[9780] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Drafting Legislation [Who *Are* These Folks?]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Rothman)
Fri Jan 21 06:45:12 1994
In-Reply-To: <199401201224.EAA25335@well.sf.ca.us>
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 94 12:11:42 -0400
To: "Robert David Steele" <steeler@well.sf.ca.us>
Cc: com-priv@psi.com, cosndisc@bitnic.BITNET, cpsr-members@eff.org,
From: "David Rothman" <rothman@netcom.com>
Reply-To: rothman@netcom.com
>DATE: Thu, 20 Jan 1994 04:24:13 -0800
>FROM: Robert David Steele <steeler@well.sf.ca.us>
>
>OSS Inc., a non-profit educational association dedicated to establishing
>a national knowledge strategy and a "virtual" intelligence community that
>serves citizens with "open books" approach to knowledge, has been asked
>to draft legislation.
Asked? By whom? Your executive board?
Please tell us more about yourself and OSS. Who started your group?
Who's funding it? Who are your biggest contribors? Amounts? Size of your
budget? Corporate and industry affiliations of board members, president,
chair, etc? How many members? Presumably you believe in the "open books"
approach here.
>Comments are invited. Our approach will be simple: the President will be
>required to *have* a national knowledge strategy (we call it the strategy
>of "national engagement") and to report this strategy to Congress annually
>as he now has to report on his national security strategy.
Sounds as if you're looking more for endorsements than comments.
> The Vice
>President will be designated Chief Information Officer of the Nation, and
>all Federal Departments will have CIO's that constitute a Senior
>Inter-Agency Group for information *resource management* across the
>government. To nurture the capabilities of our information continuum
>(K-12, univ, lib, private investigators/information brokers,...
Are you a PI, an information broker, or from a security background of
some kind--government-related or not? Any past or present ties with
intelligence agencies? Beyond your use of "OSS," I find it fascinating
that you mention PIs ahead of such tiny constituencies as business,
media, and government.
(See below)
>.. business,
>media, govt, defense, and intelligence), a National Knowledge Foundation
>will be proposed, funded at $1 billion a year, to nurture *distributed*
>centers of excellence *outside* government--centers charged will increasing
>the *content* of the information commons.
Obviously I'm old-fashioned, but I naively thought we already had a
knowledge infrastructure of sorts--*public* libraries. Last thing in the
world we need is to privatize knowledge even more than we're doing
already. I know you're talking about an "information commons," but
somehow I'd feel more secure with *librarians* setting the tone. And
please don't trot out the Andrew Carnegie example of the private sector
replacing the public one. He paid for public library buildings but
normally expected taxpayer to pay for the books.
The only real solution is a well-integrated national library system
online, together with support of local libraries, the Internet and other
alternative means. That way we benefit from centralization but have
checks and balances.
> Over-all the strategy will be
>required to address Connectivity (NII doing fine), Content (no one is in
>charge now), Culture (enfranchising our ethnic minorities to integrate
>their cognitive templates), Coordination of infotech R&D across public
>and private sector boundaries, and finally, C4 (command, control,
>communications, computer) security--we have a house built over a sinkhole--
>moving $1 billion from DoD to nurture improved redundancy and other non-
>intrusive survivability measures in civil infrastructure is critical.
Is this an information proposal, a military plan, or a combination of
the two?
**************************************************************************
David H. Rothman "So we beat on, boats against
rothman@netcom.com the current...."
805 N. Howard St., #240
Alexandria, Va. 22304
703-370-6540(o)(h)
I *encourage* online reproduction of my public postings.
Permission hereby granted--implicit, explicit, whatever. Down
with unnecessary restrictions on the flow of knowledge!
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