Among the concerns are the potential for the card to be used for location tracking by government and private entities and the relative ease with which it can be manipulated for identity theft purposes, the CDT said.
The Washington-based think tank's warning was prompted by a final ruling in the Federal Register from the U.S. Department of State on Dec. 31 calling for the use of so-called "vicinity read" radio frequency identification technology on proposed new passport cards. The department first announced plans to use RFID chips for new passport cards back in October 2006 and has been going through a process of collecting and responding to comments on its plans.
The identification cards would be needed by residents who don't have passports for verifying their identity at land, air and sea border crossings and are to be issued as part of the Departments of State and Homeland Security's Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, or WHTI.
The credit-card sized passport cards will use vicinity-read RFID technology that allow them to be read from at least 20 to 30 feet away by customs and border-protection officials. The goal is to substantially reduce wait times at the border by allowing officials to access and queue up a border crosser's information even before they reach the official.
The approach is substantially different from the proximity-read technology being used in U.S. electronic passports, and it offers fewer protections, according to Ari Schwartz, deputy director at the CDT. Electronic passports contain all of the same identification data that appears on the first page of a passport, and includes a digital photograph and a digital signature. But the information on those chips is encrypted at all times and can only be accessed by physically swiping the card through a reader at the border crossing.
In contrast, said Schwartz, the proposed RFID-enabled passport cards can be read from a distance, and without user notice, consent or control over when the information is collected. Additionally, information from the card is transmitted in the clear -- that is, without encryption. The RFID technology itself is also more susceptible to electronic eavesdropping and hacking, which makes the cards less tamper resistant compared to electronic passports, he said.
"So you have a situation where you are sending out identity information in the clear over a long distance," using a less-than-secure technology, Schwartz said.
The State Department itself has said that the passport cards will not contain any identity information such as name, date of birth, social security number, or place of birth. Instead, all it will contain is a unique identifying number that will be used to access a card holder's identifying information, which is stored separately on a secure Customs and Border Patrol system.
But the identification number itself is personal information, the CDT noted, because it is unique and corresponds to a computer file with personal identification information in a government database.
The use of passport cards will also require a separate infrastructure from that used for electronic passports and is unlikely to significantly speed up wait times at the border, Schwartz said.
David Williams, vice president for policy at Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) in Washington, said the government's decision to go ahead with the RFID-enabled passport cards "was disappointing but not unexpected.... Once the government gets something in its head, it usually doesn't change anything."
Like Schwartz, Williams also expressed concern over the potential for such cards to be tampered with, with relative ease. "We are very concerned about any kind of RFID technology for any kind of identification [purposes]," from both a cost and security perspective, he said. The fact that the cards can be read from distance, makes it a more attractive hacking target, he said: "RFIDs are great for tracking packages or for going through tolls. The problems begin when you attach it to a person's identity."
In its final ruling in the Federal Register, the State Department acknowledged that it had received over 4000 comments from a range of individuals and organizations including Senators Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer of New York, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, and Representative Louise Slaughter of New York. "The vast majority of the comments were generated from an e-petition launched by Citizens Against Government Waste opposing the choice of technology," the ruling noted. "While State and DHS appreciate the comments received, the vast majority reflected an improper understanding of the business model that WHTI is designed to meet and how the technology selected would actually be implemented."
In making its case for vicinity-read cards, the department noted that the unique identifying information stored on such cards had meaning only within the secure CBP system and was useless to anybody when taken out of context. It also added that protective sleeves would be provided to card holders to protect against the card number being inadvertently transmitted and said that use of the card was entirely optional. That claim in turn raises further questions; the technology as described would meet the description of a Faraday cage, but it's unclear whether an expenditure for such technology is explicitly covered in the budget.
Reaping Results: Data-Mining Goes Mainstream
By STEVE LOHR
“It sounded nutty at first,” Mr. Monroe recalled, “but the more and more you get into it, the more sense it makes.”
RODNEY MONROE, the police chief in Richmond, Va., describes himself as a
lifelong cop whose expertise is in fighting street crime, not in software. His
own Web browsing, he says, mostly involves checking golf scores.
