Marc Andreesen, the cofounder of Netscape, met Senator Barack Obama in early 2007. Mr. Andreesen recalls, “In particular, the Senator was personally interested in the rise of social networking, Facebook, Youtube, and user-generated content, and casually but persistently grilled us on what we thought the next generation of social media would be and how social networking might affect politics — with no staff present, no prepared materials, no notes. He already knew a fair amount about the topic but was very curious to actually learn more.” (see Mr. Andreesen’s blog post)
As a social organizer and a lover of new technologies, Mr. Obama could be expected to make good use of such tools in getting elected, and he has done so. What may not be as obvious is that Mr. Obama appears to have a keen interest in using such technologies in the act of governing. And whether Mr. Obama becomes president, or Mrs. Clinton or Mr. McCain do, these new tools have the potential to transform how a government of the People, by the People and for the People communicates and operates. Let us consider the effects of Internet tools on the act of governing by first considering the effect of such tools on the election process.
Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign has made an unprecedented use of Internet tools. At my.barackobama.com Mr. Obama’s supporters can create a profile (complete with name, phone number, email and zip code), blog about their campaign experiences, track the latest campaign news and videos, plan, attend and discuss events, find other supporters, and help raise funds for his campaign. More than 90% of the Obama campaign’s cash has come through donations of $100 or less, much of it through the Internet (see WSJ article). The website can also be used to request further funds from prior contributors, which has likely helped Mr. Obama maintain a significant fundraising advantage. Most importantly, the Obama campaign has put supporters to work not as passive volunteers but as empowered organizers. On my.barackobama.com supporters are given the tools to find, convince and organize other supporters among their neighbors.
As the Rolling Stone reports:
[A meeting of Barack supporters at a recreation center] in San Marcos wasn’t advertised in any traditional sense. Instead, the campaign posted the event on my.barackobama.com — its social-networking site affectionately known as “MyBo” — and e-mailed local residents who had donated to the campaign or surrendered their addresses as the price of admission to an Obama rally. And the volunteers who showed up won’t be micromanaged by Ukman or anyone else from the campaign. They’ll be able to call their own shots, from organizing local rallies to recruiting and training a crew of fellow Obama supporters to man their precincts on election day. To identify and mobilize Obama backers, they’ll log on to the password-protected texasprecinctcaptains.com, download the phone numbers of targeted voters, make calls from their homes and upload the results to Austin headquarters. They’ll also organize early-voting open houses — which will be publicized on MyBo — to boost turnout among core supporters. “Instead of hoping that your neighbors vote,” [Obama staffer] Ukman tells them in an unintentional twist on the campaign’s central theme, “you’re going to take them to the polls.”
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/19106326
The Boston Globe explains:
From a MyBO page, a member can click onto a list of 20 phone numbers with a series of prompts and scripts that the caller runs through, entering the responses of voters online. The information goes into the campaign database for its primary day get-out-the-vote operation.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/02/24/technology_aids_obamas_outreach_drive/?page=1
Mr. Obama knows that supporters who feel closely connected to other supporters, who are kept closely informed about the cause, who are empowered to take actions in support of the cause, are likely to be not just casual supporters but members of a movement. Internet social network websites allow people to share even small actions that move the cause forward, and shared small actions tend to evolve into larger commitments of time, attention and energy.
Of the candidates, Mr. Obama appears to be particularly aware of this potential change. Mr. Obama has often expressed on the campaign trail that to change Washington, to break the gridlock he sees engulfing both parties, he needs a movement that happens from the bottom up. Although his strongest supporters may feel the election of Mr. Obama will effect this change, Mr. Obama does not seem to be of the same opinion. To change how Washington operates he needs the movement to continue while he is in office.
Consider the tools a potential President has at their disposal. While John F. Kennedy may have been the first television president, Ronald Reagan may have perfected speaking to the camera, and George W. Bush has utilized the power of a sympathetic television channel and talk radio hosts, each of these prior technologies have been largely one way mediums of communication channeled through media companies that distort the relationship a politician seeks to have with their constituency. To organize effectively to carry a message across television and radio, modern presidencies run around the clock operations to drive a particular message through the external media companies that carry the information to the citizens. The administration of George W. Bush has created common talking points that will appeal to a broad base of his supporters, which are used by a network of media figures and commentators that seek to stay on message. In the 2000 and 2004 elections, Karl Rove harnessed direct mail technologies to send targeted political messages to particular constituencies, but he was using a broadcast medium to target small groups of supporters with the message that would most appeal to them. Direct mail is very expensive to maintain on a prolonged basis, and therefore has been used mostly during election campaigns themselves.
