If You Really Want It
That Way?
http://hnn.us/articles/19928.html
http://hnn.us/board.php?id=19928
http://hnn.us/readcomment.php?id=73447&bheaders=1#73447
So, how do you know if your phone has been tapped? With
digital telecomm switching, phone tapping is not something
people do on a street corner. The "bonus services" like caller ID,
conference calling, and call forwarding implement all the
raw technical capabilities required for telephone tapping. The
CALEA act required telephone companies to incorporate telephone
tapping into the computer programs which run the network. The
number of people, in the telephone companies, outside of the
NSA, who have "need to know" for massive telephone
tapping is approximately on the same order as the
number of Air Force and Navy officers who have "need
to know" for nuclear weapons launch codes. I know
enough about telecommunications engineering to know how little I
know. It's not my engineering specialty. Most of the HNN
conservatives have never programmed a computer in their lives, and
they think they know all there is to know!!! They know nothing and
they think they know everything. I used to have conversations with
la-di-da, too-good-for-this-world, academic Marxists who were like
that. It's a strange reversal. I don't know whether it's simply a
matter of the Trotskyite roots of Neo-Conservatism, or whether
it's just a matter of critical technological lag.
You have no way of knowing if your telephone is being
tapped. What you can do is to assume that your telephone has been
tapped, and automatically take such actions as you would consider
justified in that eventuality. There are various technical
measures you can take, such as encryption.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/20/221204&tid=158&tid=126&tid=219
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/25/0029204&tid=158&tid=215&tid=219
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/18/1456210&tid=158&tid=123&tid=4
In 1774-75, in response to events, large numbers
of villages in New England organized "Committees of
Correspondence and Defense." Something similar seems
to be happening among the computer people on the
internet.
[Responding to Bill Heuisler's claim
that (1/4/2006) message traffic could be easily intercepted
and anlyzed, I replied:]
(01/04/2006 06:30 PM)
Well, matters have
rather changed over the last forty years or so.
Physical Plant:
In the first place, there's much more optical fiber in place
nowadays. The telecommunications glut of the 1990's means that
people are practically giving bandwidth away. Fiber optic cables
are preferable to satellite links because their time
lag is less. It is something like 20,000 mile up to a
geostationary satellite, and 20,000 miles down again. That is,
about a fifth of a second at the speed of light. I know that
doesn't sound like much, but it does play the devil with machine
feedback, and you have to design special mechanisms to get
around it. By contrast, an optical cable to Europe
is only about three or four thousand miles long, and even
allowing for the diminished speed of light in glass, the
time lag might be about one sixth of that in a
satellite link. The better grade of optical fibers, used
in long-distance telecommunications, are usually "graded index
single-mode." To tap in, you would have to cut the cable,
and this would cause alarms to ring in the telecommunications
company's switching center. The whole point of the CALEA
act was that the FBI was becoming afraid because it was losing
its traditional wiretapping ability due to technological
changes.
Additionally, packet switching is in widespread use. Packet
switching tends to convert messages into waves of packets, each
traveling independently along the momentarily least congested
route. Telephone tapping in a packet regime practically requires
that packets be steered to a point where they can be picked
up.
Satelites and radio generally are primarily useful for
communication with mobile units. The tendency is to incorporate
enough cryptography to give at least as good privacy as a
landline, because any kid can use generic components to build a
receiver tunable to any frequency.
Encryption:
The gold standard of encryption is the so-called
"once-only-cipher." You take a stream of true random numbers,
produced by an electronic "noise generator," XOR them against
the plaintext to get the ciphertext, and XOR them against
the ciphertext to get the plaintext back. And you
never use the key again, which is why the cipher is called
"once-only." You can put something like 4.7
gigabytes (4700 books) of once-only-key on a DVD for about
a dollar, so the difficulties of once-only ciphers are not what
they once were. Once-only-ciphers are theoretically
unbreakable-- that is, there is no logical or even statistical
basis for asserting that one putative plaintext is the correct
solution of a given ciphertext of the same (padded)
length.
