The highlight of this year's Personal Democracy Forum was the keynote speech by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who made a bold and wide-ranging call for universal, affordable broadband access in New York State. The press gave the speech a ton of coverage, including in the Daily News and Business Week. Bloggers like Josh Benson of the NY Observer and Matt Stoller of MyDD.com were also impressed. The full text is here.

Afterwards, Spitzer was interviewed by ABC News' Mark Halperin, who was making a return visit to PDF after speaking at our first conference in 2004. Their conversation covered everything from the "are bloggers journalists" debate, to the question of regulating the internet. And yes, Spitzer aced the question on the cost of an iTunes download. The full text of their conversation follows.

Andrew Rasiej: I’d like to quickly introduce Mark Halperin. For those of you who don’t know Mark, Mark is National News Correspondent for ABC News and also the brains behind The Note which is really I think Ground Zero for using traditional media and the internet in politics. So Mark can you come up and they’re going to have a conversation for about 20 minutes and then we’ll open it up to the audience for some questions for Eliot from you.

Eliot Spitzer: I have a rule as a prosecutor for many years. The rule was three people, no secrets. And fortunately for you the way I counted no more than three people here.

Mark Halperin: It’s a big topic, you addressed the question of access, but this conference addresses more than that and it’s a big topic and I know from my dealings with bloggers on both the left and the right you’re all smarter than me, accept that as the premise of anything I ask or fail to ask, I apologize in advance. You can attack me as much as you wish, I expect that, but it’s a big topic. So, I’m going to try to cover the things that I think are most important on this issue and then they’ll be some audience questions as well. So, let me just start by asking you about some negative...things that you talked about are very hopeful and optimistic now and ask you about some aspects of technology and politics that may be more negative. The slogan or the shorthand of the conference [is] 'technology is changing politics.' You listed some ways you think it’s changing in a positive way, what are ways technology is changing politics that you worry about, even maybe negative?

ES: I don’t mean to be Pollyannaish about it, but I think all the negative consequences that are often ascribed to the internet in terms of the rapid flow of information with any unchecked editorial supervision in the sense of a different type of journalism, I think that is sort of the argument that is made against the free flow of information, is an argument that has been made against any form of new technology that permits the more rapid dissemination of information.

I don’t see it as a negative. I think the marketplace will and must distinguish over time between good and bad information. Just as the printing press initially was attacked because it broke the monopoly of information flow that had been held by those who controlled the scribes, every dramatic increase in information flow has been attacked by those who do not want to see the rapid flow of information. So I don’t see the negative impact. I think as I was, you know, somebody who was often on the receiving side of things that are said, truthful or not, you wish occasionally that they were at greater editorial supervision but that is not a technological failure, that is the nature of information flow and you just get used to it.

MH: Is there a difference between a blogger and a journalist and if so, what is it?

ES: Well, look maybe I am demonstrating my own lack of parsing the difference sufficiently. Bloggers are journalists with a different mode of communication. And that’s all. I mean I do not distinguish between somebody whose column comes out on the printed page that I pick up at 5:30 when it’s dropped at my doorstep or a blog that I go online 10 times a day to see what the most recent communication or addition is. I think again I’m not, I’ve never spent any time in a journalism school, but journalism, if you mean by the disseminating of information through whatever medium is available, I put them all together.

MH: What percentage of New York Time stories written about you have factual errors in them?

ES: (laughing). I’ll pass on that.

MH: Really?

ES: Well, there was one, they got my birth date wrong. That bothered me enormously, I mean they even misspelled my name a couple of times recently, I thought that one wasn’t spell-checked by now, but and I won’t go beyond that. Okay.

MH: You talked about government facilitating, state and federal government and Philadelphia city government facilitating the equivalent of the dial tone access to high speed, what else do you see as government’s role in regulating or facilitating or interacting, coaxing, what else should government do right now regarding the internet?

ES: Well, I think what I would like to do -

MH: Just to be clear, not in terms of using it, as a government too, in terms of private sector.

ES: Okay, I was going it off as a government tool, let me take 10 seconds on that because I think New York State has been woefully inadequate in taking advantage in the concept of e-government. We just don’t do it and if and the reason I focus on that is when I travel and speak to business men and women across the state, and ask them what is their frustration with the state, they very often talk about the difficulty of getting a response from government, dealing with the bureaucratic infrastructure that is slow and impossible to communicate with.

Government provides the remarkable opportunity to facilitate those communications and so it’s incredibly important for New York State that we actually make those communications gaps easy to fill.