Internet tools do not have these limitations. The Internet provides a platform for organizing and energizing social movements in a new way. Therefore Internet tools could have a tremendous effect on not just how governments get chosen, but how governments operate. Internet social networks allow people to stay engaged on a continuous basis. They also allow large numbers of people to receive the same message at the same time, cost effectively, without any filter or immediate commentary from critics. They allow targeted delivery of messages. If you trust the brand of a social network such as my.barackobama.com, if you value its tools and its services to you, you end up trusting many of the messages you receive through it.
The President elected in 2008 can, if they choose, communicate with anyone who provided their personal information during the campaign at nearly no cost, without having their message filtered. A sitting President could reach out to a broad base of strong supporters, keep those supporters in close contact with each other, keep those supporters funneling their support to sympathetic Congressmen, keep those supporters hounding political adversaries, and keep those supporters listening to their message. Most importantly, the nature of the message can be very granular. Millions of supporters in a particular zip code could be asked to contact their legislator on a particular bill that the President seeks to oppose or support. In theory, supporters with particular demographics, with particular religious persuasions, in particular regions of the country, could be sent messages tailored for them. For governing, the ability to coordinate a vast citizenry in such a manner is an innovation more significant than radio, more significant than television, and more significant than direct mail.
How is such a movement to be directed by a sitting President? After all, the President does not represent supporters, a President represents all of the People. David Brooks has pointed out that while Mrs. Clinton sounds like a traditional executive, gathering experts, forging a policy, negotiating a crisis and making a final decision, Mr. Obama sounds like a cross between a social activist and a flannel shirted software CEO, a nonhierarchical collaborative leader inspiring autonomous individuals to cooperate for the sake of common concerns (see David Brooks article). In some ways, controlling an Internet social network is about channeling its energies in moments of need, but otherwise just providing it tools and then allowing it to undertake its own path. Many Obama campaign messages have not been things the campaign has created but items created by the crowd that the campaign chooses to highlight. (see Fortune Magazine article)
Government in an Obama Administration will likely consist again of setting the basic message and then establishing the tools to reach the policy makers in government. my.barackobama.com will likely be supplemented, but not replaced, with whitehouse.gov and refinements to other government websites. As I noted in a prior post (see The value of transparency to (nearly) everyone), in his first term as a United States Senator, Mr. Obama cosponsored a bill with the Republican Senator from Oklahoma Tom Coburn, which would create a searchable database of government contracts, grants, insurance, loans and financial assistance with the goal of making finding information about federal spending as simple to use as a search of the Internet.
Mr. Obama perceives the role of the taxpayer and of the citizen in a very business like way. In his book, The Audacity of Hope (see my book review), Mr. Obama credits Reagan for seeing what Democrats didn’t see. “Reagan’s central insight – that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than growing the pie-contained a good deal of truth. Just as too many corporate managers, shielded from competition, had stopped delivering value, too many government bureaucracies had stopped asking whether their shareholders (the American taxpayer) and their consumers (the users of government services) were getting their money’s worth.”
An Obama Presidency may approach both government bureaucracy and obstacles to Obama’s policy prescriptions the same way the Obama campaign has come to dominate caucuses against the Hillary Clinton campaign: provide supporters (and citizens) in depth information on how to team up and then explain to them the steps they have to take to prevail.
Some signs of how Mr. Obama intends to act can be seen in his policy prescriptions. Mr. Obama wants to use “the most current technological tools available” to promote citizen participation in the actual business of government (see his website). He plans to not just solicit the opinions of the public in the work of government agencies and policy makers, but to tap “into the vast and distributed expertise of the American citizenry to help government make more informed decisions.” He also intends to have a website, search engine, and other tools that enable easy tracking online of federal grants, contracts, earmarks and lobbyist contacts with government officials. He intends to use whitehouse.gov to give the American public the chance to review and comment on any non-emergency legislation for five days. When the media expresses skepticism that he can get a healthcare policy passed, Mr. Obama indicates that while he himself can’t, he knows how to get everyone to the table for discussions, make those discussions open and transparent, and invite the American people into the conversation. He intends to require his Cabinet officials to have periodic national online town hall meetings to answer questions and discuss issues before their agencies, and to employ technologies (such as blogs, wikis and social networking tools) to modernize internal, cross-agency and public communication and information sharing.
