As President Barack Obama marks his 100th day in office today, we've set out to grade the 44th president's performance on the bread-and-butter issues near and dear to Wired.com: copyright, cyber security, science, net neutrality, transparency and privacy. Obama scored high marks in some, but in others he may have to go to summer school.

Copyright: D

The president has brought at least five Recording Industry Association of America lawyers into the Justice Department, placing two of them in the number 2 and number 3 spots. Obama's Justice Department has also weighed in on an RIAA file sharing lawsuit, supporting the Copyright Act's civil damages of up to $150,000 per purloined music track. The Bush administration had taken the same position.

Obama is also negotiating the so-called Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a global intellectual property treaty that got underway during the Bush administration. Obama declared the inner-workings of the treaty a national security issue, as did his predecessor, by refusing Freedom of Information Act requests to divulge any clear details of the measure.

Leaked documents published by WikiLeaks suggest the proposed act would require internet service providers to terminate repeat copyright scofflaws, criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing, subject iPods to border searches and even interfere with the legitimate sale of brand-name pharmaceutical products.

Meanwhile, Vice President Joe Biden says Obama is searching for the nation's first copyright czar, a cabinet-level position created by Congress to be on par with the drug czar.

Others aren't so sure of our grade. "It's more Obama is cutting class than a particular grade," says Fred von Lohmann, a copyright attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "I think the administration is facing more important priorities than copyright law right now. The economy is the most obvious issue right now. "

Cyber security: C

Obama commissioned a 60-day review of the nation's cyber security by Melissa Hathaway, the acting senior director for cyberspace. Though it hasn't been released, the review likely recommends the appointment of a so-called cyber-security czar. "It requires leading from the top, from the White House, to departments and agencies, state, local, tribal governments, the C-Suite and to the local classroom and library," Hathaway said during the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco last week.

What that ultimately means is unclear. But what is clear is that the government does not have a policy – at least a public policy – on how to respond to cyber intrusions, real or imagined. The policy vacuum has been filled by an inter-agency battle for control of the cyber security mission, complete with the anonymous planting of scary news stories about Chinese government hackers plotting to destoy parts of the U.S. electric grid.

In March, DHS cyber chief Rod Beckstrom resigned over concerns that the secretive National Security Agency would wind up in charge. Given the NSA's recent history of extrajudicial domestic spying, we'd rather see cyber security handled by the IRS.

Science: A-

On Monday, Obama pledged to spend 3 percent of gross domestic product, about $420 billion, on science. He said that global warming was a threat to public health.

Certainly, the environment has gotten no cleaner during Obama's first 100 days. But he ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to review the Bush administration's refusal to allow California, the District of Columbia and 12 other states to set more stringent auto emission standards than those imposed by the federal government. And on Tuesday, the president asked Congress for $1.5 billion to produce vaccines, rebuild anti-viral stockpiles and respond to the swine flu outbreak.

Among some of Obama's top science appointments include Lisa Jackson, to be chairwoman of the Environmental Protection Agency. As a New Jersey state EPA administrator, she was part of a movement to roll back greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent. Then there's Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the Nobel-laureate for physics, who supports solar power, biofuels and other forms of alternative energy.

"I want to be sure that facts are driving scientific decisions, not the other way around," Obama said.

Net Neutrality: B+

If Ben Scott, the policy director of Free Press isn't complaining, neither can we. He tells us he's satisfied with the president's actions for the first 100 days insofar as net neutrality is concerned, although it is taking a back seat to the global financial meltdown.

Free Press was the group responsible for getting the Federal Communications Commission last year to order Comcast to stop throttling BitTorrent traffic.

Scott, seen at right, supports Obama's nomination of Julias Genachowski as FCC chairman, which Congress has yet to approve. Genachowski and Obama advocated (.pdf) network neutrality during the election. The $7 billion in broadband stimulus money requires recipients to act under net neutrality rules, which mandates a non-discrimination policy against internet protocols, like BitTorrent, which is a bandwidth hog and often used to pirate copyrighted works.

"While you can be a stickler and say net neutrality is a priority, I'm inclined to give him a little slack," Scott said. "There are other pressing issues as well."

Transparency: B-

We were initially skeptical of Obama's promise of government transparency. Then we watched in awe as a slew of longstanding Freedom of Information Act requests were approved – requests that were stonewalled during the Bush administration. Among the most controversial documents released included dozens of memos surrounding the Bush administration's torture tactics and the legal rationale for them.

The government also just released Apple chief Steve Jobs' 2008 SEC deposition about stock option backdating after Forbes demanded it through a FOIA claim. The government, responding to a FOIA claim by Wired.com, unveiled internal documents detailing a sophisticated FBI spyware used to disrupt hackers and extortion plots.

It's not all good, of course. There was the White House's ridiculous claim of "national security" for declining a FOIA request concerning the ACTA intellectual property treaty. The claim was made worse when the government released a brief summary of the plan that basically said nothing.

Then there was the FBI failure to release documents explaining the privacy policy for its Investigative Data Warehouse, a multi-billion-document clearinghouse of data about suspects and individuals named in the agency's investigations. All the while, the FBI is seeking new funding to use the database for "link analysis" and "pattern analysis" to analyze relationships between the names of those in the database.

That said, on a government operational level, Obama has enacted some meaningful executive orders, including policies casting some sunshine on official meetings with lobbyists and government officials, and slowing the revolving door of those officials becoming lobbyists themselves.

"He's instructed the Office and Management and Budget to be more transparent going forward. He's instructed the Office of Government Ethics to study ways to better disclose procurement lobbying," said Matthew Sanderson, the former chief finance counsel for the McCain-Palin campaign.

Privacy: D-

Justice Department lawyers in Washington are arguing that the Fourth Amendment provision against unreasonable searches and seizures does not apply to so-called cell-site data. Such data, which is maintained by mobile phone carriers for up to 180 days, chronicles the physical locations of where mobile phone calls were placed. In a case pending before a federal appeals court, which began under Bush, the Obama administration says no warrant is required to obtain that data, which can be used in a criminal prosecution.

And just days after Obama's inauguration, the new administration began echoing its predecessor when it came to surveillance.

The newest administration urged a federal judge to reject a lawsuit challenging whether a sitting president can bypass Congress and secretly authorize warrantless wiretapping, as Bush did following the 2001 terror attacks. And it should come as no surprise that Obama is also seeking to dismiss a lawsuit against the nation's telecommunications companies accused of being complicit in Bush's once-secret spy program.

Obama voted for the legislation immunizing the telcos in July, when he was a senator from Illinois. The legislation, by the way, generally granted congressional approval to Bush's spy program, allowing the warrantless electronic eavesdropping on Americans in the United States if they are communicating overseas with somebody the government believes is involved in terrorism.

Obama even touted the Bush line in a lawsuit brought by five CIA prisoners who allege they were transported overseas where they were tortured. Both administrations invoked the so-called state secrets privilege, a legal nicety that usually involves a judge automatically dismissing a lawsuit because it could expose national security issues. But a federal appeals court on Tuesday, at least temporarily, rejected that assertion in a legal challenge to what is known as an "extraordinary rendition" kidnapping program.

"According to the government’s theory, the judiciary should effectively cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its partners from the demands and limits of the law," judge Michael Daly Hawkins of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote Tuesday. "The subject matter of this action … is not a state secret, and the case should not have been dismissed at the outset." Mr. President, this is going on your permanent record.

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