Home | Forums | Article Search | Subscribe & Shop | Contact Us | Log Out Back Door Email This Print This View My Personal Library Back Door February 2003 • Vol.3 Issue 2 Page(s) 108 in print issue Add To My Personal Library Back Door Q&A With Shari Steele Ten years ago, Shari Steele was out trying to peddle her new master's degree in law into a teaching position. Faced with grim prospects in the education market, she replied to an ad for a staff attorney position with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's new Washington, D.C., office. The EFF took her on, and Steele soon became engrossed in the nonprofit organization's many campaigns to defend public rights in cyberspace. Soon, she became the EFF's director of legal services, then, almost three years ago, the group's executive director and president. Steele's name is well suited to her job. The EFF fights some of the country's toughest legal battles against opponents such as the recording industry and the U.S. Secret Service. CPU: What has kept you with the EFF for so long? Steele: I don't know—insanity? [laughs] The issues. I mean if you care about First Amendment laws, you care about freedom of speech and you care about constitutional law; we're working right on the cutting edge. This is just an amazingly fascinating place to be working for an attorney who cares about these issues. It's a dream job, really. CPU: In a nutshell, what does the EFF do? Steele: Our biggest thing is trying to defend civil liberties when there are new technologies involved. We're trying to make sure that civil liberties are thought about and protected because a lot of times changes in technology have an effect on freedom of speech or privacy that people don't necessarily think about. CPU: Why you in this job and not somebody else? Steele: Because I care about freedom. And as a person who loves the Constitution and who cares about freedom, this is the place where all the battles are happening right now. I guess that's why me. But it was just happenstance that I saw the job listing and got the job. Nowadays, in order to get a job at EFF, especially as an attorney, you really have to have worked in that area for a long time. You have to show that you know all the cyberspace issues. So I fell into it, but I love it and obviously I've stayed for a really long time. This is the place for me until I decide to do something that's completely nonproductive with my life. CPU: What would that be? Steele: I don't know. Teach nursery school, although that would be productive, too. Hmm . . . CPU: What is the most dangerous pieces of legislation currently under consideration? Steele: The Berman Bill, which is this peer-to-peer bill that would basically allow copyright holders to send viruses and do all sorts of damage to your computer if you're engaging in peer-to-peer file sharing and engaging in copyright infringement. That's a pretty scary one. Another one is the CBDTPA, the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act. That one's really scary because it would basically let the entertainment industry decide what kinds of technologies get to get rolled out and which ones don't. It will allow them to say that anything that doesn't read the digital rights management systems that we're putting on our movies can't be used. You, manufacturers, need to create products that are going to follow the limitations that we're putting on our products, and if you create products or innovations that don't keep these limitations in place, then you're going to be in violation of the law. CPU: So it's like an expansion of the regional restrictions already placed on DVD players? Steele: Exactly. It's the same theory. CPU: Isn't there already a legal precedent for that in place? Steele: Well, I suppose the regional DVD player encoding did that. But also in place is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which already gives a lot more power to copyright holders than they've had in the past. But no, there's nothing that goes as far as the CBDTPA. CPU: When you say the Berman Bill would allow copyright holders to send viruses into people's PCs, what exactly does that mean? Steele: They'll be able to create files that look like they're music files, MP3 files, that people will download. Furthermore, these companies will have no liability if they cause damage to your machine. Well, if they want to pass legislation that creates no liability for doing damage to your machine, then it's pretty obvious that they're planning on doing damage, otherwise they wouldn't care about whether they're liable. Right now what they've been doing is putting a whole lot of stuff out on peer-to-peer networks that is either static or just a part of a song. But that's a drop in the bucket. It's nothing. What it looks like they want to do in the future is actually have files that can be damaging to your computer. CPU: Isn't that a violation of existing property damage laws? Steele: It is, but the Berman Act, this peer-to-peer legislation, would make it so that they are not criminally liable for whatever happens to your machine. They don't even need to provide proof or anything. They're just acting in good faith. CPU: But this just sounds insane. Steele: Yeah. And that was our initial reaction: that it was never going to get any footage. It was just crazy. But it looks like with next Congress it might actually get some teeth. We'll see. CPU: Do you think the entertainment industry figures that the average person is simply not technically educated enough to be able to understand these issues and want to stick up for them when it comes to voting time? Steele: That's exactly right, and I think that's probably true. I think that most people aren't really paying attention to the battles that are going on right now, and they will lose their rights before they even know that anything has happened. There's a huge discussion taking place right now on HDTV, the new digital television, that's going to be the only thing transmitted a few years from now. I think by 2006 that's supposed to be the only thing that gets broadcast. But there's this big thing where you wouldn't be able to receive the broadcast unless you have licensed players. The issue is whether or not technology companies need to really be limited by the entertainment industry' requirements. Right now, it's being done in standards committees rather than by Congress. But the CBDTPA would make it so that Congress is actually getting involved in making it illegal for technology companies to create innovative designs that haven't been preapproved by the entertainment industry. And consumers have no idea that they're not going to be able even to receive digital signals. They're not going to be able to receive broadcast television. This whole battle is taking place right now without consumers having any concept of what's transpiring. CPU: I'll play the devil's advocate. I should buy a licensed player so I can see my stuff, because the copyright holders own their