How does one mount a political attack on TCPA?

[Matthew Astley]

IMHO it's now obvious that, merit or none, the TCPA platform will be
sold in this country, in the form of general purpose computers and
interactive TV boxes.

It seems to make sense to do some damage limitation.

Would there be any merit to a law which stated that such technology
may not be used to manipulate political belief?

Some examples spring to mind,

 - party adverts should be broadcast to all who tune to a channel, not
   just those that the demographics say are going to "benefit" from
   them

 - channel hopping habits and the details of user interaction with the
   system should not be tied to news items, political documentaries,
   party adverts etc.

 - voting by interactive TV should be banned completely. I can see
   that the e-government people aren't going to like this, but paper
   appears to work in most cases and it doesn't have a backdoor.

 - oh and the same should apply to mobile phones. They're not just
   phones any more, they're portable multimedia computers with network
   connections and no control over the OS.

I don't like laws any more than the next computer programmer - in my
lifetime it has been the tradition that laws encroach on technological
freedom, but at this point the feet are in the other boots.

The things that have brought me to this view are discussions on the
free-sklyarov-uk mailing list, the few pages at
http://www.whitedot.org/ and Pete Chown's "Making Cults Believable"
paper at http://234.cx/socio-cult.html .

Also, I noticed recently that news.bbc.co.uk offers two flavours of
news, UK and international. On the day I discovered this (11th), the
"Mandela: US threatens world peace" story made the headlines for the
international news but not the UK version. This struck me as odd, but
I'm sure there's a good reason.


Anyway I think a line has to be drawn somewhere, even if only for 20
years while the experiments are done on exactly how effective this
technology is at convincing people to buy different shampoo.


Matthew  #8-)