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TNO 2(4).
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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 2, NUMBER 4 APRIL 1995
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This month: Privacy in Intelligent Transportation Systems Readings on the institutions of public debate Using the net to teach students to write Lots and lots of useful Internet pointers
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Welcome to TNO 2(4).
This issue is somewhat shorter than usual since I'm freaking out about a variety of deadlines. Its primary focus is the pressing matter of privacy issues in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). ITS has the potential to provide a wide range of useful transportation related services, but it also has the potential to enable some very serious invasions of privacy. For example, automatic toll collection systems are springing up all over the industrialized world. Several of them in the United States cause statements to be created which list a driver's name, address, and the precise dates and times and places where tolls were charged. Such records can be abused in numerous ways, and the dangers will only multiply as the number of toll roads one traverses in the average day increases. The time for constructive action on this issue is now, before privacy-invasive technical standards become entrenched and large institutional interests develop around the routine diversion of ITS-related personal information for secondary uses such as marketing. This issue of TNO includes some remarks on this topic that I contributed to CFP'95. This month's "Company of the Month" is developing prototype anonymous toll collection systems based on digital cash. And this month's recommendations include an issue of the Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal on the topic.
Also in this issue is a bibliography on the issues surrounding the industrial organization of public debate, a theme that I introduced in TNO 2(2) and will return to as soon as I can catch my breath. This month's "wish list" describes a hypothetical system for moving certain elements of the jobs of college writing instructors offshore. This worrisome idea provides an occasion to think through a whole variety of issues. I hope that college teachers will take the possibilities of automation in their jobs seriously before it's too late to shape either the technologies or the institutions of teaching in ways that benefit everyone.
Finally, a footnote on filthy e-mail. I saw a report on the net that Vietnam's online services are having trouble getting their keyword-based smut detectors working because they can't represent Vietnamese diacritics accurately. Perhaps the Communications Decency Act will bring such mechanisms to my own country as well. This would not be a happy result on the whole, but it would have certain virtues. For example, Usenet pornographers would be required to write their stories without any of the hundred most obvious words for sexual acts, parts, feelings, and intentions. In general, I think it is healthy when writers learn not to rely on the condensed rhetorical force of individual keywords.
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Thinking about privacy in Intelligent Transportation Systems.
[This is an edited transcript of remarks I contributed to a panel discussion at the Fifth Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy in Burlingame, California in March 1995.]
When we debate new technologies, we are necessarily arguing about the future. Lacking direct knowledge of what the future will bring, we must tell stories -- stories about the complicated interactions between technologies and institutions. These stories have all sorts of origins, from science fiction to religion to sociological theory, and it is important for us to be aware of the nature of our stories and the habits of thought that they encode. Some would say that it's useless to tell these stories, or by extension to worry about the social aspects of technology at all, given that we can't really predict the future. But to speak of "prediction" makes it sound like we have no choice in the matter -- like all we can do is wait around and see what happens. But we do have choices, and indeed we inevitably make choices, and the choices we make set things in motion that we can in fact reason about to some significant degree.
As Rob Kling has pointed out, the most common stories we tell about technology are utopian and dystopian. Utopian stories may admit the potential for harm but are confident that appropriate safeguards will permit the new technologies to unleash enormous and almost unimaginable benefits -- a societal revolution whose outlines can be read off from the workings of the machinery. Dystopian stories about technology generally draw on images of authoritarian hell on earth in which technologies are employed solely for surveillance and control with few possibilities for liberation or redemption.
In getting beyond these simple stories, the point is not to split the difference between them but to collect useful, substantive, medium-sized concepts that let us make theories about the interactions between technologies and institutions, where these theories depend in some detail on how the technologies and the institutions actually work.
