Stancle had been accused of creating a Facebook profile belonging to a nonexistent teenage girl and then, between approximately the spring of 2007 and November of 2008, using it to convince more than 30 of his male classmates to send in nude photos or videos of themselves.

Stancl then reportedly threatened to post the photos or videos on the Internet if they didn’t engage in some sort of sexual activity with him. At least seven of them have said they were coerced into sex acts, which Stancl documented with a cell phone camera.

Stancl’s victims were teenage boys focused on sex — not exactly the world’s clearest thinkers. Even so, I find it remarkable that multiple people would:

1. Send nude photographs of themselves to a stranger.
2. Be so concerned about those photographs getting published online that they would submit to sexual blackmail.
3. Allow the results of their sexual blackmail to be photographed.

Literally — WTF??

Overall, the interview went a lot better than my last one with the same station.

Please take a look. (And please overlook the UI at those links.  It’s been embarrasingly bad, especially in the matter of bullet points, ever since I started blogging there, and this month it got a lot worse. I’m sorry.)

Then please help, by advancing your take on these ideas by any means at your disposal.  It’s going to take years to get all this right.  Freedom hangs in the balance.  We need to start NOW.

Discussion is also underway on Slashdot.

Issues of privacy and liberty take at least five forms:

• Censorship
• Admissible evidence in court
• Admissible evidence in investigations (not exactly the same thing)
• The consequences of damaging information leaks from the government to the private sector
• Potential chill on useful technologies (e.g., electronic health records) caused by any of the other four kinds of issue

Taken together, that amounts to much of the Bill of Rights – or other countries’ equivalents – plus a whole lot of life-saving technology on the side. I.e., it’s more than huge.

That’s from a detailed recent post that ends with a call to action:

Please join me in raising awareness. Blog yourself. Send email to those who might have influence. Or – and this one’s really easy – just go to the suggestion page at www.change.gov and help draw the incoming Administration’s attention toward these crucial issues.

Please, please do at least one of those things. There’s still enough time for freedom to be preserved, since the worst practical threats are still some years off. But if it doesn’t happen during an Obama Administration, when will it happen, in the United States or the rest of the world? The time to make a difference is now.

We’ll zap this interview to the entire Maryland/VA/DC tri-state area. We’ll also stream it live at federalnewsradio.com. And afterwards, we’ll archive it online in its entirety (MP3 format).

Hopefully I’ll get a more precise link to the archive once it’s up, in which case I plan to edit it into this post.

The subject is what Obama should look for in a CTO, and what the Obama Administration’s technology priorities should be. This interview was surely triggered by my post arguing the new United States CTO needs to be more of a CIO, and the Slashdotting of same.

Related links

• MP3 of the interview
• My rant rebutting the attitudes represented by the interviewers
• Freedom even without data privacy

• Arguing that the CTO should really be a CIO, in line with Obama’s own description of the job. (That got Slashdotted.)
• Discussing which direct responsibilities the United States CTO/CIO actually should have.
• Recommending former IRS Commissoner and American Management Systems CEO Charles Rossotti for the job, both because of his accomplishments and his honesty. (Rossotti emailed me implying that he wasn’t interested. I shot back that this was the first time in our quarter-century acquaintance I didn’t precisely believe what he said.)
• Outlining my recommended list of Obama Administration IT priorities.

Much of the blogosphere and trade press discussion started out silly, speculating on Eric Schmidt for the job and so on. Richard Koman was one of the first to analyze the subject more sensibly. But now Dan Farber has weighed in with a great post, looking at the practicalities of the position in detail, which was quickly echoed by his old partner Larry Dignan.

Getting Federal IT straight is a VERY difficult job. It’s also utterly crucial. I hope the Obama Administration gets it right.

• A brilliant viral get-out-the-vote video (from MoveOn.org, actually, not the Obama campaign as I first thought). What was so innovative about it was the personalization inside the video. This is one to learn from in your own business.
• Obama campaign successes and failures at local targeting (that one also has links to a number of other posts on technology-in-the-campaign).
• Two appallingly dishonest site-specific search boxes.

I’m also writing over there about what I think the Obama Administration should do with respect to technology policy. First up is a ringing recommendation of Charles Rossotti for CIO/CTO. More to follow.

• A high-end “proxy”-style firewall, which was widely used in the US intelligence and defense communities
• A two-factor authentication division
• A censorware division that, for example, had run Saudi Arabia’s web censorship since the late 1990s
• A firewall-on-a-board OEM deal with 3COM

The short idea was in large part that the firewall-on-a-board idea had caused great overoptimism, stoked by the company. On further digging, I found that CEO John McNulty’s resume, as stated for example in Secure Computing’s SEC filings, seemed inconsistent with his resume as stated in SEC filings of his prior employer. Nobody seemed to care much about correcting that, however.

I quickly stopped doing business with the investment research firm in question, and nothing came of the investment project. But I wasn’t surprised when, in its very first batch of Reg FD enforcement actions, the SEC slapped Secure Computing and McNulty.

Secure Computing has subsequently made a lot of acquisitions and divestitures. I have no doubt many of the products deserve to live on, and almsot all of the people working on them deserve jobs making that happen. Even so, I’m glad to see the company itself going out of existence. And I’d guess it’s no coincidence that Secure is selling out less than half a year after McNulty’s much-belated resignation as CEO.

Here’s the thing… Those of us that live the other side of the Atlantic live with 250ms latency every day, when we connect to services hosted in North America. I dare say the same is true for those on the other side of the Pacific. There’s not much getting around the speed of light.

Now, I’ll confess to not being the greatest of networking mavens, my networking startup and my various relationships with Network World notwithstanding. Truth be told, I dropped out of a physics major when the only uncompleted course was electronics lab. But before I dropped out, I did get the speed of light drilled into me. It’s 186,000 miles/second, aka 3 x 10^10 cm/sec. (”Not just a good idea; it’s the law!”). 186,000 miles, I’m quite convinced, is a lot more than 4 times the difference across the Atlantic Ocean. And the same remains true even when you knock off 50% or so because that light is traveling through glass rather than in a vacuum.

• Ed Whitacre, CEO of SBC/AT&T, kicked things off in late 2005, arguing that he should be allowed to discriminate between, say, Google and Yahoo based on how much they paid him. He later backed down a bit, but many people are unconvinced as to his sincerity.
• Verizon said similar things around the same time.
• Om Malik made an early attempt to cover all sides of the issue, albeit with a pro-neutrality orientation.
• Jeremy Penston had an article last week arguing that bandwidth is NOT “effectively free,” at least for video.
• Scott Cleland says my thinking is “seriously flawed” because I think there’s any need for neutrality regulation. He thinks no logical case has been made for neutrality whatsoever. Perhaps we need need to spell it out for him in smaller words. Anyhow, his one-pager that is admittedly sponsored by the telecom vendors does a good job of smashing some net neutrality strawmen nobody was talking about anyway.
• Errata Security argues that network neutrality is unworkable on the backbone, and links to my article, which was only about network neutrality on the last mile.
• Richi Jennings argues that we don’t need tiering, because the speed of light has dropped from 300 million meters/second to a mere 80 million or so. Or maybe less. Or something like that … seriously, it seems that he doubts the value of super-high QOS, because latency is an inescapable fact of life.