[Plura-list] Lax antitrust vs ventilator stockpiles, Koch network vs lockdown, PE vs pandemics, Digital rights are human rights

Cory Doctorow doctorow at craphound.com
Mon Mar 30 11:50:45 EDT 2020


Today's links

* Lax antitrust killed ventilator stockpiles : The USG procured <$3k
ventilators from a startup, so an incumbent bought them and shuttered them.

* Koch network demands an end to lockdown: While sending its staff home
for their safety.

* Private equity firms scooping up pandemic bargains: It's not the wound
that gets ya, it's the opportunistic parasitic infections.

* Digital rights are human rights: Why broadband should be a public utility.

* ACLU vanquishes the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: Terms of Service
violations are not felonies.

* Munching Squares and Munching Tunes: The music and visuals of
slow-decay phosphors.

* This day in history: 2010, 2015, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

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🧻 Lax antitrust killed ventilator stockpiles

40 years ago, a fabulist named Robert Bork dreamed up an imaginary
history of US antitrust law in order to justify dismantling it.

This Nixon co-conspirator – beloved of Ronald Reagan – cooked up a
doctrine that said that monopolies are only a problem when they raise
prices in the short/medium term.

Plutes *loved* this idea, and 40 years later, mergers, acquisitions,
vertical monopolies and other anticompetitive activities are the norm,
and most major industries are dominated by as few as one, and rarely
more than five firms.

The problem is that monopolies aren't just bad because they raise
prices, *they're bad because they are monopolies*. Monopolization allows
firms to attack workers, suppliers and customers, and to extract
monopoly rents that can be diverted to corrupt our political process.

Which is why we don't have any ventilators.

13 years ago, the US Dept of HHS awarded a contract to design low-cost,
reliable ventilators to Newport Medical Instrument of Costa Mesa, CA.
The ventilators would cost <$3k, allowing the US to procure a shit-ton
of them against future pandemics.

This was a problem for existing med-tech giants, who charged >$10K for
competing ventilators, but under Robert Bork's antitrust theory, there
was a simple solution.

In 2012, Covidien, a giant in the field, simply plunked down $100m
(chump change, given its revenues of $12b that year) and bought Newport.

Then they killed the ventilator project.

I mean, not right away. First they delayed it and demanded an additional
$1.4M from the US government. Then they killed it.

Covidien is now a division of Medtronic (because Bork). Medtronic is a
ghastly shitshow of a company.

They're a lead villain in the fight to kill off open artificial
pancreases, which free people with diabetes from being turned into
ambulatory inkjet printers, dependent on manufacturers for overpriced
consumables to keep their fucking organs working.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/04/looping-created-insulin-pump-underground-market/588091/

Their pacemakers and defibrillators can be wirelessly hacked to kill you
where you stand.

Their stuff is so insecure, it can be hacked even before it leaves the
factory.

https://www.wired.com/story/pacemaker-hack-malware-black-hat/

Naturally, they're also part of the supervillain team that assembled to
kill a wave of state Right to Repair bills.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nz85y7/apple-is-lobbying-against-your-right-to-repair-iphones-new-york-state-records-confirm

(The lack of Right to Repair legislation is a big reason that hospitals
are struggling to keep livesaving equipment online during the pandemic.
Thanks, Medtronic!)

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/right-repair-times-pandemic

The dirty trick that killed off the US's attempt to procure a stockpile
of ventilators set the project back by years that, it turned out, we
didn't have. Philips now has a contract to deliver what Newport
couldn't. They haven't shipped.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-ventilator-shortage.html

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🧻 Koch network demands an end to lockdown

The Charles Koch network is one of the most successful dark
money/influence operations in the world, an example of how a single,
ultra-wealthy individual can project his will over millions of people by
funding dozens of front orgs.

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/26/americans-for-prosperity-cdc-coronavirus/

Koch orgs like Americans for Prosperity were critical to the weakening
of the CDC, pushing for a $1B cut to the agency in 2018, characterizing
it as emblematic of "the burden overspending is placing on all taxpayers."

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6810490-AFP-2018-Budget-Cut-List.html

AFP also served as a funnel for money spent to block state Medicaid
expansions, rollbacks of environmental regulations, and the $1.5T Trump
tax cuts.

They sure do get shit done. Terrible, terrible shit.

Their new project? Re-opening businesses and ending covid lockdown and
social distancing, asserting that firms will "adapt and innovate" to
maintain safety without the need for government regulation.

In a way, I feel bad for them. It's gotta be tough to have reality's
well-known left-wing bias tossed in your face with nothing but a slurry
of high-grade petrodollars to soothe the wounds.

There clearly are libertarians in a pandemic. Very, very unhappy ones,
experiencing scorching cognitive dissonance and engaged in heroic feats
of motivated reasoning.

The kicker? AFP is on lockdown. It sent its workers home: "to ensure the
health and safety of our activists, staff, and voters, our staff are
working from home and are utilizing digital organizing as one way to
continue their grassroots engagement."