This kind of reasoning, I want to suggest, is urgently needed in the case of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). ITS architecture development to date has been driven by a large and subtle process of coalition-building among the companies and agencies that already manage transportation systems or that wish to develop new markets for existing technologies and systems integration skills. Social issues have not been ignored by any means, but it is hard to find much evidence that privacy considerations, to take the topic at hand here today, have had any fundamental influence on architectural thinking, or indeed that they have been regarded as anything but, as one report recently put it, nontechnical constraints and barriers to ITS implementation. And although I do not believe in dystopian stories about technology, at least in their pure, refined form, nonetheless I do believe that the ITS design process, if it continues on its current course, will lead to serious and systemic invasions of privacy.
The raw material for dystopian visions of ITS is not hard to find. Consider, for example, a 1992 report on ITS field trials by an OECD scientific expert group, which describes the "monitoring, teaching, and policing" functions of ITS as follows:
"These functions are grouped together, although they are quite different, since they use the same technical basis. Speeds and distances in relation to rules, road condition and other road users are monitored in connection with other functions. This information can be processed to provide the individual driver with immediate feedback on his behavior. Such immediate reward and correction are known to be effective in teaching procedures. It could serve to gradually improve driver behaviour and teaching performance. In case a driver neglects these efforts to correct his misbehaviour, the same information could be used to enforce correct behaviour by various means, such as fines, license or speed limitation (policing)."
Or consider this (considerably milder) passage from the DOT's 1992 IVHS Strategic Plan Report to Congress:
"The types of innovations [envisioned as part of ITS] include:
[...]
* A variety of innovations within and outside of the motor vehicle to supplement the driver's efforts at vigilance and control, including new products which ensure the driver's own state of fitness, provide onboard road signing and visual enhancements, augment driver perception on a continuous basis, give warning of impending danger, intervene with emergency control if a crash is imminent, and over time, automate the driving process on specialized roadways."
(My thanks to Frank Durand
Further ambivalence derives from one major application of ITS, namely automatic toll collection. On one hand, automatic toll collection should increase efficiency and convenience. On the other hand, it threatens to create records of where you have been driving. Although participation in such programs is usually described as voluntary, it will more likely become involuntary in practice as toll roads multiply, a concept called road pricing. Although rhetorically motivated by market allocation arguments, road pricing is better understood as a tax being sought by revenue-starved governments, for the simple reason that in most cases it is virtually impossible to create genuine markets for roadway services, in which prices could be set by competition rather than by the politics of taxation. These privacy and taxation concerns led the citizens of Hong Kong to reject a road pricing scheme several years ago, and such resistance is a real possibility in other countries as well.
With regard to the privacy issues in ITS, I think that the crucial issue is the capture of individually identifiable information about drivers and other transportation users. ITS has the potential to generate enormous databases of individual travel information, and this information raises much more serious possibilities for abuse than the transactional information generated in supermarkets and other such consumer contexts. Although the paradigm here is the private citizen driving a privately owned car for noncommercial purposes, let me remark in passing that consumers have ITS privacy interests in a wide variety of contexts. At least one rental car company, for example, is experimenting with GPS tracking of its cars, ostensibly to assist drivers with directions but more importantly to keep track of their property. The information generated through this process will likely have a whole range of largely unforeseen secondary uses, both inside and outside the rental car company. Insurance companies may take an interest in ITS information as well, perhaps to continue segmenting their markets based on the actuarial implications of individuals' travel patterns.
The "fair information and privacy principles" being circulated by ITS America address these issues after a fashion. They explicitly envision the creation of individually identifiable records and their secondary use. Drivers will be permitted to opt out of these secondary uses. Governments are explicitly envisioned as potentially providing law enforcement with the authorith to use ITS information as a surveillance means for enforcing traffic laws. The full details are available on WWW at http://weber.ucsd.edu/~pagre/its-privacy.html
I think that technical professionals and other concerned citizens should ask a fairly long list of questions about these draft principles:
* What does "individually identifiable information" mean in
an ITS context? What about information that is indexed by a vehicle identification or debit account number, which number is associated with your name in some other database? What about the potential for reconstructing or narrowing down an individual driver's likely identity using ITS information together with information from other databases?
