June 2010

As the oil spill spreads, BP battles to contain the media

Hundreds of media outlets are demanding access to a highly mutable, complex situation, and local, state and federal officials say they are working together -- under the majestic heading of Deepwater Horizon Unified Command -- to streamline the response to both reporters and the public.

"With regards to media, we follow an incident command system, a tried-and-true way of responding to crises," said a spokesman for BP from the Unified Command's headquarters in Robert, La. "You have public information officers and you have a joint information center that includes the responsible party, BP, as well as government agencies who have involvement and oversight for this spill, the Coast Guard being the federal on-scene coordinator. We have state people, NOAA, representatives from Transocean. We've had MMS. What we do is use information that comes in through our operations and create, if you will, the message to share." That message, right now, is that the authorities want to provide access to the story while maintaining the proper safety parameters for both cleanup workers and the environment itself. But there may be more obstacles down the road if the situation intensifies, according to Chip Babcock, a trial lawyer specializing in media and First-Amendment cases at Houston firm Jackson Walker, which brought suit against FEMA when it blocked journalists from covering the removal of dead bodies in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina.

Media Companies Support Filmmaker in Chevron Case

A group of 13 media companies has filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Joe Berlinger, the documentary filmmaker who is appealing a federal district judge's ruling that the oil company Chevron may subpoena the outtakes from his film "Crude."

'Vanity' Press Goes Digital

Much as blogs have bitten into the news business and YouTube has challenged television, digital self-publishing is creating a powerful new niche in books that's threatening the traditional industry.

Once derided as "vanity" titles by the publishing establishment, self-published books suddenly are able to thrive by circumventing the establishment. "If you are an author and you want to reach a lot of readers, up until recently you were smart to sell your book to a traditional publisher, because they controlled the printing press and distribution. That is starting to change now," says Mark Coker, founder of Silicon Valley start-up Smashwords Inc., which offers an e-book publishing and distribution service. Fueling the shift is the growing popularity of electronic books, which few people were willing to read even three years ago. Apple Inc.'s iPad and e-reading devices such as Amazon's Kindle have made buying and reading digital books easy. U.S. book sales fell 1.8% last year to $23.9 billion, but e-book sales tripled to $313 million, according to the Association of American Publishers. E-book sales could reach as high as 20% to 25% of the total book market by 2012, according to Mike Shatzkin, a publishing consultant, up from an estimated 5% to 10% today. It's unclear how much of a danger digital self-publishing poses to the big publishers, who still own the industry's big hits, whether e-book or print. Many big publishers dismiss self-published titles, noting that most disappear, in part because they may be poorly edited and are almost never reviewed.

Introducing US Cyber Command

[Commentary] The Defense Department is establishing the U.S. Cyber Command. It's mission is critical.

The command and control of our forces, as well as our weapons and surveillance systems, depend upon secure and reliable networks to function. Protecting this digital infrastructure is an enormous task: Our military runs 15,000 networks and uses more than seven million computer devices. It takes 90,000 people and billions of dollars to maintain our global communications backbone. Establishing Cyber Command is just the latest in a series of steps the Pentagon has taken to protect our military networks through layered and robust cyber defenses. We have instituted strict standards to ensure that our firewalls are properly configured and antivirus software up-to-date. We have reduced the number of ports through which commercial Internet traffic enters and leaves military networks, and we have installed highly sophisticated defense systems that detect and repair network breaches in real time. But we cannot rely solely on a Maginot line of firewalls. It is not sufficient to react to intrusions after they occur. Waiting even milliseconds is too long. The National Security Agency has therefore pioneered systems that use our monitoring of foreign communications to detect intrusions before they reach our networks and to counter them with automated defenses once they arrive. These active defenses now protect all defense and intelligence networks in the .mil domain. Thanks to these active defenses, our networks are significantly more secure than they were just two years ago. Yet the cyber threat is so pervasive and pernicious that we must mount a broader and more permanent institutional response.

