| That summary was a failure. I could draw no conclusions regarding the FTC's anti-spyware authority, since each enforcement action was driven by the vague category of "unfair and deceptive practices" against "consumers" (15 U.S.C. 41), and anyhow would always end in a settlement or a consent decree rather than judge-made law. Thus, I concluded, there was no law. If the staff attorney was annoyed, I never noticed. I felt privately vindicated by Marc's suspicion that, after all, spyware is hard to define. Fortunately (or unfortunately) for me, if Marc had to stay up late that night to salvage his testimony, he blamed the staff attorney.
I, however, entered the Senate hearing room pumped for the next step. While my fellow interns collapsed in their chairs after our marathon preparations, I was scribbling notes and circling hyperlinks in the printouts of the witnesses' testimony that I'd stolen from the press table. I had volunteered to write EPIC's new spyware info page. I enjoy journalistic writing, I believe there exists a best possible way to translate arcana into public language, and I felt that if EPIC's new spyware page was to distinguish itself from all the competition on the web, I had to find it. If the definition of spyware was (in Marc's opinion) the snag, then I would define it -- or account for the controversies that complicate the effort.
As you have noticed, there is no new spyware info page. Like Michelangelo's most puzzling experiments, it never got beyond the drafts. |