* Why should drivers have to take action to opt out of
the dissemination of such potentially dangerous information? Few deny the potential economic benefits of secondary uses of such information, but surely the technology exists to provide a user-friendly way for consumers to opt in to such uses by explicitly requesting certain kinds of offers, perhaps using pseudonyms to do so.
Should ITS privacy guidelines have the force of law? Who should be liable when ITS information is employed to
violate an individual's privacy? ITS developers? States? Both of them? What statutory framework is required to ensure that violated individuals can pursue adequate legal remedies?
* How will the adequacy of ITS privacy safeguards be determined?
Who will make this determination? Will there be an ongoing evaluation?
* Is it reasonable that these guidelines are being formulated by
a private organization, albeit one serving as an advisory board to DOT, rather than by the government itself?
(My thanks to Marc Rotenberg for his help with these questions.)
I regard these questions as fairly serious and urgent, and I think we should ask whether ITS development should proceed until they have been answered. But more fundamentally, I think we should reconsider the whole premise of the "Fair Information and Privacy Principles", which is that privacy can be protected through a set of policy guidelines developed independently of the system architecture. History shows clearly that when databases of information begin to accumulate, imaginations start working overtime to think up new uses for them. In the case of ITS information, this is an accident waiting to happen. And it is a wholly unnecessary accident as well. The fact is that new technologies have arisen that should make the collection of individually identifiable information in ITS wholly unnecessary. Perhaps the prototype for these technologies is digital cash, a mathematical scheme based on public key cryptography that allows a buyer and seller in electronic commerce to transact business without necessarily identifying themselves to one another. In particular, digital cash should make it possible for drivers to pay for transportation services such as the use of toll roads anonymously. Digital cash is an improvement over other "smart card" systems because it is not based on an account that can be used to connect different uses of an ITS system together, and potentially to connect those uses back to the individual driver through the account's connection to the credit card or bank account that might periodically be used to transfer credit to it. (See this month's "Company of the Month" below.) It's best to think of digital cash not as a single technology, but rather as one amidst a whole world of technologies that can be assembled from the building blocks of public key cryptography and intelligent agents.
How will we ensure that ITS employs these 21st century privacy technologies? The bad news is that the main tradition of computer system design requires human activities to be progressively reorganized so that distributed computer systems can "capture" them in real time. This is what will happen with ITS unless privacy protection is redefined as a central functionality of those systems.
The good news is that the business and government entities that have been central to the ITS initiative do not plan on making their money, at least most of it, through secondary uses of personal information but by providing useful transportation related services. These people realize that privacy issues are a potential show-stopper through the resistance they can provoke from an informed public, and they are likely to be open to constructive proposals that provide genuine privacy protection while permitting everyone to enjoy the benefits of ITS.
Technically informed professionals will play a crucial role in this process. I would suggest that we need an Internet-based ITS Watch, with volunteer citizen-activists using on-line forums like the Privacy Digest to pool reports on the privacy aspects of the hundreds of national, state, and local initiatives, while also raising awareness within the architecture development and standards-setting processes both of the new technologies of privacy protection and the risks of public resistance that may attend the failure to use them. Will these things happen? It's our choice, right now.
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Bibliography on industrialized public debate.
I hope that my TNO articles about industrialized public debate will inspire others to inform themselves and join the crusade to restore the health of democracy. Although these articles are informal and not part of the scholarly literature, they are influenced in various ways by others' work. Here are some books that you might find useful. They are an extremely mixed bag, including both journalism, advocacy, and scholarship from a wide variety of political perspectives. I find them all valuable, but in different ways -- some as sociological specimens and others as serious accounts of our current dilemma. I'll let you decide for yourself which ones are which.
Eric Alterman, Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politics, New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, The Lobbyists: How Influence Peddlers Get Their Way in Washington, New York: Times Books, 1992.
Craig Calhoun, ed, Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
Bill Cantor, ed, Experts in Action: Inside Public Relations, New York: Longman, 1984.
