|
Mining the Internet for Evidence
Stefan Bauschard, Boston College 2000 - Privacy Protection Policy: Nowhere to Hide? |
|
While debaters' use of the Internet has been increasing, it largely remains an underutilized resource. This lack of use is really in no way the fault of the participants; the Internet is not a very well organized, making it difficult to retrieve a lot of useful information. And, there really is no sage advice to be given as to how to "beat the system." At the present time, the only real way to effectively use the Internet for debate research is to know where some of the critical information that you are looking for can be found. The purpose of this essay is to introduce you to some of the hottest sites that are available for debate research on some of the most common topics for debate research. If you visit these sites regularly, you are likely to find a lot of useful debate material. Researching at Government Web Sites Only a week ago, the Federal Trade Commission (http://www.ftc.gov) issued a reported entitled Privacy Online: Fair Information Practice in the Electronic Marketplace that argued for establishing federal regulations to protect privacy on the Internet. Within days of the report's release, the report was made available at the FTC's website at http://www.ftc.gov/reports/privacy2000/privacy2000.pdf. Since the FTC is charged with establishing regulations to implement many federal privacy initiatives, you can expect continued activity at their site. In fact, the web site already has a unique privacy section. Another very hot topic relating to consumer information privacy deals with privacy of financial information. In November of 1999, Congress passed and Clinton signed The Financial Modernization Act of 1999. (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d106:s.00900:). The most significant part of this legislation permits cross-ownership of conglomerates (banks owners can now own insurance companies and insurance companies can own hospitals, for example). This legislation did include a requirement that banks and other relevant entities establish privacy policies that are to be mailed to consumers and will also give them the option of opting-out of sharing their personal financial information with other companies. The industry has just been given an extension of July 1, 2000 to comply with the new guidelines. Although progress has been made in protecting financial privacy, there is considerable support for additional action, including provisions that would require that consumers "opt-in" before information is shared, and establishing a privacy commission to oversee compliance. You can read the testimony involving the core issues of the debate by going to the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services at http://www.house.gov/banking/. All of the testimony can be key word searched from the home page. Hearings through 1999 can be searched at http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/cong017.html and other Congressional reports can be searched at http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/cong005.html. The General Accounting Office (GAO) is an "independent" arm of Congress that hires experts to provide an objective evaluations of federal programs. The reports do seem very objective and are an excellent source of high quality debate evidence. In the last two months, the GAO has issued a number of reports on privacy related issues, including Privacy Standards: Issues in HHS' Proposed Rules on Confidentiality of Health Information ( http://www.gao.gov/new.items/he00106t.pdf,), Social Security, Use of the Social Security Number is Widespread ( http://www.gao.gov/new.items/he00111t.pdf), and Racial Profiling: Limited Data Available on Motorist Stops ( http://www.gao.gov/new.items/gg00041.pdf.) You can search the GAO reports at http://www.gao.gov:8765/. New testimony, updated daily, is available at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/newtest.htm. One great place to read the commentary of Congresspeople on many impending policy issues, such as privacy, is the Congressional Record. The Congressional Record is a daily compilation of comments made by your Senators and Representatives. You can keyword search the Congressional Record at http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/aces150.html One central jumping off point for legislative information relating to privacy and other issues is Thomas (http://thomas.loc.gov). From Thomas, you can access the Congressional Record, various House and Senate committees, and a bill-tracking service. So, for example, if you want to research the Consumer Internet Privacy Protection Act, you could type it into the bill/phrase search. From there, you can follow links taking you to Congressional Record statements relating to the bill, links to committees the bill has been referred to, and see the status of the bill (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c106:1:./temp/~c1064Iiz3c::). Researching in the News There are at least two specific places that you can find daily, or almost-daily, updated sources of current events related to privacy. The first one is a newspaper, Privacy Times which is available at http://www.privacytimes.com/. The second place is Privacy Page (http://www.privacy.org). These sites carry many current news articles on privacy issues. The best place for issues related to electronic commerce, including privacy is E-Commerce Times (http://www.ecommercetimes.com/). You can also search the general press, particularly the major newswires, at Yahoo (http://dailynews.yahoo.com/.). Newstories from popular, and even less popular, press sources can be searched at http://www.newsindex.com. Moreover.com organizes the newswires based on topics, such as politics or economics. This is useful because you can find all of the stories related to a particular topic, such as your