But shortly after he became chief in 2005, a crime analyst who had retired
from the force convinced him to try some clever software. The programs cull
through information that the department already collects, like “911” and police
reports, but add new streams of data — about neighborhood demographics and
payday schedules, for example, or about weather, traffic patterns and sports
events — to try to predict where crimes might occur.
The technology, for example, pointed to a high rate of robberies on paydays
in Hispanic neighborhoods, where fewer people use banks and where customers
leaving check-cashing stores were easy targets for robbers. Elsewhere, there
were clusters of random-gunfire incidents at certain times of night. So extra
police were deployed in those areas when crimes were predicted.
The crime rate in Richmond declined about 20 percent last year, and it is
down again this year.
The Richmond experience is part of a wave of sophisticated computing and
mathematical analytics that is moving into the mainstream. Fueling the trend are
the digitization of information, ever faster and cheaper computing, and the
explosion of online networks and data collection.
The results, says Jon M. Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University, are a “revolution in measurement”
and the “introduction of computing and algorithmic processes into the social
sciences in a big way.” The phenomenon is strikingly evident in economics,
business and crime prevention.
Productivity research has traditionally focused on manufacturing, because the
output of widgets and the headcount of factory workers were easy to measure,
notes Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The productivity of information workers — much of the nation’s work force —
was shunted into a category that economists labeled “difficult to measure” and
given short shrift.
But the digital age, he says, has opened the door to detailed measurement of
the labor of professionals and office workers who handle ideas and information
from customers, suppliers, colleagues and marketers.
“My thinking on productivity has completely changed,” says Mr. Brynjolfsson,
who is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic
Research.
By tracking e-mail traffic, instant messages and other digital communications
— stripped of personally identifiable information — he and other researchers are
beginning to study the flow of work and ideas through the social networks inside
companies — minute by minute, bit by bit.
“We’re really on the cusp of being able to understand what goes on inside
corporations in a much more scientific way than ever before,” he said. “It’s
similar to the way that the microscope opened up biology in the 17th century, so
that you could see blood cells. Now, we can start to see bits of information as
they flow through the organism of the corporation.”
The desire to exploit computing and mathematical analytics is by no means
new. In the 1960s and ’70s, “operations research” combined computing and math
mainly to make factory production work more efficient. And in that period,
“decision support” software was intended to help managers more intelligently use
information in the big computing file cabinets — databases — that were becoming
common in corporations.
But the earlier efforts were limited mainly to information access and
reporting systems, says Thomas H. Davenport, a professor at Babson College. The
quantity and quality of data were typically inadequate, he notes, and the
software could not do the advanced optimization and predictive calculations of
today’s programs.
Faster and cheaper computing and ample sources of information in digital form
— plucked from enterprise resource planning systems, point-of-sale devices and
Web sites — mean that most companies now have the tools to do the kind of
competitive analytics that only a relative handful of elite companies could do
in the past. “It’s really starting to become mainstream,” says Mr. Davenport,
co-author with Jeanne G. Harris of “Competing on Analytics: The New Science of
Winning” (Harvard Business School Press, 2007). The entry
barrier, he says, “is no longer technology, but whether you have executives who
understand this.”
There are plenty who do. Big retailers like Wal-Mart Stores and Kohl’s use today’s advanced computing and math
to more accurately predict what sizes of clothes should go to what stores. Harrah’s and other casinos decipher slot-machine
results to optimize customer traffic and profits, and they use face-recognition
software to identify people with criminal records. And Stockholm and other
cities use traffic data and patterns to determine “congestion pricing.”
In the financial industry, Capital One and other
banks mine all kinds of transaction data to identify, and stop, fraudulent
transactions. And Cemex, the big cement company, uses global
positioning satellite locators and traffic and weather data to improve
delivery-time performance in Mexico.
In the last year or so, Whirlpool, the appliance maker, has begun using
new analytics software to automatically scan warranty reports as well as
manufacturing, supplier, sales and service data to try to further trim its
warranty costs and improve quality. That is no small task, since it sells an
average of 25,000 washing machines a day, for example. “A human being cannot see
and detect all those trends,” says John Kerr, the general manager for global
quality.
With the new computing tools, Whirlpool has trimmed by 30 to 90 days the time
required to detect and fix parts or manufacturing problems that cause defects.