Charles T. Clotfelder and Michael Rothschild, Studies of Supply and Demand in Higher Education, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Cynthia Crosson, Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.
Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., Waging and Winning the War of Ideas, Washington: Heritage Foundation, 1986.
Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., Beyond Agenda Setting: Information Subsidies and Public Policy, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1982.
William Greider, Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.
Joseph R. Gusfield, The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking- Driving and the Symbolic Order, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.
Robert L. Heath, ed, Strategic Issues Management: How Organizations Influence and Respond to Public Interests and Policies, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1988.
Robert Jackall, ed, Propaganda, New York: New York University Press, 1995.
Barry Mitnick, ed, Corporate Political Agency: The Construction of Competition in Public Affairs, Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993.
Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko, eds, The Political Economy of Information, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
David M. Ricci, The Transformation of American Politics: The New Washington and the Rise of Think Tanks, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
James Allen Smith, The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite, New York: Free Press, 1991.
Elizabeth L. Toth and Robert L. Heath, eds, Rhetorical and Critical Approaches to Public Relations, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992.
Bruce C. Wolpe, Lobbying Congress: How the System Works, Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1990.
Slavoj Zizek, ed, Mapping Ideology, London: Verso, 1994.
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Wish list.
Why don't students learn to write better? All sorts of reasons, I suppose, but one of them is that teaching people to write well is labor-intensive. You can teach introductory chemistry in big lectures and graduate-student-led problem sections, but nobody learns to write unless someone copy-edits their writing with a red pen. You don't learn to write by writing but by revising something you've written, and revisions start with someone else's well-informed comments and tailored advice about the problem areas to work on right now. Students who come to my classes from the community college system are often particularly ill-served in this regard, given that savage budget cuts most often mean very large community college classes.
In my own preferred world, we would decide as a democracy that it is important for students to learn how to write well, and we would train and hire enough writing instructors for them. Some writing instructors would be career professionals and others would be students commenting on the work of less advanced students. Although writing instructors as a profession generally do not get the respect they deserve, this is more or less the system we already have. We just don't have enough of it, and maybe we're not going to get any more.
There is an alternative. Perhaps our students can write their essays on WorldWide Web pages, and the copy-editing and advice-giving can be done in India. India has a good higher educational system and more educated people than jobs. We would effectively be moving certain components of writing instruction offshore, just as an increasing amount of software development is moving offshore. The difference here is that the work would be less project-oriented and more job-oriented, so that any given worker would sit at a terminal marking up papers and writing comments on them without having any very complicated contact with the student whose work is being marked up. The web provides a nice, convenient interface for this process, though it would need to be augmented with a good interface for the mark-up notations. (Isn't that what a mark-up language is supposed to be for? I guess the phrase "mark-up" has different meanings.)
I expect that many people reading this suggestion are upset by it. Moving people's jobs offshore to low-wage parts of the world usually does not make them happy. Perhaps they would emphasize the intricacy of the relationship between writing instructor and student, the importance of face to face interaction in talking about an essay, and so forth. It's an empirical question, certainly, how the costs and benefits of the different approaches compare. And if people in India are willing to do the work then why deprive them of it? One issue would be the contrast in cultural backgrounds; if you've grown up in a culture whose stock of cultural references is rooted in the Mahabharata then perhaps it's hard to mark up a manuscript written by someone whose stock of cultural references is rooted in Shakespeare and the Bible. We shall see.
My point is not to present this speculation as a Good Thing, or even as a Prediction. It's a fantasy, like all of the fantasies in this department of TNO, offered as an occasion to reflect on the nature of technological fantasies. This one, like most, is no doubt way too simple. We can be sure, I think, that computer network based work reorganization is coming to academia, and not just to writing instruction: introductory chemistry seems like an obvious place to look as well. Once professors are obliged to think about their courses as "courseware" (ugh), the world is going to change. But not in obvious ways, simply by replacing a person doing job X by a machine that does the same job. More likely job categories will get shuffled and rearranged. Most of this will get presented as lightening the load, leaving the skilled employees to do the more highly skilled parts of their jobs, expanding the job definitions of employees in lower job categories, and so forth. It will take much trial and error to figure out precisely which part of writing instruction, for example, really can be moved offshore to India, and which part must be left to the (presumably fewer) professionals and trained student workers back on the university campus.