In terms of the private sector, I would like to sector to the largest telecom companies, here are, here is a list of our rights of way, you get us a proposal to wire the state or to create wireless and I just don’t know why we haven’t taken that dramatic step, we have the thru-way, we have roads across the state, we have lamp posts and the things I was talking about, mailboxes, I guess that’s federal government, all of these possible transmitters, accesses for repeaters, let’s just say to folks, we will give you access as Philadelphia did, if you will open up the avenues of access.

MH: But would you ever want to say tax the internet, for the government of New York, would you ever (inaudible) taxes on internet commerce?

ES: Well, they’re already, the debate about taxing Internet retail sales is something that would go on for some period of time and at a certain point as more and more commerce moves to the Internet, obviously [that] will become more prevalent and I think it is probably going to happen at some point down the road. I mean, as it becomes a more sustainable and more traditional part, way of doing business, in other areas, I don’t see it as a revenue source, cause right now I see it as a way of generating economic activity.

MH: What about content, should the government have anything to say about the content on the Internet?

ES: Not beyond what we do in other contexts. Obviously there are prohibitions on pornography that relate regardless of the medium and I will tell you as a parent, as a prosecutor, the issues of content online are problematic. We are thinking all the time of somebody earlier raised the issue of online gambling, now online gambling is certainly not the most of the invidious of the many things that go on, online, but it is very difficult jurisdictionally to enforce certain statutory prohibitions with respect to online behavior because those who participate can be clearly outside our jurisdiction.

So, I don’t think as a premise, I’m very reasonably strict, very strict on First Amendment issues, I do not believe we should be in the business of regulating content, I do think that we have a role to play in enforcing existing constitutional bans on dissemination of certain types of content regardless of the medium, but I think we also can use traditional law enforcement techniques to do so and we have done that, in context of pedophiles, etc.

MH: So your vision of extending high speed access, you imagine young children reading Chaucer and listening to Beethoven.

ES: My kids do, yours don’t?

MH: Read your position papers, but obviously there’s also, have you seen,

ES: They’re reading the Aeneid in the original Greek [sic].

MH: Have you seen Avenue Q?

ES: No.

MH: There’s a song in there -

ES: I’ve been on Avenue Q. Haven’t seen it.

MH: A song in there called the Internet is for porn, and also shopping and IMing, how, if the government is to be facilitating Internet, doesn’t the government have some responsibility to help parents at least figure out how to keep children from using the internet for things besides the high minded?

ES: Yes, you stated it in a very different way, in other words, government helping parents control what their kids do is something I’m all in favor of and I talk all the time about parental responsibility. In fact in our house we’ve got five of us, four computers and they all face inwards so we have three kids, we can see what they’re doing and I think that’s a parental responsibility, I mean that’s something I believe in very strongly, and I believe as a government official, in helping parents understand what they can do to monitor, but that’s a very different issue than government enforcing content.

MH: Can you be more specific though, what can the government of New York state do to help parents if you’re advocating that the state bring the pipe into their home and access this content, what can the government advise or do?

ES: We can educate parents, all the time, to say, look, structure the computers so that instead of having the computer in your son or daughter’s bedroom so you really have no idea what they’re accessing or how much time they’re IMing or with whom, do it in the family room, put on...you know there are all sorts of filters, they give us to report, I’m very comfortable with this, at the end of the day, we get a report about what websites our kids have visited. I have no problem with that with an 11 year old daughter I want to know what websites she’s going to.

MH: Okay, I wanted to ask you about two examples you gave are positive developments. One you said Governor’s Dean’s campaign. What worked in terms as an example of how a campaign can use the Internet as a tool of democratization? What worked for Governor Dean and what do you think the lessons were that the fact that as I recall it, he didn’t end up being the Democratic nominee?

ES: Well, first his fundraising work, the man I’d like to be as good as…

MH: Well why did it work?

ES: It worked because the Internet permits you to reach individuals who have not traditionally been politically active and to have a direct contact with them which is the remarkable thing about the Dean campaign. They can participate in a very different way. You can speak to them without needing to either pay for extraordinarily expensive TV time or depend upon the free media that may or may not want your message to break through or--forget it’s an invidious conspiracy, they just may not consider it important enough and so there’s a whole new pipeline here that permits people to contact you and vice versa. The flow of ideas and the flow of participation.