Fort Knox is no model for the Internet

[Commentary] A few weeks ago PC security company McAfee released an update to its anti-virus software. For some customers, the update mistakenly destroyed a legitimate and crucial file in the Windows operating system. Hundreds of thousands of personal computers, perhaps millions, were rendered unusable. One university lost the use of 8,000 of its 25,000 PCs, and some affected hospitals turned away non-trauma patients from their emergency rooms. This debacle is an example of a structural failing in security that echoes across the entire Internet. We can call it the "Fort Knox" problem.

The famed US bullion depository offers security through centralization. Gunships, tanks, and 30,000 soldiers surround a vault containing more than $700bn in gold. But while such centralization is ideal for a government's bullion it is an awful model for Internet security. Traditionally, we have had decentralized security: if one PC is compromised, or one website fails, others will carry on. But in the past few years cyber attacks have leveraged their reach through increasingly sophisticated digital "bots", which crawl the web looking for computers and sites to compromise. Those with well-financed websites have spent enormous amounts on digital bunkers, while others simply hunker down. We have two things going for us that the real Fort Knox does not: we can copy our digital gold, and there are lots of us, each with our own stake in security and autonomy. First, back-ups can be made more routine and decentralized. Second, we can reinvigorate the Internet's principle of open, distributed architecture responsible for so much growth and innovation.

California should act to regulate outdoor advertising

[Commentary] Spray paint your name on a freeway underpass and, if you're caught, you'll get fined up to $10,000 and maybe jailed. And you should be. Vandalism is a crime that can undermine communities by turning them into graffiti-ridden dumps. But erect an illegal billboard near the same freeway — or alter a legal sign by turning it around or enlarging it, for example — and you're protected, rather than punished, by state law. Your sign, and your contempt for the law in erecting or altering it, can be as damaging to neighborhood livability as any graffiti, but current law dictates that you can't be fined or otherwise punished for your act. At most, the owners of signs illegally placed near interstate highways and other roads that are part of the federal network can be asked to "cure" their illegal acts. In Los Angeles, where most signs facing freeways are banned, that means that if you break the law by turning your otherwise legal sign toward the freeway, the city can't fine you. It can only tell you to turn the sign back the way it was. And if you don't, well, it can tell you again. That gives billboard companies a choice: make lots of money by breaking the law and suffering no financial consequences, or be law-abiding suckers. Like all laws that encourage lawbreakers, the faulty portion of the Outdoor Advertising Act may be as bad as having no law at all. It must be changed, and the state Senate can begin to make a measured and appropriate change by passing SB 1470 by Mark Leno (D- San Francisco).

Data show Google abuses search role, group contends

Consumer Watchdog continues to push its case that Google's behavior necessitates antitrust scrutiny, releasing a report Wednesday that alleges that the company is abusing its dominance in online search to direct users to its own services.

The study, which will be sent to U.S. and European antitrust regulators, cites online traffic data that the Santa Monica group claims shows the Mountain View Internet giant seized large portions of market share in areas like online maps, video and comparison shopping after its search engine began highlighting links to its products in results. Google called the report's methodology and premise flawed and said its practices are designed to benefit users.

Public Knowledge nabs Stupak aide

Public Knowledge has brought on Ernesto Falcon to serve as director of government affairs. Falcon arrives from the office of Rep Bart Stupak (D-MI), where he was a legislative assistant covering matters before the House Commerce Committee.

Cable COO: Scant evidence that TV viewers will move online

Pressed on whether online television will erode cable subscriptions, Comcast chief operating officer Steve Burke did not sound afraid of the Internet. During an interview at the All Things Digital conference outside Los Angeles on Wednesday, he was confident about the specter of evolving consumption habits. "The fact of the matter is, and it's a little counter-intuitive ... that quarter by quarter, year by year, the number of people subscribing to what we call multi-channel video, whether it's satellite, telco, or cable, has always gone up. It's never gone down."

Facebook's Zuckerberg Says Privacy 'Really Important' Issue

Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said privacy is "a really important issue" for his company, the world's largest social networking service.

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