In my experience, academic workers are generally oblivious to the ongoing projects aimed at reorganizing university institutions and teaching activities through the application of technology. For professors in particular, tenure is a narcotic. And even more narcotic is the idea that each individual professor succeeds or fails on his or her own individual merits and networking and publication and general hustle. But times of radical change tend to make explicit the unarticulated assumptions that underlie the previous order of things. Once this happens at the university, it will probably be too late.
The issues are enormous. As conservative rhetor Thomas Sowell points out, once most university classes are taught through video, it will be possible to document the political views that are being taught in class and explose the unpopular views to criticism. (He thinks that this is a good thing.) On the other hand, it would be excellent if a professor who wishes to offer a course on meter in Chaucer can assemble a large enough class of students by assembling the geographically scattered enthusiasts of that specialized topic into a networked virtual classroom. Let's get it into our heads that university teaching work, at all levels, is work, and that like any other kind of work it can change radically for better or worse. It is not a matter of "predicting" these changes, since the whole idea of prediction presupposes that we can only wait passively and see what happens. Instead, I think it is important for university workers to learn the emerging technology and get busy organizing themselves to shape both the technology and the institutions of education in accord with the values that are important to them.
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This month's recommendations.
Bill Morrissey, Night Train (Philo/Rounder). I mentioned this record in passing in TNO 1(5) as part of my list of excellent new records from middle-aged white guys. I've been listening to it ever since, and it just keeps getting better and better. Bill Morrissey is a folk singer from New Hampshire who is just about the best song-writer in the world. His perfectly honest, achingly beautiful, utterly unpretentious songs concern small epiphanies in the lives of people with genuine emotions. Each one is a precisely drawn picture with no extra stuff left over. For example, "Cold, Cold Night", a gently quick-tempo number about the heightening of senses in new love, breathes striking clarity into a series of small things and clocks in at 2:13.
Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Kluwer (ISSN 0925-9724). This is an academic journal about people working together using computers. It is rare among journals in focusing with equal seriousness on both the technical and social aspects of computer work, balancing a sophisticated critical consciousness with a commitment to building real, useful things. (Look for my own article about the business discourse of "empowerment" sometime later this year.) Library budgets for journals are in crisis these days, but even so I really recommend that you tell your local academic or corporate library about CSCW. As more and more activities come to be mediated by long-distance computing and communications, the work being reported in this journal is precisely what we're going to need to help build tools in way that's informed by real ideas about people's lives.
Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal, special issue on privacy issues in Intelligent Transportation Systems (volume 11, number 1, March 1995). It derives from a symposium on this topic that Dorothy Glancy organized at Santa Clara University in July, 1994. Contributions include: Hon. Norman Y. Mineta, "Transportation, technology, and privacy"; Jeffrey H. Reiman, "Driving to the Panopticon"; Sheldon W. Halpern, "The traffic in souls"; Robert Weisberg, "IVHS, legal privacy, and the legacy of Dr. Faustus"; Sheri A. Alpert, "Privacy and intelligent highways"; Ronald D. Rotunda, "Computerized highways and the search for privacy in the case law"; Philip E. Agre, "Reasoning about the future"; and Dorothy Glancy, "Privacy and intelligent transportation technology". According to the order form in the journal, single issues may be purchased for US$20 (or US$25 for foreign addresses) from: Computer and High Technology Law Journal; School of Law; Santa Clara University; Santa Clara, California 95053; (408) 554-4197; scchtlj@scuacc.scu.edu.
