Daniel Solove, professor at the George Washington University Law School, discusses his new book Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security. He suggests that developments in technology do not create a mutually exclusive relationship between privacy and national security. Solove acknowledges the interest government has in maintaining security within our technological world; however, Solove also emphasizes the value of personal privacy rights and suggests that certain procedures, such as judicial oversight on governmental actions, can be implemented to preserve privacy. This oversight may make national security enforcement slightly less effective, but according to Solove, this is a worthwhile tradeoff to ensure privacy protections.
Today is the 33rd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark First Amendment decision, FCC v. Pacifica Foundation. By a narrow 5-4 vote in this 1978 decision, the Court held that the FCC could impose fines on radio and TV broadcasters who aired indecent content during daytime and early evening hours. The Court used some rather [...]
It remains unclear how interested the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is in bringing a formal antitrust action against Google, but we at least know that inquiries have been made. I suspect these inquires are far more serious than whatever the agency is fishing for with its new Twitter inquires. After all, as I note in [...]
As we’ve noted here before, state and local politicians just love wireless taxes. They are going up, up, up. Dan Rothschild outlined this disturbing trend in his recent Mercatus Center paper making “The Case Against Taxing Cell Phone Subscribers,” and I discussed it in my recent Forbes essay lambasting the “Talking Tax.” Another new study [...]
According to a report today from SAI Business Insider, “The Federal Trade Commission is actively investigating Twitter and the way it deals with the companies building applications and services for its platform.” Apparently the agency has reached out to some competing application / platform providers to ask questions about Twitter’s recent efforts to exert more control over the [...]
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