If you know someone to the point of conspiring with
him, the only sane thing to do is to exchange DVD's, and go to
once-only cipher in the interests of peace-of-mind. One
can take for granted that all the more critical communications
of the Pentagon are on this basis. Lesser ciphers are
useful for dealing with people you don't know well enough to set
up a special arrangement with. And of course, people you
don't know very well are precisely the people you can't trust
not to publish messages sent to them.
Now, for ordinary encryption:
There is something called Bremmerman's Conjecture, an
argument from quantum physics about the ultimate limits
of how fast a computer can ultimately go. The consensus is
that a "complexity" much in excesss of ten to the three
hundredth power is beyond the limits of any computer which
can be built. The computational difficulty of cracking a
cipher increases much faster than the computational difficulty
of encrypting and decrypting. A typical desktop computer, which
would have been worth perhaps a hundred million dollars in 1975,
can shove a message into Bremmerman's Conjecture territory
without undue difficulty.
Now, of course there is this buzz going around about "quantum
computing," which is hard to assess. However, it is agreed that
there are certain operations which quantum computers cannot
perform. Private key ciphers are designed to methodically use
just about every possible operation. They are designed rather
like the thicket in which Brer Rabbit was born and
bred. Furthermore, they use "autocoding," an operation
analogous to carrying in addition, so they can only be
attacked at the start of the message-- after that,
the autocoding gives the cipher the properties of a
once-only-cipher.
Public-key ciphers, at present, are not thicket designed.
They _may_ be vulnerable to quantum computing, and they seem
exposed to advances in mathematics. It is presently unclear
whether one can design a public-key cipher on the thicket
principle. A partial solution to the weaknesses of public-key
ciphers is the so-called "keyserver," eg. Kerberos. You
have an ongoing relationship with the party operating the
keyserver, and they give you "cryptographic introductions" to
people you want to talk to. That is, you use your
private-key cipher to communicate with the keyserver, and the
other party uses his private-key cipher to communicate with the
keyserver, and the keyserver generates a random number and
gives it to both of you to use as a private key in
communicating directly.
The main ultimate practical usefulness of public-key ciphers is
not for secrecy as such, but for digital signatures. Someone can
have enough information able a public-key cipher to determine
that a signature is good, without being able to forge it. So the
real threat of quantum computing is primarily towards signatures
and electronic payments.
Incidentally, with the rise of "bot-nets," the NSA is no
longer top dog in code cracking. The author of a computer virus
can steal computer time worldwide faster than the NSA can
buy computers. Basically, everyone in the
telecommunications business knows that they have to take certain
cryptographic measures, or the Russian mafia will own all
their subscribers' credit card numbers, simply by tapping
the phones of the major mail-order firms. A
practical side effect of this is that if the NSA wants in, it
cannot simply tap lines, but has to physically get
into the telecommunications company's control room, and
practically, that means inducing the telecommunications company
to cooperate.
Now, of course, if you don't trust the telephone company, you
can superimpose your own cryptography. That is what people
are discussing doing. Telephone tapping is ultimately
futile, in much the same sense that the British
march to Lexington and Concord was futile. It merely broke down
trust, and caused people to start acting in terms of the logic
of force. One can say with the benefit of hindsight
that General Gage was probably a rather stupid man who did
not understand what America was all about. The logic of force
meant that within a couple of days, he was besieged in Boston by
15,000 minutemen, twice the total number of British troops
in North America. The logic of force as applied to
telecommunications means that every little girl burns a
disk full of random numbers, and exchanges same with her
best friend, so that they can giggle over the phone in
perfect privacy.