While Mr. Obama may be further along in understanding the implications of these tools then his rivals, they are so potentially powerful that it is likely at some point we will have a Digital Presidency, even if Mr. Obama does not obtain the Presidency.
While it is clear Internet tools will have profound effects, it is not yet clear what those effects will be because it is not clear how such tools will be managed. The most advanced Internet social network technologies are controlled by private companies such as Facebook, Myspace and Google/Youtube. Although these companies follow political issues, they do not have a strong political axe to grind. Hopefully they will act as a counterweight to social networks that are motivated by a political cause. In the political sphere, the most advanced and people rich Internet social networks appear to belong to the candidates for the Presidency. By the nature of their cause, they attract the most attention and have the most capital both in money and people to develop their platforms. Intriguingly, with a big enough brand name an individual is far less reliant on the party apparatus if they are able to develop or build their own Internet social network. Perhaps this means that once a candidate has run for President once, they will be in a good position to run again.
In The Audacity of Hope (see my book review) Barack Obama describes the advantages of politicians who already hold a political office as being: (a) name recognition, (b) a fund raising advantage, (c) gerrymandering (where the already elected representatives redraw their districts to in effect choose their voters), (d) most politicians are pretty likable, and (e) the already established support of grass roots organization (which is as important as cash). Mr. Obama interestingly states that these advantages of incumbent politicians push rival candidates to look for the support of the opposing political party. What do the political parties bring to a candidate? Organization. They own the list of donors, of voters, of volunteers. They can help with raising funds, finding the right voters to hear a message, or even crafting the right message to tell. For Democrats organization means unions, environmental groups, and prochoice groups. For the Republican party organization means the religious right, local chambers of commerce, the NRA, and anti-tax organizations.
Clearly the political parties, the unions, religious organizations, and cause motivated organizations are behind the technological times. While these organizations have amassed databases of supporters and potential supporters, for the most part they have not created active, vibrant Internet social networks. Perhaps they will do so in the future as they seek to preserve their role and power in the political ecosystem. Despite the obvious privacy concerns, perhaps the government will create its own Internet social networks, for any citizen who wishes to use them, authenticated in some manner. Perhaps some of these networks will even be accessible to all politicians to use to reach their constituencies.
Use of these new tools has profound implications for the American form of government. America was founded on the principle that sovereignty lies with the people, but also with the somewhat contradictory principle that the people’s representatives should be removed from the worst passions and impulses of the people. The founders were aware that factions form when people care deeply about something, and that although factions are unnecessary, they can also fail to think dispassionately, becoming ruled by emotions and an allegiance to their faction. Many of the founders of America held in high esteem the idea that representatives would be chosen by the people, but would be disconnected sufficiently from the people to take whatever action was wise. They disliked mobs grouping together to take action. Even Thomas Jefferson, who formed the first political party of a young America and secretly started a very partisan newspaper to give it a voice, detested what he perceived as the necessity of doing so.
Yet the system of governance we have today is one where representatives are in the long term accountable to the people, but in the short term look for support to various factions, either special interest groups (such as unions, the NRA, etc) or monied interests (such as companies, wealthy individuals, etc). These factions end up having an outsized influence on what representatives are chosen and they make any representative who wishes to support a policy that goes against their chosen factions pay a severe price for the disloyalty.
By increasing the involvement people have with their government, or the involvement they feel they have with their government, the Internet can change, for good or ill, the relationship between citizens, such factions and government in ways that may have horrified the founders. One vision is to transform America’s modern republic into something more similar to an Athenian democracy, where every governmental decision is watched and weighed in upon by a connected populace. Another vision is to increase the transparency and accountability of government, but still keep the baser angels in check. Yet another vision is to prevent even a majority of moderate thinkers from impressing their particular policy prescriptions upon those who simply want the liberty to disagree.
