CONTENTS
[1] Newsletter Highlights
[2] Computing Community Express Concern Over Budget
[3] USACM Calls on Congress to Protect Patients Privacy Rights
[4] “Net Neutrality” Amendment Defeated
[5] Key Lawmaker Floats DMCA Expansion
[6] Conference Highlights DMCA Divisions
[7] California Voter Registration Database Rejecting Voters
[8] Upcoming Events
[9] About USACM
[An archive of all previous editions of Washington Update is available here.]
[1] NEWSLETTER HIGHLIGHTS
Below are highlights of the top stories for April; there is more detail on each below, as well as on our weblog at http://www.acm.org/usacm:
* USACM joins with several computing societies and IT companies in a letter sent to the House of Representatives expressing concern that the proposed budget short changes science funding
* USACM joins a diverse coalition calling on Congress to protect patients privacy rights as it considers legislation to better integrate information technology and health care
* Key House Committee turns back “net neutrality” amendment during its consideration of the Telecommunications Act rewrite
* Powerful lawmaker floats legislation to make the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) more stringent.
* Conference on the DMCA finds little common ground between DMCA advocates and critics
* New Californian voter registration database rejecting voters
[2] COMPUTING COMMUNITY EXPRESS CONCERN OVER BUDGET
With the House of Representatives poised to pass its version of the budget for next fiscal year, USACM joined the computing research community and several IT companies expressing our concern that it does not reflect full funding for the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI). The ACI provides about a nine percent increase in funding for basic research at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy Office of Science, and the core labs at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The President’s goal is to double funding for those agencies over the next ten years.
The budget season is well underway and the first step toward funding next fiscal year is passage of a Budget Resolution. This sets targets for broad spending categories, which the Appropriations Committee then uses to fund individual programs and agencies. One of those broad categories is “Science” and that is where the community’s concerns lie.
The House Budget Resolution allocates $300 million less for science than the President’s budget request and about $500 million less than the Senate. (One of the reasons the Senate put more money in this category is to show support for the National Institutes of Health). The appropriations committee is not bound to the numbers in the Budget Resolution, but not funding the President’s proposal would be a set back.
The letter can be found here:
http://www.acm.org/usacm/Letters/jointBudgetLetter.pdf
The following groups signed the letter:
The American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
The Association for Computing Machinery, U.S. Public Policy Committee (USACM)
Cisco Systems, Inc.
The Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC)
The Computing Research Association (CRA)
The Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA)
Intel Corporation
Microsoft Corporation
The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)
[3] USACM CALLS ON CONGRESS TO PROTECT PATIENTS PRIVACY RIGHTS
USACM joined a diverse collection of consumer, privacy, technology, and other groups calling on Congress to ensure that patient privacy rights are part of any federal health information technology legislation. Policy issues associated with health information technology usage are clearly a growing area of interest for policy makers with initiatives from both President Bush and Congress.
Seeking to reduce health care costs and medical errors, last year President Bush called for most Americans to have electronic medical records within the next decade and created an office within Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In addition, the Senate passed legislation (S. 1418), which gives the HHS office a statutory mandate and provides competitive grants for hospitals and other medical providers to facilitate the use of electronic health records. In the House, Congresswoman Nancy Johnson (R-CT) introduced a similar measure (H.R. 4157), which has not yet been considered.
