Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Caren Myers Morrison, assistant professor at Georgia State University College of Law, discusses how internet tools are affecting our jury system, which she details in her new paper, Jury 2.0. She cites examples of jurors using the internet to seek information about cases, Facebook-friending witnesses and defendants, and even blogging about trials on which they are [...]
J. C. R. Licklider (1915-1990) was early to expound on the potential of computing. His papers “Man-Computer Symbiosis” and “The Computer as a Communications Device” (both collected here) foresaw many of the uses we make of computers and the Internet today. In Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet, Katie Hafner and [...]
Up until I began doing my reading for this fall’s Criminal Procedure: Investigation course, I largely bought the heroic Warren Court story of privacy and the Fourth Amendment. The story is simple: The Supreme Court, concerned only with helping businesses through decisions like Lochner, had left people unprotected from warrantless searches and seizures. In decisions like Olmstead v. United States (holding [...]
Washington Times reporter Shaun Waterman has a characteristically excellent article out today about U.S. cybersecurity authorities failing to secure their own systems. According to a new report by government auditors, systems at the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), part of the Department of Homeland Security, were not maintained with updates and security patches in [...]
[Over at the Concurring Opinions blog, I've posted my latest installment in the excellent online symposium they've been running on the themes set forth in Jonathan Zittrain’s Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. My previous post is here. My latest is "On Defining Generativity, Openness, and Code Failure," I've pasted the entire [...]
Individuals, shadowy criminal organizations, and nation states all now have the capacity to devastate modern societies through computer attacks. It’s simply not true. The author must not know the meaning of “devastate,” which is, according to the handiest Web dictionary, “to lay waste; render desolate.” There is no such capacity—anywhere—to do such damage through computer [...]
After a quiet August recess in Washington, DC, it’s time to refocus our efforts on public policies that impact online commerce. And today we consider not the good, and not merely the bad, but the awful – iAWFUL. NetChoice unveiled an updated version of out Internet Advocates’ Watchlist for Ugly Laws (iAWFUL) where we track [...]
After our podcast last week, Tim Lee wrote a blog post expanding on our conversation about spectrum policy. I thought I’d take a little space here to respond. Although we will probably continue to disagree on empirical questions, I think philosophically there is no light between Tim and me. He succinctly expresses our shared view [...]
Don’t miss the current issue of Cato Unbound, which explores the ideas in author James C. Scott’s essential book, Seeing Like a State. Scott’s opening essay, “The Trouble With the View From Above,” captures many of the ideas from the book. I stumbled across Scott when I was researching my book on identification policy, Identity [...]
At yesterday’s Gov2.0 Summit conference, "rogue archivist" Carl Malamud gave a great speech about what’s wrong with government IT and what should be done about it.
January 27, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
