Anti-Astroturfing Wiki

Seth Godin has pointed out a new Anti-Astroturfing Wiki, for exposing those who are creating fake grassroots efforts by actions like coordinating letters to the editor or blog comment posts which don't mention the coordinating body--a practice engaged in by both advocates for and against net neutrality regulations.

The current Wikipedia definition: "In American politics and advertising, the term astroturfing describes formal public relations projects which deliberately seek to engineer the impression of spontaneous, grassroots behavior. The goal is the appearance of independent public reaction to a politician, political group, product, service, event, or similar entities by centrally orchestrating the behavior of many diverse and geographically distributed individuals."

The Anti-Astroturfing Wiki and campaign has been set up as part of TheNewPR Wiki by Paull Young and Trevor Cook in response to the PR Institute of Australia's promotion of a "how-to" seminar on astroturfing even though the practice violates the PRIA Code of Ethics. Young has issued an anti-astroturfing statement:

We oppose the practice of astroturfing, defined above, in any form. The practice should never be a part of a public relations campaign as it is anti-democratic, unethical, immoral and often illegal.

We will attempt to raise awareness of this practice, expose it for what it is, and encourage our fellow communicators to join us in opposition.

We call for all professional communication bodies to strongly, publicly and actively oppose astroturfing; alongside PR agencies, individual practitioners and bloggers.

I endorse this, along with the InOpinion list exposing astroturfing which I posted about back in May. (For those who want to deny that providing prewritten letters on a website without mentioning the name of the organizing group supplying them is astroturfing, I recommend this rebuttal from the InOpinion blog.)

I wrote about an Arizona astroturfing effort by beverage distributors to stop direct wine shipments here. The fact that these astroturfers weren't really concerned about underage purchases of wine by mail was demonstrated by their agreement to a compromise based on the size of the winery--their principle was making sure that they remained in the middle for most wine purchases, not whether or not underage drinking occurs.

Telecom regulation around the world

Paul Kouroupas has written an interesting series of posts about the state of telecommunications regulation around the world. He postulates a hypothetical company, CoolCo, that is an ISP that wants to sell Internet access, voice over IP, email, instant messaging, and web hosting to residential customers, while not owning any of its own transmission facilities. CoolCo wants to expand its services to include dedicated circuits for business customers, and is majority owned by U.S. investors with a Thai investor who owns 15% of the company.

Kouroupas then looks at how CoolCo would fare in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the United States with respect to licensing requirements, license fees and other fees, foreign ownership restrictions, tariff, contract and pricing rules, interconnection rights and obligations, and the efficiency and effectiveness of the regulatory process.

He begins with Europe--licensing requirements are nonexistent; operators must simply "register and abide by a set of basic consumer protection obligations and regulations." License fees are nominal and consistent across the entire EU. There are no universal service fees or foreign ownership restrictions. There are no tariff requirements, no contract requirements beyond "conformity to basic legal precedence," no pricing rules "other than basic non-discrimination requirements." No regulator approval is required to set prices. Interconnection is mandatory, some states require unbundling of services by the incumbents. The regulatory process is relatively efficient and does not consume the bulk of CoolCo's resources.

In Latin America, Kouroupas looks at Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela, the countries where Global Crossing operates, and shows that there is a large amount of variation between countries, with Argentina, Brazil, and Chile being more open and adaptable, and Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela having more heavy-handed regulation. All have licensing requirements, with the less-regulated three and Peru requiring only a single license for CoolCo's offerings, while Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela require separate licenses for each service offered. All have license fees as a percentage of revenue, ranging from 0.5% to 3%. Universal service fees fall in the same range. Only Mexico has foreign ownership restrictions. Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela heavily regulate prices, tariffs, and form of contracts. Most countries require some form of interconnection, but in Mexico the incumbent (Carlos Slim's Telmex, which was privatized in the worst possible way) has been the recipient of multiple complaints for taking steps to avoid or delay the implementation of interconnection. In most countries the incumbent telco is the largest employer in the country and has considerable influence over the regulatory process, which often fails to complete by the legal time limits, leaving competitive telcos in legal limbo for months or years.

Kouroupas then turns to Asia, looking specifically at Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, with a brief look also at China and India. The former countries, unsurprisingly, are more open than the latter two, though the level of bureaucracy is also high in Japan and Taiwan. China, India, and South Korea have foreign ownership restrictions, at least for facilities-based operators.

Finally, he looks at the United States, which is hampered by a lack of consistency and coherent regulations, especially with respect to VoIP. Licenses are not required at the moment, but the FCC appears to have opened the door for it, and there are some specific requirements that now apply such as CALEA and E911. VoIP providers will have to contribute to the universal service fund by assuming that 64.9% of their traffic is interstate, which means paying 10.5% of 64.9% of their revenue. Foreign ownership restrictions exist, but CoolCo should not hit them at the moment due to its foreign ownership of less than 25% and its not requiring licensing, but this could change. There are no tariff, contract, or pricing rules that apply. For VoIP there are currently no interconnection rights and unbundling is limited. The regulatory process exists at both the federal (FCC) and state (public utility commissions) level. At the federal level, regulation is incredibly inefficient; at the state level it varies considerably from state to state but is generally more efficient than at the federal level and has promoted competition. The overall picture is one of uncertainty about the future.

I've only touched on the highlights of the detail in Kouroupas' posts, but it's clear that CoolCo will find Europe to be the easiest region to establish business in today. Check them out.

The DHS National Asset Database

The Department of Homeland Security's National Asset Database has come under fire recently for the absurdity of some of the more than 77,000 items on the list, most of which were added in 2005--there were fewer than 32,000 items in 2004. Indiana leads the nation as the state with the most entries on the list, with 8,951 (up from 322 in 2004), including Amish Country Popcorn near Berne, Indiana. New York has 5,687 (up from 1,634 in 2004) and California has only 3,212. Washington state has 3,650, which includes 65 "national monuments and icons"--more than Washington, D.C. Arizona has a mere 675 entries on the list, up from 597 in 2004.

