[Disclaimer: When a lawyer writes about economics, things can go dreadfully wrong. My terminology may be way off the mark – and maybe my thinking too. I welcome constructive corrections in the comments.]
Harvard University’s Samuel W. Morris University Professor of Economics Dale Jorgensen kicked off this morning’s session of the PFF Aspen Summit with a talk entitled Whatever Happened to the New Economy? [ppt here – Shane Tews, reading over my shoulder, wants me to mention the pretty colors!] In it, he examined both growth in the IT sector and growth in other economic sectors thanks to their adoption of IT. One of the delights of IT is that innovation in this area propagates out across the economy, magnifying the benefits to society.
I was interested in a slide he put up showing the “Relative Prices of Computers, Communications, Semiconductors, and Software and Computer Services Industry Output, 1960-2005,” slide seven in the PowerPoint. Each area showed consistent decline in price over this period, except Software and Computer Services, which has remained essentially flat.
I was curious about whether and how open source software was measured in Professor Jorgensen’s data, so I asked him during the break whether it was.
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Geoffrey Stone offers some worthwhile perspective on the state of civil liberties today:
The fact is that fear-mongering has played a critical role in every major wartime episode in American history. In 1798, the Federalists used a largely trumped-up threat of French invasion to enact the Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime for any person to criticise the president, the Congress, or the government. During the civil war, President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus on eight separate occasions and Congress rushed headlong to approved his actions.
During the first world war, President Wilson stampeded Congress into enacting the Sedition Act of1918, which made it a crime for any person to criticise the war, the draft, the military, the flag, the uniform, or the government. During the second world war, Congress blithely ratified President Roosevelt’s internment of almost 120,000 individuals of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were American citizens. And at the height of the McCarthy era during the cold war, a frantic Congress hastily enacted the McCarran Act of 1950, one of the most grievous assaults on freedom of speech and association in American history.
So, we should consider recent events in context. The legislation amending FISA is unwarranted, reckless and possibly unconstitutional. Nonetheless, the overall state of civil liberties in the US, viewed in historical perspective, is surprisingly strong.
There’s certainly something to this, and Stone is certainly right to credit civil liberties groups for keeping public attention on these issues and discouraging elected officials from proposing truly egregious restrictions on civil liberties like those of past eras. However, I think there are a couple of crucial differences between the encroachments of civil liberties we see today and the problems we saw in past eras.
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8:09 am – Seems that Cord forgot to bring toothpaste. They sell it in the St. Regis, but at a price!
8:17 am – Bacon! And there’s sausage patties too, but bacon is what really excites people.
8:25 am – Am I the only one wearing sneakers?
8:35 – A little chilly here in the conference room.
And – to summarize – I’m not too big on liveblogging.
Michael Skube, a professor of journalism, writes a column bewailing the low quality of reporting in the blogosphere:
Bloggers now are everywhere among us, and no one asks if we don’t need more full-throated advocacy on the Internet. The blogosphere is the loudest corner of the Internet, noisy with disputation, manifesto-like postings and an unbecoming hatred of enemies real and imagined.
And to think most bloggers are doing all this on the side. “No man but a blockhead,” the stubbornly sensible Samuel Johnson said, “ever wrote but for money.” Yet here are people, whole brigades of them, happy to write for free. And not just write. Many of the most active bloggers — Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Joshua Micah Marshall and the contributors to the Huffington Post — are insistent partisans in political debate. Some reject the label “journalist,” associating it with what they contemptuously call MSM (mainstream media); just as many, if not more, consider themselves a new kind of “citizen journalist” dedicated to broader democratization.
Marshall, who’s got a whole site devoted to investigative reporting, emailed Skube and learned that Skube doesn’t actually read Marshall’s blog. Apparently, an editor suggesting added Marshall’s name, and Skube agreed without bothering to learn much of anything about Marshall or his site. And Matt points out that neither he nor Sullivan are blogging “for free.”
Which makes this awfully rich:
Such a story demanded time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance. It’s not something one does as a hobby. The more important the story, the more incidental our opinions become. Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life.
We could definitely use some of that. I’m looking forward to the LA Times op-ed about how the mainstream bloviating business is inadequate because it can’t match the blogosphere’s rigorous peer-review process.
Hat tip: Yglesias
If Eddie Vedder sat stone silent for 30 seconds, everyone would know that he hated George Bush. Eddie Vedder is hate for George Bush. He is the Jeremy to George Bush’s recess lady. Bleeping out Eddie Vedder’s criticisms of George Bush is censorship in the same way umbrellas censor the sun.
But maybe reheating the tempest in a teapot about some AT&T-owned site bleeping some political comments from a big rock star is a good way to while away the August doldrums.