[order of material shifted for clarity]
Let's finish off my field first. Fiber optic cables do not cease
at the water's edge. Another basic point you have to
understand is this: the information capacity of an
electromagnetic wave-- that is radio, microwave, or light,
is proportional to its frequency. Satellite radio is
broadly speaking in the gigaherz range, that is,
billions of cycles per second. The signal has to drill up
through twenty miles of atmosphere before reaching space,
so you can't go too far up-frequency before it starts behaving
like a weather radar. Weather radars are very nice in
their place, but for long-distance communication, they present
certain problems... By contrast, an optical cable runs on
light in the hundred teraherz range.An optical cable will
typically have ten or so optical fibers. In other words,
an optical cable can carry as much information as a
thousand or more communications satellites. As
you may infer, the relation between an optical cable and a
satellite is very much that between a truck and a mule. Undersea
cables were built to all kinds of improbable places. In
particular, Global Crossing built a long way out
into the Third World.
http://www.cellular.co.za/news_1999/news-06071999-africa_one_plans.htm
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2002/08/09_mpp.html
http://www.globalcrossing.com/xml/news/2002/january/11.xml
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=51872
http://www.globalcrossing.com/xml/network/net_map.xml
http://home.singtel.com/about_singtel/network_n_infrastructure/submarine_cable_systems/networkinfra_submarinecablesystems.asp
http://www.convergedigest.com/DWDM/dwdmarticle.asp?ID=16871&ctgy=
If you want to get somewhere which is only
mule-accessible, what you do is to drive your truck, pulling
your horse trailer to the road access point which is closest to
where you want to get to. I think the same principle applies to
cables and satellites. Even it the cable doesn't go all
the way, you might want to get within the footprint of a
comparatively underutilized satellite, perhaps over
the Indian Ocean, and avoid competing with mobile services
and satellite broadcasting in the comparatively congested
and expensive North Atlantic region.
---------------------
Parenthetically, computer voice recognition does not work very
well. As one Slashdot humorist remarked: "Voice recognition is
AI complete." Unless a surveillance agency knows exactly what it
is looking for, it has to record a large swath of
telephone conversations, file them away, and eventually
accumulate enough so that the telephone numbers which are called
form a pattern. They need to know that little Jenny is little
Brenda's best friend, simply for purposes of filtration.
You see the potential invasiveness.
You might review the Brandon Mayfield case, incidentally. It's a
classic case of that general sort of thing going haywire. The
FBI issued an apology, but the apology was not accepted, and the
last I heard, Mayfield was suing them. His "theory" will be in
effect that the FBI intentionally attempted to isolate
militants by interfering with their marital relations, and that
he got picked up on account of his work as a divorce
lawyer. The truth is probably more subtle. Artificial
Intelligence programs are like badly behaved dogs. They tend to
surface and act on their owners' suppressed feelings and
motivations. You don't like someone, but you know you are
not allowed to bite him. Your dog knows that you do
not like the person, but cannot understand why biting is not
permissible. So he bites the person for no better reason
than that you dislike him.
(01/05/2006 12:23 AM)
Now then as to the Mayfield case, I take it your source is this,
or perhaps the derivative Daniel Pipes column.
http://www.thetribonline.com/archview.cgi?id=24584
http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/330
I'm going to tell a shaggy dog story first. Some year ago, the
Guinness Book of World Records looked into odd card hands that
people claimed to have dealt themselves. Computing the
probabilities, the McWhiter brothers, who edited the Book, came to
the conclusion that the entire world population would have had to
have been playing cards continuously for considerably longer
than the earth has existed. No one seriously contends that
brontosauruses played either bridge or poker. The
editors' conclusion was that virtually all such claims
had to be phony.
Now, let's look at the FBI's story in that light:
Quoting the article:
"The FBI
found 15 potential matches for the fingerprint found near the
scene of the terrorist train bombings in Spain. But the
bureau only arrested one man — local attorney Brandon Mayfield,
a convert to Islam."
" U.S. Attorney Karin Immergut
and Portland FBI spokeswoman Beth Anne Steele both insisted this
week that Mayfield was not targeted because of his faith....
'That really had nothing to do with it,' Steele said. 'It was
based on a computer analysis. The computer had no idea whether
he was Muslim. (The fingerprint) was looked at by fingerprint
examiners who had no idea he was Muslim. It was sent to us, and
we had no idea who he was, much less the fact that he was
Muslim.'"