“The math is astounding,” Mr. Kerr says.
The results help explain why business-intelligence software is one of the hot
markets in technology, supplied by companies like SAS, Business
Objects, Cognos, MicroStrategy and Information
Builders. In March, Oracle offered a hefty $3.3 billion for Hyperion, a maker of business intelligence software. Microsoft has entered the field as well.
But packaged software is not the only way to combine powerful computing with
deep math tools. The major technology services companies, like
I.B.M., Accenture and Hewlett-Packard, have researchers, programmers
and industry specialists doing this kind of work for clients.
Internet marketing and advertising is a social market made for the use of
heavy-duty computing and sophisticated mathematics. Investment and start-up
money is pouring into the market, and so are many high-powered computing brains.
Basem Nayfeh has a Ph.D. from Stanford, where he did his graduate research
down the hall from one of Google’s founders, Sergey Brin. Mr. Nayfeh’s
thesis was on multiprocessor chips, and he has worked in corporate labs in
Silicon Valley on things as diverse as climate and computer design.
Today Mr. Nayfeh, 37, is the chief technology officer of
Revenue Science, which tracks, analyzes and predicts online behavior to
help advertisers find people most likely to buy their products. Many of his
fellow computer wizards are in online marketing.
“If you asked any of us 5 or 10 years ago if we would be in advertising,” he
says, “none of us would have said yes.”
Coast to Coast AM Is No Wack Job
By Randy Dotinga
Omar is phoning from the future. "I'm in the year 2063," he declares during an open-lines segment on Coast to Coast AM, a nationally syndicated late-night radio show.
Show host George Noory listens with the same respectful tone he uses whether callers have Ph.D.s in microbiology or advanced degrees in wacko. "So what's going on?" he asks, getting an impenetrable answer about the decline of money.
And then it's on to the usual calls about alien-human hybrids, spiritual visitations and global conspiracies. But that's not all. Noory combines the unexplained with something unexpected -- in-depth chats with some of today's most respected scientists.
An estimated 4.5 million listeners tune in to Coast to Coast each night, reportedly making the show No. 1 in its time slot in cities from Los Angeles to Albuquerque (where it gets a whopping 22 percent of the audience) to San Diego (where it attracts more listeners than the next two most popular stations combined).
Three years after the departure of Coast to Coast host Art Bell, this bizarre brew of the strange and the serious appears to be on a roll, boasting nearly 500 affiliates, podcasts and a satellite radio feed.
"I've brought in new topics, seeking more answers and the truth," said Noory, 55. "Will we have a cashless society? Will they try to put chips in us one day? That's made us even more successful."
Its popularity dipped severely several years ago after one of several departures by Bell, an unusual character who hosted the show from Pahrump, Nevada, not too far from Area 51. (Bell still hosts the show on weekends.) But ratings reportedly went up after the affable Noory began hosting.
Noory, like Bell, talks about more than alien bases on the moon. Within the past few weeks, shows have examined bird flu, string theory and computer security.
One might assume mainstream scientists would steer clear of the show's guest list of astrologers and psychics. In fact, many gainfully employed scientists and doctors make regular appearances.
"We need to go on that show," said Tess Gerritsen, a physician and best-selling novelist who has discussed death and forensic science on Coast to Coast.
"It's the way I feel (about) evolutionists and biologists, that they need to go and argue about creationism," she said. "You need to go out and say there's another point of view, this is what science believes."
Frequent guest Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, agrees. He appears on the show even though he devotes his life to battling the very things Coast to Coast stands for -- the acceptance of time travel and premonitions, for example.
"We want to chase out bad ideas with good ideas," Shermer said, "and just explain what science is. Why don't most scientists accept psychic powers as real or UFOs are real? Why do we have high standards of evidence before you accept something?"
And besides, many of the stories told on Coast to Coast are "so outrageous that you have to really be a nincompoop to take the far-out stuff seriously," said Peter D. Ward, an author and paleontologist at the University of Washington. He appears on the show, which he views as "entertainment with some good science in it."
It helps that Noory treats everyone with respect, even if they're skeptics. "It's a non-confrontational show. At that hour of the night and into the morning, people don't want some show host screaming and yelling," Noory said. "They want to be informed and entertained."