Yeah, this is a sick burn, but also, totally normal. As Yochai Benkler
points out in this lecture, even the most selfish, Rand-worshipping PE
manager can be seen in playgrounds, shouting "Timmy, you share that
toy!" at his toddler.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMxz7rzwee8

Sociopathy may be pareto-optimal, but no one wants to live with a child
who has been raised to live in Galt Gulch, and it's hard to doom your
office staff to die for want of a ventilator in good conscience.

It's not really any different from the Young Earth Creationist oil
barons who direct their geoengineers to look for oil where it would be
if the Earth was 4B years old, rather than 5K.

Just as every (surviving) Breatharian was found to be secretly sneaking
out to 7-11 for Doritos at 2AM while claiming to survive on nothing but
nutrients siphoned up through deep-breathing.

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🧻 Private equity firms scooping up pandemic bargains

This is the crisis that private equity has been waiting for. With $1.5T
in cash reserves and crippled businesses, the pandemic is a dream come
true for vulture capitalists like Carlyle, Blackstone and KKR.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/25/private-equity-eyes-coronavirus-hit-industries-theyve-been-waiting.html

They're chasing "PIPEs" (private investments in public equity – discount
shares in public businesses) like crazy, looking for weak businesses to
buy, debt-load, asset-strip and leave to die.

Shouldn't surprise anyone: opportunistic, parasitic infections are
always a present when an animal is wounded.

But this is an election year, and the Democratic candidacy has not been
determined. There's only one of the final two who calls for real limits
on finance.

It'll be interesting to see which impulse wins out in the PE boardrooms:
greedy desire to devour good companies and shit out useless husks, or
self-preserving forbearance in the face of a looming plebiscite on our
regulatory future.

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🧻 Digital rights are human rights

I've been working on digital human rights for nearly 20 years now, and I
remember how the idea was once widely mocked as a distraction.

Back in 2009, Finland was derided for declaring broadband a human right.

https://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/15/finland.internet.rights/index.html

And even by Malcolm Gladwell standards, this 2010 take on the
uselessness of online activism has not aged well.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell

The GOP and Ajit Pai's attacks on the Lifeline fund to bring broadband
to rural and disadvantaged Americans are modern versions of the
infection that says that the digital divide is a frivolity.

But pandemics have a well-known left-wing bias, and as the world
struggles to replace f2f with digital-only, the foolishness of allowing
rapacious, lazy, financialized, incompetent telcos to maintain the
nervous system of the 21st Century is increasingly obvious.

Hence calls like this one, to treat broadband as a public utility:

https://qz.com/1826043/the-coronavirus-crisis-proves-internet-should-be-a-public-utility/

As I've mentioned, my city, Burbank, has a 100GB publicly owned fiber
network that runs right under my foundation slab, but residents can't
access it, thanks to a franchise deal with Charter, a genuinely terrible
company.

As it happens, I was discussing something else with one of my city
councillors yesterday and this subject came up and he asked me to send
him a briefing on the subject that he could circulate to other city
officials. Here's what I wrote him:

It would be a dream come true for Burbank to make its fiber network
available to residential customers. Our taxpayer-purchased 100GB loop is
300X+ faster than the fastest speeds offered by our broadband
monopolist, Charter.

Municipal fiber networks are beloved wherever they are found.

The only Americans who love their ISPs are customers of
city-owned/operated fiber:

https://www.consumerreports.org/telecom-services/cord-cutting-continues-high-cable-pricing/

Municipal fiber is the fastest, cheapest broadband in America:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7xgne9/locally-run-isps-offer-the-fastest-broadband-in-america

(It's 50% cheaper!
https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2018/01/communityfiber)

More than 750 cities in the US operate municipal broadband networks:

https://muninetworks.org/communitymap

Despite Trump admin warnings, it's totally untrue that municipal
networks are liable to commit censorship (indeed, muni networks are
constrained by the First Amendment in ways that private networks are not):

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bj49j8/fcc-falsely-claims-community-broadband-an-ominous-threat-to-the-first-amendment

The poorest predominately white community in the US – in rural
Appalachia – installed a fiber network (they used a mule named "Ole Bub"
to reach their most isolated homesteads!) and underwent an economic miracle:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

The best book on this is Susan Crawford's "Fiber: The Coming Tech
Revolution―and Why America Might Miss It":

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300228502/fiber

Instead of muni fiber, Burbankers are using Charter service, which is
rated some of the worst in the USA. They're the company that is forcing
back-office employees to come into work even if they can work from home:

https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/16/charter-coronavirus-work-home/

and in lieu of hazard pay (or PPE, or hand sanitizer), the company is
providing its field techs (who enter our homes and risk us and them!)
with $25 gift certificates…to restaurants that are not open and may not
survive the crisis (these are also a taxable benefit for those workers):

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amberjamieson/spectrum-workers-coronavirus-gift-cards

(Charter got billions in the tax bill and blew it all on buybacks while
dropping maintenance and capex to historic, industry-trailing lows).