If this account were true, it would imply that about twenty
million people were terrorist affiliates of the same sort that
Mayfield allegedly is, that is, about one fifteenth of the
population. The FBI claims to have selected down to 15 people on
the basis of fingerprints alone. The FBI admits that
there is no connection between Mayfield's fingerprint and
the fingerprint on the bomb. It is agreed that this belongs to a
North African who was subsequently arrested in Spain, and the
FBI claims that the fingerprint transmitted to them was so bad
that it was confused with Mayfield's. Therefore, the political
associations of those fifteen people should be a random
distribution of the political associations of all
Americans. Muslims are in fact only about two
percent of the population, and even remotely militant one
must only be a fraction of a percent.
My reaction is essentially a statistical one-- the FBI claims to
have drawn four aces, ten times running. There's just no way you
can do that without fuzzing the cards. I don't know what
the Arizona method is for dealing with someone who draws
four aces, ten times running...
I don't know if you have ever heard of the "Six Degrees of
Separation" experiment, carried out some years ago. People were
given a letter to a random stranger, and told to deliver it,
without simply sending it through the mail. Rather, they were to
pick someone they knew who might be in a
better position to hand-deliver the letter, in
effect to create a chain of acquaintances leading from
themselves to the unknown stranger. It turned out that people
could do it in an average of six hops. If you know a hundred
people, and they know a hundred, and so on, that works out to
a trillion people, and the world
population is only six billion. So that kind of indirect
association means nothing. For example, anyone who is
Irish-American has probably talked to someone who has talked to
someone who has talked to someone who is an IRA
fundraiser.
My guess is that this Perouz
Sedaghaty character, if he were raising money, would have gone
about it like any other businessman. He would have
collected directories from mosques, made a list of the people
who seemed likely to have money (doctors, lawyers, executives,
etc.), and called them up. He would have tried to avoid stating
his business to a secretary or wife, because no one really wants
to talk to a fundraiser. However, a fundraiser makes his living
by getting people, in essence, to pay him to go away. It's easy
to see how some one might have been induced to
write his telephone number down.
The computer does not know the difference between scientific
fact and political prejudice. The most obvious explanation for
Mayfield's arrest is that someone stirred a "watchlist" into the
computer, either intentionally or inadvertently. I think the FBI
were trying too hard to find a man who couldn't be found because
he didn't exist. There was no American who had left his
fingerprint on the bomb, because a North African had done so. In
looking for this mythical American, someone faked
something. Effectively, the FBI's computer was feeding their
ideas back at them, and it was a kind of cyborg Folie a Deux.
Such an event has been postulated in science fiction, but this
is probably the first real live sighting. I suppose Karin Immergut and Beth Anne Steele
will eventually be brought to trial for kidnapping, or
conspiracy thereto. I don't know if there's a statute of
limitations, but if so, it must be a long one. Sooner or later,
a Democratic U. S. Attorney will open charges. This will
raise an interesting legal question: does the McNaughton
Rule defense apply to a delusional relationship with a computer?
Parenthetically, Daniel Pipes' comments reveal a complete
failure to grasp the distinction between dependent and
independent events. You are effectively demanding
that the mathematics of probability and statistics be abolished in
support of your political agenda.
[Bill Heuisler (1/5/2006) acknowledged my debating skills, and
wanted to know if I was a professional lawyer. He also made the
assumption that I was postulating some sort of conspiracy. So I
clarified.]
(01/05/2006 10:50 AM)
Well, I should
state that I am an engineer and historian, not a lawyer.
And, no, I don't postulate planning in the FBI. I
postulate recklessness, or rather, a "culture of recklessness."
Too many people egging each other on, too many people
afraid to say no to the boss. Oh, and as I said, there is
this weirdly dangerous relationship of people who rely on
complex machines, but don't understand them well enough to
exercise sound human judgment. As to intent, no robber who
shoots a shopkeeper in the course of a stickup really intends to
do so. The law imputes intent, as a means of taking the
more dangerous crooks out of circulation.
