Author: Shawn K. Quinn

Aerial drones, lies, censorship, and video news reports

Whatever would I do without great posts from Boing Boing like this? The YouTube video embedded therein is a news report from KPRC-TV (which Houston folks will know as Channel 2, our local NBC affiliate). Stephen Dean reports on what was supposed to be a secret test of unmanned aerial drones conducted by the Houston Police Department (HPD). I’ve embedded it below for ease of commenting, but I do recommend you check out the Boing Boing post linked above for the comments.

[Edit 2016-04-05: the original video was deleted when the YouTube account was terminated due to multiple copyright infringement incidents. I have replaced it with another link I found, still online today.]

The scary part is a quote at 2:54 into the video:

Back at the secret test site, police helicopters claimed the entire airspace was restricted. They even threatened our Local 2 Investigates pilot with action from the FAA if we didn’t leave. But we checked with the FAA several times and there never was a flight restriction. That leaves some to wonder whether the police are ready to use terrorism fears since 9/11 to push the envelope even further into our private lives.

Really, HPD? What jurisdiction are you operating under? Airspace is the FAA’s jurisdiction; local police departments cannot arbitrarily restrict airspace. If local police were allowed to restrict airspace at will we would have total chaos, and there would be little use for the FAA at all.

The KPRC-TV news team had every right to gather the information they did. It is unfortunate that the law enforcement agencies running this exhibition (particularly HPD) did not secure the proper airspace restriction from the FAA, relying instead on the “no media allowed” on the invitation and bully tactics.

I think HPD is owed a visit by the FAA for what certainly appears to be a nominal disrespect of Federal law, possibly much worse. Law enforcement agencies must operate within the law, or risk losing the respect of the citizens which they have sworn to protect and serve. Example: Ever seen a police cruiser blasting by you, well in excess of the posted limits, without lights? They’ll say it’s a “code 2” or something similar, an emergency that’s just enough of an emergency that speed limits can go out the window, but not for lights and siren. Now, no matter what emergency we, the common citizens have, we are subject to getting a ticket if we do that. The same goes for stop signs and red lights, or even parking tickets.

And I’m not even touching on the downright creepy surveillance allowed by this technology yet. That’s almost a whole rant in and of itself. The fact that HPD went to these lengths to hide their new toy (which quite possibly fly in the face the First Amendment of the US Constitution in addition to FAA regulations) is quite chilling, and makes me wonder what kind of a society we live in now in \2010. The report mentions speed limit enforcement as one possibility; I think I made my viewpoint clear on that above. This is the stuff of dystopian sci-fi novels, made into reality. Sorry to disappoint, but I’d prefer as much of that be kept fiction as possible.

Killing the landline: a dubious idea

A recent Lockergnome post details AT&T’s surprising request to the FCC: setting a date for the sunset of analog landline service.

And my take on this may surprise many, but I think this is a mistake. I have noticed a steady decline in the quality of telephone communications ever since the rise of the wireless phone. Prior to 1990 sudden disconnects were relatively rare. They did happen, but not how they happen now. During frequent marathon phone conversations with a friend of mine about a year or so ago, we used the phrase “kitchen phone” or “bathroom phone” every time a call got dropped when I was in those rooms of the house. It was crazy. This never happened with a cordless phone plugged into a landline.

I will admit I have only occasionally used VOIP lines (similar to a landline, except the call is routed over the Internet) and I don’t use Skype. (I had a Gizmo account some years ago but never really used it.) I have called a Skype number and there have been a couple of times where the line quality became unusable (the last 5-6 seconds of the call would just start repeating like a broken record and/or skipping and glitching like a scratched CD).

Plus there is the issue of emergencies. Text messaging (and I’ve posted before on the outrageous markup on text messages) is sometimes the only usable application on a wireless network after a disaster. During a power outage it is very likely that VOIP service will be completely unusable. Analog landlines have been built to function after some disasters; they aren’t disaster-proof by any means, but they are the most likely type of telephone to be usable after, say, a hurricane or tropical storm hits.

Pay phones have been a traditional backup to mobile phones, and would also potentially be affected by the sunset of analog landlines. This is especially true for areas where cell tower coverage is spotty, although having a phone croak (low battery, or sudden failure) can happen to anyone, anytime, anywhere. I’m not expecting the huge wall of payphones inside of shopping malls like we would have seen up until the early 1990s, but it’s reassuring to know the option is there. I dread explaining to my future kids that yes, that thing the guy in the movie put a quarter in is a telephone.

At minimum, work-alike alternatives to analog landlines need to be deployed that are equally reliable. That is, in fact, the one thing I miss about landline phone calls: reliability. It’s enough to make the likes of Alexander Graham Bell roll over in his grave.

Controversy, timing, hockey, personal branding, and publicity

Dan Schwabel (personalbrandingblog.com) recently wrote a piece on the story of two different reactions of hockey players passed over for their respective 2010 Winter Olympics national teams. My interest in this story comes from two interests of mine: professional hockey and marketing/PR. (Yes, I know it may come as a shock to some, but I do have an interest in both.)

Scott Gomez of the Montreal Canadiens, a former NHL All-Star, was passed over for the USA national team. Scott’s reaction was relatively mild-mannered and happy-go-lucky, acknowledging the realities that there are 23 roster slots but certainly more than 23 players that can be seen as qualified to fill those slots, a decision which is extremely subjective and certainly haunts some players passed over for years (probably the most notable example: Herb Brooks).

