey is.  He backs it up with some statistics designed to show that the incidence of predation on MySpace may be higher than in society at large.  Like Stephanie, he also notes that it's not the young kids that are vulnerable, but the teens, quoting University of New Hampshire's David Finkelhor:

So these are not mostly violence sex crimes, but they are criminal seductions that take advantage of teenage, common teenage vulnerabilities. The offenders lure teens after weeks of conversations with them, they play on teens’ desires for romance, adventure, sexual information, understanding, and they lure them to encounters that the teams know are sexual in nature with people who are considerably older than themselves.

Given the wide scope of definition around the term sex offender, it's nearly useless for identifying predators and for protecting the vulnerable in society.  Tools like the ones that Brandon's company, IMSafer, provides are whatreally help to keep kids safe.  IMSafer uses sophisticated pattern matching algorithms to look for text that might be considered dangerous in IM messages, and then alert parents to the conversations.  It goes right to the heart of the problem, which are conversations between our kids and strangers.  At the same time, it's not an intrusive or privacy busting solution because it only alerts parents when a potentially dangerous situation is occurring.  The rest of the time, kids privacy is preserved.

Brandon dropped me a note last week to say that since their launch they are now monitoring over 2,000,000 relationships, and have scanned 100 million messages.  What IMSafer is doing is far more meaningful than MySpace's decision to delete a few user accounts.  If you have reason to be concerned about your children's safety online, then you owe it to yourself to check out IMSafer.