There really does not seem to be even the beginning of a
case against Mayfield. There is no evidence that he
ever contemplated any action save purely legal and
constitutional protest, and considerable evidence that he
is a stable citizen, who does things like teaching English
to immigrants. I was not able to find a copy
of the original Immergut memorandum, but [only] as reproduced by
Pipes. [I]t seems a thoroughly disingenuous
document, evasive about details.
If the tables were turned, how would you defend yourself against
an accusation that you intended to organize a systematic
massacre of all Muslim Americans? Turn about is fair play,
and the standards of evidence you set for other people will
inevitably be used against you. Give the Devil benefit of law
for your own sake!
[Bill Heuisler's response was in effect "that there are no
sanctuaries for theenemies of Christ." I responded that:]
(01/05/2006 06:01 PM)
Well, put
this in perspective. The noted trial lawyer ("barrister") F.
Lee Bailey made a specialty of representing "gruesome murder
suspects," typically men who were accused of strangling
their wives, eg. Sam Shepherd. Then there's Otto
Schily in Germany. Back during the 1970's he
defended the various members of the Baader-Meinhof gang, and
was subject to official harassment. He eventually became the
Interior Minister of Germany (equivalent to
our Attorney General). By definition, defense lawyers have
dubious clients. In the last analysis, if you
allow lawyers to be harassed for taking clients the
authorities disapprove of, it effective works out to denying
the constitutionally guaranteed right to counsel.
[Bill Heuisler (1/7/2006" claimed that: "We're at war. Of course
there have been declarations. Three in fact." I responded that:]
(01/08/2006 06:28 AM)
The term "state of
war," or "declaration of war," has a very specific and
technical meaning. It is what the lawyers call a "term of
art." Various and sundry laws are formulated in terms of
the state of war. Provisions become operative when a
declared state of war exists. Congress, made up almost
exclusively of lawyers, declined to declare war, but
merely made various lesser resolutions. This was their
way of saying that they did not permit the courts to be closed
down, that they did not authorize the introduction of
conscription, nor the introduction of price controls or
rationing, etc. You may have seen the picture of Sewell Avery,
president of Montgomery Ward, being forcibly carried out of
the company offices by two soldiers, upon the orders of
President Roosevelt during the Second World War. Avery
had refused to deal with trade unions. Roosevelt had
reached a concordat with the trade unions, guaranteeing
against strikes in wartime industries, and Avery's actions
represented a threat to the bargain.
http://www.suntimes.com/photos/galleries/realchicago/1940s/20.html
http://www.suntimes.com/photos/galleries/realchicago/1940s/index.html
http://www.suntimes.com/photos/galleries/realchicago/index.html
Avery does look rather smug, don't you think. The GI's, on the
other hand, seem a bit nervous.
[Postscript: The government eventually settled litigation with
Mayfield by paying him a reported two million dollars.]
RE: http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/20676.html#comment
The Basic Idiocy of the Federalist Society
The discussion between David Rivkin and
Robert Levy seems irrelevant. If as many as five percent of the
citizenry decide to resort to technological measures, and the
president cannot dissuade them, the NSA will simply drown in
encrypted static. The task facing the president is to convince
his political opponents that he is willing to play by the
constitutional rules, and that they do not need to resort to
defensive measures. And if he fails, the result will be a
technologically updated version of Lexington and Concord.
I discussed the issue here a few days ago:
http://hnn.us/readcomment.php?id=73451&bheaders=1#73451
(
http://hnn.us/articles/19928.html
http://hnn.us/board.php?id=19928
)
You can debate until the cows come home about whether
the Royal Prerogative extends to seizing the stores of powder and
shot at Concord, or arresting John Hancock and Samuel Adams, but,
as it developed, the underlying realities were somewhat different.
