On the high-technology front, president-elect Obama has indicated he’d appoint a Chief Technology Officer. The role seems federal-government-focused: The tech “czar” would manage government technology policy with respect to matters like cybersecurity, privacy and Internet policies–basically securing governement networks and keeping government agencies on the cutting edge of communications technology.

The role as described seems limited to “bringing government into the 21st century.” But would the role remain circumscribed? “Czars,” like commissions of various sorts, are tempting for politicians, and can end up as barriers and stumbling blocks to non-political solutions to normal problems and challenges. A drug czar wages a hugely expensive war on drugs; An education czar ends up supporting funding of education programs from Washington, D.C.

Industries–and mere concepts like “technology”–do not need czars in Washington. Such enterprise needs to operate apart from this city. Indeed, even supposedly “deregulatory” Republicans were not reluctant to regulate the Internet. Bush favored federal privacy regulation, but never pushed it. His adminstration was also happy to target porn and “spam.” Legislation favored by the Republicans ran the gamut from gambling to cable regulation to media ownership. Right now, many firms in Washington are poised to push for federal privacy legislation to, as they say, pre-empt the states and get rid of the “patchwork” of privacy legislation with which they must deal. But the risk is merely trading 50 regulators for 51.

Given the constant pressures for meddling in technology by both parties, a “czar” can easily becomes a central figure in the drive to regulate someone, somewhere, rather than simply tend to government modernization knitting.

A government tech czar would likely grow in stature and as a focus of lobbying. It’s one thing to form a commission (such as the military base closure commssion) when we already have big government and are looking for ways to reduce it by fast-track means. But a technology officer seems too easily a mechanism for establishing government authority over our most vulnerable, frontier technologies and sciences. Leaving technology “officer-ship” to the private sector seems a better approach, and one more apt to ensure competition among the states as far as any regulatory policy goes.

So as far as a Chief Technology Officer is concerned, America is not any worse off without it, and could be a lot worse off with it. Hearings on the idea are in order at the very least, but best would be for the idea to simply fade.

Your hosts Richard Morrison and Cord Blomquist discuss the looming presidential election, Halloween, the conviction of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, the continuing economic unease, tough times for the U.S. Postal Service, American companies react to Internet censorship abroad, Cox’s new wireless service, Microsoft’s new web-based OS Azure, and all the finest Olympic News.

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In the communications realm, it used to be that the heavy-metal infrastructure companies were regarded as monopolistic or potentially so. Then, wise regulators feared the Windows desktop surely was an essential facility to which competitors deserved access. Now, “mere” content companies are the monopolies.

Think about it; websites–code!!–are being regarded as something regulators must oversee, as if our left-mouse-button no longer works should the ads we’re served up by Yahoogle seem stilted.

The end result of concessions here, as in satellite mergers and elsewhere, is that we end up with entities that increasingly do not resemble what would exist in a free market. Kind of like banks in a world in which central bankers have controlled money and credit for decades, but that’s another story.

Switzerland’s tax authorities, under pressure from a growing United States investigation into the Swiss bank giant UBS, are expected to hand over confidential data on wealthy American clients of UBS to the Justice Department, two people briefed on the matter said Tuesday.

The move would represent a significant shift in Switzerland’s banking secrecy laws, whose tradition dates to the Middle Ages.

Swiss neutrality (which is irritable to some) and stability has enabled its banking sector to become a source of prosperity for the nation. Reasonable exceptions to their secrecy laws for actual criminal activity should be allowed, but forcing banks to share private information on its clients merely for ’suspicion’ of tax evasion (something often disputable due to folks scrounging through the complicated tax code to reduce liability) seems quite dangerous. Especially since Swiss tax law has a different view of tax evasion than the U.S.

Swiss law makes disclosure of client data or names a crime unless the Swiss authorities think that the client has committed a serious crime, like money laundering or tax fraud. Unlike in the United States, Switzerland does not consider tax evasion to be a crime, though both countries have largely similar definitions of tax fraud.

