"What I Did Over Summer Vacation"

My summer was swell. I interned at EPIC. This was my first chance to adapt law school habits to the workplace. In the fast-paced world of Capitol Hill, and of electronic privacy, assignments changed too quickly, and their subject matter was too novel and complex, to permit me the luxury of analyzing every facet and contingency of every possible issue. I learned to mass-produce sufficient work rather than hand-craft perfect work. With each project that passed my desk, my school-honed intensity loosened, notch by notch, and my output became more functional and less abstract. As a result, my first project was my favorite.

On Monday -- our first day -- Marc received a last-minute invitation to testify before a Senate subcommittee regarding S.1625, the "Counter-Spy Act" -- a bill to expand the FTC's leverage against purveyors of spyware. By Tuesday night, he needed a briefing on existing FTC authority to pursue spyware. A staff attorney assigned each intern a subtask. Mine was to summarize this list of FTC enforcement actions. "My suspicion --" mused Marc as we returned to our desks, "-- is that this bill will snag on the definition spyware."

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.

http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:L2VCFbJp9MoJ:epic.org/privacy/dv/Spyware_Test061108.pdf+site:epic.org+spyware&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a http://www.antispywarecoalition.org/documents/

-- AndrewGradman - 18 Dec 2008