David Rivkin, with his large claims, impossible of enforcement...
well, if he is the President's friend, then who needs enemies?
https://aaeblog.com/page/450/?chocaid=397
[HNN Version https://www.hnn.us/blog/38931
http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/38931.html#comment
not retrievable
]
[A snappy one-liner, wrong. but I found it
worthwhile to explain why it was wrong]
My Response 05/23/2007 08:41 AM
Freedom of the Press Belongs to the Person Who Owns One.
There is an old saying to the effect that freedom of the press
belongs to the person who owns one. If you are doing something
controversial, there is a point where you need to go out and
buy your own printing press, so to speak. Consider the
case of Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press. Of
course, this has to be adapted to modern conditions, by
choosing an appropriate method of electronic communication.
As I understand it, XM Satellite Radio negotiates for content and
broadcasts it, on the same basis as a radio station, except that
they have a subscription system and a proprietary type of
receiver. They have a reserved frequency range
(approximately within 2.310- 2.360 GHz), that is, in the same
general range as cellphones and Wi-Fi, with about the same
properties, and the same limitations on receiver performance.
Frequency rights in this range are purchased from the
federal government in auctions for sizable sums of money (billions
of dollars), though XM Satellite Radio got its frequencies under
the old "license to broadcast in the public interest"
model. XM Satellite Radio has considerably more
capacity than conventional radio, Nominally, AM and FM have a
hundred channels each, but overlap issues restrict that to
something like twenty different programs on each band. Thus,
XM Satellite Radio's 175 channels are considerably more extensive.
In view of the more expensive equipment required to
receive satellite radio, the market value of a given frequency,
and the prospective advertising revenue, must be much
lower. So it is probable an error to lump Opie and
Anthony together with Don Imus.
Parenthetically, Satellite Radio is separate and distinct
from the "Ku band" (12.2-12.7 GHz) used by television
broadcast satellites to transmit to aimed dish antennae. I
should explain that any frequency above 5 Ghz is useful for
line-of-sight communications (satellite dish antennae, microwave
relays), or radar, and very little else; as such, these
frequencies are essentially non-rivalous. The Ku band is thus
line-of-sight, a fairly important legal distinction in
federal communications law. Federal radio law is based on the
notion of "interference." If someone has to aim their
receiver at your transmitter in order to pick up
your signal, then they are free to aim their
receiver elsewhere (to "look away"), and you therefore
cannot be guilty of interference.
Some transmission media have more common carrier status than
others. The Post Office has about the strongest common carrier
status of all, especially if one mails things first-class. If
one's material is not time sensitive, it is worth looking
into whether one could distribute it on DVD disks. A DVD
disk can hold something like a hundred hours of compressed audio,
and can be profitably sold for several dollars through the
mail, if one goes about it the right way. One can buy a
small disk-duplicating machine for a couple of thousand dollars,
so the barriers to entry are not very great.
Another alternative is internet podcasting, with which HNN
has experimented to a limited degree. Broadband internet
ISP's seem to have de-facto common carrier status for
downloads in the multi-megabyte range, such as audio
podcasts. The situation is more involved for complete movies (as
distinct from short video clips), and for internet
telephony. These applications tend to stick their necks
out much further, and are therefore more liable to
commercially-motivated sabotage. The fighting over Net Neutrality
tends to take place further out than podcasting needs to venture.
This fighting creates a "safe zone" for podcasting to live in.
Verizon does not want to take any measures which generate
minimal revenue, and yet prejudice its position in its controversy
with the internet telephony (VOIP) vendors who are presenting a
threat to Verizon's long-distance telephone revenue.
Don Imus was broadcasting over WFAN, an advertising-supported,
CBS-owned AM radio station, of the super-powered "clear channel"
type, in the New York area, which employs a couple of dozen
different hosts, anchors, announcers, etc. Given the way people
leave radios set to one frequency or another, this could not
by any stretch of the imagination be called a common carrier.