Clinton disadvantage, in one place. All of the major papers and news agencies also have their own place on the web, with hourly-updated stories. The Christian Science Monitor can be found at http://www.csm.com, CNN at (http://www.cnn.com), the New York Times at http://www.nyt.com, and the Washington Post at http://www.washingtonpost.com. Researching in Magazines and Journals Although I have not found any magazines or journals that are specific to the topic of privacy, there are many online magazines and journals that are available in the full-text format for free. Time magazine, a general newsweekly, is available online at http://www.time.com. This site has all of the articles of the print edition, as well as a number of articles that are only published in the online edition. Business Week (http://www.businesweek.com), a more conservative periodical, is a great source of information for debating economic positions, particularly inflation, and budget issues. Fortune is also online at http://www.fortune.com . Fortune is a periodical that is focused on corporate business and is a great source of updated articles on the business confidence disadvantage. Foreign policy impacts will inevitably make it into your debates. After all, what is a good debate without a nuclear war impact? The Washington Quarterly (http://www.twq.com) is a quarterly periodical that features analysis of contemporary geopolitical issues written by very qualified individuals. Many full-text articles from the popular journal, Foreign Policy, are available at http://www.foreignpolicy.com/. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a liberal journal devoted to arms control issues, is available at http://www.bullatomsci.org/ and Arms Control Today is available at http://www.armscontrol.org/ACT/act.html Researching the Tanks Think tanks are groups of public policy specialists and advocates that champion particular outcomes in public policy disputes. Generally, these groups have an ideological focus: libertarian, liberal, conservative, or radically conservative. Libertarians: Libertarians hold many positions that the conservatives do, though they support a much more minimalist conception of the state, including the abolition of almost all regulation and only very minimal taxes. Libertarians oppose U.S. intervention abroad and support only a minimalist foreign policy. They do not support most foreign. They are a great source of "heg bad" evidence. Liberals: Generally speaking, liberals believe the opposite of conservatives. Liberals support a large role for the federal government, they often fear devolution of policy-making to the state and local levels, they favor social spending and wealth redistribution, support higher taxes than most republicans, welcome governmental regulation of the private sector, and generally support lower defense spending. Conservatives: Conservatives generally believe in the following: small-sized government, devolution of government to state and local levels, privatization, low taxes, reduced social spending, and a strong military. Papers at the Heritage Foundation web site, for example, generally argue for one of these perspectives. Most traditional Republicans are conservatives. Radical Conservatives: Radical Conservatives is really my reference, and may imply something about my political beliefs, but it is still a useful way of categorizing another group. Radical conservatives believe in the core conservative beliefs mentioned above -- a small government -- but also believe strongly in religion and a strong version American patriotism, something that is at least not a generalizable characteristic of the other two groups. A good example of a libertarian group on the Internet is the CATO Institute (http://www.cato.org).The CATO Institute is a site that is updated daily that features Policy Analysis (http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/policyanalysis.html), Foreign Policy Briefing (http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/foreignbriefs.html), Trade Policy Studies (http://www.freetrade.org/pubs/pubs.html), and Regulation magazine (http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regultn-arch.html), a periodical devoted to fighting government regulation. The Brookings Institute (http://www.brookings.edu) is a good example of a liberal think tank. The Brookings Institute has a number of foreign policy centers, including the Brown Center for Education Policy (http://www.brookings.edu/gs/brown/brown_hp.htm), The Center for Law Economics, and Politics (http://www.brookings.edu/es/clep/clep_hp.htm,) which just started a new project called The Economic Payoff from the Internet (http://www.brookings.edu/es/research/ra12summary.htm). A full-text version of The Brookings Review is available online at http://www.brookings.edu/press/review/rev_des.htm. A large number of speeches, transcripts, and other full-text documents are available. The Heritage Foundation is probably the most popular conservative think tank at http://www.heritage.org. The site has a number of backgrounders, memorandums, lectures, and data analyses. The site is updated on a regular basis (almost daily) and most of the papers are also organized by issue. You can easily key word search the entire site. One of the more radically conservative groups on the web is The John Birch Society (http://www.jbs.org) Selected articles from their periodical, The New American, are online at http://www.thenewamerican.com/current_issue/. Documents criticizing Clinton, the U.N. and the decision to give back the Panama Canal are common. One excellent center for foreign policy analysis that has no particular ideological slant is the Center for Strategic and International Studies (http://www.csis.org.) This site has a number of journals, speeches, and other documents related to global security issues. The Center is very prolific, and the site is updated daily. The site has separate directories for Africa, Asia, the Americas, Energy, the environment, Europe, Russia, Turkey, and many others. This is an outstanding site to visit for any international affairs research. There are some advocacy organizations that deal specifically with privacy issues, particularly consumer privacy issues. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (http://www.epic.org) is probably the most popular. The site has a large number of documents on a variety of electronic privacy issues. Georgetown's Health Privacy Project can be found at http://www.healthprivacy.org/ When you are starting a research assignment, think of what side of the political spectrum would support the point of view that you are seeking evidence for. Once you do that, all you need to do is find a think tank on the web that supports it. Researching the Law There is an awful
lot of legal information available on the web for free. You can access
every single Supreme Court decision ever rendered through Findlaw.com
at http://www.findlaw.com/casecode/supreme.html. Amicus Briefs, court
briefs written to support a particular side in a court case, from the
Court's current term are available at http://supreme.findlaw.com/supreme_court/briefs/index.html.
You can monitor the entire docket at http://supreme.findlaw.com/supreme_court/resources.html
and follow Supreme Court news at http://legalnews.findlaw.com/legalnews/us/sc/.
Duhaime's Law Dictionary is available at http://www.wwlia.org/diction.htm The Air University Research Database ( http://www.au.af.mil/au/database/research.html) is an excellent place for papers produced by those graduating from the military academies. Papers are available from 1995 onward and can be keyword searched. Defense Link (http://www.defenselink.mil/) is the Department of Defense's web site that features news, speeches, and other documents related to military issues. Parameters, a journal of the Army War College that features coverage of military issues, is available online at http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/. Researching with Directories There are a couple of sites on the Internet that have started to organize papers and other documents from various places on the web that are useful to debaters and other academic researchers. The best, most general, site is Policy.com (http://www.policy.com) This site has a number of papers that are organized by topic -- globalization, global warming, gun control, etc, with papers listed by pro and con. One of their recent daily briefings covered the FTC privacy report (http://www.policy.com/news/dbrief/dbriefarc282.asp). Global Beat (http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/) is a site that is devoted to international security issues. Full-text papers are organized both by content and geographic interest. The site is updated daily and contains thousands of useful links. Stratfor.com (http://www.stratfor.com) is another useful international security website. It is updated regularly and contains geopolitical analyses of various parts of the globe. Listservs and Email Updates Debate research usually involves a proactive effort by you to go out and seek books and articles that may have relevant pieces of debate evidence in them. In the computer era, however, there are a few different ways to have both articles, and notices of new articles, delivered to you in your email. This will substantially reduce the amount of time that you need to spend collecting citations to articles. The two primary tools for this method of "research" are listservs and email updates. Listservs Listservs are discussion groups for people with interests in particular subjects. If you subscribe to a listserv, every email message that someone posts to the listserv is distributed to all the members of the listserv. All you need to join a listserv is a computer and an email account. There are a number of reasons to join a listserv. First, as a person with particular interests, you can engage in a discussion relating to those interests with everyone else in the world. For example, you can join a discussion about what is going on in high school debate by joining the cx-l, a listserv for debaters. You can join by sending the following email
Second, you can keep yourself updated with new knowledge that is being produced in the community that you are interested in -- you can have free email updates delivered to your email box! Third, you can join a discussion and express your opinions on matters that you have learned about. Try joining some of the following listservs. Before you do, though, there are a few things that you should know. One, most listservs will generate a lot of email, sometimes over 50 pieces a day. You must either keep up with reading the email or sign-off. Otherwise, your email box will be quickly become overloaded. When you register for the listserv, you will receive back a list of instructions and guidelines for etiquette on the list. You should save these instructions for when you want to sign-off. Two, don't join too many listservs at once. Your email will become too difficult to manage. Three, remember your manners. On listservs, people have a tendency to be more rude to people than they ever would be in person. Sending a very rude message is called "flaming." Check yourself to prevent sending these messages. Before you send the message, ask yourself, would I really say this to this person to their face and yell it in front of an audience of a 1000 people?! Cypherlist From the originator: " Cypherlist-watch is a moderated discussion list where high quality discussion can take place regarding many aspects of privacy in the electronic age. Items such as encryption, anonymous remailers and associated software are all ideal for this list. This list isn't an arena for crypto-anarchists; there are already enough mailing lists in that area."
