Tech Policy Is ‘Heart’ of Administration, Crawford Tells Activists
President Barack Obama’s guiding principle in setting technology policy is to “resist isolation, overstatement, the notion that there’s only one right answer,” Susan Crawford, White House special assistant for science, technology and innovation policy, told the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Washington Tuesday. “Tech policy is at the heart of this administration,” she said. A lawyer with the Obama transition predicted later that privacy activists could become strange bedfellows with an unpopular industry: cable companies.
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The U.S. faces “economic stagnation” without a big expansion of broadband, Crawford said. “Slow and expensive” Internet connections increasingly show the U.S. is “not falling behind -- we're definitely behind.” The issue, which is “not about national pride,” is tied to the government’s making available federal datasets through Data.gov, a project spearheaded by new chief information and technology officers Vivek Kundra and Aneesh Chopra, Crawford said: “We have no idea how this data will be used and that’s the point.” The administration will start discussing the public comments it’s received through its open-government initiative Wednesday and will start drafting proposals based on submitted ideas June 15 on a “very tight schedule,” she said.
Internationally, the administration will promote “citizen-centered engagement methods,” using “cutting-edge tools” to communicate beyond other governments, Crawford said. Foreign service officers are getting new-media training because “they've got to be able to understand a country’s digital society,” she said. Obama started the “era of YouTube diplomacy” by posting a video to the site directed at Iranians. The president also hopes to take advantage of Cubans’ newfound access to mobile phones, Crawford said.
Crawford confirmed that Obama’s reference to net neutrality in the context of his new cybersecurity plan (CD June 1 p1) was quite deliberate. “This will be a challenge” to balance the competing needs of security with privacy and network nondiscrimination, she said, calling for a “broader and deeper public awareness” of the issues. Crawford also played down potential quarrels that may emerge from NTIA’s Online Safety and Technology Working Group, which has its first meeting this week. The group’s goal is simply to “educate and empower parents,” she said.
There’s a “growing split” among progressives between Web 2.0 technologies and privacy, said Peter Swire, a former White House privacy chief in the Clinton administration and lawyer for Obama’s transition team, on a later panel. “A lot of us here would like to be on both sides, but there’s some tension.” With social networking sites, “we own the databases” and privacy is a backseat concern, he said, warning that a “schizophrenia of politics” could emerge.
Privacy advocates could align with “surprising segments of industry” to ram through stronger privacy regulations, Swire said. The cable industry still operates under the Cable TV Privacy Act, restricting its collection of the kind of data routinely collected by Internet and online advertising companies, he said. Yet activists should be wary of joining with TV providers, who have a monthly billing relationship with subscribers and presumably would have a competitive advantage if online companies were forced into opt-in rules, “the holy grail” of privacy activists. The debate is turning into a traditional FCC fight, with the twist of “industry politics entering into privacy politics,” Swire said.