Individual versus Corporate rights

Two things are bothering me this weekend. Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky (or older and crankier) but I just couldn't let them pass without comment.

First up... The national Do Not Call registry (and the new regulations it would have imposed) has been blocked by U.S. District Judge Lee R. West of Oklahoma. In his decision, he ruled that the law violates companies rights to free speech.

Free speech was granted as an individual right. It is a privilege extended to corporate entities. In the case of Do Not Call, my right to domestic privacy would seem to trump any corporate right to speak freely. It's a complex question, but Jan Falstad presents a pretty balanced overview. Here's a view which believes 'Do Not Call' was wrong. I'm afraid that the legal precedent giving commercial speech the same protection as individual speech may have been overly broad but I also worry about tinkering with it.

Next... eVoting.

The whole electronic voting issue is going to be one of contention for years to come. Diebold (parent of Diebold Election Systems) has stepped up the warfare early by using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown procedure against blackboxvoting.org. See blackboxvoting.com (which is still up) and a short note here for more information.

When our governments (local, county, state and federal) ran the voting process, we had free access to the methods and techniques used to guarantee vote integrity (if all else failed, we could sue). By virtue of a shift in technology, we have privatized voting. And now, one of the companies who own this technology has dodged behind a law (DMCA) that says that they are allowed to keep parts of their technology away from prying eyes (all of us). Somehow, this means that a basic right; the ability to elect representatives in a free and open process has been subverted because some corporations interests are threatened?

I dislike the DMCA for many, many reasons (mostly because reverse engineering is how so much of the technology we use today was — and still is — built) but this use of the law is so hurtful that I find myself shocked (along with angry and frustrated). All information about voting systems (regulations, registries, software, hardware, wetware, documents and memos; that is, everything) must remain in the public domain and be subject to constant evaluation. Anything less is unthinkable.

Commercial entities should not have the rights of individuals. They already have the resources and wealth of governments (in some cases), with none of checks that have been created to keep governments honest. They certainly should not have more rights than governments (see Matrix information) to subvert our individual rights in the republic. The sooner we remind them of this with legal repercussions, the better off we'll be.

The alternative is to give up and let commercial interests run everything. Some days, it feels like we already have done so.