To coordinate a mass of people when the issues being discussed are technical and complex, to retain the attitude of a reasoned debate and not descend into purely factional allegiances, is a significant challenge. Even if a moderate consensus emerges on major issues, it is not clear that a moderate majority acting through coercion to force others to adopt their particular policy feelings is something to be esteemed. A broader movement, a more open and transparent system, can be an improvement, but it can also be a curse. The task of reconciling these visions lies ahead.
However the political world evolves, the greatest safety citizens have may reside in the design of the Constitution and the Internet. The Constitutional design makes changing the judicial branch of government a slower process, no matter what the popular will, and it entrusts the judiciary to protect the minority’s rights even in the face of a coordinated hostile majority. The Internet is designed in a manner that permits any device, any software, and any new service to be reached through it. New forms of organizing people on the Internet are constantly being invented, from Google to Wikipedia to Facebook. Each new tool creates different systems of behavior, has different strengths and weaknesses. If these new tools allow one person, through a cult of personality, or one faction, even if it is a sanctimonious majority, to amass unchecked power, to choose popular whim over in depth thought, it will likely be because the citizens and their judges ignore other voices, other social networks, and their own better natures.
Update October 10, 2008: The Obama campaign has released an iPhone application.
The application can take a look through your contacts, and organize them by key battleground states, making it fast and easy to reach your friends where it matters for the campaign. The application also anonymously reports how many calls you made nationwide initiated in the application (but not the contact information of whom you called) back to the Obama campaign, so they can judge how effective that feature is, and so you can compare your efforts in calling out to friends to those of other people using the application.
Another feature of the application is that it uses the location capabilities of the iPhone to find the nearest Obama headquarters and inform you of local events you can participate in.
One of the four co-founders of Facebook, Chris Hughes (age 24), has been instrumental at making the Obama campaign utilize technology effectively, as described in this NY Times profile: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/technology/07hughes.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Update November 11, 2008:
A reporter from the New York Times, Mr. David Carr, interviewed me for about two hours to discuss this essay, and subsequently published the story How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power.
You may also find of interest other essays I’ve written on President-elect Obama, including a concisely written but thorough review of Mr. Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope, a criticism of Mr. Obama’s dislike of Walmart, praise for a bill Mr. Obama co-sponsored to bring greater transparency to government contracts, and an examination of the Obama campaign’s iPhone application
As iPhone excitement reaches a fever pitch, let’s take a moment to ponder what Steve Jobs called Apple’s “hobby”, Apple TV (product page). Jobs explained to Walt Mossberg that Apple TV is not another set top box or a set top box replacement, but is “sort of a new DVD player for the Internet age.” Jobs also said Apple TV is a product that will evolve over time.
Many people in the developed world have a DVD player. It’s not as big a market as cell phones, but it is a huge market. It’s historically been a pretty bad business, unless you’re the low cost manufacturer, because the format in which DVD discs are encoded is a standard that any manufacturer can create a device for.
Toshiba and Sony each saw a solution to the commoditization of DVD players: create and control a new standard for a new type of DVD disc that carries a lot more data, enough to carry movies in high definition. Toshiba, with its HD DVD standard, and Sony, with its Blueray standard, are fighting a pitched battle over who gets to control that high definition DVD disc future. A good amount of their fight has been over convincing the movie studios to back their respective standards. Yet the confusion over which type of player to buy has kept many people from buying either type of player. And when hackers cracked the digital rights protection on high definition DVDs, Fox stopped distributing high definition movie discs.
Meanwhile, Apple and startups like Vudu (see my prior post on Vudu) are seeking to use Internet connected boxes that would replace the DVD player entirely. Is an Internet connected box a better approach than a high definition DVD player? For any type of content, to me it seems the Internet is a better medium than a physical disc in 4 ways and a worse environment in 3 ways.
The ways the Internet is superior are:
- Marketing. It’s cheaper to do marketing. You can tease people with parts of content and it’s easier for people to share what they like. With community features like YouTube ratings and the Facebook social graph, you can let people know what content their communities prefer.
- Upload, storage, distribution. It’s easier to allow people to upload. In the physical world, only a select few get DVDs made. In the Internet world, anyone can share their video. The technological costs of storing and distributing that video are rapidly decreasing as the Internet evolves.
- Encryption. It’s technologically easier to create an encrypted environment on the Internet because you control the software on both the server, client, and data packet sides. In the physical world it’s harder to update broken encryption systems once part of the encryption scheme has been shattered.