While legislation dealing with electronic health records is gaining momentum, there is still broad concern from many groups about what electronic records will mean to patients’ privacy. To address these concerns, the group called on Congress to embrace the following principles:
* Restore the patient’s right of consent
* Give patients the right to opt-out of having their records in any national or
regional electronic health system
* Give patients the right to segregate their most sensitive medical records
* Require audit trails of all disclosures
* Deny employers access to medical records
* Require that patients be notified of all suspected or actual privacy breaches
* Preserve stronger privacy protections in state laws
* Enact meaningful enforcement and penalties for privacy violators
The letter can be found here:
http://www.acm.org/usacm/weblog/wp-content/PPR_group_letter.pdf
And the list of groups signing the letter can be found here:
http://www.acm.org/usacm/weblog/index.php?p=362
[4] “NET NEUTRALITY” AMENDMENT DEFEATED
The House Commerce Committee considered and passed legislation to update some of the nation’s telecommunications laws in late April. One of the key points of debate was an amendment over the so-called “Net Neutrality” issue. (For background on this issue see):
http://www.acm.org/usacm/weblog/index.php?p=349
Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) offered an amendment intended to strengthen the underlying bill’s neutrality provisions, but it was defeat largely on a party line vote 22 to 34.
The issue of whether Internet Service Providers should be allowed to set up tiered pricing structures or “fast lanes” for delivery of content has become the hot button issue in this year’s telecommunications reform debate.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s proposal would give the Federal Communications Commission limited power to enforce a set of four principles the Commission adopted last August to encourage broadband deployment and promote the open nature of the Internet. Supporters of stronger neutrality provisions criticized the proposal by saying it was too vague and created a policy framework that just adjudicated conflicts instead of regulatory ground rules on which the broadband industry should operate. The Markey amendment was intended to provide such a framework by specifying in law five different duties that broadband providers would have to follow. These were somewhat similar to the FCC’s principles, but went into further detail especially regarding non-discriminatory treatment of internet traffic.
While the amendment was defeated in Committee, Rep. Markey introduced it as a free-standing piece of legislation (H.R. 5273). When the full House of Representatives considers the telecommunication reform bill, he will likely attempt to offer the bill as amendment. However, it is not clear right now whether or not the House Leadership will allow his amendment to be offered.
[5] KEY LAWMAKER FLOATS DMCA EXPANSION
Congressman Lamar Alexander (R-TX), Chairman of the powerful Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property Subcommittee (which has jurisdiction over the DMCA), recently floated the Intellectual Property Protection Act (IPPA). The draft proposal has a broad reach across copyright enforcement, and it specifically reopens part of DMCA to arguably make it more stringent. The full text of the proposal can be found here:
http://www.acm.org/usacm/weblog/wp-content/Draft_DOJ_IP_bill.pdf
And here is a “redline” (which shows how the proposal would change underlying law) of just the language that amends the DMCA:
http://www.acm.org/usacm/weblog/wp-content/IPPA_DMCA.pdf
The proposed legislation would just deal with the “tools” section of the DMCA (which makes it illegal to create or provide anticircumvention tools) by creating a definition for the currently undefined “traffic in:”
“[T]he term “traffic in” means to transport, transfer, or otherwise dispose of, to another, or to make, import, export, obtain control of, or possess, with intent to so transport, transfer, or otherwise dispose of.”
There are a couple of troubling aspects. The first being that defining “traffic in” in this way seems to shift the focus of mass distribution of a tool to one-to-one distribution. The other being the use of the word “intent,” which could arguably chill security research even more than existing law. Under this proposal, a researcher may have to worry about litigation being brought against them based on the vague notion of they “intend” whether to distribute a circumvention tool, which would likely be based on a lengthy and costly fact finding process.
[6] CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS DMCA DIVISONS
Policymakers and experts focused on the DMCA during a half-day conference held yesterday by the Cato Institute titled “Copyright Controversies Freedom, Property, Content Creation, and the DMCA.” (Hopefully they will put video or a podcast of the event on their site.) Finding little common ground, they battled over whether or not copyright policy generally and DMCA specifically have met the challenges of the digital age.
The conference started with a panel of two sitting Members of Congress: Congressman Lamar Alexander (R-TX), Chairman of the powerful Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property Subcommittee (which has jurisdiction over the DMCA); and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who is also on the IP subcommittee. Chairman Smith opened with a couple of interesting remarks:
“DMCA is the foundation for the nation’s digital economy.” And then a bit later, “DMCA makes capitalism work in the digital economy.”
