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Tauzin washed his hands of the process: a canny, sleazy Hill
operator, he had the political instincts to get his name off any
proposal that could be shown to be a plot to break voters’ televi-
sions. (Tauzin found a better industry to shill for, the pharmaceu-
tical firms, who rewarded him with a $2,000,000/year job as chief
of PHARMA, the pharmaceutical lobby.)
Even Representative Ernest “Fritz” Hollings (“The Senator
from Disney,” who once proposed a bill requiring entertainment
industry oversight of all technologies capable of copying) backed
away from proposing a bill that would turn the Broadcast Flag
into law. Instead, Hollings sent a memo to Michael Powell, then-
head of the FCC, telling him that the FCC already had jurisdic-
tion to enact a Broadcast Flag regulation, without Congressional
oversight.
Powell’s staff put Hollings’s letter online, as they are required
to do by federal sunshine laws. The memo arrived as a Microsoft
Word file — which EFF then downloaded and analyzed. Word
stashes the identity of a document’s author in the file metadata,
which is how EFF discovered that the document had been written
by a staffer at the MPAA.
This was truly remarkable. Hollings was a powerful commit-
tee chairman, one who had taken immense sums of money from
the industries he was supposed to be regulating. It’s easy to be
cynical about this kind of thing, but it’s genuinely unforgivable:
politicians draw a public salary to sit in public office and work for
the public good. They’re supposed to be working for us, not their
donors.
But we all know that this isn’t true. Politicians are happy to
give special favors to their pals in industry. However, the Hollings
memo was beyond the pale. Staffers for the MPAA were writing
Hollings’s memos, memos that Hollings then signed and mailed
off to the heads of major governmental agencies.
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