Jon Stokes at Ars has penned a little fantasy about how this Pearl Jam/AT&T ‘censorship’ thing – the most discussed, widely available, and obvious censored information ever! – may bring ‘net neutrality regulation back to life.
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Julian explains just how unhinged (or mendacious) you have to be to believe that the FISA bill was “nothing more than the preservation of the original effect of FISA.”
As Julian points out, not only is that false, but it’s so obviously false that the guy who wrote it is either an idiot or a liar. Before the bill passed, the Bush administration was required to get a warrant that named the specific individuals or facilities that would be monitored. Now, the administration only needs to submit an after-the-fact report describing the general contours of its monitoring program, but not naming specific targets. If that’s not a complete abandonment of the principles behind FISA, it’s hard to imagine what would be.
Julian has more on the lies people are telling in defense of this legislation.
A reporter from Education Week called me today to get my comments about the supposed persistence of the “digital divide” among U.S. schools and school children. Apparently a speaker at a conference that this reporter had attended recently had made the point that although the divide in computer use and basic Web access has been bridged, a new divide is emerging in Web 2.0 applications, high-speed Internet, and laptops and mobile technologies The reporter asked for my comments.
Back in the late 1990s, I used to do a lot of work on this issue and the same point I made during those old debates is still true today. Namely, although the pace of technological diffusion is never perfectly even, the good news is that digital technology is getting out to the masses faster than every previous media or communications technology known to man. In fact, children are gaining access to digital technology and software and a breakneck pace. The problem that many parents (and schools) will face in the near future is not too little technology being available to children, but rather, too much!
But there was another point I used to always make in those old digital divide debates that still holds true today as well: We should be careful not to confuse the debates over “goods-based divides” versus “skills-based divides.” Debates about what goods and gadgets kids have access to are interesting and at times can be important since some gaps can persist longer than others. But, again, when it comes to digital technologies, those gaps tend to close very quickly. That’s because the market for digital technologies continues to expand rapidly and costs fall almost as quickly. A lot of it is even free, of course.
But skill-based divides are another matter entirely. There are deep and persistent divides in our educational system. The basic skills our children need to take full advantage of digital technologies are not always being instilled in them. But let’s not pretend that this has anything to do with access to technology or the supposed existence of a “digital divide.” This is about an broken, state-run education system that has short-changed our children in terms of basic skills. Let’s find ways of fixing that mess and stop pretending that digital hardware or software has anything to do with this.
Wired‘s excellent Threat Level blog has a blow-by-blow description of the proceedings in the EFF/AT&T spying case (which was heard in conjunction with the Al-Haramain case). It sounds like the judges are at least sympathetic to allowing the cases go forward.
The government and AT&T’s argument strikes me as proving a little bit too much:
AT&T attorney Michael Kellogg (right, entering the courthouse) has taken the podium, and, not surprisingly, insists the case has to be dismissed. He says AT&T customers have no actual proof or direct knowledge that their communications were forwarded to the government without warrants.
“The government has said that whatever AT&T is doing with the government is a state secret,” Kellogg says. He adds, “As a consequence, no evidence can come in whether the individuals’ communications were ever accepted or whether we played any role in it.” (Back at Wired, THREAT LEVEL’s head just exploded –klp)
So if I’m understanding this correctly, a judge is obligated to dismiss a case as soon as the government asserts a state secrets privilege, because any inquiry into whether the information in question is actually a state secret could itself reveal state secrets. Which, in practice, would mean that “state secret” is a magic incantation that allows the government to do whatever it wants with no court scrutiny whatsoever. Somehow, I don’t think that’s what the founders had in mind when they wrote the Fourth Amendment.
Many of your humble Technology Liberation Front contributors will be attending PFF’s annual Aspen Summit next week and we think many of you will too. So, we’ve decided to hold the fourth in our series of Alcohol Liberation Front get-togethers on Tuesday, 8/21, at 9 p.m. at the Sky Bar located at the base of the Aspen Mountain. Like we did last time, we’ll also be recording our contributors (and hopefully some of you) pontificating for our podcast, Tech Policy Weekly. So drop on by and have a drink with your favorite TLF bloggers.
Earlier this month, in the wake of a University of California study revealing serious security weaknesses in touch-screen voting machines, California’s secretary of state decertified the state’s electronic voting machines, and then re-certified them with added security restrictions. And last month, Florida released a security analysis of Diebold voting software and found that the company had still failed to fix security problems identified in earlier analyses of the systems.
In this week’s podcast, Adam and I are joined by one of the most prolific and insightful scholars in tech policy today: Ed Felten, computer science professor at Princeton. He discusses his research on the security of e-voting systems, the Holt bill now making its way through Congress, and the future of secure elections.
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.