MH: But Bob Graham had the same access to those same people, General Clark did, all the candidates did, what was it about Governor Dean’s campaign besides the brilliant genius of Joe Trippi here today…

ES: It was Joe Trippi’s brilliance and as well of the components of the candidate who excited the public, it was akin to Kennedy in ’68 or McGovern in ’72 or McCarthy in ’68. The essential ingredient, the technology is antiseptic unless the message and the content are going to excite people. What the technology permits us to do, if you have a message that resonates with people is community it at a much lower cost direct in a direct manner. It doesn’t mean that a candidate who has the traditional yammer of most politicians will have any impact, and I think we’ve seen that over and over again with politicians who said, ah hah, we’ll use the internet, we’ll raise lots of money, we’ll communicate with people, we’ll generate a barnstorming effect across the state of the nation and they don’t get it. The content is what matters, the technology provides the opportunity if you have the requisite message.

MH: And what is the lesson related to technology that caused him not to become the Democratic nominee?

ES: It wasn’t technology that caused him to either become or not become the nominee, the technology in my view and again here I’m off in a world that is not mine, I should leave it to you and the pundits, the technology permitted him to create a tidal wave of very motivated activists, participants in his campaign, at the end of the day, numerically they weren’t as big as people thought they were, but he would not probably have been able to create that momentum early on in that manner had the internet not been used by Joe and others - and I don’t say that to slight Joe - in such a remarkable way, so it is easier now to communicate than it used to be.

MH: Why won’t EarthLink have a monopoly in all the negative aspects of that in Philadelphia?

ES: Nothing I’ve said relates to giving people monopoly rights, and it depends, you went to contracts, you have fair bidding, there are all sorts of other ways to communicate, somewhat as akin to...it hasn’t worked very well, in the cable context, where we ended up with municipal charters and municipal franchises that have been the monopolies. Although had we done it differently it would not have been monopolies and now given technology I think we can give people a first mover advantage without there being a monopoly.

MH: I k now you said you want a task force to study this more, but be more specific about that, in the short term, let’s say, you’re running for governor, let’s say you become governor, in the short term, your vision of how long someone should have that first contract?

ES: Look, I can’t give you numbers, I think it depends on the magnitude of the capital investment you have to make, in other words, it’s a very simple - not simple - it’s an analysis what do you need to offer in order to induce the capital investment to get the desired goal. And if it turns out we need a five year lock up, fine you give it to him and then you have free bidding and fair bidding and there are many different ways to structure, but what you do, the objective is to get the access. And so you basically you go out to the marketplace and say what does it take if we contribute our equity essentially would be the resources, the right of way, the access to a lamppost, the water tower, whatever, it may be, how long do we need to give them as a lock up.

MH: You know the famous political questions that sometimes trips up candidates is how much does a six pack of beer cost or a loaf of bread, I’m going to try to give you the digital equivalent of that.

ES: Right.

MH: Cause I know your staff will appreciate it.

ES: Right, I don’t have to answer that cost.

MH: What does it cost to download a song on iTunes?

ES: I think 99 cents. Yeah. (applause). Turn around , fair play I’m going to ask you a question. What does it cost to buy (inaudible) today.

MH: what does it cost to, the price of beer, the --- software.

ES: And you talked about (inaudible).

MH: And the access with having computers, what’s your vision? What a computer could cost to get the lowest income group, is there any… to create a 100 dollar computer crank-up.

ES: Which is primarily targeted to other continents obviously, but if we can do it there, then that product will be available anyway, I mean I think we’re getting to the age where sort of low functionality computers that are good for most of what most of us use computers for would be in the range of 100 to 200 bucks.

MH: And what does it cost?

ES: What it then will cost to give them the wireless access, per month, who knows?

MH: What does it cost in Manhattan today to have high speed access, what do the Spitzers pay?

ES: To tell you the truth, I have no idea.

MH: Okay.

ES: It’s on my Visa bill and I don’t look at it.

MH: What kind of access do you have, do you have a DSL or …

ES: Yeah, we have DSL.

MH: And do you know why you chose that over …

ES: At the time it was considered the fastest and it was the only way my kids could do their homework and at least, the pretext was they could only do their homework at warp speed that way. I think it’s more for IMing but that’s a separate issue.

MH: Okay. When I’ve asked you about negative things you said you mostly just see the positive, ask you about bloggers again, you said thousands of voices is great, is there any, even any cautions you would want to give people in the blogging industry about how they can maximize their public good of what they’re doing. What are the ways you’d like to see blogging develop to maximize the public good?

ES: You know that’s somewhat akin to being asked the question, what would I say do to newspaper writers, cause again I don’t think it’s a technological issue, I think it’s a question of the responsibility that you bring to any creation of…

MH: What are they?