- Update the interface. The interface for Internet based solutions can be revised and updated, as we see in the rapid changes happening to websites. This advantage of the Internet will spread to Internet connected consumer devices.
The ways the Internet is inferior are:
- Technologically it’s cheaper to move large amount of data by moving discs than by copying bits. High definition video takes up a lot of data space. For a long time it has been cheaper to move that data around by truck than by a network because each physical disc can store tremendous amounts of data. The advantage trucks enjoy is diminishing, however, because the Internet is evolving swiftly and peer to peer file sharing systems dramatically lower the technological costs of distribution.
- Legally it’s cheaper to move discs then to copy bits. For professionally produced content it’s a bit more expensive to buy or rent movies than it is to share physical discs (thus the current disc through the mail business models of Netflix, Blockbuster, Gamestop, LaLa). This is because although technology makes it cheaper to copy bits electronically then to move them physically, the law of copyright requires you to obtain rights to copy bits electronically but often lets you move them around physically without seeking permission. Therefore, despite the greater technological costs of moving discs, they have less legal costs, and therefore potentially less total cost.
- Painful to hook up. It’s a bit difficult to connect the Internet to your high definition television type displays. The interfaces on the devices currently used to make this hookup are generally pretty poor and keeping the Internet connection live adds a potential point of failure.
Yet that’s just where things are currently. In the spirit of Wayne Gretzky, let’s ask where the puck is going.
Are physical discs going to become better at marketing, upload (openness), storage, encryption, or changing their interface, than the Internet? It seems to me self evident that the answer is a resounding no.
Is it going to get technologically and legally cheaper to move discs onto the Internet relative to the legal cost of moving physical discs? The discrepancy in technological and legal cost will likely diminish, but it’s unlikely for the legal cost advantage of physical distribution to disappear unless more and more content is unencrypted.
There are multiple approaches to dealing with the legal cost of moving content around. Apple is trying its best to get around this disadvantage by creating one environment (iTunes) to serve content (music, video, games, software) to a multitude of devices (the desktop, laptop, ipod, iphone, Apple TV). Internet stores selling professional content in a digital form may be able to leverage their growing market share (see story) to diminish their legal cost disadvantage. Like Apple, Joost has created an encrypted hard to upload environment, but there are also unencrypted easy to upload environment (think YouTube), or encrypted easy to upload environments (think Brightcove), which all circumvent some of the legal cost disadvantages that the Internet has over physical distribution. The growing size of the Internet advertising market also potentially will draw more professional content onto Internet based distribution systems.
Is it going to get less painful to hookup the Internet to your high definition television type display? Undoubtedly. User interface design in consumer devices is something that Apple is very good at, but it’s not beyond the capabilities of a TiVo, Microsoft, Google, or other party to innovate in such a space. And one significant advantage of building consumer electronics devices with a built in Internet service to distribute media is that you can continuously upgrade the interface of that device. We’ve seen this in the desktop, the laptop, and hints of this with Apple TV and the iPhone. Device development goes from a relatively slow iteration hardware model to a super fast iteration web site like model.
Although leadership in the Internet age can change rapidly (see my post on Murdoch’s statement “They’re all moving to Facebook now”), it is possible to create competitive advantage in the Internet. Apple has shown they can do it by coupling beautiful hardware, elegant software interfaces, a minimalist aesthetic approach to what a customer actually finds most useful, and a growing library of professional content that it has the rights to distribute (iTunes) and amateur content (YouTube through Apple). Internet connected consumer electronics devices is certainly a better business than being a commodity DVD player manufacturer, if you can get traction with the consumer, and can maintain a proper pace of innovation. This is a point that Toshiba and Sony, with their massive initiatives on a waning medium, would do well to heed.
Update, 1-9-08: An alternative to Apple TV or the various Windows extender devices is to attach a full computer to the television. See http://scobleizer.com/2007/12/27/the-macmini-hdtv-revolution/
Update, 3-14-08: An even better alternative may be to get Netflix’s streaming movie service ($13.99 a month for 2 DVDs in the mail AND unlimited streaming of about a third of Netflix’s movies) onto your television. Currently this requires a Windows PC (thanks to Apple’s refusal to license digital rights management to Netflix), but in the near future this Netflix service is expected to appear on other consumer products devices.