And the Swiss are capitulating! In direct contradiction to their own legal view of tax evasion.  Even though some may argue that this is moot because the U.S. does not consider a financial transaction as something beholden to privacy rights, the Swiss do–and besides, the U.S. view is wrong.  A person’s financial records should be considered as sacred as their medical records.

Every citizen should maintain a healthy distrust of its government, after all, we have seen federal bureaucracies used to abuse the rights of citizens in many ways by many different regimes.  If the government has the power to search through someone’s private financial dealings in another country solely on suspicion, where does our right to privacy stand? In terms of what constitutes law-breaking in one country as opposed to another, can the U.S. impose its view of a crime on another sovereign nation? Here, the U.S. Justice Department wants to see foreign bank records of thousands for the suspicion of committing an act NOT considered a crime in the country in which those records are held (I know, it happens).

Under pressure in recent months from the Justice Department, Switzerland’s justice ministry, taxing authority and banking regulator have adopted the view that some American clients of UBS may have committed tax fraud.

Note what this says, “Under pressure…[from the DOJ],” Swiss officials “have adopted the view…” that sees, contrary to their own law, these folks as criminals–because the DOJ ’suspects’ that they are.

So where does this lead? If the DOJ can pressure a foreign authority into ignoring its own legal views, where does this leave the U.S. on other issues, namely environmental and other laws that seek to usurp national sovereignty (there are a few)?  What’s worse, under U.S. tax law, a U.S. citizen can still be taxed on income he earns outside of its borders and cannot renounce his citizenship solely to avoid taxes (how they’d find out who knows)–which is in my opinion just wrong–leaving you with the IRS and DOJ chasing down every red cent of your money they feel entitled to.  Add to that some of the invasive banking provisions of the PATRIOT Act, and you have further intrusion into people’s lives and business by a government that knows no boundary. This is not a “pro-rich” or pro-tax cheat view, but a pro-civil rights and sovereignty view.

-GH

Do you use Ebay, PayPal or Amazon? Senator Charles Grassley wants to know. Grassley plans to create a new government database that tracks businesses online sales. His law would require companies to report sensitive detailed information about millions of online purchases.

Online ads can be annoying. From pop-ups to flash screens, it’s hard to surf the Web for long without encountering a sales pitch for an unwanted product. A world without these ads might be pleasant, of course, but then who would pay for all the original content websites make available?  Advertising explains why we can browse the Internet without pulling out our credit cards at every turn. But New York lawmakers are now considering a bill that would make this scenario a reality, spelling doom for the advertising models that could fuel the Internet’s future.

Irked by pervasive advertising, some consumers see the Wild Wild Web as a realm warranting legislative assurances that all information stays private, hidden beyond the reach of marketers without explicit consent. They prefer that we opt-in, rather than opt-out.  

But an alternative interpretation of the nature of the cyberspace is that any advertiser may legitimately assemble information that has been transmitted on what is clearly a very public network.  

Even Wikipedia, long funded entirely by private donations, may soon have to place ads on its popular encyclopedic entries. All the server farms and fiber optic cables that power today’s Internet are not cheap, and somebody has to pay. Ad revenues indirectly fund many of the network upgrades needed to prepare for the ever-increasing stream of global Web traffic. And since advertisers are expected to tighten their belts as the global economy slows down, effective advertising models are more important than ever. If the Internet is to realize its full potential, firms must be free to develop experimental new methods of delivering ads. 

Increasingly, today’s “dumb” online advertisements are yielding to “smart,” behavioral ads.  By cataloguing individualized information about a user’s browsing tendencies, behavioral advertisers like Phorm and NebuAd can guess what sort of ads might interest that person, and select which product to promote accordingly.  In this model, advertisers don’t even have to record specific web addresses; rather, browsing habits are stored only under broad subject categories, like automobiles or golf. Sensitive websites like WebMD aren’t logged whatsoever. All this data is tied not to our names but to anonymous identifiers like cookies or IP address, which typically cannot be traced back to a particular individual except by court order.

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