Comp Privacy
Privacy
Email Updates If you are too lazy to get on the Internet and search for your own updates, you can always rely on your teammates to do the work. This is a good piece of advice if your teammates are not lazy. If they are lazy though, this approach probably isn't going to work. One way to keep yourself updated is to register to have updates sent to you. These updates will not come in card form, but will come to you in article form. These updates usually come on a daily, weekly, or bi-weekly basis and will be sent to your email box. You need to register for these updates. These are some of the updates that you may wish to register for. Just point yourself to the URL that is listed and fill in the necessary information. Foreign Policy Updates
Domestic Policy Updates
Government Updates
Periodical Updates
Newspaper Updates
Researching with Search Services The most popular, and still occasionally useful, way to search through the web is by using popular search services such as Altavista (http://www.altavista.com), Google (http://www.google.comm) and Hotbot (http://www.hotbot.com.). In order to maximize each of these services, it is useful to understand how each of them work: Can you do a boolean search, a phrase search, or both? Can you search in particular domains, such as .org or .mil? Can you restrict your search by date? Do pages that have the keyword(s) you searched appearing near one another get rated the highest? Are pages that have a large number of direct hits -- pages that other people use for a long period of time -- returned highest in the results list? Many search services use the same search engines so I have been careful to use the term search services rather than engines. Yahoo, for example, relies on results produced through the Inkotami search engine when it can't find results in its directory and Iwon.com uses Inkotami both to build its organized directory and for its search results. Hotbot also uses Inkotami results for its search results and combines them with results from the Human Directory. Netscape uses its own results and Google results to produce the returns. This is important to understand to prevent yourself from wasting time doing redundant searches. AltaVista AltaVista is considered to have the largest number of individual web pages cataloged. It claims that it has over 250 million pages cataloged. If you do not use it properly, however, you will also get millions of useless hits returned to you. Since it has the largest number of cataloged pages, you should use AltaVista for doing specific searches, such as searches for a particular document that you do not have a URL for. Google can probably be described as the "hottest" new search engine. Most users, myself included, have found that Google returns an incredible number of useful results, and usually in less than two seconds. Its search results are based on the popularity of sites linking to it and the quality of those sites. So, if you have a website that has a high number of large and popular websites that have a link to your site, your site will get rated high in the search results. Hot Bot Hotbot is easy to use because all of the "fine-tuning controls," are on the first page. You can limit your search to "any" or "all" keywords, filter words, restrict dates, or limit the domains you are searching in. This is a particularly quick way to do many advanced searches. Its primary unique feature is that you can limit your searches to Web pages that use specific technologies, such as JAVA, but that isn't very useful for debate research. That may be useful for other projects, however. You can limit your search to particular domains such as .edu, .com, .org. Org. has the best materials for debate purposes so you may want to try limiting a search to that domain if your searches are retrieving too much information. One major drawback to using Hotbot for debate research is that Hotbot uses a new popularity-based service called Direct-Hit which tracks which results users click on and how long they stay at a site. They rate the number of clicks, and the greater the amount of time a user spends at a site, the higher it will be ranked in the search results. The first page of results you see will likely be generated by the Direct Hit service. This is not necessarily best for debaters because academic research is not one of the most popular uses of the Internet. Direct hit results are more likely to take you to commercial sites, which are more frequently used. Secondary results come from the Inkotami engine and its directory information comes from the Open Directory project. Iwon.Com Iwon.com is the hottest growing search portal. Its popularity is not due to any specific, unique features, but rather to one feature: each time you