When I first saw multi-touch screens being developed in universities, I knew it would be pretty revolutionary. They later showed up in movies like Minority Report, devices like the Apple iPhone, and presentations such as the one shown here: http://www.mathoda.com/archives/112.
Microsoft has now thrown it’s hat into the ring with Surface, a multi-touch table computer:
Pretty neat, although they are targeting high end resorts and other such places as the first customers for their $10,000 computer.
I suggested desktop multi-touch would happen in an earlier post, stating:
Despite this recent history, I believe software that runs on your local computer without needing an internet connection is going to make a come back. Two things will cause this change.
The first is that multi-touch interfaces will come to desktop machines, allowing for new types of desktop applications. You only have to look at the Nintendo Wii to see that when the human interface to a machine changes, new forms of software can meet previously unmet or unknown desires.
As cool as multi-touch desktop computers are, I’m waiting for the first laptop/tablet computer with multi-touch capabilities.
Steve Jobs of Apple indicated that their multi-touch efforts were first directed to such a device, but they decided to redirect towards the phone market due to its size and the obvious integration advantages with the iPod.
I’m sure Apple and Microsoft and a few dozen startups are hard at work developing a multi-touch laptop… who will get the prize?
Update July 20, 2007: Microsoft research demo’ed a rudimentary multi-touch laptop.
Update July 2010: Clearly the iPad gets the prize.
A study by federal scientists has concluded that meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring is safe to eat and should be allowed to enter the food supply without any special labeling. It is likely based on the study made by federal scientists that the Food and Drug Administration will approve such meat and milk for human consumption. The study has attracted considerable media attention (see http://news.google.com/news?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&tab=wn&q=clone+fda&btnG=Search+News), and has given rise to shock and concern.
Why would scientists conclude there is a lack of risk? After all, if you clone a creature, isn’t there something unnatural about it?
To my mind, part of the problem is that cloning is a terrible term. The actual technology should be called twinning. The technology made famous by the sheep Dolly doesn’t xerox a creature. It instead is an expensive process that often fails, but creates a slim chance that identical twins will be born. Because this technology is so expensive and so prone to failure, its unlikely that anyone will eat meat from a cloned animal anytime soon. Simply put, once you’ve gone through the process of creating a cloned animal, it’s too valuable to kill. It’s much more likely that people will eat the offsprings or milk of the identical twins created by the process.
Currently, we don’t worry about whether the steak we are eating or the milk we are drinking was from a cow that was an identical twin or not. Some people say that would change if the identical twin was forced into being by a process like cloning. Yet it doesn’t make difference to the molecular makeup of the animal whether it is an identical twin that arose due to complex processes in a womb, or complex processes in a petri dish, just as it doesn’t make a difference whether a human child arose due to conception in a womb, or conception in a test tube. When artificial insemnination first arose, people thought the human child conceived in a test tube would be somehow different. Time has put that fear to rest.
Interesting things are likely to result from twinning technology. For example, a lot of drugs must now be created by synthetic processes that are expensive and difficult to distribute. You could potentially gene splice a drug into a cow that allowed it to by organic processes produce an anti-malarial drug. With twinning technology you could then create identical twins of that cow and then breed mutliple offspring from such cows. The offspring that carried the spliced gene could be used to create very inexpensive therapies.
Alternatively, you could breed different cows together, and then when the cows have an offspring that produces a particularly high quality milk, you could twin the offspring so that you can create more robust milk producing breeds. Therefore twinning technology could be used in conjunction with the much older technology of breeding.
Regardless of the factual evidence, not everyone would trust such a process. Should such people be kept purposely dark of the source of their food by government mandate? I don’t think so.
Although I don’t think it is proper for the government to ban people from making the decision that such food sources are fine with them, I do think it is proper for the government to require better information be provided to consumers.
Therefore, although I agree with the conclusions of the federal scientists that the meat and milk of cloned animals is safe for human consumption, I would prefer that the source of such food be clearly disclosed. We should be able to know what we ingest, and choose whether or not to ingest it, whether or not we will be rational in making that choice.
Therefore I support the conclusion of federal scientists that meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring is safe to eat, but I do not conclude that it should therefore be allowed to enter the food supply without any special labeling. In fact, I would support that all food in the food supply be labeled as to its origins (farm, factory, etc) and the processes used upon it.