It is what it is. You get the call, you realize it, you move on and focus more on here. It wasn’t meant to be. Congratulations to the guys who made it. You just wish them the best of luck and hope the U.S.A. brings the gold.

Now, we move on to the reaction of Mikael Samuelsson, who played on the Swedish national team in 2006, and won a gold medal. Given this, it’s a bit more understandable his reaction isn’t exactly the stuff congeniality award winners are made of:

I pretty much have one comment and maybe I’ll regret it. But they can go [expletive] themselves. That’s what I really think. […] If [Swedish coach Bengt-Aake Gustafsson] doesn’t want me, he doesn’t want me.

There is a time for controversy. I think Mikael picked a really good time to be controversial. The gold medal he already has, of course, means Mikael has a little more room to get away with what he said, and in fact may well be the sports equivalent of a “get away with it card” in this case. (Scott has yet to win any Olympic medals, having only played for the USA national team once before in 2006.)

While I generally disapprove of indecorum, Mikael’s reaction will definitely get people talking about him and may have little effect on his real chances of making the Olympic team. That’s not to say Scott Gomez’s graceful reaction was the wrong one. Not all publicity is good publicity, and Scott’s choice was likely a good course of action for Scott in his circumstances. In the proper circumstances, publicity about controversy can be leveraged to work to one’s advantage.

The future of event ticketing, maybe

Some of you may remember my previous post on ticket scalping made in response to Trent Reznor’s post on the NIN forums. Well, I was recently reading Mashable and found this post about a new startup called SaveFans! (abbreviated SF in following text) which is an offer-based ticket platform. Now if you remember my original post, I quote Trent Reznor as saying:

My guess as to what will eventually happen if / when Live Nation and TicketMaster merges is that they’ll move to an auction or market-based pricing scheme…

At the time, I said this would be a bad thing, and as suggested, with the ticket providers unilaterally setting “market-based” prices, it would indeed be disastrous for fans.

The twist with SF is that buyers are allowed to negotiate with sellers. This, by itself, is not a bad idea on the surface. It is still a possibility true scalpers will use the system and not accept perfectly reasonable offers for tickets they hold.

However, it does give the fans a chance to say what they think about truly usurious and monopolistic pricing. SF is not a panacea. Ticket buyers still need some form of protection against egregious scalping as well as not being stuck with unusable and yet non-transferable tickets. Ticket sellers need some form of protection against scalpers profiting at their expense as a result of an attempt to keep shows affordable for fans.

The only way I see to keep everyone happy is to allow event managers/promoters to opt an event out of SF or similar sites or move to a model where ticket transfers are tightly regulated or simply cannot happen without the express approval of the ticketing agency or the event’s management/promoters. Many event managers/promoters nominally prohibit the resale of tickets above face value; it is a long-standing policy of most venues (at least those in Houston) that resale of tickets on the property of the venue and adjoining parking lots is prohibited, sometimes just resale above face value, sometimes any resale. It should be noted that platforms such as SF can be used for good or evil. They aren’t much different from eBay or Craigslist in this regard. It’s still up to the ticket buyers (fans) to promote responsibility and defend their rights.

I see it as unlikely, here in 2010, that more states/cities will pass anti-scalping legislation. In 1999, the New York Office of the Attorney General released a report on scalping. In that report, several suggestions were made on how to reform the ticketing process, and protecting licensed ticket brokers by raising the premium they are allowed to charge above the listed price (at the time of this report, the greater of $5 or 10%; it’s not clear whether or not the extra fees are included in the amount the 10% is calculated on). It is interesting to note that some of the ticket brokers (and I am deviating a bit from my usual “scalper” terminology here, since this is New York we are talking about, where the types and quantity of ticketed events are vastly different) label their markup as a “service fee” which was not addressed by the applicable law. This, however, should be seen for what it is: an attempt to exploit a legal technicality.

I’m not sure what became of the release of this report. I do know that a decade later, scalping is still a major problem.

Aggressive, hardball censorship threats by the TSA

Continuing on with the airport security theme, even though the holiday travel season has came and went:

Wired.com’s Threat Level blog reports on an attempt by the TSA to censor two bloggers who posted a TSA document describing screening procedures, sent to many major airports worldwide (not just in the US). According to one of these blogers, Steven Frischling, “they’re looking for information about a security document sent to 10,000-plus people internationally. You can’t have a right to expect privacy after that.”

The TSA agents who visited Steven at his home the evening of 2009-12-29 aggressively questioned him about the source of the document as well as threatened him with the loss of his job and a “security risk designation”– something which may be a mere annoyance for people like me who don’t fly very often, but which carries far greater ramifications for someone who works for an airline as Steven does.

It’s a pretty low blow to aggresively and mercilessly threaten an airline employee while he is holding his three-year-old daughter (as Steven was). This is a huge abuse of Steven’s civil liberties, and it is alarming to me that the TSA would use a subpoena in a similar manner to a search warrant. The two are not the same thing.

Shame on you, TSA agents who did this. How disgraceful, cold, thoughtless, and unkind of you.

For those of you out there who find yourself in a similar spot, be aware of the difference between a subpoena and a search warrant. It’s a good idea to have contact information for the local office of organizations like the ACLU and the EFF handy, especially for bloggers who write about issues the least bit controversial. (And let’s face it, blogs without a little controversy once in a while tend to get a bit boring.)