On multiple fronts, the U.S. government is pumping up the database industry with large sums of public money. The notion that “public” government-surveillance and “private” corporate-surveillance are some how different is a useless distinction – they’re two sides of the same state-surveillance coin.
First, from The Hill:
This week, without much fanfare, the House is expected to approve a bill mandating that the Treasury Department create a real-time electronic database of information related to the bailout. And for data warehousing and analysis firms, the bill could lead to a hefty contract. At a September hearing, Stephen Horne, vice president at Dow Jones, testified that it could cost $50 million to create and run a database for the first year . . .
“We can track where any UPS package is at any time of day,” [Rep. Carolyn] Maloney told The Hill this week. “Why in the world can’t we track this information?”. . .
Dow Jones & Co., IBM and SAS Institute have all lobbied on the bill, according to congressional records. Teradata, an Ohio-based data analytics and warehousing firm, has been a prominent supporter of the bill.
Then, from Wired:
The federal court system charged the Department of Justice more than $4 million in 2009 for access to its electronic court filing system, which is composed entirely of documents in the public domain. . .
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts runs the search system known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER. PACER charges citizens, journalists, corporate lawyers and even the Attorney General $.08 per page to look at court filings in U.S. District Courts. The system pulled in nearly $50 million in 2006. The contract between the PACER office and the Justice Department began in 2002 with a charge of $800,000, which quickly rose to more than $4.2 million in 2009.
Wired also notes that the Justice Department had to sign a $5 million contract in 2005 with West Publishing to gain online access to court records since the U.S. Court system does not make their records available for bulk download:
West, and its competitor, Lexis Nexis, buy court data in bulk, reformat it and add proprietary citation codes. They then license the database of public documents at high rates to libraries, law firms and government agencies. Even the U.S. Court system pays West’s high license fees to access public court documents that West purchased from it.
[UPDATE 12.08.09: Yahoo's "spy guide" and price list for user information published by Cryptome]
John Young has obtained and published documents on his website that details some of the digital surveillance policies of Yahoo, Verizon, AT$T, SBC, COX, and Sprint — among others. Most interesting, however, is Young’s publication of Yahoo’s Compliance Guide for Law Enforcement that describes the kinds of user information available to law enforcement and how much the company will charge the government for such information. While this ‘price list’ more or less confirms what a lot of people have suspected — that the border between big-business and big-government surveillance is a porous one — Yahoo’s reaction to its publication is truly revealing. Yahoo has issued a DMCA takedown notice to Cryptome, demanding the document be removed and arguing that its publication is (somehow) an act of copyright infringement.
Further, as Wired reported back on 12/01/09 before Cryptome published Yahoo’s Compliance Guide for Law Enforcement, Yahoo had been trying to prevent a FOIA request seeking information on how much Yahoo (among others) charge the government for user information. Yahoo opposed the FOIA request by claiming it would both “shock” and “confuse” their customers.

























Apple is the Medium and the Message
According to AppleInsider*, Apple has purchased a mobile ad company, Quattro Wireless, for $275M and named Quattro’s CEO as the VP of Mobile Advertising. Apple is now in the hardware business (Macs, iPods, iPhones, etc), the software business (OSX, Safari, QuickTime, etc), the transmission business (iTunes, App Store, MobileMe, etc), and the content business (Quattro Wireless). At first glance this doesn’t look so bad, as Apple doesn’t have a traditional (i.e. industrial) monopoly in any one of these areas.
However, having substantial influence in each of these areas – from medium to message – starts to look a lot like an informational monopoly. After describing the four horizontal layers of the WWW — transmission > hardware > software > content – Tim Burners-Lee describes his concern with “vertical integration“:
I am more concerned about companies trying to take a vertical slice through the layers than creating a monopoly in any one layer. A monopoly is more straight forward; people can see it and feel it, and consumers and regulators can “just say no.” But vertical integration — for example, between the medium and content — affects the quality of information and can be more insidious.
Apple certainly isn’t alone, Google immediately comes to mind . . . and Microsoft, but to a lesser extent since they’re more of a traditional monopoly.
* h/t Michael Oman-Reagan.