The show is certainly entertaining. More than a few callers have outlandish stories to tell, and many of the guests aren't far behind. Tales of spiritual visitations are especially popular -- the show transforms into Ghost to Ghost on Halloween -- and more than a few callers claim to have seen the now-infamous Old Hag lurking in their bedrooms.
Show host Noory is a believer in unexplained phenomena himself: He had an out-of-body experience as a young boy and remains fascinated by the paranormal. While he's skeptical of things like Ouija boards -- saying "I don't know anyone who's had a good spirit come through that thing," and worrying about their connection to evil spirits -- he's probably the last person to challenge callers with scientific theories about why they think they were abducted by aliens.
"If they think their dead grandmother is visiting them at night, more power to them. They don't need me telling them (it's) true or not true," he said. "There are those few people who may challenge the facts and say some of the stuff may not be true. I say to them, 'Chill out, relax and have an open mind.'"
The Laptop Crusade
By Douglas McGray
The mission: Create a $100 computer for millions
of poor kids around the world. Now designer Yves Béhar just has to figure out the details.
Yves Béhar sits at a wide worktable on the lofted second
floor of fuseproject, his San Francisco design studio, surrounded by windows and
whiteboards and nearly a dozen foam laptops. He is tall and tan, with a surfer’s
mess of curls and the quiet, easy manner of someone who just woke up from a nap.
“There are two types of projects,” he says. “There are the stylist projects –
the ones you sign with your signature. Then there are the ones that are going to
be difficult.” He looks at his pile of discarded ideas, none of them much alike,
and smiles.
For nearly a year, Béhar has been at work on the most visible and most
controversial project of his career. His client, a nonprofit offshoot of the MIT
Media Lab, had dreamed up a radical new computer. Depending on who you asked, it
was either soon-to-be-legendary vaporware or a shortcut to modern education for
tens of millions of poor kids around the world. The plan called for a garage
full of experimental technology: radio antennas that network computers up to 10
miles apart without satellites or towers; a dual-mode display that switches to
monochrome in bright light; a power scheme that lets the computer run
indefinitely without an electrical outlet. But nothing worked together. Media
Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte was looking for someone to puzzle together the
technology – someone to make it bright and iconic, rainproof, dustproof,
heatproof, drop-proof, spillproof, and intuitive to a Thai or Nigerian child who
had never seen modern technology. Negroponte would offer the laptop to
governments who would commit to buying at least a million computers each; it
promised to outsell every other laptop in the world in just a few years. Oh, and
one more thing: The machine would need to cost one-fifth the price of the
cheapest laptop at Wal-Mart. The Media Lab dubbed the project One Laptop per
Child, but everyone else knew it simply as “the $100 laptop.”
Béhar was skeptical at first. And who wasn’t? After Negroponte announced the
plan at the World Economic Forum in January 2005, the critics descended: Most
scientists said a $100 laptop was unbuildable, many development experts said it
was out of touch with the needs of poor communities, and a good number of
educators wondered about giving computers to kids who go without modern
textbooks. Steve Jobs dismissed the idea as “a science project.” Intel’s chair,
Craig Barrett, called it “a gadget.” Bill Gates mocked the idea of its
battery-charging crank. Béhar saw their point. “I grew up as a designer in
Silicon Valley,” the Swiss-born Béhar says, “but I’m not one who sees computing
as the remedy for everything.”
There was something about the project that appealed to him, though, something
that almost sounds like nostalgia. “Computers were supposed to be a
democratizing tool. You used to see that boundless optimism from Silicon Valley
hardware companies. I’m not sure it’s still there,” he says. “One Laptop per
Child is the first thing I’ve seen in many years that is in line with the
original goal of the PC.”
Now it just has to work.
Béhar got involved in the laptop project when a Media Lab
alum invited him to present ideas on next-generation computer concepts. He
focused on pragmatism over high art. “This is a product that has to go into the
field,” he says. Meantime, the design firm Negroponte originally hired to create
the prototype, Boston-based Design Continuum, had run into some trouble. “We got
stuck and could not rethink the basics,” Negroponte says. So he turned to Béhar:
“Yves brought us a fresh look.”
