Articles by Jim Harper 
Jim is the Director of Information Policy Studies at The Cato Institute, the Editor of Web-based privacy think-tank Privacilla.org, and the Webmaster of WashingtonWatch.com. Prior to becoming a policy analyst, Jim served as counsel to committees in both the House and Senate.
Brilliant column from William Jackson on GCN.com debunking “cyberwar”:
“The United States is fighting a cyberwar today and we are losing it,” former National Security Agency chief and national intelligence director Mike McConnell wrote in a recent op-ed column in the Washington Post. “It’s that simple.”
It is neither simple nor true. Failure to distinguish between real acts of war and other malicious behavior not only increases the risks of war, but also distracts us from more immediate threats such as online crime.
The habit of threat inflation is harmful to the country. Jackson’s welcome take on “cyber” threats earns an accolade I rarely give out: Read the whole thing.
Update: Tim Stevens, a researcher in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, has—ahem—attacked “cyberwar” rhetoric multiple times. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) Kudos, Tim.
—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.
Over on the WashingtonWatch.com blog, I’ve laid out in the simplest terms I could what’s going on in terms of procedure with health care overhaul legislation. The post, called “What is Deeming, Anyway?“, comes in at a mere 900 words… If you’re a real public policy junkie, you might like it.
But what about the transparency oriented processes that President Obama and leaders like Speaker Pelosi promised the public? Recall that the Speaker promised to post the health care bill online for 72 hours before a vote back in September.
There was debate about whether she stuck to her promise then. And it was probably a one-time promise. It’s almost certain that she will not do so now. If she lines up the votes to pass the bill, the vote will happen. Right. Then.
What about President Obama’s promise to put health care negotiations on C-SPAN? The daylong roundtable debate on health care was an engaging illustration of what happens when you do transparent legislating. Voters got a clearer picture of where each side stands—and perhaps saw that there actually is some competence on both sides of the aisle. Some competence.
The health care negotiations going on right now are the ones that matter. This is when the most important details are being hammered out. This is when the bargaining that draws the public’s ire is happening. But I’m not seeing it on C-SPAN.
President Obama’s promise may have been naive, but that doesn’t excuse it. The inside negotiations going on this week represent an ongoing violation of the president’s C-SPAN promise.
And there’s good reason to anticipate that the president will violate his Sunlight Before Signing promise as well. This was his promise to post bills online for five days after he receives them from Congress before signing them into law. Continue reading →
This morning, a small group of us open government collaborators (joined by others) rolled out a transparency campaign called “Just Give Us the Earmark Data!”
Visitors to EarmarkData.org are encouraged there to sign a petition asking Congress to publish data about earmarks in formats that are useful for public oversight. Developers can also participate in perfecting the data schema that will capture the “earmarks ecosystem” in the best possible way.
There has been a lot of action on earmarks recently. House Democrats announced last week that they would restrict their earmarking only to non-profits. The next day, House Republicans announced that they would forgo earmarking entirely. That’s House Democrats and House Republicans. Don’t assume that earmarking is going to go away.
Whatever happens, our demand is simple: Just give us the data!
If you agree that Congress should make good information about earmarking available, please sign the petition—and pass along the word with a Tweet, a Facebook post, an email, or whatever communication you like!
(If you’re a developer, take a look at the schema and join in the conversation about it on our Google group.)
What struck me most about the executive summary of the FCC’s “National Broadband Plan” is that they published it in one of the most opaque formats going: It’s a PDF scan of a printed document.
This means you can’t cut and paste the bullet point that says:
Increase civic engagement by making government more open and transparent, creating a robust public media ecosystem and modernizing the democratic process.
This and other observations/snark in my recent Cato@Liberty post join Adam’s early comment on the FCC’s incredible cost claims. Undoubtedly, there will be more here at TLF.
If you haven’t been paying attention to the Comcast-NBC Universal merger, here’s a reason to: A good fight has broken out!
It starts with Mark Cooper, Director of Research at the Consumer Federation of America, who testified against the merger to the House Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet on behalf of CFA, Free Press, and Consumers Union.
The merger has so many anti-competitive, anti-consumer, and anti-social effects that it cannot be fixed,” says Cooper.
Cato Adjunct Scholar Richard Epstein lays into Cooper’s testimony with aplomb: ”Dr. Cooper has achieved a rare feat. The evidence that he presents against this proposed merger suffices to explain emphatically why it ought to be approved.”
And in a second commentary, Epstein ladles out another helping of humble pie to Cooper, concluding:
The cumbersome Soviet-style review process that Mr. Cooper advocates does no good for the consumers who he purports to represent. It only shows how far out of touch he is with the basics of antitrust theory as they relate to the particulars of the telecommunication market.
Maybe Cooper will have a rejoinder. But until then, I’ll just note that the best fights are the ones that your guy wins.
So reports the Wall Street Journal:
Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.
It’s the natural evolution of the policy called “internal enforcement” of immigration law, as I wrote in my Cato Institute paper, “Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”
Once in place, watch for this national ID to regulate access to financial services, housing, medical care and prescriptions—and, of course, serve as an internal passport.
I wasn’t going to pay $35 piece for a couple of 3-foot HDMI cables—the shortest Radio Shack carries—when all I needed were 1-foot cables.
So on Adam’s recommendation I went to Blue Jeans cable, where 1-foot cables are $8.75.
Ordered on Friday night. Shipped Saturday. Arrived Monday.
What more do you need to know? I’ve got a set-up with noooo cable clutter.
Blue Jeans cable is a good outfit, sez this happy customer.
Here’s a great conversation at Slate.com about Shane Harris’ new book The Watchers.
We’ll be having the author here at Cato on March 10th for a similar discussion of his book and the growth of the surveillance state.
Register here.
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