Imus's complaint is essentially that he is having
difficulty in being paid by advertisers who sell goods to
the general public. Imus was fired because the
advertisers pulled the plug, notably including Proctor &
Gamble, Staples, and Bigelow Tea, examples of comparatively small
companies which buy much more advertising than their
size would indicate. Imus was also getting advertising
from really big firms such as General Motors. However, he
was apparently not getting appreciable quantities of
advertising from anyone who wanted to use the distinctive
qualities of his audience. At present, Imus does not
seem to have a website of his own (though his fans have many). He
was using a page within the WFAN website, and of course that went
away when he got fired. Presumably, however, Imus could start
podcasting if he wanted to. This supposedly censored artist has
the common-carrier means to transmit his material to his fans
without extraordinary difficulty. However, that would not
give him access to the oligopoly which supports large
advertising revenue.
The case of Opie and Anthony is rather different. It seems
that they are paid employees of XM
Satellite Radio, ie. that they have not bought out a block
of time on a concession basis, infomercial fashion. However,
Opie and Anthony also have the usual range of podcast downloads
and internet mail-order vending available on their own
website, which they are presumably at liberty to use as a
fallback. They were able to locate advertisers who were
interested in the distinctive qualities of their audience. When
their show was suspended, they obtained protest cancellations from
such advertisers as Nashville Coffee, a specialty mail order
coffee merchant, and Adam & Eve, the mail-order sex toy
vendor, bona fide small businesses. In short, the economics
of satellite radio, with more than a hundred channels
available, seem to be more akin to magazines sold on
newsstands than to broadcasting per se.
The newsstand has largely ceased to exist. It used to be that one
went to the newsstand to browse magazines, before deciding to
subscribe to some. The newsstand was a kind of broadcasting in the
sense that the magazine jobber exercised the same kinds of
prerogatives as a television network. Now, of course, one
browses on the internet. This is part of a broader trend.
Broadcasting is breaking down in favor of common-carrier
communications involving the creation of a private channel between
two parties. Broadcasting was always a kind of "poor man's
solution" from the point of view of everyone except the few
oligopolists who benefited from it. Now, with abundant
technological riches, broadcasting is no longer necessary.
It is a basic principle of advertising that, if possible,
one is supposed to "advertise to the channel," that is, find an
organization of people around an interest corresponding to
whatever one is selling, such as an enthusiast magazine. For
example, something like half of all advertising for computers and
software is in magazines-- one can pick the computer
magazine which corresponds to the precise degree of
enthusiasm and expertise of one's optimum customer. If one
can put a name to the prospective customer, the situation is even
better. One can send him a catalog, with an order blank and a
pre-addressed envelope, spending almost nothing. Since the advent
of the internet, we now have keyword advertising. It is only when
channel advertising breaks down that one needs to resort to
broadcast advertising.
Broadcast advertising, which is much more expensive than print or
internet advertising, is generally appropriate for articles of
common consumption, things which nearly everyone uses. These are
essentially boring goods, which means that the producer has to
bombard an unwilling audience with commercials in order to get a
few more sales. This is of course a very good thing for the
broadcasting industry. Now, here's the crab: such articles are
generally bought in volume by whoever shops for the
household, instead of being bought individually. If something is
boring enough that you are impervious to advertisements,
then you don't want to spend much mental energy in buying it. One
of the biggest advertisers, Proctor and Gamble, sells a range of
prepared foods and household supplies which are bought
incidentally to the purchase of fresh foodstuffs. The major
grocery chains not only have house brands competing with P&G's
wares, but they charge "slotting fees" as well, while competing
with each other on the basis of fresh food. Daily or weekly
shopping is basically an extension of cooking. One has only to
visit a grocery store to observe that shopping is a
preponderantly feminine activity. One can often see a woman
pushing a grocery cart down the aisle, followed by a little girl
pushing a miniature grocery cart made of brightly colored plastic
(supplied by the store). Fathers do not take their sons
grocery shopping-- they play baseball instead. It is perhaps
predictable that the "shock jocks" might not go over very
well with women.