Most star designers have a signature style. Whether the product is a
motorcycle or a toilet brush, they use a distinctive color palette, curve,
material, or texture. “They suffer from an almost obligatory style,” Béhar
explains. “Their work has to be like what they have done before, because that is
how the product is marketed.”
Béhar’s work is different. His massive chandelier for Svarowski – a loose
tangle of organic curves hanging at JFK airport – hardly seems imagined by the
same guy who fashioned Aliph’s noise-canceling Jawbone headset with its hard
metal angles and a line of bouncy rubber clogs for Birkenstock. There is a unity
to Béhar’s work, but it isn’t about colors or materials or even genres of
design. “He takes minimalism and has fun with it,” says Joseph Rosa,
architecture and design curator for the Art Institute of Chicago. And often that
means subtle, even invisible use of experimental technology. A simple cashmere
hoodie for the New York fashion house Lutz & Patmos appears almost
undesigned, until you discover that it is water-resistant (Béhar had each
cashmere fiber coated with Teflon). Or take Béhar’s Leaf light, which Herman
Miller released this summer. The LED bulbs along its bright face remain
startlingly cool to the touch, thanks to a novel network of vents and a heat
sink that took nearly four years to engineer. All that science means you can
direct your light source simply by grabbing it – an interface that humans
mastered a few million years ago.
As soon as they accepted the challenge, Béhar and a handful of his 28
staffers began a stretch of late nights at the studio, sketching shapes on
tracing paper. They reviewed 20 or 30 models that other designers had proposed
at various points in the project. They gave special attention to Design
Continuum’s original version, a boxy green laptop with a prominent power
crank.
“There were too many parts flapping around, too many open places. It wasn’t
realistic,” Béhar says. “It should be compact and sealed, like a suitcase. And
it should really look and feel different. It shouldn’t look like something for
business that’s been colored for kids.” (That’s more than an aesthetic concern:
An unmistakable, childlike design will be the laptop’s only real defense against
theft and resale.)
“My temptation as a designer was to explore a lot of options,” Béhar says. He
looked into electronic ink displays, which run on very low power and could allow
for smaller, lighter batteries. (The laptop must be light, since kids are meant
to carry it everywhere.) He liked the idea of a soft keyboard, connected to the
screen with something called a living hinge (think of the way a cap attaches to
a shampoo bottle), which would be cheap and practically indestructible. But E
Ink technology is not mature enough, and kids who have no desks at school would
find a floppy hinge awkward to balance in their laps. Besides, the laptop was
supposed to roll off an assembly line at Quanta, the world’s largest laptop
manufacturer, by the end of 2006. He had to move quickly. “A lot of concept
ideas I eliminated pretty early on,” Béhar says.
One of his first decisions was to stick all of the computer’s guts behind the
display, like an iMac, instead of beneath the keyboard. That simplified the
wiring (the motherboard and display no longer had to communicate through a
fragile hinge) and cut costs, but also made the machine top-heavy. So he came up
with two fixes: One model, codenamed Blue, had the battery beneath the keyboard
to give the laptop a nice ergonomic tilt and act as a counterweight to the heavy
display; another, codenamed Yellow, was propped up by a sturdy handle behind the
keyboard.
Figuring out how to protect everything from dust and moisture was harder.
Béhar replaced the traditional keyboard on Design Continuum’s model with a
sealed rubber one and built a sensor right into the palm rest to eliminate the
seam between it and the trackpad found on a regular laptop. Other problems: The
USB ports were exposed to the elements, and a pair of radio antennas had to stay
outside the machine. (The Media Lab wanted the antennas to have a half-mile
range for building a city- or village-wide mesh network, with each laptop acting
as a node.) Solving one problem solved the other: Béhar turned the antennas into
a pair of playful “ears”that swivel up for reception or down to cover the
laptop’s naked ports.
“Everything on the laptop serves at least two purposes,” he says.
In March, Béhar’s team presented two models to the One
Laptop per Child panel of researchers, engineers, and former Media Labbers.
Members of the Design Continuum team also presented two versions. Only one
design would survive to a final round of revisions. After Béhar showed off his
work, he wandered out to the hall for a glass of water. Fifteen minutes later,
he walked back into the room and was greeted with a round of applause.