Relative to those provocative remarks, the rest of his talk was largely as expected – that the digital content age is starting to flourish, namely iTunes, and Congress needs to make sure the law has mechanisms to go after those with the tools to strip content protections. He did express regret that the DMCA has been used inappropriately as a legal cudgel at times. This is the first time that I’ve heard a DMCA supporter even mention this. Unfortunately, his solution wasn’t to narrow DMCA to curb these suits, rather it was to champion tort reform to “get rid of frivolous law suits.” (He pointed out the House passed legislation to do so, but the Senate did not take it up).
Rep. Lofgren went in the other direction, saying Congress overreached with DMCA and the act hampered innovation. She discussed her proposal to reform DMCA, the Balance Act (H.R. 4536). She mentioned that there were very few in Congress that understood or believed in DMCA’s drawbacks. She could only name a few Republicans and Democrats that agreed with her.
The last panel focused squarely on DMCA with technical and legal experts debating the law’s efficacy. While the debate between the panelists was good, the takeaway was how little common ground they had. Tim Lee, of the Show-Me Institute walked through his recently released paper, Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, on the DMCA. It is an excellent analysis (about 20 pages but well worth the read) because it not only deals with copyright law, it focuses on the DMCA’s impact or potential impact on technology, research and more broadly competitive markets.
Solveig Singleton of The Progress & Freedom Foundation defended the DMCA arguing that technology was needed to protect digital content and needed a little legal assistance, hence the DMCA. She also clearly stated that lawsuits brought against individuals for copyright infringement weren’t a realistic way to deal with piracy and the DMCA was a far better tool. She argued that it was up to those opposed to DMCA to find a better solution. She was fairly dismissive of Mr. Lee’s arguments, particularly about some of the lawsuits that chilled innovation. She noted that the DMCA was a success because the suits against individual researchers – specifically citing the one against Ed Felten for his research on music protection – were dropped and they were able to present their papers. Ed Felten rebutted this claim on his blog:
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1010
[7] CALIFORNIA VOTER REGISTRATION DATABASE REJECTING VOTERS
Last month Computerworld reported that about 43 percent of voter registration forms in Los Angeles County were rejected by the new California statewide voter registration database. Alademda County’s rejection rate was about 10 percent. Although the article is a little vague, the likely cause is data entry errors that cause conflicts when the voter database is compared against the motor vehicle database.
This cross-checking is a new requirement under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). HAVA requires that states authenticate each potential voter by cross-checking with other state databases. If a potential voter does not have a state driver’s license, then the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number must be used for authentication.
We recently issued a report USACM commissioned looking at statewide voter registration databases, and the cross-checking of databases was one of the key issues the study committee identified (page 23). Because data entry errors are a significant problem and databases (voter or motor vehicle) can be inaccurate, the study committee recommended that:
* When other databases, such as driver registration databases, are used to check for eligibility, those databases should be used for screening and not to automatically enroll or de-enroll voters.
* An automated check can be used to flag some voters for further scrutiny, but the final determination of eligibility should be performed only by an appropriate election official.
Apparently under the California system, any errors are kicked out for manual checking. The Computerworld article notes criticism of the rigid cross-checking protocol.
[8] UPCOMING EVENTS
“IT Innovation and the Role of Diversity” Town Hall, May 17, 2006 1:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m., the National Academies, Washington D.C., for more information see:
Princeton University-Microsoft Intellectual Property Conference, May 18-20, Princeton University, for more information see:
http://www.princeton.edu/~pumipc/
We are experimenting with a weekly listing of some of the upcoming tech hearings in Congress on the USACM weblog. The updates will be under the subject category of “Hill Tech Happenings” at:
http://www.acm.org/usacm/weblog
[9] ABOUT USACM
USACM is the U.S. Public Policy Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is an educational and scientific society uniting the world’s computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.
For more information about USACM and ACM, see:
http://www.acm.org/usacm/about.html
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