Government needs help governing technology

The government clearly has issues handling technology. There are questions regarding jurisdiction and application of laws written before certain technologies existed. The problems, as I see it, are two-fold. First, lawmakers misunderstand technology and its ramifications. Second, the process for creating laws and policies is too cumbersome to rapidly respond to situations created by new technology.

For proof regarding the ignorance of policy makers, one needs only recall Senator Ted Stevens’ explanation of the Internet. His speech is indeed concerning when we consider that he was arguing against net neutrality, an issue central to the technology sector. The same misunderstanding displayed by Ted Steven’s is rife throughout the upper echelons of our government, and we see examples of it in recent laws such as the one tying federal funding for universities to a prevention plan for illegal downloading. My personal belief is that age, more than anything, contributes to the inability of our lawmakers to understand technology. Examine today’s successful technology companies; most were started by younger individuals who had grown up with new technologies and had a more intuitive understanding of its true applications. While age isn’t necessarily an indicator of technical understanding, there is a correlation. Therefore, it is concerning that most politicians are in their late 50’s to early 70’s. We need lawmakers to understand technology so they understand its ramifications and change laws accordingly. As long as our lawmakers don’t understand technology, laws governing things like identity theft and intellectual property will remain out of sync with the general public.

Another concern hindering our government is that the method for creating laws and policies is flawed and unusable when it comes to technology. Let’s take, for example, the recent outbreak of data leaks in government organizations. The most frequent kind of leak is a laptop or external hard drive that goes missing. Because of this, some organizations have begun to require hard drives to be encrypted in order to mitigate the damage when a hard drive does get lost or stolen. Unfortunately, that won’t help the situations, as just a few weeks ago hard drive encryption was cracked by a team of researchers. From the rise of data leaks to the breaking of the encryption only took about a year, rendering all the budding policy around encrypting hard drives essentially useless. The organizations created to implement policies are so cumbersome that they simply can not keep up with the rapid changes in the technology world.

RIAA at it again

The RIAA has made it obvious time and time again that suing their loyal fans is a better business strategy than actually finding new and innovative business models. Of course, they don't want to go at it alone, and would love to get DAs to prosecute more pirating cases. Their latest tactic is a doozy: a training video created for the National District Attorneys Association.

Apparently, the RIAA is claiming that prosecuting piracy can be used to convict known criminals who the DAs can't convict on more serious charges. Think Al Capone, who was convicted on tax evasion charges. One gem from the video: Frank Walters is asked if people who have committed serious crimes are "gravitating to this type of piracy." Walters replies "More often than not, we find that most of the defendants we deal with...have spent time incarcerated on much more serious crimes." If that's the case, I wonder that the RIAA repeatedly claims that college campuses are the biggest source of piracy? Most college students hardly fit the picture of a typical music pirate painted by Frank Walters and Deborah Robinson.

Family History is not just Genealogy

Regarding family history, the council from church leaders frequently centers around genealogy, which is identifying your direct ancestor. My father has traced almost all of our family lines at least 10 generations back; the work that needs to be done to find names requires, at least, knowledge of languages I don't know. Continuing my family's genealogy has proven to be extremely difficult. Fortunately, the church emphasizes not only genealogy, but family history work, which calls people to "turn their hearts" to their ancestors. I believe we will soon see an increased emphasis from the church on that aspect of family history as more and more individuals trace their families so far back that traditional genealogy becomes too daunting to the average member.

Working for the Church

I'm in my third year working for the Corporations of the Presiding Bishopbric. It's fascinating watching, from the inside, how an organization I've been a member of all my life operates. I've grown up knowing the this is Christ's organization, but I've never thought of the very human errors and processes that make up all the levels of the Church. The Church is an inspired organization, run by individuals called of God, but the average person working for the Church doesn't have big revelations regarding exactly what they should do in their day to day lives. The Church operates much as we are told to run our lives; stay in tune with the Spirit, make decisions, check in frequently to make sure your not far off base, and move ahead. It's wonderful watching the principals of the Gospel put into action by those who steer this world-wide organization.

Send in the designers

The medical industry has undergone a veritable revolution when it comes to provider technology, but patient technology is stuck in a 70's time warp. The insulin pump is a good example: the device is functional and reliable, to be sure, but there's no thought given to the usability and design of the pump.

Young technology companies with a fresh industry perspective can help fix this problem. Unfortunately, the inherent risk in developing a life device is too high for new companies. If an insulin pump's hardware fails silently, or a software glitch causes insulin to be dosed at the wrong levels, the patient's life is at risk. This exposes young companies to legal liabilities they can't financially handle.

If a revolution is going to happen, the existing medical device manufacturers need to rise to the challenge. They stand to benefit the most by by making devices that integrate smoothly with life.

College isn't the end of learning

Nobody knows what a CS degree should be teaching, but it doesn't matter. College can't teach everything needed to be successful in a future job; the decisions made about curricula will always be random choice from a myriad of possibilities, and there will always be people who think those choices were bad.

Once I get a job, the rest of life will have little to do with what I'm learning in school and everything to do with my personal drive and learning patterns. The cool things I learn are almost never in class, but through my own study. This won't change when I graduate, and it's this capacity to learn on my own that will determine what kind of employee I'll be.

The RIAA == Neil Postman

The RIAA is run by people like Neil Postman. The core problem with governance in the RIAA is they don’t understand their business. Postman shows the same flaw of understanding; take this gem from a speech he gave in ’98:

“School teachers who are enthusiastic about [television’s] presence always call to my mind an image of some turn-of-the-century blacksmith who not only is singing the praises of the automobile but who also believes that his business will be enhanced by it. We know now that his business was not enhanced by it; it was rendered obsolete by it, as perhaps an intelligent blacksmith would have known.”

If the blacksmith’s business is defined by using a forge and handling all metal work in the area, then yes, that sort of blacksmith is gone. But if you define the blacksmith as someone who works with metal to create and fix, then blacksmiths are very much in business. Postman didn’t recognize automobiles were a boon to blacksmiths because he didn’t understand their real business. Similarly, the RIAA doesn’t recognize that file-sharing is beneficial because they don’t understand their business isn’t only distributing music, but providing entertainment through music.