content. That's their right. So what's the problem? Steele: The problem is, first of all, not all the stuff on broadcast television is owned by these companies that are doing it. But the real problem is that right now you can do all sorts of things with those television broadcasts, and those things are going to go away. Besides, you're going to have to pay whoever it is to be able to receive the broadcast in the first place. You're not going to be able to copy them freely, download them to your PVR, or to use your TiVo to play them at another time besides when they're being broadcast. There are all sorts of fair uses that you're supposed to be able to do legally that you will lose. That law will also make it so that you can't circumvent the technology in order to be able to make your legal uses of the product. CPU: Have some of our digital rights already been curtailed? Steele: They have been expanded, and they have been curtailed. I mean, rights have changed, and that's a good thing. The amount of speech that you can get access to now is incredible, thanks to the World Wide Web. The ability of you as an individual to get your word out to lots of people has increased tremendously. So, in those respects, your speech rights have been expanded. But it's much easier now for companies you shop with to track you, to know not only what you purchase but even which Web pages you look at to know what you've even been doing. They can track which books you've pulled off the digital shelves to just see what the jacket has to say. You don't even have to purchase the book for them to have this whole complete dossier on what it is you look at and are interested in. The antiterrorism legislation has made it so that the FBI can track your Web browsing habits, and they probably are doing it already if you've indicated at all that you've got any interest in what's going on with the Palestinian terror groups. Or take al Qaeda, for example. If you go to al Qaeda's Web site, just because you're interested in knowing about al Qaeda, I think it's pretty safe to say that your Web browsing habits will be tracked from now on. CPU: The government has the technology to do this now? Steele: Oh, they definitely have the technology. Now they have the legal right to do it without even judicial oversight. They don't even need to report who they're looking at. So in that respect, you've lost something. You've lost your ability to look critically at speech online without there being some sort of a privacy invasion involved. CPU: Think of these depraved online hate groups. Should there be a limit to free speech? Steele: Not when it comes to hate groups, but there are limits to free speech. For example, you can't libel somebody. You can't spread lies about them. You can't take trade secrets and pass them around. You can't violate copyrights. There are limitations that we've put in the laws of speech, but when it comes to disagreeing with a speaker because you think that speaker might incite people to do things, no, there shouldn't be limitations on that kind of speech. It's behavior that is the problem, and the answer to bad speech is more speech. That's what the Supreme Court has said, and I think that's a really good thing. CPU: What has been the greatest victory and worst defeat for your organization? Steele: The greatest victory has probably been Steve Jackson Games. This was a case where the judge held that you need to have a warrant in order to be able to read people's email. This was a new concept. I mean we take it for granted for now that of course you do. But at the time, the Secret Service took down an entire bulletin board system and read all the email on it while only having a search warrant for the premises. What the judge said is you need to have a warrant to particularly describe each of the communications that you're trying to get access to in order to be able to read them. Otherwise you're violating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. As far as our worst loss, the most ominous is the passage of the USA Patriot Act. We lost a tremendous amount of civil liberties when that act passed, and there really wasn't anything we could do. It was a landslide, and it was clear that the American public really wanted to give the government all sorts of authority to be able to make them feel more secure [after Sept. 11], but the bottom line is that civil liberties have taken a big hit, and it'll take a long time for us to gain back some of the things that we lost with the USA Patriot Act. CPU: Which did what? Steele: Well, it basically gave law enforcement all sorts of new powers, and it removed a lot of oversight so that law enforcement doesn't need to get warrants, judges aren't making them prove that they need to be able to do the things that they want to do, and they don't need to report to Congress and let Congress know what they're doing. So there's a lot of secret stuff going on that we don't even know about. CPU: How do you hope to evolve the EFF under your stewardship? Steele: I'd like us to get more into the general public consciousness. Right now, we are very strongly supported by the tech community, by people who already understand the technology issues, and it would be great to get Mom and Pop to understand a little bit more about what we do. That's probably the biggest area in which I see us expanding. [I also see us] doing a whole lot more grassroots organizing. That kind of goes hand in hand, I think. CPU: What's the most important thing someone should understand about your "message?" Steele: That there are civil liberties issues involved with technology. That's the biggest thing that people don't seem to really get. And that we should really be careful if something is necessary before we start giving away our rights. CPU: If readers want to get involved in the EFF mission, what can they do? Steele: We've got an action center, and we put out action alerts every month with things that people can do based on whatever it is that's the hot issue of the day. The biggest thing, of course, is to join EFF. We're a membership organization, and the more people that we can show are interested in these issues, the more power we'll have when trying to get lawmakers to pay attention. >William Van Winkle began writing for computer magazines in 1996. He was first published in 1990, the same year he took his first job in computers. He and his family live outside of Portland, Ore. Want more information about a topic you found of interest while reading this article? Type a word or phrase that identifies the topic and click "Search" to find relevant articles from within our editorial database. Enter A Subject (key words or a phrase): ALL Words (‘digital’ AND ‘photography’) ANY Words (‘digital’ OR ‘photography’) Exact Match ('digital photography'- all words MUST appear together) Home      Copyright & Legal Information      Privacy Policy      Site Map      Contact Us Copyright © 2008 Sandhills Publishing Company U.S.A. All rights reserved.