use it you are entered into a drawing for a huge cash prize. Every day Iwon.com gives away $10,000, once a month it gives away $1 million, and this Spring (April 17), it will give away $10 million. Despite the opportunity to win a lot of money, this isn't the best search service to use for debate purposes for a number of reasons First, Iwon.com relies on the Inkotami search engine for its search results. This is the same engine that Hotbot uses for its results. You can get most of these results through Hotbot, plus take advantage of the other features. Second, the Inkotami engine has less pages cataloged than AltaVista's engine. For a specific search, you probably want to use AltaVista. For a broader search, Inkotami is less useful because it builds its directories primarily through the automated crawlers that build the search base. Inkotami does not support frame searching, instant indexing, or cataloging image maps. Third, Inkotami uses link popularity to determine the search rankings and much of the information that you will be looking for will not be popular. Yahoo The important thing to know about Yahoo is that Yahoo is a directory and not a search engine. The directory is compiled by humans that peer review potential entries to determine if they are valuable. Generally, only the home page of a site is indexed, so if you use it, you may be missing searches of many documents. If Yahoo cannot find what you are looking for, it will automatically run a search on Inkotami and return those results to you. General Tips The web contains a lot of information that isn't useful for debate purposes and the cataloging method is necessarily poor. Using the search engines properly will help you avoid some of your searching problems, but it will not solve them entirely. You need to be patient. Learn to use one search engine properly before you try to use them all. You do want to learn how to use all of the major search engines, however, as they each offer some unique features and may have catalogued some different Web pages. Keep your searches as narrow as possible. Search engines always return too many, not too few, search results. Read through the instructions on each search engine's Web page. I have provided some general instructions here, but the search engines will change how they work from time to time and the most current information will be found there. If you click on a link produced by a search result and the link is broken (it will not take you to the Web page), try eliminating everything but the base URL from the referenced link and enter that into your browser. The exact location of the page within that site may have changed and if it is still online you should be able to find it by surfing or searching that particular site. Don't rely on search engines to search the current news. Spiders only travel the Web so fast, returning to a particular site every month or so at best. If you want to read the current news you will have to direct your browser to particular current news sites, such as Reuters on the Yahoo page. Know what type of sites (.com, .edu, .gov, .net, .mil) will be best for debate use. Basically, you want to know which ones are more likely to contain full text documents. Com sites rarely have any, unless you want to count some company's advertisement as a document. The exception here are com sites that house search engines for periodicals (www.sfgate.com/wais/-chron.html). Edu sites do have some full-text documents but not that many. Professors don't seem to be into Web publishing. Org sites have the most. These organizations are usually trying to influence the policy process by attracting followers so they publish their points of view for free. Gov sites also have a lot of government documents. "Net" sites are too much of a crap shoot because, remember, net sites may actually house an .org, a .com, an .edu, or a .gov file server. If you have a limited amount of time (don't all of us?) click on the search engine returns that reference .org sites Conclusion: The Continuing Search In this brief essay, I have had the opportunity to highlight what I think are some of the most useful sites for debate research, explain the political organization of the web, and provide an explanation and suggestions for using listservs, email updates, and search services. The resources that I have outlined, however, are really just the tip of the iceberg. For more resources, and more advice, you should point yourself in the direction of the Hitchhiker's Website, the web companion to the Hitchhiker's Companion to the 2000-2001 Debate Topic and the forthcoming Forensics Internet Guide, a comprehensive, topically-organized directory to over 1500 web sites with useful, full-text information for debate and speech contestants.
|