[governance] Google in the New York Times:

[Guru गुरु]

Mr. Vint Cerf and friends and colleagues should also read another recent 
(May 22, 2012)  NYT article

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/technology/google-privacy-inquiries-get-little-cooperation.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

***
some excerpts
(Germany)
....After months of negotiation, Johannes Caspar, a German data 
protection official, forced Google to show him exactly what its Street 
View cars had been collecting from potentially millions of his fellow 
citizens. Snippets of e-mails, photographs, passwords, chat messages, 
postings on Web sites and social networks — all sorts of private 
Internet communications — were casually scooped up as the specially 
equipped cars photographed the world’s streets. ... “It was one of the 
biggest violations of data protection laws that we had ever seen,” Mr. 
Caspar recently recalled about that long-sought viewing in late 2010. 
“We were very angry.”
(in USA)
Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut’s attorney general at the time, 
announced in late June 2010 that he and attorneys general from more than 
30 other states had begun an investigation. Like the Europeans, they 
asked for the data. For months.... “Google resisted providing more 
information, even in the face of its acknowledgment that the collection 
was a mistake,” Mr. Blumenthal recalled in a recent interview. *Google 
argued that its data scooping was legal in the United States.* *But it 
told regulators it could not show them the data it collected,* because 
to do so might be breaking privacy and wiretapping laws.

... Citizens in several states filed suits against Google, saying the 
company had violated federal wiretapping laws through Street View. These 
suits were consolidated into a class action in San Francisco.... *Google 
moved for dismissal, arguing that because it had picked up information 
only from unencrypted networks, it had not broken the law. *In a 
significant loss, a federal judge said what the company was doing might 
be more akin to tapping a phone and allowed the suit to proceed.
****

The 'father of the Internet' should wonder how his current role as an 
'evangelist', relates to this kind of work of his employer ... In the 
article forwarded by Nick, he says "  .... Such proposals raise the 
prospect of policies that enable government controls but greatly 
diminish the*“permissionless innovation” *that underlies extraordinary 
Internet-based economic growth to say nothing of *trampling human 
rights.* "

Here it is the*permissionless innovation* that is *trampling human 
rights....*

The civil society statement to UNCSTD 
(http://www.itforchange.net/civil_society_statement_on_democratic_internet) 
is clear about both dangers - the danger of*statist control leading to 
repression,* (what Vint Cerf is discussing),  as well as the*danger at 
the global level from the actions of USG and US based corporates,* which 
this NYT article speaks of...

Both need to be resisted by civil society .... the status quo leaves us 
vulnerable to abuses on both counts, and new innovative *and democratic* 
structures and processes are much required... which also the statement 
to UNCSTD discusses...

regards,
Guru


On Friday 25 May 2012 11:06 AM, Nick Ashton-Hart wrote:
>  Dear friends and colleagues,
>
>  I thought you would appreciate knowing that an OpEd by Vint Cerf as
>  above titled was printed today in the New York Times (and I believe
>  the IHT).
>
>  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/opinion/keep-the-internet-open.html?_r=1
>
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