ES: I think that to the extent that there are more irresponsible commentators who do not care as much about accuracy, you degrade the entire industry and you risk sacrificing the credibility of everybody else. There is a collective responsibility that is very hard, if not impossible to enforce because there is no way to regulate it--and this is the beauty of it, there’s no way to regulate, the folks out there who are participating--but I think to the extent that people demonstrate greater responsibility and fidelity to factuality, there will be a greater confidence on the part of the public in the credibility of what you write.

MH: Anything besides fidelity to factuality?

ES: There’s some element of good taste, doesn’t hurt.

MH: What do you think your website and your campaign now will do that will be innovative, what do you aspire to?

ES: As of a couple of weeks from now, we’ll do more, I mean it’s...we’ve been rethinking that, and I’ll be very honest, everybody looks at the Dean campaign and says alright, we want to be that and we have through some very low level effort garnered a list of 25-26,000 supporters who are activists around the state whom we can occasionally shoot messages to. We can occasionally, and I’ll give you one example, we did a meet up, everybody has been trying it, to sort of market test the campaign, in North Tonawanda, which is just outside Buffalo, and it’s in Niagara county, and got an overwhelming response by emailing to sort of a discreet group that we thought we’d market test.

And you use it that way, you use it both to market test, to see what the residences of ideas, to harvest ideas. There’s a very good friend of mine, whose name I won’t throw out for his sake, has basically said that Wikipedia is a model for creating a virtual think tank to solve the state’s problems, and at a certain point what we want to do is roll out the notion of harvesting the ideas that are out there from remarkably thoughtful New Yorkers who have thought about the issues, whether it’s property taxes, economic development or anything else.

The problem we have right now quite frankly is I’m not sure we have the capacity to handle what would be I hope would be an onslaught of content, but I think in terms of creating a virtual interaction with all the thinkers out there. And I think one company did it, I forget who, you give awards for the best idea when it comes to organic farming and how we’re going to make organic farming part of New York agriculture...you give an award of the best energy R&D that the state should fund or the private sector should fund, there is an enormous wealth of talent and thinking out there that we have not accessed because we are still stuck in our last century of communication vehicles.

MH: You talk a bit more about the test that you’re doing, of the one community?

ES: This was just we sent out to see how many people would show up, and we got 450, 500 people showing in a little bar deli restaurant type venue, probably had a capacity for 250 people. I mean it was an overwhelming response, which was nice at some level obviously, but it shows you the virtue of what we’re doing.

MH: Right, you talked before about your disappointment in New York State in using the Internet through government, obviously you run part of the New York State government, so what has the Attorney General's Office done that you think has been innovative and worthy of copying?

ES: We have done pretty well in terms accessing the office via email complaint generation flow, our capacity to keep the public appraised of supplements and therefore communicate to them about them about the availability of participation in settlements, electronic filing. I’ll tell you something that’s very simple, but I think we were one of the first State agencies to, not only not encourage, but work with the courts to create electronic filing of documents, which saves enormous paper flow. We have been participating in a very serious conversation about what public access to court records should mean, even though public court record have always been deemed public documents, it means something very different to have Social Security numbers and personal information in all sorts of litigation, whether it’s divorce litigation or anything else suddenly available online to be searched, and so there is a conversation that needs to go on about how that information should perhaps be preserved in some zone of privacy or not, since we are hoping to open all the court records to public access via the Internet.

MH: What do you think the lessons are of the success, to extend you think they’ve had success, of MoveOn.org?

ES: I… what I’m hoping frankly is that one of the great lessons or consequences of the Internet infusing politics, whether it’s MoveOn.org or anybody else regardless of the political viewpoint, is that technology will solve the campaign finance conundrum, because one of the things we have found is that no matter what laws you pass, McCain-Feingold, or others, essentially it’s like pushing a balloon, and there are other porous access points that are used for money to begin to influence decision making. The reason for that is that communication has always been so expensive. Thirty-second TV spots are very expensive to buy if you’re targeting a demographic.

The Internet, theoretically is going to be a much lower cost way of communicating with the public. So I think one of the lessons we’re taking is that technology may solve the problem before legislation does. If we have a generational impact here, and it may not be that those over sixty-five are as comfortable or as frequently will use the Internet to garner political information, but my guess is that those who are under twenty will feel more comfortable accessing blogs and going online to get information. And so five, ten, twenty years from now, when they are the core demographic that votes, communicating with them may be a much less expensive proposition, and so political costs may be driven way down.