They picked the Blue model, the one with the ergonomic tilt. But its triumph
was brief. To get 12 hours of power and a five-year lifespan, the battery had to
grow by 50 percent, and it no longer fit under the keyboard. Béhar tried using
two smaller batteries, even turning the handle into a battery, but nothing
worked. A month later, in late spring, Béhar ditched the Blue model and went
back to work on a version of the Yellow one.
Béhar’s crew also discovered that putting a crank on a laptop – the most
distinctive feature of nearly every design so far – was a bad idea. If the user
gripped the laptop with one hand and the crank with the other, the whole thing
would shake with each whirl, wasting muscle power and putting too much stress on
the hardware. Other design firms are working on a foot pedal, a kind of rope
tug, and a more efficient crank built onto an AC adapter.
All the while, Negroponte has been relaying feedback from around the world,
trading emails with Béhar in the middle of the night. “The Brazilians wanted a
bigger display, and we did that,” Negroponte recalls. “The Thais wanted a taller
touch tablet” – big enough so kids could write on it in tall Thai script – “and
we did that.” And everyone, it turns out, is a decorator. “Color is a time sink
in conversations,” Negroponte says. “Nigeria has asked for it to be in their
national colors.”
Negroponte has promised to ship millions of laptops around the world. If it
succeeds, Béhar’s design will become an icon. If it fails, it will be something
more like the first English-Esperanto dictionary – an artifact of ill-fated
idealism. The project’s transparency, part of Negroponte’s insistence on open
source development, amplifies the pressure.
“With the Leaf light, we were left in peace for four years,” Béhar laughs.
“If something horrendous had happened or it got canned, nobody would have
known.” With the laptop, every misstep becomes public.
Béhar thinks the laptop project is more pragmatic than his skeptics realize.
“There’s a criticism that comes up,” he says. “I think it’s the stupidest
argument: Send kids food, send them water.” These critics, he says, imagine all
the developing world to be a famine-stricken village in Africa. “This is the
typical ignorance of the West. There are different conditions in different
places,” he says. “And there are a lot of places where kids are not starving,
where kids want to learn more than anything else.”
Then there are the critics who believe the project requires villagers to run
a T1 line into the center of town. It doesn’t. In fact, many laptops will go to
areas with no Internet access. “Our emphasis is peer-to-peer,” Negroponte
explains – connecting kids with each other over the mesh network, and offering
schools a $100 server packed with 200 gigabytes of educational mat-erial. If
every textbook resided on a server, a country like Brazil would save roughly $20
per kid per year (minus the cost of licensing). When fast Internet access
becomes more widely available, the laptops will simply become more valuable.
“Let’s not wait,” Negroponte says.
As of early summer, One Laptop per Child was negotiating with many potential
buyers – Argentina, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Thailand, and
countries in Central America – some of them close collaborators in the design.
But none of them have committed to the minimum purchase of 1 million laptops, at
a cost of about $140 each (Negroponte expects the price to drop to $50 by 2010).
Which means the program is a long way from Negroponte’s self-imposed minimum of
5 million laptops, expected to ship at the beginning of next year. “What happens
if we get only 1 million?” Negroponte says. “We delay launch until we have
enough.”
But Béhar has become a believer – and he’s not the only one. Intel is showing
off a $450 education laptop, and Bill Gates has proposed plugging cell phones
into televisions as a way to bring computers to the developing world.
Competition is a welcome change from the eye rolls of a year or two ago.
“It’s like there’s this virus of cheap laptops,” Béhar says, laughing.
“That’s what happens when you plant an idea.”
People Are Doing Double-Takes,
And Taking Action,
As Web Snapshots Are Nabbed for Commercial Uses
By Monica Hesse
The pug in the corner of the Saints-Eagles football telecast on Fox looked familiar to Tracey Gaughran-Perez.
Not in the slobber-smile way that all pugs look familiar, but in the who else but me would dress their pug up in a bleeping Santa suit kind of familiar.
Gaughran-Perez logged on to http://www.sweetney.com, the personal blog where she'd uploaded a snapshot of her dog, then waited for the Fox pug -- a sort of "Merry Christmas" icon -- to appear again on TV.