Second Annual Report of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Center for Public Interest Law, University of San Diego, January 1995. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC) is a consumer education project on privacy issues that operates a toll-free phone number that California residents can call with questions and concerns about privacy issues. They also produce a large number of highly regarded fact sheets about specific privacy related topics -- a remarkable feat given the murky state of most of the relevant law. Their Second Annual Report features 47 excellent real-life horror stories drawn from the thousands of phone calls they have answered. The PRC is on the web at http://www.acusd.edu/ and on gopher at gopher.acusd.edu (under "USD Campuswide Info. Svcs."). Their e-mail address is prc@acusd.edu. Their hotline number is (800) 773-7748 (in California only) or +1 (619) 298-3396.
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Company of the month.
This month's company is:
Amtech Systems Corporation 17304 Preston Road, Building E-100 Dallas, Texas 75252
phone: +1 (214) 733-6600 fax: +1 (214) 733-6699
Elsewhere in this issue of TNO you've read about the potential for serious privacy violations in Intelligent Transportation Systems. No doubt someone will tell you, "hey, that's just the price of progress" or "those privacy paranoids just don't like technology". The truth is that the privacy invaders are the ones who are against technology -- the powerful technologies of privacy protection that are rapidly becoming available. Amtech, one of the major providers of equipment for automatic vehicle identification (AVI) for highway toll collection, has developed a prototype of an AVI system based on the "digital cash" methods of David Chaum's company Digicash. This system will permit people to pay for tolls automatically and with complete privacy through the use of cryptography. Amtech is planning to market the system in Europe and Japan, but at present they have no plans to market it in the United States for the simple reason that the highway authorities who are implementing ITS systems are not terribly unconcerned about privacy. That's not necessarily because they are evil; often it is because they are simply not aware of the magnitude of the dangers and the availability of technological solutions. I encourage you to do research on the ITS systems that are coming to a highway near you (and I promise that ITS is definitely coming to a highway near you), contact the local highway authority administrators (they usually answer their own phones), politely ask them whether they plan to employ technologies based on digital cash for their toll collection, and when they say "huh?, what's that mean?", politely tell them about the virtues of digital cash, its wide acceptance in Europe, and the progress of Amtech's digital cash AVI technology.
I am sure that Amtech would be happy to send you information about their technology. Please, though, don't ask for it unless you have a serious reason to want it. Doing research on the privacy aspects of ITS systems in your area is a serious reason.
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Follow-up.
My notes on the industrial organization of public debate provoked
some correspondence. Bill Dickens
(It's an awful phrase -- a common euphemism is "research institutes", though that latter phrase includes some scientific and technical institutions that do more than produce ammo for public debates.)
This comment is bogus enough that I've actually removed it from the archival versions of TNO 2(2). Many difficult issues arise here, not least when we are faced with people working in think tanks who are sincerely trying to do the right thing. I wouldn't want to impugn those people's motives or enter into any sort of straightforward reductionism about the people who contribute money to think tanks. Further analysis, though, will have to wait until I get some time to think clearly again.
I was a little unclear in TNO 2(3)'s mention of Ellen Spertus' WWW list of non-profit organizations. The list is at MIT and Spertus herself used to be at MIT, but now she's at Microsoft.
In TNO 2(3) I mentioned my "wish list" idea for a web-based
system for letting booksellers know about author's publicity
schedules. Frank Kroger
The journal Information Technology and People has recently published a special issue, edited by Roger Clarke, entitled "Identification Technologies and Their Implications for People". Christine Harbs and I have an article in this issue entitled "Social Choice About Privacy: Intelligent Vehicle-Highway Systems in the United States". You can see the full set of abstracts by sending a message that looks like so:
To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: archive send identification
Or on WWW at http://weber.ucsd.edu/~pagre/identification.html
Also, I have coedited (with Stan Rosenschein) a special double volume of Artificial Intelligence on "Computational Theories of Interaction and Agency". The first volume has appeared, and the abstracts for the articles in both volumes, along with contact information for all of the authors, are available on the web. The URL is http://weber.ucsd.edu/~pagre/aij-abstracts.html
The Australian Privacy Charter Council has released a very interesting list of privacy principles that improves considerably on the principles that have been suggested in the United States and many other countries. It will be a valuable reference for anyone trying to articulate the conceptual basis for privacy protection in specific contexts such as transportation, banking, and medical records. The URL, which I've split over two lines, is: http://commerce.anu.edu.au/comm/staff/RogerC/Dataveillance/ PrivacyCharter
Jerry Werner is editing an on-line newsletter on Intelligent Transportation Systems. It will be valuable for people who are concerned about the privacy implications of this enormous, potentially worrisome project. The URL is http://io.com/~itsol/ Check out the interview on ITS with Newt Gingrich.