Absurd entries on the list include a petting zoo in Huntsville, Alabama, the Columbia, Tennessee Mule Day Parade, the Sweetwater Flea Market near Knoxville, Tennessee, and items like "Beach at End of a Street," "Nix's Check Cashing," "Mall at Sears," "Ice Cream Parlor," "Tackle Shop," "Donut Shop," "Anti-Cruelty Society," and Arkansas' Bean Fest.

In Seattle, the list includes Auburn's SuperMall (which received a $50,000 DHS grant). There are 1,305 casinos on the list, 234 restaurants, and 700 mortuaries. Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat has called for reader submissions of their own items, "as absurd as you want"--"No way can it top the spectacle going on at homeland security."

Not included on the list: Times Square, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, or the Brooklyn Bridge.

The list has made the press because auditors at the DHS Inspector General's office have questioned the value of "unusual or out-of-place sites ... whose criticality is not readily apparent." But the DHS is unapologetic: "We don't find it embarassing ... The list is a valuable tool," says DHS deputy press secretary Jarrod Agen. Agen claims that the list is not used for funding decisions, but the DHS budget for Arizona was cut in half for 2006.

The committees in Congress responsible for oversight of the DHS are the House Judiciary Committee (which includes two Arizonans, Rep. Jeff Flake and Rep. Trent Franks) and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs (no Arizonans).

How about setting some reasonable standards for what submissions from states get put on the list?

Radley Balko paramilitary police paper

Radley Balko's paper, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, has been released by the Cato Institute today. It is available for download (PDF) and is accompanied by an online interactive map of incidents. The executive summary:

Americans have long maintained that a man’s home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

This paper presents a history and overview of the issue of paramilitary drug raids, provides an extensive catalogue of abuses and mistaken raids, and offers recommendations for reform.

You can hear Balko talking about his paper here (MP3 podcast).

Via The Agitator.

Another lottery casualty

The Arizona Republic reports on the story of Shefik Tallmadge, who won $6.7 million in the Arizona Lottery in 1988 at the age of 29. He was the biggest Pick winner at the time, taking the payment as 20 years of $335,000 payments. He quit his job, bought a Porsche, took his family around the world, completed a political science degree, and married a pharmacist. He cashed in on the remainder of his lottery winnings in 1998 to get a large lump sum, which he used to buy an expensive house and four gas stations. Last year he filed for bankruptcy and continues to play the same numbers he won with on the Florida Lottery.

This seems to be a not-uncommon story for lottery winners.

Kent Hovind and Ali G

Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power

Under the headline "The end of the high road," The Economist reviews Joseph Margulies' new book, Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power. The review begins:

IN HIS new book on the American jail at Guantánamo Bay, Joseph Margulies recounts the story of a prisoner who told his interrogators of plans to use bacteriological weapons. The man named many others involved, and before long his interrogators had confessions from 35 further prisoners, “page upon page of chilling, meticulously detailed admissions”. The problem is that the prisoners he is writing about here were not suspected members of al-Qaeda, but American soldiers. The questioning took place 50 years ago and the interrogators were North Korean.

The confessions were false and had been extracted after the Americans were subjected to extreme psychological torture. Mr Margulies, a lawyer who has represented some of the men at Guantánamo, describes what happened in Korea to illustrate how, in its eagerness to prosecute the “war on terror”, the current American administration has borrowed from some of its most ruthless past enemies, abandoning practices that had allowed it for decades to take the high road in the conduct of war and international affairs.

Read the rest of the review here.

Monty Python: International Philosophy competition

Coulter fundraising reception raises no money

Rep. Bob Beauprez (R-CO), running for Governor of Colorado, had a fundraising reception at the Paramount Theater in Denver with Ann Coulter as the guest. Beauprez himself did not attend, being busy in D.C., but his wife was present. The event didn't attract any donors, leaving Mrs. Beauprez and Coulter to chat with each other, a dozen campaign volunteers, and a few radio station listeners who had won free tickets to hear Coulter speak. Funds raised: $0.

Craigslist no longer uses TCP window size of 0

The erroneous claim that Cox was blocking Craigslist turned out to be a combination of a bug in a firewall driver from Authentium and the fact that Craigslist was using a TCP window size of 0 in the initial TCP handshake. Authentium took full responsibility for the issue, but no one was ever able to get Craig Newmark to answer why Craigslist was using a TCP window size of 0. My speculation was that this was being done as a way of avoiding congestion, possibly by a load-balancing switch in front of the web servers. Although Craig politely responded to some private emails from me, I never got an answer to whether my speculation was correct.

Now Craigslist has stopped using a TCP window size of 0 in the initial handshake, which indicates that it was always within Craigslist's power to fix the problem. Here are some packets I captured a couple of days ago (66.150.243.20 is www.craigslist.org); see the first link above for a more detailed explanation of what the TCP window size means and what caused the problem:

TCP SYN from my machine to craigslist, window size 16384:

15:13:18.469829 [my IP].50845 > 66.150.243.20.80: S 4043800370:4043800370(0) win 16384 (DF)

TCP SYN-ACK from craigslist.org, window size 4380 (this was the one that used to have a window size of 0):

15:13:18.504234 66.150.243.20.80 > [my IP].50845: S 1583028840:1583028840(0) ack 4043800371 win 4380 (DF) [tos 0x80]

TCP ACK from my machine, completing the three-way handshake, window size 16384:

15:13:18.504640 [my IP].50845 > 66.150.243.20.80: . ack 1 win 16384 (DF)