Argh.
The pug was definitely Truman; the photo was definitely one she'd marked as "all rights reserved."
"It's not like the picture was some golden chalice of Internet wonder. It's a picture of a stupid dog," says the Baltimore mom. "But it's my dog and it's my photo!"
Supreme irony: "Every commercial break there would be a warning from Fox saying, 'This telecast may not be reproduced,' " she says. "I guess copyright pertains only to them."
Under the banner of "intellectual property," record labels warn you not to bootleg their songs. Hollywood studios warn you not to download their movies. Intellectual property has lately seemed the concern of corporations trying to protect the artist from the grabby public.
But in an increasingly user-generated world where the public is the artist, sometimes it's the big boys who get grabby. And the questions that arise are about ownership, but they are also about fairness, and changing culture, and ultimately, the search for authenticity.
* * *
The (literal) poster child for corporate photonapping: Dallas 15-year-old Alison Chang, who paused in the middle of a church-sponsored carwash last summer to flash a goofy grin and a peace sign to her friend Justin Ho-Wee Wong. Click! Wong posted his pictures from the event on the photo-sharing Web site Flickr. A couple months later, the one of Alison resurfaced -- as part of a national ad campaign for Virgin Mobile in Australia. "Dump Your Pen Friend," the billboards read. "Free text virgin to virgin." Alison was the chump to dump.
The Chang family lawyered up.
While Wong had agreed to make his snapshots available through Creative Commons, a nonprofit that licenses photos for Flickr, he didn't anticipate commercial use, says Ryan Zehl, the attorney and spokesman for both the Chang family and Wong. Additionally, Zehl says, the license had required Wong to be attributed by name, which he was not. He and Alison, now 16, learned what had happened only when another Flickr user forwarded Wong a picture of the ad.
They're all suing Virgin Mobile Australia -- the Changs claiming Alison's violation of privacy and Wong claiming the company's failure to credit him properly.
Understanding cases such as the Changs' requires a crash course in copyright law:
Photographers (even amateur ones) automatically own the rights to their own work (even online). That means others can't use a photo without permission.
But sometimes, through "fair use," it actually is okay to use a photo without permission. Fair use can include scholarship or parody, and is determined by a number of criteria.
Further: sometimes, individuals such as Wong can decide to give away just part of their control. For example, permitting use of a photograph as long as the source is credited.
It's all doubly muddled online, where images can be thoughtlessly taken with one mouse click, such as when thousands of boys made screensavers out of high school track star Allison Stokke's photo and never once asked, "Legal?"
Clearly, the only way to really make sure your photos on the Internet don't get splashed around is not to put them up there to begin with.
In some ways the more interesting question for this corporate breed of photonapping isn't "Is it legal?" but rather, "Why does it sting so badly?"
For Niall Kennedy, the issue was hypocrisy -- the casual smugness with which corporations seemed to say, Copyright? What copyright? Kennedy had snapped photographs at a technology convention in late 2005 only to see one suddenly appear, without proper crediting, on a Microsoft-run blog.
"I've had audits where Microsoft has sent people to verify that I have copyrights for the software running on each employer's computer," says Kennedy, who once worked for Microsoft and now runs a Web technology firm. "This is a company that goes after copyright violators with the assumption of guilty until proven innocent."
The original blogger later posted an online mea culpa: "I forgot to include an attribution, which I had fully intended to do, but for which I apologise [sic] to him." Microsoft did not return calls seeking further comment.
Says Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford legal scholar who created Creative Commons, when asked about the issue of corporations borrowing photos: "There's really no excuse for [these companies] except that they think it's not important to protect the rights of the amateur."
Brandon Stone, a Web designer in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was as flattered as he was peeved when he saw his photographs of a dirty alley appear as background in a "Real Time With Bill Maher" skit on HBO.
Still, the amateur photographer didn't want to undersell himself, and solicited advice online. While still debating a course of action, he received a call from an apologetic show producer who had been forwarded Stone's advice request.
They negotiated a price of $500 for the images used, "plus a little more for pain and suffering," Stone says. "They know the business. They have to be held to a higher standard. The average Joe doesn't have a team of lawyers telling him what's legal and what's not."