There are cases of censorship, the activities of U. S.
Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan in Pittsburgh (Western Pennsylvania)
being perhaps the most blatant, but one need not use the
term to describe the actions of advertisers who prefer not
to be identified with a given performer.
The Hogarth Press
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogarth_Press
Technicalities of Radio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM_Satellite_Radio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Radio_Service
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_broadcast_satellite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_band
http://www.xmradio.com/
http://www.xmradio.com/xmp3/index.xmc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius_Satellite_Radio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_broadcast_band
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_broadcasting_in_the_USA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM_radio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_channel
https://web.archive.org/web/20111116112817/http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2006/tc20060413_150389.htm
[formerly:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2006/tc20060413_150389.htm]
Censorship:
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/05/19/2041259.shtml
https://web.archive.org/web/20070410051103/http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more_sports/2007/04/08/2007-04-08_cbs_call_on_don_hinges_on_dollars_not_se.html
[formerly:
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more_sports/2007/04/08/2007-04-08_cbs_call_on_don_hinges_on_dollars_not_se.html]
----------------
Items no longer accessible:
http://sports.yahoo.com/top/news?slug=ap-imus-protests&prov=ap&type=lgns
http://chicagoparent.com/cs/blogs/parenting/archive/2007/04/11/so-what-are-you-gonna-do-about-imus.aspx
http://www.radioandrecords.com/RRWebSite/NewsStoryPage.aspx?ContentID=SD5U1fifX0M=&Version=2
Re: HNN Post,
Roderick T.
Long, Dim Bulb of Liberty
01/06/2008 06:03 AM
RE:
http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/46131.html#comment
Digital Television
I beg to correct you about the televisions: there is a
chunk of radio bandwidth which people want to reclaim, for
purposes such as wireless communication. The federal
government has a reasonably good chance of
making its money back by auctioning off the radio
bandwidth, according to established practice. This is assuming
the bandwidth is bought by people whom the government does
not eventually feel obliged to bail out. By way of comparison,
about ten or twenty years ago, the microwave relay people moved
up from 2 GHz to 20 GHz, to make room for the
cellphones, and they got paid compensation to buy them new
equipment. This is basically the same deal.
You can obtain two $40 rebate coupons for converter boxes
from the federal government, and with falling prices, this is
likely to cover nearly all of the price of the converter
box. The going rate for a device of comparable complexity, a
television tuner which plugs into a computer's USB connection,
is about $20-- and falling. In fact, I shall
be mildly surprised if some kind of "dead
souls" operation does not develop in coupon redemption.
You know, good old Tchitchikov, running around selling
imaginary converters, for a coupon and a bogus receipt, and
kicking back twenty dollars.
More legitimately, it is likely to cost very little money to
build a digital tuner into a DVD player. I find that the going
rate for a DVD player at Wal-Mart is now only $35.
Digital television uses the same basic portmanteau of techniques
which DVD players use (eg. Fourier Transforms, the backbone
of MPEG 2), and modern electronics are so heavily
software-based, that it really isn't all that big a deal to
switch the hardware around internally to receive a wide range of
different signals, including digital television.
At present, the coupon cannot be used to buy a DVD
player, but this may change if there is an embarrassingly low
rate of coupon requests. The government will be under pressure
to prove that no one is still watching analog television, and I
don't doubt that there will be an exercise in what
Tom Wolfe called "Mau-Mauing the flak-catchers." You know how
that works-- charter a hundred greyhound buses, provision each
with a movable feast, load them up with welfare
recipients, and deposit five thousand or so chanting voices
on the Capitol steps. You can put on quite a decent
Mau-Mauing for a hundred thousand dollars. Seriously, the owners
of televisions stations are not poor men-- they are in
approximately the same league as sports team owners, and
manufacturer-franchised automobile dealers, and I think they can
be left to look after their own interests without
John-Edwards-style pseudo-populism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UHF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_of_television#Transmission_band
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_television
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_Standards