MH: Okay, now it’s time for audience questions. While I explain the audience roles, I’ll give you one more of your favorite Beatles song And why, so think about that. I see lots of people already at the mics, as always I remind you that we all know what a speech sounds like, please don’t give one. Ask a question, if you wish to identify yourself, please do, and start there.

Q1: Ah, I actually didn’t want to go first, because I… it’s an honor to have you here Mr. Spitzer, and I actually am so into what you’re saying I think it’s so important. My question, actually Mark was for you…

ES: He does not work for the campaign...yet.

Q1: (laughter) Yes, Mark I had a question for you, is that okay, is that okay, is that…?

MH: Oh I’m not really answering, how about you ask me afterwards, is that okay?

Q1: Okay, sure.

MH: Favorite Beetle song and why?

ES: I’m thinking about it.

MH: Okay. Yes, over there.

Q2: Hi I’m Gail Brewer, City Council member, and I want to thank you Mr. Spitzer for… (applause)…

ES: Good to see you.

Q2: Thank you for mentioning the City Council. Bruce Lai’s with me here today, and he’s very much responsible for the work we’ve been doing in the council. Obviously rights away are extremely important, and we did pass a bill, and the great Andrew Rasiej helped also to have the mayor and the council go to all five boroughs talking about the issues that you have talked about today, and I’m hoping we can put together a broadband strategy here in New York. But my question is obviously in Washington, there’s a lot of concern about this COPE bill, which would limit the ability for the City of New York and other cities to have our own franchising, would hurt us red-lining, it would hurt our franchise fees, which are about eighty million dollars now. So I’m just wondering if you’ve taken a position on that bill, and if not, will you? The city counsel did pass a resolution against the COPE bill, thank you.

ES: I’m not sure that I’ve said anything about the specific bill or know enough about the terms to say I’m against it, but obviously as I’ve said in my prepared comments, I’m against efforts to limit the capacity of states or what traditionally we call subordinate political entities to participate in making the decisions that would facilitate the wiring and proliferation of access. So inherently, and intrinsically I’d be opposed to it.

MH: I’m impervious to hissing, but I’ll just say the reason I’m not answering questions is that people are here to hear the Attorney General Spitzer, I’m happy to answer any questions afterwards, but I don’t feel it’s my place to take the time. Is there no one else at that mic? For some reason we have a preponderance of people there.

Q3: Yeah, Mr. Spitzer, you mentioned broadband, and the speed of broadband, but when the Internet is offered in a discriminatory way, when the people offering the broadband can decide what to speedup and what to slowdown, then 'broadband, shmoadband,' I could be just cable TV. The issue is called network neutrality, and do you have a position on network neutrality?

ES: We’re looking at it, obviously I’ve read a fair bit about it and it certainly strikes one that having those who control the gates discriminate between among based on content or who’s putting stuff on is inherently contrary to what we think of as a pipeline that should not be making those decisions, and we’ve dealt with that in the cable context. As you know not terribly successfully, but when vertical integration began to proliferate in terms of ownership not only of the cables themselves but also the creation of content. Theoretically we prohibited and put in statutory limitations on the ability to discriminate between or among various content providers. I don’t think we ever brought enough enforcement actions of the FCC to make that a reality. My presumption is that we have to do the same thing in terms of Internet as well.

MH: Okay, the last question I’m told is from this gentlemen.

Q4: Right, Rory O’Connor from Media Channel and AlterNet. Two quick questions, one is in terms of technology and politics. Do you support making it easier to vote then it now is by moving voting online. And then the second question is if people want to send you some information about digital divide, they have some ideas, how can we get to you directly? How can we share that?

ES: www.spitzer2006.com. There’s a very easy way to send messages. In terms of online voting, I don’t think there’s any question we should aspire to that. The… I don’t want to embrace it right now, without saying, giving the obvious comments about insurance against fraud. I have put out a report in January of 2001, right after the 2000 debacle confronting voting issues, and it’s raised too many issues to go into now, voting by mail, which is done in a number of states has been enormously successful without any increase in fraud that has been registered anywhere, and so if we can do it by mail, theoretically of course we can do it online. The only reason I’m not saying, yes let’s do it immediately is that I haven’t seen the technology or the filters that be put in place to prevent the problems that we would all be concerned about, but should it happen some day, of course. And anything that increases participation is good. (applause)

Any unanswered questions--"Here Comes the Sun," it’s my wife’s favorite song.

MH: Attorney General Spitzer, thank you very much, I appreciate your coming. (applause)