The producer's explanation? An intern, a lowly intern who didn't know any better, had grabbed the screen shots for the last-minute sketch.
Low-level employees were also the forces cited when stay-at-home dad Jim Griffioen's daughter appeared on Babble, an online parenting magazine. The story, about lead paint, featured a photo from Flickr of Juniper playing in front of a paint-peeling wall.
"It implied that I expose my daughter to all kinds of evils," says Griffioen, who hadn't agreed to licensing. "I'm just glad it wasn't an article about smoking pot [in front of] your kids," the subject of another Babble story.
Griffioen, as it happens, was once an intellectual property lawyer. When he unleashed his legalese, he says, staffers removed the photo.
Griffioen accepted their untrained-employee explanation -- until, he says, he started hearing from other bloggers who said they'd been wronged by the site. One woman said a photo of hers was improperly used for the magazine's inaugural issue. When she complained, the editor blamed . . . an intern.
"That is one very active intern," says Griffioen.
Babble, for its part, immediately admits wrongdoing, but says that the cases were not nearly as widespread as Griffioen implies. "There was a period of a few weeks where it happened as a pattern," says Rufus Griscom, Babble publisher. He says that one photo assistant did not understand permissible use, but that when the problem came to light, the offending photos were immediately removed and replaced with stock photography or with images from Flickr that Babble had permission to use. The photo assistant was fired, and the magazine reviewed all of its published images to make sure it had the photo rights.
What's noteworthy in each of these cases, Lessig says, "is that bloggers, a community typically associated with piracy, are rallying in support of copyright."
He says average individuals are increasingly thinking of themselves as artists, whose work has value -- or at least deserves respect. Lessig predicts that as the average Joes have their own material appropriated, it will eventually result in better behavior from both individuals and corporations.
Or, in total anarchy?
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When news broke of the Alison Chang story earlier this fall, Virgin Mobile Australia released a statement (and has subsequently declined all interview requests, including one requested for this article). In part: the campaign "was part of an approach designed to reject cliched 'advertising' imagery in favour of more genuine and spontaneous shots."
Griscom, of Babble, similarly explained the magazine's decision to use Flickr, calling the images found there "more original, less generic."
It's easy to get so caught up debating the fairness of photonapping that we miss the other question: Why would big name corporations even want our point-and-click photographs?
The answer seems to be less "Because we can" and more "Because we need to."
"Authenticity is the new consumer sensibility," says Joe Pine, a business consultant and co-author of "Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want." It is the criterion "by which people decide what to buy and who to buy it from."
It's a byproduct of the user-generated world: the trustworthiness of YouTube, the realness of Facebook. Above all else, we believe ourselves. "People don't want to buy the fake from the phony anymore," Pine says. "They want to buy the real from the genuine."
Most of Flickr looks genuine. Type in "nerdy teen" and the current first hit is not some stylized nerd with braces and suspenders and mismatched socks. What you get instead is an image more subtle -- an old yearbook photograph of a smiling brunette, glasses not quite right, hair not quite right.
The image is more "right" than the Steve Urkel an ad firm would have concocted.
And the ad firms get that. So we get videos like Burger King's "Freakout" campaign in which real people are told the Whopper has been discontinued. They do their best to replicate real.
Viewers can spot a professional pug model from across the living room.
It all gets very meta.
And none of it is comforting to the people who have had their images grabbed online.
So while these issues of authenticity and fairness and legality are all being sorted out, amateur photographers who find themselves more famous than they would like may consider taking advice from Niall Kennedy.
When his initial e-mails to the Microsoft blog asking it to remove links to his photo didn't immediately work, Kennedy replaced the image with one of a man engaging in an activity best described as "extreme mooning." Visitors to the Microsoft blog who clicked on the innocent-looking link were guided to the new photo.
Says Kennedy, "They pulled down the link within 15 minutes."
Redflex, an Australian company that operates red light cameras and speed cameras for more than 170 US cities, is under scrutiny by the United States Postal Inspection Service. Stephanie Ware, a private investigator in Lafayette, Louisiana, filed a complaint with the federal agency after she received a ticket in the mail in November.
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