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🧻 ACLU vanquishes the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

The ACLU has prevailed in a crucial lawsuit, where they argued that
journalists and security researchers should be able to violate websites'
terms of service without risking criminal liability under a Reagan-era
anti-hacking law.

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/federal-court-rules-big-data-discrimination-studies-do-not-violate-federal-anti

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) was passed (literally) in a
panic over the movie Wargames, delivering broad powers to US prosecutors
to criminally charge anyone who "exceeds authorization" on a computer.

Over time, companies like Facebook (in its Power Ventures suit)
converted this overly broad doctrine into a "Criminal Contempt of
Business Model" statute, arguing that violating its terms of service
constituted a CFAA breach.

They were assisted by prosecutors like Steven Heymann and Carmen Ortiz,
who used CFAA to charge Aaron Swartz with 13 felonies and threaten him
with 35 years in prison after he ignored JSTOR's terms of service and
bulk downloaded articles he was allowed one-at-a-time access to.

In the years since, there have been multiple attempts to reform CFAA,
but these have been repeatedly killed by Big Tech companies, notably
Oracle, whose CSO has a history of threatening customers who audit its
products before trusting them.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/oracle-security-chief-to-customers-stop-checking-our-code-for-vulnerabilities/

The result has been a deep chilling effect on researchers, from security
researchers who tell us whether we can trust online products, to
investigative journalists who test algorithms for bias, including bias
that violates federal antidiscrimination statutes.

And this is where the ACLU has prevailed! In Sandvig v Barr, a federal
judge in DC ruled that there is no criminal CFAA liability for
terms-of-service violations, though he left the door open for civil
liability.

But that civil liability is also being eroded: LinkedIn recently had
their asses handed to them in a CFAA suit against a competitor, setting
a precedent that dramatically narrows civil liability for ToS violations.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-linkedin-protects-scraping-public-data

This is a really important moment for online freedom. It says that
companies can't conjure up new jailable offenses merely by asserting
that you have agreed that you are a criminal if you displease their
shareholders.

There are still some really ghastly Contempt of Business Model laws
hanging around out there, like Section 1201 of the DMCA, which makes it
a felony to bypass a copyright "access control" even if you don't
infringe copyright.

It's a rule that's used to felonize everything from refilling printer
cartridges to accessing your own medical implant data, and (especially)
getting your devices repaired by independent technicians.

At EFF, we have a longrunning lawsuit, on behalf of Bunnie Huang and
Matthew Green, to overturn this law. It's slow going, but we took a huge
step forward last spring.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/first-amendment-case-against-restrictive-copyright-law-can-proceed-says-judge

(Image: Daniel J. Sieradski, CC BY-SA)

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🧻 Munching Squares and Munching Tunes

Old PDP7 systems used Type 340 XY displays whose P7 phosphors had a slow
decay process that MIT AI lab hackers used to create "Munching Squares"
displays.

https://youtu.be/V4oRHv-Svwc

These were pretty cool! But even cooler was the weird "Munching Tunes"
that you could listen to if you placed a small AM receiver near the
display and picked up the prodigious RFI it gave off.

Munching Squares has been an option in JWZ's Xscreensaver since 1997!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXNIYpdh8Ug

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🧻 This day in history

#10yrsago EFF, AT&T and Google all on the same side of this privacy
fight https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2010/03/30

#10yrsago NZ MPs reject software patents
http://passthesource.org.nz/2010/03/30/no-software-patents-in-new-zealand/

#10yrago Recaptioning New Yorker cartoons with "Christ, what an
asshole!"
https://web.archive.org/web/20060203045552/http://www.modernarthur.com/blog/christwhatanasshole.html

#5yrsago Clean Reader is a free speech issue
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/30/allow-clean-reader-swap-bad-words-books-free-speech

#5yrsago Utilitarianism versus psychopathy
https://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/03/27/the-trolley-and-the-psychopath/

#1yrago Facebook owns Netscape
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/03/brand-necrophilia-part-7/

#1yrago Researchers find mountains of sensitive data on totalled Teslas
in junkyards
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

#1yrago Animated David Byrne/Big Suit enamel pin
https://www.psapress.com/products/stop-making-sense-enamel-pin

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🧻 Colophon

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/),
JWZ (http://www.jwz.org/blog/).

Currently writing: I'm getting geared up to start work my next novel,
"The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland:
it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs.
Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a
magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they
cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into
Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt
Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to
it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Data – the new oil, or potential for a toxic oil spill?
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/23/data-the-new-oil-or-potential-for-a-toxic-oil-spill/

Upcoming appearances:

* Quarantine Book Club, April 1, 3PM Pacific
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/quarantine-book-club-cory-doctorow-tickets-100931360416

* Museums and the Web, April 2, 12PM-3PM Pacific https://mw20.museweb.net/

* Short Story Club, April 7, 530PM Pacific https://www.shortstory.club/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies
and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the
monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

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