Voters' Telecom Watch is at http://anansi.panix.com:80/vtw/ They're leading the charge against the Communications Decency Act (the Exon bill, recently incorporated by the Senate into the telecom deregulation bill).
In case you haven't seen it, the very funny "Useless WWW Pages" site is at http://www.primus.com/staff/paulp/useless.html
The US government has declassified a batch of Cold War era satellite intelligence photographs of the Soviet Union. The photographs are of fairly low resolution and seem part of an advertising campaign aimed at finding civilian uses for military spy satellite technologies, but they are certainly interesting documents. They've put a few of them on the web, and they claim they'll make the whole batch available on-line eventually. The URL is http://edcwww.cr.usgs.gov/dclass/dclass.html
An Irish friend passed along to me and twenty other acquaintences the URL for the "framework document" released by the British and Irish governments for negotiations over Northern Ireland. He says that the document was hard to get in paper form, and the web site provides a fine example of the power of the net in getting information out and opening political processes to the public. The URL is http://netman.ul.ie/ITD/framework.html
Lew Rose has a good web site of materials on advertising law. The URL is http://www.webcom.com/~lewrose/home.html
The Senate Democrats have a skeletal but decently maintained web site at ftp://ftp.senate.gov/committee/Dem-Policy/general/dpc.html
The hotel industry has set up some web pages that are more interesting than most non-computer industry pages. They're called TravelWeb and the URL is http://www.travelweb.com/
Gleason Sackman's exhaustive net-happenings mailing list of net resources on education now has a searchable index on the web. The URL is http://www.mid.net:80/NET/
There's a pretty impressive collection of educational resources at http://inform.umd.edu:86/Educational_Resources/
Another web index of conservative stuff is under construction at http://www.moscow.com/~bmdesign/tcl/conhome.html
A good guide to newspapers that have web pages can be found at http://marketplace.com/e-papers.list.www/e-papers.home.page.html
A site of resources for WWW developers, including a page of advice on how to publicize your web pages, is located on WWW at http://www.uwtc.washington.edu/Computing/WWW/General.html
A very interesting set of web resources in Spanish is located at http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/~justin/jornada/index.html And a flamboyant guide to web stuff in French is located at http://www.cam.org/~hugo/francais.html
Here are the pointers to web sites on the Oklahoma City bombing that the LA Times reported on April 21st: http://www.coast.net/~emv/tubed/ok-bomb.html http://www.ionet.net/explode.html http://www.uoknor.edu/okdaily/bombing.html http://www.cpb.uokhsc.edu/okwww.html http://qns1.qns.com/kwtv/news/bombing.html http://pathfinder.com/
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Phil Agre, editor pagre@ucsd.edu Department of Communication University of California, San Diego +1 (619) 534-6328 La Jolla, California 92093-0503 FAX 534-7315 USA
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The Network Observer is distributed through the Red Rock Eater News Service. To subscribe to RRE, send a message to the RRE server, rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu, whose subject line reads "subscribe firstname lastname", for example "Subject: subscribe Jane Doe". For more information about the Red Rock Eater, send a message to that same address with a subject line of "help". For back issues etc, use a subject line of "archive send index". TNO is also on WWW at http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/tno.html
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Copyright 1995 by the editor. You may forward this issue of The Network Observer electronically to anyone for any non-commercial purpose. Comments and suggestions are always appreciated.
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