Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
—all one paragraph of it—on the Cato@Liberty blog.
The upshot: Their promise not to have a national ID database is almost certainly wrong. Sold as a simple quick-fix, it would take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build, encountering untold complexities beyond what we already know.
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Posted in: Privacy, Security & Government Surveillance
Over on the Cato@Liberty blog, I’ve written a piece grading the “high-value data sets” agencies released a few weeks ago on Data.gov. (Agencies are supposed to have “/open” sites up by tomorrow.)
The results? Four As, four Bs, seven Cs, eighteen Ds, and eight Fs. Take a look!
Comments Posted in: E-Government & Transparency
Last week, Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig visited the Cato Institute for a lunchtime talk he had sought through Julian Sanchez. Fellow TLFer Julian discussed the substance of the visit on the Cato@Liberty blog.
I discussed the real purpose of the visit as I interpreted it, and Professor Richard Epstein had a comment, too. He finds that Lessig is now, in fairness, a libertarian—if by “fairness” we mean “tit-for-tat.”
Comments Posted in: Miscellaneous
Over on the Cato@Liberty blog, I’ve done a fairly lengthy write-up of the Google Flu Trends privacy issue. It’s an important problem that I think deserves a little more than dismissal.
My conclusion: “The heart of the problem lies not with the current leader in search, or any other Internet innovator. The problem lies with our unconstrained government.”
If you’re inclined to dismiss this conclusion as libertarian boilerplate, please read the post.
Comments Posted in: Privacy, Security & Government Surveillance, Technology, Business & Cool Toys
Over on the Cato@Liberty blog, I’ve highlighted some recent talk of a creating a national ID system for voting. Worrisome thinking from people who should be more circumspect.
“A Breezy Slide From Vote Integrity to National ID” is the post.
Comments Posted in: Privacy, Security & Government Surveillance
I’ve run across the most curious thing today.
Searches on Google that should turn up the Cato@Liberty blog (at http://www.cato-at-liberty.org) do not return any result with that URL in it.
Berin took great care the other day to report on the temporary demotion of some Progress & Freedom Foundation content by the Google search engine. I want to do a similar, careful job with this because it’s a sensitive area.
Could I ask you, our visitors, to check what you get from Google? Visit Cato@Liberty and then craft the Google search that you think is most likely to return that Web site. (I’ve tried searching “site:cato-at-liberty.org the” for example, which would return instances of the word “the” on the cato-at-liberty.org domain, and gotten no results.)
Next, if you have any technical knowledge, please opine on what might be causing this to occur. Cato@Liberty is a fairly high-traffic site with a large following. Its disappearance from Google search results is unusual. Any ideas on how to get it restored would be welcome.
Update: It’s a problem with robots.txt on the site.
Comments Posted in: Things that Go 'Bump' in the 'Net
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
